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 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.

During the 1990s, many Australian universities adopted innovative new online learning technologies without critical examination of their merit to those institutions, leading in some cases to wasted resources, unfulfilled expectations, program and organisational failure. Given that limited theoretical and empirical explanations have addressed this important research problem, this paper discusses and applies a management fashion framework to this research problem and argues that online learning technologies could be conceptualised as a management fashion, following the empirical work of Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999). The major contributions of this paper are to identify an important yet under-researched area in higher education research, demonstrate the utility of a management fashion framework in this context, and propose a number of recommendations for policy makers, university managers and academics confronted with educational innovations.