Inter-organisational systems: a personal history

The observations reported in this paper are based on an auto-ethnography of a participative engagement in the emergence of the globalised automation, media, information, and communications technology environment in Europe, over the last four decades. The conclusion is that, in the often disruptive and un co-ordinated coalescence of the publication and mass communication, telecommunications and information systems sectors, which has been a characteristic of the emergence of the global information economy, key aspects of centuries old learning about the nature of the roles and responsibilities associated with information and communications have been lost

Community participation agreements: a model for welfare reform from community-based research

Summary In its June 2001 budget, the Federal Government announced a new framework for welfare reform, Australians Working Together. One component of the framework is the proposed development of Community Participation Agreements in remote Indigenous communities, to deal with welfare income payments, mutual obligation and related service delivery. This paper presents the results of community consideration and the author’s field research between March and August 2001 at Mutitjulu, Central Australia, regarding what such an Agreement might look like on the ground. Mutitjulu presents a microcosm of many of the issues currently affecting remote Indigenous communities. As Mutitjulu residents struggle daily to come to terms with substantial economic and social difficulties, they find their culturally-based forms of social and cultural capital are being undermined by external factors seemingly beyond their immediate control. These include: the continuing failure of governments to develop a comprehensive approach to planning and service delivery, reflected in a band-aid approach to addressing welfare dependence; the debilitating impacts of inter-generational dependence on welfare income; and the multiplicity of local corporate structures and institutions with ill-defined roles and poor accountability to the Mutitjulu community. The failure to adequately address welfare dependence and major community problems of substance abuse, family breakdown, domestic violence, and low levels of education is viewed by Anangu (local Aboriginal people) as directly contributing to a noticeable deterioration in the wellbeing of individuals, their families and the community at large. There is growing frustration over the failure, at all levels, to deal effectively with these matters. The Mutitjulu Community Council has formally decided to proceed with the development of a Community Participation and Partnership Agreement (the ‘Mutitjulu Agreement’), in partnership with government and other stakeholders, as one means to begin addressing these matters. The development of practical partnerships with key government departments and local agencies will be a critical factor in the overall success of the proposed Mutitjulu Agreement. It is for this reason that the name of the proposed Agreement has been expanded to include the strategy of ‘partnership’ and well as ‘participation’. The paper begins with an overview of the background to the community-based research, terms of reference and research methodology. The proposed Mutitjulu Agreement is then placed in its national policy context to identify the factors that have generated this particular initiative. The paper goes on to describe the community context for the Agreement, including the nature of the local welfare economy, and Anangu views about the impacts of the welfare system. Consideration is given to the nature of contemporary Anangu social and economic relations, and how the term ‘participation’ might be most relevantly defined for the purposes of a community agreement about participation

Cadres, gangs and prophets: the commodity futures markets of China

In China's market reforms, the emergence of commodity futures markets marked the way in which the country took up more sophisticated components of capitalist markets. Based on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2005, this thesis is the first ethnography conducted in the commodity futures markets of China. It provides field records of the relationship between state structures, quasi-public organisations and the private sector in a post-Communist market. It shows how social groups align to form capital factions, and how these factions attempt to calculate the actions of each other. It also provides an account of how knowledge is circulated, and how reputation, authority and expertise are developed within the markets. The author argues that the notion of"performativity" can be applied to the case of Chinese futures markets. The consensus held by market actors and their subsequent actions are a major contribution to market reality. In the context of Chinese markets. political power plays a particularly crucial role-it links up a politicized feedback loop between perception, action and reality. The thesis applies the concept of technology transfer to assess whether futures markets have an inherent "script" that unfolds and is implemented under different social, cultural and political contexts. Relaxing assumptions held by neoclassical economists (such as individualized rationality), the author believes that the feedback loop of knowledge, action and reality is th e "vanilla core" of markets. One of the key factors in success in market construction is the successful implementation of s.uch feedback loops

Ethics and taxation : a cross-national comparison of UK and Turkish firms

This paper investigates responses to tax related ethical issues facing busines

Security in a Distributed Processing Environment

Distribution plays a key role in telecommunication and computing systems today. It has become a necessity as a result of deregulation and anti-trust legislation, which has forced businesses to move from centralised, monolithic systems to distributed systems with the separation of applications and provisioning technologies, such as the service and transportation layers in the Internet. The need for reliability and recovery requires systems to use replication and secondary backup systems such as those used in ecommerce. There are consequences to distribution. It results in systems being implemented in heterogeneous environment; it requires systems to be scalable; it results in some loss of control and so this contributes to the increased security issues that result from distribution. Each of these issues has to be dealt with. A distributed processing environment (DPE) is middleware that allows heterogeneous environments to operate in a homogeneous manner. Scalability can be addressed by using object-oriented technology to distribute functionality. Security is more difficult to address because it requires the creation of a distributed trusted environment. The problem with security in a DPE currently is that it is treated as an adjunct service, i.e. and after-thought that is the last thing added to the system. As a result, it is not pervasive and therefore is unable to fully support the other DPE services. DPE security needs to provide the five basic security services, authentication, access control, integrity, confidentiality and non-repudiation, in a distributed environment, while ensuring simple and usable administration. The research, detailed in this thesis, starts by highlighting the inadequacies of the existing DPE and its services. It argues that a new management structure was introduced that provides greater flexibility and configurability, while promoting mechanism and service independence. A new secure interoperability framework was introduced which provides the ability to negotiate common mechanism and service level configurations. New facilities were added to the non-repudiation and audit services. The research has shown that all services should be security-aware, and therefore would able to interact with the Enhanced Security Service in order to provide a more secure environment within a DPE. As a proof of concept, the Trader service was selected. Its security limitations were examined, new security behaviour policies proposed and it was then implemented as a Security-aware Trader, which could counteract the existing security limitations.IONA TECHNOLOGIES PLC & ORANG

Performance controls for distributed telecommunication services

As the Internet and Telecommunications domains merge, open telecommunication service architectures such as TINA, PARLAY and PINT are becoming prevalent. Distributed Computing is a common engineering component in these technologies and promises to bring improvements to the scalability, reliability and flexibility of telecommunications service delivery systems. This distributed approach to service delivery introduces new performance concerns. As service logic is decomposed into software components and distnbuted across network resources, significant additional resource loading is incurred due to inter-node communications. This fact makes the choice of distribution of components in the network and the distribution of load between these components critical design and operational issues which must be resolved to guarantee a high level of service for the customer and a profitable network for the service operator. Previous research in the computer science domain has addressed optimal placement of components from the perspectives of minimising run time, minimising communications costs or balancing of load between network resources. This thesis proposes a more extensive optimisation model, which we argue, is more useful for addressing concerns pertinent to the telecommunications domain. The model focuses on providing optimal throughput and profitability of network resources and on overload protection whilst allowing flexibility in terms of the cost of installation of component copies and differentiation in the treatment of service types, in terms of fairness to the customer and profitability to the operator. Both static (design-time) component distribution and dynamic (run-time) load distribution algorithms are developed using Linear and Mixed Integer Programming techniques. An efficient, but sub-optimal, run-time solution, employing Market-based control, is also proposed. The performance of these algorithms is investigated using a simulation model of a distributed service platform, which is based on TINA service components interacting with the Intelligent Network through gateways. Simulation results are verified using Layered Queuing Network analytic modelling Results show significant performance gains over simpler methods of performance control and demonstrate how trade-offs in network profitability, fairness and network cost are possible

The Devil Is in the Details: Attorney Heterogeneity and Employment Arbitration Outcomes

Conventional wisdom holds that hiring a lawyer will improve outcomes for non-union employees who take individual rights complaints to arbitration. However, the limited amount of empirical scholarship into this topic has rarely accounted for the concurrent influence of employer representatives, or for the presence and effects of employee and employer attorney heterogeneity. I analyze all arbitration awards rendered within the securities industry from the implementation of its ADR program through the late-2000s, and first find that hiring an attorney benefits employees only in the rare cases that employers do not also include an agent. I then account for attorney selection into cases by limiting the analysis to only claims that involved attorneys. I use biographical records for each lawyer to explore attorney heterogeneity in education, expertise, gender, experience, and other characteristics. I examine longitudinal changes in attorney characteristics over time, and empirically test how these differences affect outcomes. I find that many employee and employer attorney characteristics vary and have grown more pronounced over time, and several of these variations shape outcomes. I conclude that although hiring an attorney may not redress power imbalances within employment arbitration, more nuanced analyses reveal that they are important to the system and certain types of lawyers can provide important benefits