The Grand Seaside Hotel is a large five-star hotel in an Australian Coastal town. It is a place that not only aspires to provide excellent service but that also seeks to reconcile two apparently divergent demands: the need for customized service and the efficient management of business operations. To commit staff to the provision of service excellence, management has introduced a customer service programme that relies on various forms of training and rewards, as well as a guest response system. The customer service programme, particularly the use of guest questionnaires, appear as disciplinary strategies that aim to produce service encounters in which both staff and guests are ‘normalized’. The main loci of ethnographic data collection for this paper are regular Management Briefings. Through data collected from these, the paper investigates the use of the ‘imaginary’ in constituting service encounters and guest expectations. It interprets these in terms of Foucault's Panoptic analysis to identify the immanent mechanisms of discipline in these customer service programmes.

The case method of teaching and learning is prominent in management education. We know little about the processes involved in writing and learning through cases. One element that may help the beginning of a theoretical understanding of these processes comes from an experiment with students entering organisations and writing cases for use with other management students. Students not only gain more knowledge related to management and organisations than in using prepared cases, but they also gain substantial additional process skills that are far more generalisable and to do with life-long learning – than those developed using traditional case learning.

This paper is based on a study of a large U.S. multinational corporation, examining the importance of career plateauism, the condition whereby more employees find that opportunities for promotions are limited or non-existent. This phenomenon has gained special attention with corporate downsizing and the emergence of “flatter” organizations. This exploratory study suggests that plateauism is a multi-faceted construct. Plateauism can have adverse effects upon certain employees in the organization; however, a segment of plateaued employees commonly referred to as “solid citizens” can manage to function effectively. Instead of viewing plateauism solely by its traditional definition of hierarchical movement, the assessment of plateauism needs to be expanded to include factors such as the content of the job, change in work responsibilities, and the learning of new skills. “Content” plateauism is contrasted as being distinctly different from the conventional measure referred to as “structural” plateauism. This difference in the assessment of plateauism may explain why one type of plateauism has detrimental effects while the negative repercussions attributable to the other type of plateauism can be moderated; consequently, the different types of plateauism may require different interventions. The implications for managers, organizations, and plateaued employees are discussed.

Australia is highly dependent on imports of products and services. The cost of these has to be serviced by exports to achieve a balance of trade. Unfortunately in most years the result is a deficit. Contemporary international trade theory indicates the need for a State government and private industry nexus to initiate and enhance trade outcomes. One of the key aspects of this nexus is the role of Sister State Agreements. However these high level government-to-government agreements are not subject to extensive research. This paper explores the Sister State Agreements of Queensland by designing a screening grid map using two axes each a construct of multiple variables. The map is designed with a view to examining how public sector management can advance the effectiveness of trade outcomes.

Note: A conference working paper based on this article was presented at the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2001 conference.

The current study analyses the effect of an international diversification strategy measured by multi-nationality and country scope, and tests its relationship with economic performance in the context of Australian corporate activity. Evidence from previous US studies on the relationship between international diversification strategy and economic performance was inconclusive, which suggests that research should go further with empirical analysis than testing for a linear relationship and should test for curvilinear relationships resulting from transactions costs analysis. Guided by that evidence a Chow test was used in the current study to establish a cut-off point that divided the sample of Australian firms into two subgroups (low-to-moderate and high level international diversification) to determine whether a non-linear relationship existed between economic performance and international diversification. This approach followed a similar technique used by Hitt, Hosskisson and Kim, (1997) and was used in this study as a method for determining two subgroups. The sample was selected from the population of large firms in Australia over a three-year period covering 1993-1995. The results suggest there is a statistically significant non-linear relationship between economic performance and multi-nationality. The results suggest that Australian corporations may be sensitive to the effect of transaction and managerial processing costs on the relationship between multi-nationality and economic performance resulting in a non-linear relationship.

Leaders are widely exhorted to employ visions, yet surprisingly little research has been conducted on what constitutes an “effective” vision. A research model is proposed for investigating relationships between vision components, and business unit performance as measured by employee and customer satisfaction. The model, expressed both graphically and as three propositions, proposes that vision attributes of brevity, clarity, abstractness, challenge, future orientation, stability, and desirability, plus vision content relating to employee and customer satisfaction, can directly affect performance. However, the model also predicts indirect effects on performance mediated by six realization factors and two intervening variables.

Management literature related to globalisation and the need for organisations to gain a competitive advantage has grown in prominence over the past two decades (Caves 1982; Porter 1985, 1990, 1991, 1998; Barney 1995; Peteraf 1993; Barner 1996; Duncan, Ginter & Swayne 1998; Thomas, Pollock & Gorman 1998; Zahra 1998; Zahra & O'Neil, 1998; Gupta & Govindarajan 2001). Concomitant with globalisation and competitive advantage are issues related to achieving successful organisational change, since it logically holds that any activity to increase an organisation's effectiveness necessarily involves some sort of change. Much of the research attention in the past has focussed on strategies for implementing change, including overcoming resistance, rather than developing theories which lead to a greater understanding of the processes of change. Early research (Coch & French 1948; Ginzberg & Reilly 1957; Lewin 1951) reflect the historical concentration on how best to implement change; this tradition is more recently exemplified by Carnall (1999) who examines practical techniques for achieving change in organisations. However, literature relating to the theory of change remains fragmented and inconclusive.

The paper presents findings of a study evaluating the impact of performance appraisal training on rating accuracy and perceived rating ability. 41 supervisors from a telecommunications firm took part in the training evaluated video vignettes and completed a questionnaire measuring self-efficacy beliefs about rating, goal intentions, and feelings about future rating behaviour. Supervisors in a control group (n = 12) also rated the video and completed the questionnaire. Trained supervisors showed increased accuracy on video ratings of work behaviour over the course of the training and an increase in self-efficacy measures. Control group supervisors by comparison decreased their accuracy of rating over the same time period while self-efficacy ratings remained constant. Impact of training on satisfaction and goals of participants is also presented.

Given the need to provide increased opportunities for busy managers to learn, but their reduced availability to attend formal on-campus classes, management students and corporate employers have turned to Distance Education (DE) provision as an alternative to face-to-face (FtF) programmes.

Providing flexible delivery, however, does not guarantee that the learning requirements of management students will be met, and needs to be considered in terms of the limits and enhancements to learning that different flexible methodologies support. DE comes in many forms and pedagogics, uses a variety of media, and tends to be designed with the individual learner in mind, whereas the demand for work-relevant management skills requires Management Education (ME) programmes to include collaborative as well as individual modes of learning.

Managers require integrative knowledge, emotional intelligence, and complex social and perceptual skills and attitudes that increasingly reflect ethical and values-oriented behaviour. At issue in the shift from FtF to DE is the need to provide opportunities for the ongoing social and interpersonal skills development that would normally occur within the classroom. For DE to add value to management learners it needs to offer flexibility that supports quality work-relevant education.

In this paper the author explores whether print-based DE combined with Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) technologies provides a solution. CMC is a networked electronic medium; used in conjunction with print-based DE it can provide opportunities for group interactivity and collaborative learning. Since the skills required for effective CMC participation are also synergistic with the socio-cultural and technical skills required of today's ‘networked manager’, the author suggests that there are further advantages to including CMC as part of the ME curriculum. From a review of the literature, the author concludes that there is much benefit in combining the two methodologies provided that:

• appropriate pedagogy is designed into the combined media

• the flexibility and educational needs of management learners are met

• educators and learners learn how to learn by the new media.

The concept of widespread “telecommuting” in a community envisages the presence of large numbers of employees who, instead of commuting to work, perform either all or a significant fraction of their tasks at home. It is widely accepted that large-scale adoption of telecommuting is just a matter of time in those countries with the necessary telecommunications infrastructure.

This paper reports on the conduct of a telecommuting project in a large Australian organisation. The data and the analyses demonstrate that, overall, the telecommuting project has been successful and brought benefits to both the employees and the organisation. The results also indicate the presence of strong positive links between the relationship/interactions telecommuters had with their supervisors, and the telecommuters' perception both of their own productivity, and their levels of satisfaction with the telecommuting experience. The tasks which telecommuters performed were also related to the employees' perception of productivity and job satisfaction.

Although inquiry into the impact of contextual factors on the governance of multinational enterprises (MNEs) has increased, primary attention has centred on MNEs from developed countries, which operate in other industrialised economies. There has been relatively little research into organisations from developed nations involved in less developed countries (LDCs). As this dearth of inquiry is particularly evident in South Pacific economies, this paper examines the management of Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL), an Australian mining company that operated in Papua New Guinea (PNG) until it was violently expelled by local communities in 1990. While this study supports research claiming that MNE performance depends upon the alignment of firms' internal and external environments, it demonstrates that alignment becomes increasingly difficult as characteristics in the host setting deviate from those in the home country. More importantly, it reveals that MNEs cannot survive under extremely divergent home—host conditions despite management efforts to control environmental variables. It also establishes that MNEs should focus contextual congruency on the host society, not the host country as widely suggested in the literature.