Call centres have been described as ‘electronic sweatshops’ and ‘slave galleons of the twenty first century’ and, contrarily as progressive, team based and career fulfilling work environments. Drawing on data from a survey of call centre managers in Australia, it is shown that there are elements of call centre management with practices from both extremes of the descriptive continuum and in some instances these elements coexist in the one centre. Whilst call centres are managed with a high level of control and the work of call centre agents is subject to intense scrutiny and monitoring, the simplistic notion that they are electronic sweatshops, or that the metaphor of the Panopticon applies, is rejected.

The Tall Poppy Syndrome (TPS) of knocking high achievers is often described as being ingrained in New Zealand's culture. This study interviews 40 entrepreneurs to explore how TPS impacts on entrepreneurs. Internationally, New Zealand is considered to be a highly entrepreneurial country. Thus TPS and an entrepreneurial culture appear to co-exist. Over half of the participants had experienced TPS in their role as entrepreneurs and their individual strategies for managing its impact included 'staying under the radar', not telling people they owned a business and not ‘flaunting’ their wealth. This study suggests that the effects of TPS may have significant implications for entrepreneurship in New Zealand. Firstly, TPS may discourage entrepreneurs from starting a business. Secondly, people who have experienced a business failure may be reluctant to establish another business because of the public reaction to their 'fall'. Finally, entrepreneurs may deliberately limit business growth because they don't want to attract attention. Potential ways of reducing the impact of TPS on entrepreneurs include celebrating entrepreneurial success more visibly, highlighting realistic role models for people to aspire to and emphasising the hard work and risk that entrepreneurs take to achieve success.

Large Australian and Swiss banks have been trimming their workforces since the mid-1990s. With further rounds of downsizing activities predicted, this study sought to identify, examine, and compare the adopted organizational downsizing implementation strategies. The primary purpose of this cross-cultural study was to determine how large Australian and Swiss banks implemented downsizing in their most recent endeavors. The research has revealed three key findings. First, Australian banks primarily adopted workforce reduction strategies, whereas Swiss banks employed a mixture of organization redesign, workforce reduction, and systemic strategies. Second, Australian banks had considerable depth in their downsizing, whereas Swiss banks had more breadth in their overall strategies. Third, Australian banks favored reorientation approaches, whereas Swiss banks embraced reinforcement approaches. It remains unclear as to why large Australian and Swiss banks differed in the selection of implementation strategies and why they diverged in their overall approaches to downsizing. Further research is required to explore aspects that are likely to influence the adoption of downsizing strategies in both Australia and Switzerland.

This paper reports the outcomes from a teaching and learning research project at an Australian University centred on improving a third year course in industrial relations. The paper addresses the cognitive and affective outcomes of the course. Cognitively, students developed a greater understanding of the processes of industrial relations and their interconnectedness; however, research and academic skills were identified as in need of further improvement. Affectively, students responded to the challenges of the course, increasing their confidence and self-efficacy and being better prepared for the transition from student to practitioner. While the course in question was a final year ‘capstone’ course, the findings are applicable to all who are interested in designing, or redesigning, any business course that attempts to integrate theory and practice.

In order to understand the characteristics of bioentrepreneurs, this paper seeks to identify the entrepreneurial types present in the Australian biotechnology industry by using the four-way psychological typology (Miner 2000) and identifying linkages between the four-way psychological typology and the Big Five model of personality traits. We believe this is a new approach to using psychological typology in the study of entrepreneurship by mapping with the Big Five model of personality traits. Miner's four typological types are ‘personal achievers’ (PA), ‘super sales people’ (SS), ‘expert idea generators’ (EI) and ‘real managers’ (RM). The Big Five factors are extraversion (Ex), stability/emotion stability (Es), agreeableness (Ag), conscientiousness (Co), and openness to experience (Op). By combining the entrepreneurial types and the five-factor personality traits, we can map the linkage relationships as PA-ExEsCoOp; SS-ExAgCoOp; EI-ExEsOp and RM-ExEsCoOp.

In this pilot study, we find there are more ‘personal achiever’ and ‘expert idea generator’ bioentrepreneurs in the biotech industry with the linkage relationships of PA-ExEsCoOp and EI-Ex EsOp, which lead us to conclude there are strong demands for bioentrepreneurs with managerial skills, sales and marketing skills, skills in forming strategic alliance with partners and skills in securing the public and private capitals through finance channels such as public listing and venture capital. This implies that if PA entrepreneurs acquired more agreeableness personality traits and EI entrepreneurs also acquired more agreeableness and conscientiousness personality traits they would improve the ability of their businesses to attract more financial investments and form sustainable strategic alliance with partners in the Australian biotechnology industry.

Context is an important but largely ignored dimension of quality service encounters. This paper contributes to the hospitality service industries literature by examining how the front-of-house and back-of-house boundary work (Nippert-Eng 1996, 2003) engaged by Room Attendants working within the hotel guest room space impact on the hospitality impression management performed. Qualitative data from fieldwork engaging with hotel employees located within the tourist resort of Queenstown New Zealand are used to explore the multiple fronts on which the front-of-house and back-of-house boundaries are simultaneously negotiated. The results suggest that Room Attendants negotiate the front-of-house and back-of-house boundary through objects – such as the guest room and articles belonging to the guest – and aspects of self– such as impression management, safety, socialising and self-responsibility for room checking. The results support the importance of considering context when seeking to understand the complexities associated with the (re)production of a reliably positive service encounter.

Workplace bullying is a phenomenon that is attracting increasing interest from researchers throughout the Western world. To date, most of the research into workplace bullying has focused on managers and colleagues as the perpetrators of bullying in the workplace. By contrast, little is known about ‘upwards bullying’, where managers are the targets. We argue that in order to more fully understand workplace bullying as a whole, the phenomenon of upwards bullying requires research attention. In the present study, upwards bullying was explored in interviews conducted with 24 managers from public and private organizations, with the data coded and arranged thematically. Results indicate that potential contributing factors towards upwards bullying include the current work environment, change within organizations and power issues. We recommend that organizations identify the occurrence and processes of upwards bullying as important steps in developing comprehensive workplace bullying policies.

The pursuit of regulatory reform in order to enhance organisational flexibility and efficiency appears to be ongoing in Australia. This is particularly salient in the service sector, where competition is strong and operating hours are often extended. In responding to these issues, government has sought to provide both employers and employees with additional regulatory options to better suit their individual needs; thereby offering what might be termed ‘regulatory choice’. While employers, on average, have engaged in these alternate forms of agreement making, those within the hospitality industry have been less enthusiastic about bargaining outside of the award system. The reasons for their reluctance have not been examined in depth, however. This paper therefore seeks to analyse the factors underpinning employers' bargaining decisions in order to develop a greater understanding of regulatory choice in Australian service sector firms. In doing so, the analysis focuses on employers' bargaining arrangements in the Australian luxury hotel sector. The findings indicate that regulatory choice is influenced by four primary factors: business/human resource management strategy; workplace characteristics; finances and perceived risk; and administrative issues. Contrary to the government's endeavours to enhance flexibility, some employers ‘choice’ of employment regulation was restricted. Regulatory choice appears to be significantly more complex than anticipated.