Rod Gunn

Successes and Failures of the Mirroring Principle: The Case of Angling and Beauty Websites

This article examines whether industries with differing target markets in terms of their customers gender reflect the design preferences of their target markets in line with the mirroring principle. An analysis was conducted of websites of industries concentrated alternatively on male and female consumers, namely the angling and beauty salon industries. In each case, a random selection of 60 angling and beauty websites were rated using rating characteristics identified as typical of the male and female web-design production aesthetic. The fact that each gender has a marked preference for the production aesthetic of its own gender, and that the websites of industries focused on, alternatively, male and female consumers, are produced using a predominantly male design production aesthetic, shows the current failure in certain industries to deliver the empathy or mirroring principle. The male domination of the information technology and web-design industries, together with the earlier rooting of research on web aesthetics in the universalist, as against the interactionist perspective, are adduced as possible factors in this failure. This failure, if representative of other industries, could be leading to the suboptimal use of web design for markets not dominated by men, and may be one of the factors leading women to be less frequent users of the web than men.

Obstacles to Greater Design Diversity: Gender and Webdesign Software

The last chapter explored some of the practical issues that stand in the way of achieving greater design diversity. This chapter will take this further by looking at the practical case of grocery websites, noticing how they fail to reflect the aesthetic diversity that would allow them to maximise their impact. In the second half, we will see how the majority of free webdesign software is similarly failing to deliver on diversity, and we suggest that at root is a male-dominated webdesign and Information Technology (IT) culture. We show here how this culture produces free webdesign software that is overwhelmingly masculine in its orientation.

Knowledge Management and the Positive Impact of a Collectivist Culture

How does cultural diversity affect the development of knowledge? This chapter explores an under-researched issue namely the relationship between individualism and collectivism and knowledge creation and does this through a study of the research process in universities in a collectivist (Slovenia) and individualistic country (Australia). The Higher Education (HE) sector provides a suitable context in which to study this question since it is home to a research community devoted to knowledge creation (KC) and knowledge management (KM), or intellectual capital management (ICM) as it is sometimes known. However, although this chapter focuses on the processes in the HE sector, the conclusions that are reached are relevant to other contexts such as commercial organisations where information and knowledge management are important.