Marco Berti

Higher Education in Management: The Case of Australia

The strategic relevance of higher business education in Australia cannot be overstated. From a purely economic perspective, it has the lion’s share in one of Australia’s most valuable exports, education, generating around

Protecting expatriates in hostile environments: institutional forces influencing the safety and security practices of internationally active organisations

15 billion in revenues each year (Group of Eight 2014). Business schools train and accredit generations of business leaders, entrepreneurs and business professionals, who constitute the backbone of national economy and society. Their research offers useful intelligence on how to reinforce and reconfigure organizational and industrial capabilities, helping practitioners and policymakers.

Making a place out of space: The social imaginaries and realities of a Business School as a designed space

Abstract The operations of internationally active organisations continue to encroach on hostile locations that are vulnerable to the negative consequences of crises such as political upheaval, terrorist attacks or natural disasters. Yet research into how firms ensure the physical and psychological safety and security of international staff in these locations is limited. This article reports an empirical study exploring the expatriate safety and security practices of 28 internationally active organisations from three industries that commonly operate in hostile environments. We unveil starkly different approaches across the three industries, and label these approaches ‘regulatory’ (mining and resources), ‘informal mentoring’ (news media) and ‘empowering’ (international aid and development). We use institutional theory to propose that these configurations reflect legitimacy-seeking choices that these organisations make in response to the various institutional environments that affect each sector. Our results provide a platform for initial theory building into the interrelated elements of organisations’ safety and security practices, and the institutional factors that shape the design of these.

The power of metaphors

We chart the sociomaterial imaginaries and realities of a new Frank Gehry–designed University of Technology Sydney Business School as both a space and a place. We review the broad sociological literature on space, considering its philosophical and conceptual parameters. Lefebvre’s work is central to such discussion, a centrality that we do not so much question as extend by turning attention from a macro-historical conception of space to consider the specificity of place and placemaking, contributing our ‘place in space’ heuristic model. We apply the model empirically through analysis of the design and occupancy of the business school, highlighting elements that concurrently produce the phenomenology of space and place. Our findings suggest that while organizational space ensconces power and the production of relationships, the translation of these into an identity ordering place is not a linear process. ‘Spatial narratives’, characterizing the imagined functions of the building, have been inconsistently materialized, and different actors have re-inscribed alternative functions and meanings in this new place. Theoretically, the article moves debate beyond the frame bequeathed by Lefebvre while building on it, proposing an analysis that affords equal emphasis to material elements (architectural features, furniture, policies) as to discursive elements (symbols, interpretations, narratives).

Elgar Introduction to Organizational Discourse Analysis

The best metaphors are based on something that is already familiar to the student, and the more vivid and concrete you can make it, the better. How do you come up with a metaphor? Once you have identified a bottleneck to learning, ask yourself, what is the desired thinking like? In a fine arts example, if I want to model the thinking process I use when I create a self-portrait, am I trying to picture the light and dark colors, like a kaleidoscope? Or is it about creating a message about myself, more like deciding what to bring along on a canoe trip? The metaphor will help the students understand the kind of thinking to be invoked.