Project managers and technical change : curriculum development in strategic technology management

Traditional business approaches do not take account of the rapid technological developments underpinning today's world. Further understanding the role of technology and its efficient management to build and maintain a competitive edge in business can allow project managers to more successfully manage organisations, and to adapt to and capitalise on, today’s rapidly changing environment. Strategic Technology Management links engineering, science and management principles to identify, choose, and implement the most effective means of attaining compatibility between internal skills and resources of an organisation and its competitive, economic and social environment. This paper reviews the rationale and the development of a new Strategic Technology Management subject in QUT’s Master of Project Management program. It discusses recent developments in the area of technology management from an international perspective, provides details of the curriculum developed and discusses the experience of completing two years of teaching the new program

Understanding the Recovery Process in Psychosis

Conceptualizing recovery in the context of severe and persisting mental health conditions is a complex issue. In recent years, there has been a call to re-focus research from understanding the concept of recovery to improving understanding of the process of recovery. There is a paucity of knowledge about the core processes involved in recovery from psychosis. Objective: The authors aimed to gain insight into possible processes involved in recovery through analyzing data generated from a large qualitative study investigating employment barriers and support needs of people living with psychosis. Research Design and Methods: Participants were 137 individuals drawn from six key stakeholder groups. Data obtained from focus groups (14) and individual interviews (34) were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: The main recovery processes identified were: learning effective coping strategies; recognizing personal potential; identifying and realizing personal goals; participation in social and occupational roles; positive risk-taking; and reclaiming personal identity. Discussion: The results of this study have implications for treatment as well as the daily support needs of people recovering from psychosis

Harsh Creditor Remedies and The Role of the Redeemer

The concept of the judgment-proof or collection-proof debtor is fundamental to our understanding of civil law and of what distinguishes it from criminal law. But when civil creditors can threaten unduly harsh or cruel debt collection measures (whether legally or not), they extend their reach into the pockets of those whom this Article calls “redeemers,” third parties with a familial or quasi-familial relationship to civil debtors who have reason to pay on their behalf. This Article examines four such measures—imprisonment, homelessness, destitution, and deportation—remedies that sound like they come from another time and place, but which are threatened by some creditors in the United States today. Such “remedies” are problematic because (among other reasons) they undermine a core pillar of civil law: that liability—absent a guarantee—is limited to the defendant. Because harsh creditor remedies can affect third party redeemers, they also provide a classic example of an externality that justifies nonparentalistic intervention. We should think of this field not as “the law of debtors and creditors,” but as “the law of debtors, creditors, and redeemers.” The role that redeemers play in debt collection law is one of many instances in which legal institutions display a myopic view of communities: redeemers too often stand outside the field of vision of courts and legislatures. Even so, this theory provides a powerful tool for explaining and reinforcing legal rules ranging from the law of unconscionability to exemption statutes to consumer protection. This Article also recommends several measures to cabin this “spillover” effect, including an argument that imprisonment for civil debt violates not only state bans on debtors’ prisons, but also the federal Due Process Clause (even after Dobbs)

Bankruptcy Fiduciaries

Does social enterprise end with insolvency? Is bankruptcy all about the bottom line? The answer to these questions begins with understanding the estate in bankruptcy and the fiduciaries that control its fate. Yet the law of fiduciary duties in bankruptcy is undertheorized, conflicted, and muddled. After almost fifty years of confusion, this Article provides the first comprehensive examination of the nature and source of fiduciary duties in bankruptcy. Although the Supreme Court has intoned “maximize the value of the estate” as a shorthand, I argue that the trustee’s duty of obedience in reorganization cases gives rise to a “duty to facilitate a plan” or, as I call it, a “duty to clear runway.” I also conclude, based on 28 U.S.C. § 959, that the trustee must observe state law fiduciary duties that would otherwise have governed the debtor outside of bankruptcy. Trustees of benefit corporations, for example, must not pursue money-maximization above all else, but must balance pecuniary interests against the public benefit set forth in the debtor’s articles, such as preserving employment, protecting the environment, or supporting the local economy. For their part, creditors and debtors alike have opportunities to advocate for public-minded goals in bankruptcy cases as part of official committees or, in a novel twist, a “benefit committee.” And indeed, some creditors, like DIP lenders, may step into a fiduciary relationship with the bankruptcy estate if they wield extraordinary control over the estate’s decision making. The timing is right for a rethinking: as the social enterprise ecosystem finds itself caught up in bankruptcy proceedings, creditors and debtors alike may wish to press for their vision of value. This vision for bankruptcy law is both capacious and controversial: it would allow for a wider range of values to be pursued during the plan negotiation process and could reshape bankruptcy practice for social enterprises

Bespoke, Tailored, and Off-the-Rack Bankruptcy: A Response to Professor Coordes\u27s \u27Bespoke Bankruptcy\u27

Toward the end of every semester that I teach bankruptcy, I let my students vote on which “non-traditional” insolvency regimes they would like to study, including municipal bankruptcy, sovereign bankruptcy, and financial institutions. What I am really trying to do is convey to the students that the default procedures and substantive rules in Chapters 7 and 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code do not apply to all types of enterprises

State Bans on Debtors\u27 Prisons and Criminal Justice Debt

Since the 1990s, and increasingly in the wake of the Great Recession, many municipalities, forced to operate under tight budgetary constraints, have turned to the criminal justice system as an untapped revenue stream. Raising the specter of the debtors\u27 prisons once prevalent in the United States, Imprisonment for failure to pay debts owed to the state has provoked growing concern over the year

Bankruptcy & the Benefit Corporation

As pressure grows for money-making businesses to prioritize social responsibility, the benefit corporation - a recent innovation in corporate governance - promises to require the directors of socially minded businesses to balance public benefit with shareholder interests. But will that promise survive the crucible of financial distress? While most discussions of the benefit corporation give only passing treatment to insolvency (or ignore it altogether), this Article provides the first complete analysis of how bankruptcy principles would apply to benefit corporations, informed by the practical context of out-of-court workouts and negotiations that take place in the shadow of the bankruptcy laws. After analyzing three normative models, including an innovative application of the channeling function of law, this Article answers that the benefit corporation\u27s key innovations should persist in bankruptcy. But with the reticulated provisions of creditor-debtor law and the Bankruptcy Code, the Article warns that the application of that principle is complicated and provides a detailed map of some of the major considerations - and pitfalls

The New American Debtors\u27 Prisons

State by state, Americans abolished imprisonment for debt in the first half of the nineteenth century. In forty-one states, the abolition of debtors\u27 prisons eventually took the form of constitutional bans. But debtors\u27 prisons are back, in the form of imprisonment for nonpayment of criminal fines, fees, and costs. While the new debtors\u27 prisons are not historically or doctrinally continuous with the old, some aspects of them offend the same pragmatic and moral principles that compelled the abolition of the old debtors\u27 prisons. Indeed, the same constitutional texts that abolished the old debtors\u27 prisons constitute checks on the new today. As the criminal law literature grapples with debtors\u27 prisons through more traditional doctrinal avenues, this Article engages with the metaphor head-on and asks how the old bans on debtors\u27 prisons should be interpreted for a new era of mass incarceration.

Sedimentological and tectono-stratigraphic characterisation of a shallow-marine reservoir, ‘Dona’ Field, offshore Niger Delta

The ‘Dona’ field is located in the shallow offshore Coastal Swamp depobelt, western Niger Delta. The field contains multiple, stacked shallow-marine reservoir intervals of Miocene to early Pliocene age in the Agbada Formation. The area surrounding the field is characterised by a series of synthetic, listric normal faults that strike north-northwest to south-southeast and dip southwest. These faults show stratigraphic thickening in their hangingwalls, indicating growth, and are associated with the development of rollover anticlines, which define the trap configuration of the ‘Dona’ field. Spatio-temporal variations in stratigraphic expansion indicate that growth faulting started in more landward (northeasterly) locations and migrated progressively basinward (southwestward). These variations are consistent with growth faulting due to gravity-induced shale diapirism, potentially driven by overall progradation of the Niger Delta. Core and wireline-logs from a representative reservoir interval contain a facies assemblage and stratigraphic architecture developed under a mixed-influence depositional process regime, which was dominated by wave processes but influenced by tidal processes. Wave-dominated shoreface deposits occur in a series of coarsening- and shallowing-upward parasequences that are laterally continuous over the reservoir but are locally erosionally truncated by fining-upward tidal channel-fill deposits. The mixed-influence process regime may reflect spatial variations in the dominance of wave, tide and fluvial processes, as in the modern Niger Delta, and/or temporal variations between a regressive, wave-dominated regime and a transgressive, tide-dominated regime. Sedimentological heterogeneities are present across a range of scales, and their distribution reflects the mixed-influence depositional process regime