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How the boundaries of what management once considered acceptable work redesign have been expanded by new competitive pressures is demonstrated. Research evidence based on the experience of American multinational corporations shows how the approaches now being developed give employees considerably greater discretion and opportunities for skills development and improved performance than conventional “job enrichment” techniques. The sample of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) at its Ayr site in Scotland is used and the effects of high performance work systems examined.

This paper examines the introduction of self managing teams into a high technology workplace. The paper looks at the managerial and organizational implications of developing teams in what was considered a high technology environment where the physical restrictions of manufacture were assumed to dictate working practices. The case study evidence suggests that even in an atmosphere of clean rooms and clear communication difficulties, SMTs can prosper and suggests that it is only the physical boundaries which impede the development of more flexible forms of work organization.

This paper examines the introduction of self‐managing teams into a high technology workplace. The paper looks at the managerial and organizational implications of developing teams in what was considered a high technology environment where the physical restrictions of manufacture were assumed to dictate working practices. The case study evidence suggests that even in an atmosphere of clean rooms and clear communication difficulties, SMTs can prosper and suggests that it is only the physical boundaries which impede the development of more flexible forms of work organization.

This paper describes the development of a unique prison participatory research project, in which incarcerated women formed a research team, the research activities and the lessons learned. The participatory action research project was conducted in the main short sentence minimum/medium security women’s prison located in a Western Canadian province. An ethnographic multi‐method approach was used for data collection and analysis. Quantitative data was collected by surveys and analysed using descriptive statistics. Qualitative data was collected from orientation package entries, audio recordings, and written archives of research team discussions, forums and debriefings, and presentations. These data and ethnographic observations were transcribed and analysed using iterative and interpretative qualitative methods and NVivo 7 software. Up to 15 women worked each day as prison research team members; a total of 190 women participated at some time in the project between November 2005 and August 2007. Incarcerated women peer researchers developed the research processes including opportunities for them to develop leadership and technical skills. Through these processes, including data collection and analysis, nine health goals emerged. Lessons learned from the research processes were confirmed by the common themes that emerged from thematic analysis of the research activity data. Incarceration provides a unique opportunity for engagement of women as expert partners alongside academic researchers and primary care workers in participatory research processes to improve their health.

The purpose of this research is to report on research to date concerning the creation of a hybrid model for managing performance and decision making with elements of an IBM supply chain.

As part of a wider research programme this paper utilises survey, focus group and case analysis techniques to examine the supply chain interactions.

A cross‐functional process‐orientated team was assembled to look at the end‐to‐end process logic, skills alignment, effective codified knowledge systems, and the prioritisation of change to overcome inhibitors of change originating from functional/IT‐focused processes/solutions.

The results of this paper have, as yet, not been validated beyond the process performance targets set by IBM. Validation across and within industry boundaries, based on survey and case analysis, is about to commence.

Too often “management” play too active a role in the operational aspects of team‐based solution methodologies – and can potentially reinforce the functional inhibitors of change. This paper suggests that management sets the scene and prioritises process outcomes – allowing non‐managerial professionals the scope to reach optimal outcomes.

This research draws upon a number of inter‐disciplinary fields in an effort to better understand how knowledge is created, managed and exploited within complex solutions.

Research and development (R&D) plays a significant role in creating and sustaining technological leadership. This paper aims to look at the extent to which R&D interventions stimulate innovation engagement.

This paper examines, in the main, secondary data sources from Honda to assess the extent to which R&D‐enabled plants enjoy both enhanced innovatory potential and employee engagement.

Initial indications point to a positive correlation between R&D and associated plant performance. Ongoing research suggests that there is a clear link between interventions and enhanced employee engagement. In addition, there appears to be evidence that monoculture outperform multicultural establishments.

The research was exploratory in nature and relied, in the main, on secondary data sources. However, access to the secondary sources was extensive which hopefully compensates for the limited primary data.

Practitioners and academics interested in the relationship between engagement, value add knowledge transfer, R&D and innovation should find this paper of interest.

The purpose of this research is to examine the manner in which employees access, create and share information and knowledge within a complex supply chain with a view to better understanding how to identify and manage barriers which may inhibit such exchanges.

An extensive literature review combined with an in‐depth case study analysis identified a range of potential transfer barriers. These in turn were examined in terms of their consistency of impact by an end‐to‐end process survey conducted within an IBM facility.

Barrier impact cannot be assumed to be uniform across the core processes of the organization. Process performance will be impacted upon in different ways and subject to varying degrees of influence by the transfer barriers. Barrier identification and management must take place at a process rather than at the organizational level.

The findings are based, in the main, on an extensive single company study. Although significant in terms of influencing both knowledge and information systems design and management the study/findings have still to be fully replicated across a range of public and private organizations.

The deployment of generic information technology and business systems needs to be questioned if they have been designed and implemented to satisfy organizational rather than process needs.

While companies in developed countries are increasingly turning to indigenous employees, integration measures have met with mixed results. Low integration can lead to breach of the psychological contract, i.e. perceived mutual obligations between employee and employer. The purpose of this paper is to identify how leadership and organizational integration measures can be implemented to promote the perceived insider status (PIS) of indigenous employees, thereby fostering fulfillment of the psychological contract.

A search for relevant literature yielded 128 texts used to identify integration measures at the level of employee–supervisor relationships (leader-member exchanges, inclusive leadership) and at the level of employee–organization relationships (perceived organizational support, pro-diversity practices).

Measures related to leadership included recruiting qualified leaders, understanding cultural particularities, integrating diverse contributions and welcoming questions and challenges. Organizational measures included reaching a critical mass of indigenous employees, promoting equity and participation, developing skills, assigning meaningful tasks, maintaining good work relationships, facilitating work-life balance, providing employment security, fostering support from communities and monitoring practices.

While PIS has been studied in western and culturally diverse contexts, it has received less attention in indigenous contexts. Yet, some indigenous cultural values are incompatible with the basic assumptions of mainstream theories. Furthermore, colonial policies and capitalist development have severely impacted traditional indigenous economic systems. Consequently, indigenous people are facing many barriers to employment in ways that often differ from the experiences of other minority groups.

This paper presents a descriptive analysis of elite women's biographical sketches in Who's Who-type collections, now out of copyright, published in Australia in the 1930s: Victoria (1934), New South Wales (1936) and Queensland (1939). It concentrates on information given about their schooling.

The biographical sketches of the women, defined as “elite” by their inclusion in three collections from the 1930s, were examined for information about their and their daughters' education. Using mixed methods in a prosopographical approach, this is mainly a quantitative analysis. It outlines and compares the schools they attended where given as well as providing basic demographic details of the 491 women.

The paper shows that, for those who gave educational details, the women and their daughters attended private schools almost exclusively. Three types of schools were listed – private venture, corporate, and a very few state schools. The paper demonstrates that the landscape for girls’ secondary schooling was not a settled terrain in terms of type, place, religion, or age of schools available for elite girls' education in the late 19th and early 20th century. Private schools are shown to be part of the “machinery of exclusiveness which characterised the inter-war years” (Teese, 1998, p. 402) and private venture schools survived well into the third decade of the 20th century.

Beyond the histories of individual schools, little is known about the educational profile of Australian elite women in the past. This largely quantitative analysis helps to uncover and compare across state-based cohorts, previously unknown demographic, and schooling details for interwar women who recorded their educational details, as well as for the NSW and Victorian daughters where given.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a reconceptualised view of public education, with specific reference to early twentieth-century Australia, and to revisit the significance of the Carnegie Corporation of New York in this period. Further, in this regard, the paper proposes a neo-Foucaultian notion of philanthropic power, as an explanatory and analytical principle, with possible implications for thinking anew about the role and influence of American philanthropic organisations in the twentieth century.

The paper draws on mainly secondary sources but also works with primary sources gathered from relevant archives, including that of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

The paper concludes that the larger possibilities associated with the particular view of public education outlined here, referring to both public school and public libraries, were constrained by the emergence and consolidation of an increasingly professionalised view of education and schooling.

The influence of the Carnegie Corporation of New York on early twentieth-century Australian education has been increasingly acknowledged and documented in recent historical research. More recently, Carnegie has been drawn into an interdisciplinary perspective on philanthropy and public culture in Australia. This paper seeks to add to such work by looking at schools and libraries as interconnected yet loosely coupled aspects of what can be understood as, in effect, a re-conceived public education, to a significant degree sponsored by the Corporation.

The paper draws upon but seeks to extend and to some extent re-orient existing historical research on the relationship between Australian education and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its originality lies in its exploration of a somewhat different view of public education and the linkage it suggests in this regard with a predominantly print-centric public culture in Australia, in the first half of the twentieth century.