Anne S. Huff has a reputation that goes before her for helping other academics, particularly in their endeavours to have their work published. I attended one of Anne's sessions on writing for scholarly publication and had my eyes opened to the traps a researcher can fall into; I was also made aware of ways to focus my effort to maximum effect In the workshop sessions that Anne conducts she shares her successes but also acknowledges she too had difficulties in getting her research accepted for publication. I trusted that her advice was sound because she has been there and done that.

Some time after the workshop I felt the need to bring the conversations that we had during that workshop to a wider audience. I asked Anne if she would consent to an interview that would take readers along one of her research journeys. To my surprise Anne was more than delighted to do the interview and she found the idea of having the focus of our conversation on the process or research journey she undertook rather than the outcomes that are usually reported in journals quite novel. We agreed to meet at the EURAM 2005 conference which she co-organised.

Research is reported in a different way than it was first conceived An interesting (but often undiscussed) aspect of research is the process or journey that is undertaken to reach the reported outcomes. Junior and senior staff alike can learn a great deal from understanding the research journey that eminent scholars have undertaken. In this conversation Professor Huff takes us along the research path she followed in several projects, especially work with Professor Louis Pondy between 1979 and 1986. Anne discusses how the research changed shape over time as well as detailing how and why the research came to an end. She gives us an insight into problems that resulted in deviations from an initial research plan. Through Anne's discussion of the research we discover how issues were handled and with the benefit of hindsight what aspects of the research she would change. Finally, Anne shares some general lessons for undertaking research.

The resource-based view of the firm has drawn attention to the role of human resources in building innovative capacity within firms. In ‘high technology’ firms, scientific capability is a critical factor in achieving international competitiveness. Science, however, is a costly business and many firms are entering into cross-sector R&D partnerships in order to gain access to leading edge scientific capability. The Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) program is typical of the ways many governments are seeking to promote such cross-sector R&D collaboration. Scientists are key resources in these organisational arrangements. However, there is only fragmentary information available about why and when scientists choose to work in these cross-sector organisations rather than others, or the impact of changing funding regimes on their career choices. Similarly, there has been little research into the impact of such partnerships and career choices on the organisations in which scientists work. This paper presents some findings from two new ARC funded studies in Australia designed to investigate the careers of scientists and the organisational and career implications of participation in cross-sector R&D collaboration. One of our findings is that CRCs may not endure as long term ‘hybrid’ organisational arrangements as some observers have suggested, but rather remain as transitional structure influencing the partners involved and the careers of scientists. This has important implications for the managers of CRCs as well as those responsible for partner organisations.

This study examined the impact of situational and individual characteristics on sales representatives' propensity to lie or to tell the truth. The situational elements were the honesty of the organisation climate and its formal rules about lying to customers. The individual elements were the participants' degree of Machiavellianism and tolerance for ambiguity. The results indicated that more Machiavellian people were more likely to lie and that they were less guided by the rules than people who were low in this trait. In addition, rules and climate work together for people with a high tolerance for ambiguity in a complex manner.

A recent trend throughout Australia has been to develop multi-purpose indoor public aquatic centres in favour of outdoor pools. Such major policy and planning decisions often rely on consultants' feasibility studies, yet there is limited comprehensive industry-wide data available on which to base such decisions. The industry-wide performance measures discussed in this paper help fill this void by providing objective data to support the contention that multi-purpose indoor aquatic centres tend to outperform centres with solely outdoor pools. The key indicators of performance are based on financial viability and community participation data for a sample of Australian public aquatic centres.

This paper addresses the issue of services outsourcing by looking at both theoretical and empirical arguments. Previous debates have often concentrated on the motives for adopting the practice rather than the outcomes. These various themes can be discussed under the twin concepts of the cost and efficiency argument and the fashion and isomorphism approach. Our research provides strong evidence to support the cost efficiency argument. On average, significant cost advantages were sought and delivered, as well as improvements in service levels and systems. Many organisations in the current environment in Australia look at outsourcing not only as a method of increasing efficiency but also as gaining competitive advantage through harnessing the superior specialist skills and experience of the outsourcing provider who takes someone's back office function and transforms them into their front office. A 10% net cost saving was considered necessary by an organisation before embarking on an organisational change that was disruptive and in some cases involved downside risks. Even if other efficiency gains such as service levels or systems improvements were required, so were 10%+ cost savings. A number of the organisations thought their skills in managing outsourcing had improved considerably such that they were in a position to move from a client/server relationship to a partnership model (i.e. an alliance).

This paper reports on the nature and extent of intrapreneurship (or corporate entrepreneurship) practiced by Australian businesses. We examined the relationship between measures of corporate entrepreneurship and finn growth and profitability. and utilised measures devised by earlier researchers attempting to assess corporate entrepreneurship, viz: new business venturing, innovativeness, self-renewal, and proactiveness. Control variables included industry, finn age, and finn size. Interestingly, we found that the items measuring corporate entrepreneurship loaded onto not four but five factors, effectively splitting the self-renewal measure into two distinct elements, Profitability was significantly correlated with self-renewal (negative) and organisational support (positive) while growth was found to be significantly and positively related to both new business venturing and environmental munificence.

Scholars suggest that in the ‘intangible’ economy, firms need to exploit intangible, rather than tangible resources to generate superior performance. In this study, we theoretically developed the proposition that intangible assets and capabilities would be linked to superior performance while tangible assets would be linked to low performance. Drawing upon a broad sample of manufacturing and services firms in Australia and by segmenting out the central cluster of firms, we found that tangible resources were linked to low performance while as hypothesised, intangible assets and capabilities were linked to superior performance. Studies such as the present one offer some support for resource-based theory which argues that in today's economy, resources that are intangible in nature are more likely to be sources of competitive advantage than resources that are tangible in nature.

This study has used a longitudinal, quantitative design to explore the expected increase in the reference to human resource management (HRM) strategic planning roles in Australian organisations between 1993 and 2004. The research also examined which of the organisational characteristics of ownership, sector and size best predicts strategic planning roles for HR managers in 2003-04. Data was collected from the content analysis of 315 job advertisements for senior Human Resources (HR) managers published in national newspapers and on the Internet. Results established a longitudinal increase in references to strategic HR roles and established that internationally-owned, larger, and public sector organisations placed greater emphasis on promoting strategic roles for HR managers. The strongest predictor of a strategic planning role however was the sector in which the organisation was placed. Specifically, in the public sector HR managers at the most senior level were given the same strategic role as counterparts in the private sector but HR managers at the next level down were significantly less likely than HR managers at the same level in the private sector to be given strategic roles. These findings have implications for the training and development opportunities for HR managers working in the public sector.