Greg Whitwell

The transfer of human resource and management practice by Japanese multinationals to Australia: do industry, size and experience matter?

This paper examines management and HRM practices adopted by Japanese multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the transferability of Japanese HRM in the Australian host-country situation. It also compares HRM practices of Japanese MNEs in Australia with the experience in North America and Europe and attempts to map the typology of the human resource management utilized by a range of Japanese firms operating in Australia, including large and small firms; manufacturing and non-manufacturing companies; firms with differing levels of Japanese equity and with different levels of operational experience. This paper is based on survey data from sixty-nine Japanese subsidiaries operating in the Australian manufacturing and service sectors in 1994.

Weight and Welfare of Australians, 1890–1940

Views differ on whether living standards in Australia improved between 1890 and 1940. The pessimists, relying principally on product and incomes measures, argue that living standards stagnated; the optimists, using augmented measures of well-being, argue that living standards may have improved. This paper contributes to this debate between the pessimists and optimists by using alternative measures of living standards, namely the height and body mass index (BMI) of male Australian army recruits of World Wars I and II. The nature and usefulness of these measures is examined. The major findings are that the height data indicate an unequivocal improvement in living standards in the period under consideration. The BMI data tend to support a similar conclusion, but the results are ambiguous and there are difficulties in using them alone to determine exactly what happened to living standards.