Diana J Kelly

International education: quality assurance and standards in offshore teaching: exemplars and problems

The massification of university education is being replicated in many emergent and newly‐industrialised countries, as universities from older economies have begun to offer educational services overseas. Initially, these were small‐group programmes, but in recent years many more subjects, programmes and degrees have been taught offshore to increasingly large groups. This kind of education is dissimilar both to distance education and to local (campus) education, and provides particular challenges for those ensuring and assuring quality from a global perspective. Drawing on the significant experience of the authors, this paper takes a case‐study approach to investigating the principles and processes of assuring quality and ensuring standards and to identifying elements that can prove fruitful in achieving high quality and standards.

A Shock to the System? The impact of HRM on academic IR in Australia in comparison with USA and UK, 1980-95

Taking a theme of the transmission of ideas within disciplines, this paper investigates the impact of academic human resource management on academic industrial relations, comparing the impact in Australia between 1980 and 1995 with the earlier responses in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is shown that while HRM had a significant effect on academic industrial relations, the extent of that impact is not wholly clear because other events, such as public policy shifts and the changing role of universities, also affected academic industrial relations.

Trade Unionism in 1993

employment relationship-not a surprising strategy, given the severity of the economic recession up to the end of 1993. The imperatives of cost-cutting, efficiency and competitiveness increasingly overwhelmed the flexibility that used to come with recognition of equity and a ’fair ago’. Thus, while much of the major twin initiatives of amalgamation and rationalization came to remarkably early fruition, these initiatives were matched or possibly exceeded by the array of attempts to circumscribe trade union power or simply marginalize trade unions.

Beatrice Webb and the National Standard for Manual Handling

In 1896 Beatrice Webb reported that those individuals opposed to special labour laws designed to protect women employees had formed a powerful alliance. The alignment of forces making up this alliance was composed of employers, free market economists and the middle-class wing of the movement for womens emancipation. In this paper it is argued that a similar alliance is active presently in Australia. Like its 1890s counterpart, this modern Australian alliance is campaigning for the abolition of certain special laws that exist to defend women employees from excessive demands on the part of employers. The paper discusses the nature of this alliance and examines one of its more recent successes. It is concluded that industrial relations analysts have paid insufficient attention to the protective character of these laws and that this is an omission that must be remedied.

Trade Unionism in 1994

Trade unions were under many and competing pressures in 1994. Their commitment to promoting the creation of wealth frequently stood at odds with their role of protecting workers’ interests. The fragmentation of bargaining structures, the need for expertise in a multiplicity of areas for effective workplace bargaining, and the requirement to deal with new and often complex legislation in the states and the

Towards Tripartism: Industrial Relations in the Steel Industry 1978 to 1987

From 1982 union responses to the rapid downturn of the Australian steel industry focused on industrial action, a sequence of redundancy cases, and a public inquiry, until the Hawke government was elected in 1983 and union calls for an integrated tripartite approach were heeded. Subsequently, in the first half of the five-year tripartite Steel Industry Plan, industrial relations at BHPs Port Kembla steel works were notable for a marked decline in strike levels and generally improved industrial relations. These were aided by the Steel Industry Authority, which worked to facilitate relations previously characterized by confrontationism, mutual suspicion and ready recourse to the New South Wales Industrial Commission. The impact of the Steel Industry Plan is, however, diffused by other phenomena, such as changes in BHP management style and the effect of heavy job losses on the dependent steel regions. Nevertheless, despite some evidence of a return to higher strike levels in 1985-87, the plan has offered an integrated and positive approach to the industrys problems and enabled improved industrial relations at plant level.

Perceptions of Taylorism and a Marxist scientific manager

Purpose This paper aims to provide evidence of pro-worker orientation and acceptance of socialist idealism in scientific management, with particular focus on Walter Polakov. Design/methodology/approach A range of original texts have been examined to identify the ideas expressed or accepted by the early scientific managers. These include Bulletin of the Taylor Society and the early publications of the socialist engineer and scientific manager Walter Polakov. Findings This paper shows how an avowed socialist is outspoken but unremarkable for the members of the Taylor Society in the 1910s and 1920s, contrary to the views expressed in textbooks and other histories which assert a deep antiworker bias in scientific management. Research limitations/implications This is limited to a historical analysis of the role and extent of involvement of the Marxist engineer Walter Polakov in the US scientific management movement in the 1910s and 1920s. Originality/value This paper offers insights into the workings of the Taylor Society using a biographical approach. In so doing, it demonstrates, in a new way, the verity of claims that the original proponents of scientific management were not authoritarian or anti-worker in their views or ideals, but, rather, open to progressive and socialist ideals.

The Scientific Manager and the FBI: The Surveillance of Walter Polakov in the 1940s

Scholars who have sought to demonstrate the complexity of scientific management as a philosophy, a movement, and a mode of thinking have only rarely discussed the scientific managers themselves. Yet their lives offer important insights not only into a unique group of engineers, managers, and academics, but also into the competing tensions across American society in the first half of the twentieth century. The great complexity of scientific management is rarely more evident than in the life of one of the movement’s most prolific writers and greatest political outlier. Walter Polakov, an immigrant Russian, was an avowed scientific manager and an acknowledged Marxist in a country where fear of communism and socialism was deeply held and widespread. Given the rising tensions in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century, it is not surprising

THE TRANSFER OF IDEAS IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: DUNLOP AND OXFORD IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUSTRALIAN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS THOUGHT, 1960–1985

The primary objective of this paper is to understand the extent to which Australian industrial relations academics took up the different heuristic frameworks from USA and U.K. from the 1960s to the 1980s. A second objective is to begin to understand why, and in what ways ideas are transmitted in academic disciplines drawing on a “market model” for ideas. It is shown that in the years between 1960s and 1980s a modified U.S. (Dunlopian) model of interpreting industrial relations became more influential in Australia than that of U.K. scholarship, as exemplified by the British Oxford School. In part this reflects the breadth, flexibility and absence of an overt normative tenor in Dunlop’s model which thus offered lower transaction costs for scholars in an emergent discipline seeking recognition and approval from academia, practitioners and policy-makers. Despite frequent and wide-ranging criticism of Dunlop’s model, it proved a far more enduring transfer to Australian academic industrial relations than the British model, albeit in a distorted form. The market model for the diffusion of ideas illuminates the ways in which a variety of local contextual factors influenced the choices taken by Australian industrial relations academics.

Book Review: Steel Town: The Making and Breaking of Port Kembla

to bow to the collective workers’ view; or management may make concessions that dissipate the collective sense of grievance. Are the activists who mobilise to frame a distinct employee perspective more ‘militant’ in the first scenario than in the second? The term itself is perhaps not very helpful. Ultimately Gall’s easy equation of ‘militant = regular striker’ undersells the trade union activist who does not strike but who may be every bit as involved in resisting employer arbitrariness and social injustice. The book is worth looking at as an antidote to the benign volumes considering the advent of team working and partnership in the UK over the last 15 years. It also remains a major addition to the recent history of the British labour movement. What it is not is a serious discussion of the nature of trade union activism and of the relationship between resistance to the employer and resistance to capitalism.