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There has been sustained interest in how to support doctoral students through the often-gruelling journey they undertake from enrolment to graduation. Although doctoral numbers and successful completions have been steadily increasing globally as well as in Australia, the quality of student progression and outcomes has been widely interrogated and criticised in the literature that is reported in this paper. The authors’ interest as experienced research higher degree supervisors and research leaders in the creative arts and humanities prompted a research project that aimed to better understand the challenges and breakthroughs involved in completing a doctorate from the perspective of candidates themselves.

This was implemented through an action learning collaboration with 18 students from three Australian universities facilitated by four research supervisors.

The main findings presented in this paper include the necessity for maintaining, brokering and supporting a range of relationships; understanding expectations of research study and embracing the need for agility in managing these; and finally, using techniques to improve personal agency and ownership of the transformative journey of research higher degree candidature. The importance of establishing an understanding of the multidimensional human experience of doing a doctorate and providing appropriate support through enhanced forms of research training emerged as a core finding from this research project.

The relatively small number of research participants in this study and the discipline-specific focus prohibits generalizability of findings; however, the collaborative, action learning method adopted represents an approach that is both productive and transferable to other contexts and disciplines.

Further research might investigate the relevance of the findings from this research to doctoral students in other disciplines and/or institutions or apply the collaborative action learning approach to doctoral training presented here to a range of contexts and cohorts.

Improving doctoral training options to support the multidimensional needs of candidates can better assure the mental and emotional well-being of doctoral students (essential to their continuing intellectual development and sense of agency) through developing sustainable relationships and realistic expectations. This in turn has the potential to address the consistently high attrition rates in doctoral programmes.

This research contributes new insights from doctoral students on the challenges and breakthroughs experienced by them as they pursue original research through formal study and present a novel, collaborative and empowering approach to doctoral training that can be applied in diverse setting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential benefits that books, and specifically memoirs, may offer mental health students, positing that first person testimonials may make the complex experiences of a mental health challenge, in this case eating disorders (ED), accessible to learners.

The paper presents a pedagogical approach, based on transformative learning (TL), to assist in encouraging the development of a Recovery Approach in students. TL is a pedagogy that is interested in problematic practices that keep afflicting an area such as mental health, such as the imbalanced focus on learning illness rather than wellbeing, and in pondering and revising the educational solutions.

The paper proposes that forward movement in this area will be based on considering and developing such innovative curricula, and researching its impact.

By virtue of their accessibility, memoirs could offer to a large audience the benefits of universality, empathy, hope and guidance. Teachers and learners could be making use of these books in face-to-face or online activities. This paper explores the groundwork that is needed before ED memoirs can be confidently recommended as an empowering tool.

Deleuze and Guattari have argued that in art, including literature, the senses get hold of the world in a non‐conceptual or “sensational” way, adding “new varieties” that can lead to new ways of knowing and seeing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of multi‐disciplinary, practice‐led research in creative writing as a form of knowledge making in qualitative research.

The author uses her own writing, especially the novel Swimming (Vanark Press, 2009), which is situated in the broader context of feminist fiction writing, as a subversive feminist project that aims to intervene in and challenge the dominant narratives of what it means to be a woman, by creating “alternative figurations” of “woman” which highlight differences among women and enhance our understanding of “woman” as a complex and multiple subject always “in process”.

By using her own practice of fiction writing and research as a case study, the author explores the ways that constructing an imagined narrative – in this case a novel – can make a contribution to knowledge and raise questions about representation, truth and subjectivity.

In this paper, through a few examples from her novel, the author's aim has been to write a narrative of the process, of “material thinking” that led to the final work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how non-host cities strategically plan to leverage pre-Games training for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games to maximize benefits to the city.

Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with key tourism and government stakeholders involved in developing leveraging strategies for pre-Games training in a non-host city. Interviews were conducted a little over 18 months before the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

A model of the strategic planning of leveraging pre-Games training is presented. Pre-Games training was positioned as a leverageable resource. The non-host city was well positioned to host pre-Games training given its existing sport focus and facilities and its proximity to the host city and its similar climate. Opportunities, objectives, means, and considerations were constantly developed. The city strategically targeted teams to maximize the use of the training facilities and make the most of the value of well-known athletes, while being cautious of overcrowding. The teams had to be secured before strategies were devised to achieve other opportunities and objectives. Short-term benefits included generating tourism through visiting teams and entourages and integrating visiting teams into the local community through education and sport programming. Long-term benefits included building the destination’s capacity and reputation as a place for elite training camps and tourism.

Understanding how to develop strategies to leverage pre-Games training can inform those responsible for developing and implementing pre-Games training strategies and lead to maximizing the benefits to a city or region.

Limited research has examined the strategic planning process used to develop tactics to leverage mega-events. This study provides insight into the strategic planning process of non-host cities to increase short- and long-term benefits by leveraging pre-Games training.

Grounded in the principal-agent theory, this study aims to develop and test hypotheses too, investigate how the firm’s strategic orientations, namely, innovation, growth, differentiation and cost leadership impact the chief information officer (CIO) reporting relationship and structure.

The study uses content analysis to analyze a data set of press releases collected from the LexisNexis Academic wire index. The press releases were issued by firms when they hired CIOs between 2003 and 2007, yielding 128 firms, which had specific information about the CIO reporting relationship and structure.

The results reveal that firms seeking an innovation, growth or differentiation strategy have their CIOs reporting to the chief executive officer.

The current study is motivated by the desire to replicate and extend the works of previous researchers who have assessed various CIO issues. Replication takes several forms such as the use of similar or different data sets, different research environments or reinvestigating research concepts through a different theoretical lens. This study makes use of a multi-firm data set spanning five years and the principal-agent theory as the theoretical framework to explore the CIO reporting relationship and structure. Although this study focuses on the hiring trends and the strategic orientations of the firms, future studies should explore other characteristics associated with the CIOs that might have an impact on the reporting relationship such as the years of experience, age, educational background of CIOs and information technology budgets.

The existing literature has not settled the debate as to whom the CIO should be reporting to and understanding the reporting relationships is important because, in many firms, the organizational structures and the reporting relationships are indicative of the power dynamics and how the organizational resources are controlled and shared.

Replication studies are important because they confirm, reinforce, extend and provide reliability to the paradigms and knowledge in the discipline, as well as offer reliability of the results upon which scientific progress is based.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

This research explores how gender influences the experience of cancer care and proposes a new explanation for gender differences in posttraumatic growth among individuals who received blood or marrow transplantation as treatment for lymphoma.

We use mixed methods, combining quantitative examination of surveys with 180 survivors with qualitative findings from semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 50 survivors. Participants were 2–25 years after transplantation. Quantitative data were analyzed using statistical modeling; qualitative data were analyzed using thematic coding.

A quantitative examination indicates that compared to men, women report greater posttraumatic growth and more positive impacts of cancer despite having lower physical health. These gender differences are robust even after controlling for physical and emotional well-being, life satisfaction, and social support. Qualitative findings from in-depth interviews show that gender norms and expectations about masculinity and femininity shape how individuals experience illness and perform the role of patient and survivor. Expectations about being a good patient and survivor are more aligned with expectations about femininity and tend to conflict with expectations about masculinity. Gender norms discourage men from reporting personal growth from cancer and encourage women to overemphasize the positive aspects of having had cancer.

This study was conducted two or more years after treatment had ended; therefore, potential for recall bias existed. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that viewing cancer as transformative is part of a gender performance that limits opportunities for individuals to experience and express a diverse range of reactions which, at times, increases the emotional burden on individuals.

By combining survey data with in-depth interviews, the study offers new insights into the causes of gender differences in the reporting of patient outcomes after illness.