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Following a recent government initiated change to a consumer-directed care model across the Australian community aged care sector, the purpose of this paper is to explore frontline home support workers’ perceptions of relational changes with clients in power and subordination within the triadic relationship between employer, employee and client.

Contextual interviews were held with managers (n=4), coordinators (n=10) and semi-structured face-to-face interviews with support workers (n=17) in three organizations. Interview transcripts were analyzed.

Some workers did not perceive a power change in their relationships with clients. Others perceived minimal change but were concerned about the incoming client generation (baby boomers) that were more aware of their rights. Others felt subordinated to the client, perceived a loss of control or that felt treated like an employee of the client. Consistent with the philosophy of consumer-directed care, senior staff encouraged clients to treat workers in this way.

Further research is recommended on worker and client perceptions of relationships within the context of a consumer or client focused model.

A clear and realistic understanding of the locus of power within a triadic relationship by all actors is important for positive workplace outcomes.

The increasing ageing population makes it essential that workers’ relationships with clients and with their organization are unambiguous.

This study makes a contribution to theories about change and power transfer in the implementation of consumer-directed care through the perceptions of support workers. Examination of power and subordination transfer through the perceptions of the actors of rather than through the prism of organizational policy deepens the understanding of frontline service work and relationships.

This study empirically examines factors affecting the extent of balanced scorecard (BSC) adoption in Vietnamese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) such as top management involvement, an innovative culture, a product innovation strategy, organisational resources, a competitive environment and business network support. This study aims to gain an improved understanding and draw important lessons on BSC adoption for SMEs.

Using primary data obtained from a survey of top managers of SMEs that have experienced some forms of BSC adoption, the authors conduct their analysis using exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis methods.

The authors find that top management involvement, an innovative culture, organisational resources and business network support are essential factors impacting the extent of BSC adoption in Vietnamese SMEs. Besides confirming literature findings on these variables, the authors identify support of business networks as another important factor affecting the extent of BSC adoption, alongside location and business owners’ experience. However, the impacts of a product innovation strategy and a competitive environment are not significant.

This study adapts scales previously designed for large enterprises in developed countries to fit into the context of Vietnamese SMEs. Future research can take advantage of this new set of scales and data to obtain further research results.

This study will serve as guidance for SMEs considering BSC adoption to have a clear vision of what factors are likely to affect BSC adoption, how they affect it and in what direction.

Lessons learned can be extended not only to Vietnamese SMEs that have not yet adopted the BSC but also to firms in other countries with similar economic conditions.

This study is among pioneering studies on BSC in SMEs and within the context of Vietnam.

Mentoring is widely used in the health sector, particularly for early career professionals in the public health system. However, many allied health professionals are employed in private practice and rely on their professional association to provide mentoring support and training. This mentoring context is under-researched. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A purposeful sample of 15 allied health professionals were interviewed using semi-structured interviews that were then analyzed using template analysis.

The many-to-many group mentoring program delivered valuable knowledge, diagnostic skills and networking opportunities but did not provide inclusion, role modeling or psychosocial support to participants. Also identified were structural and operational issues including; the role of the coordinator in addressing contribution reluctance and participant confidence, confidentiality issues, lack of mentor training and overall organization of the program.

Group mentoring is a valuable method of delivery for professional associations. The many-to-many group mentoring model is beneficial in a situation where the availability of mentors is limited. Further, the importance of having a dedicated program coordinator and a skilled facilitator is emphasized.

This research contributes to the limited literature on many-to-many group mentoring by reviewing the effectiveness of an existing many-to-many group mentoring program for allied health professionals delivered by a professional association.

The aims of this paper are: to investigate the perceptions held by police (insiders) and community member (outsiders) of the recruitment and retention of culturally and linguistically diverse employees of Victoria Police; and, to develop a model that can assist in future recruitment and retention policy development.

Structured focus group interviews were conducted based on an instrument deduced from existing literature. Police and community members were interviewed separate cohorts. The discussions were thematically coded to themes and sub‐themes.

Specific differences were identified in perceptions of the importance of recruiting culturally and linguistically diverse groups, barriers to recruitment, recruitment methods, and retention methods.

Based on these perceptions, a proposed a model addresses the importance of cultural diversity in policing and barriers to recruitment and retention of culturally and linguistically diverse employees. Further research is necessary to assess the broader applicability of this model.

The proposed model may be used as the basis for future recruitment and retention activities, and human resource management policy development.

This is the first study in the Australian context of recruitment and retention of culturally and linguistically diverse police that addresses both community and police perspectives. Aligning the demographic profile of the police service with that of the community is beneficial to effective policing.

This philosophical paper explores why people have so much trouble understanding, coping with and managing change. It looks behind the problem to try to understand its origins. It provides an account of human nature that suggests people are “naturally” capable of coping with change but that we have forgotten how to do so because of our intellectual history. It suggests the pervasive influence of scientific paradigms and rationalism has turned us into conformists who are afraid to trust our own individual experiences and who rely on others to validate them and tell us how to respond. Change makes it difficult to conform because we do not know on whom to rely for validation; we do not know which paradigm is “right.” This paper suggests some current management remedies respond to this conformity problem but others may exacerbate it. It offers its philosophical analysis as a tool to interpret and evaluate such remedies from a fresh perspective.

I expect many librarians would sympathise with Mr Lee's predicament. As a profession, we are trying to create a sparkling, technological image. In contrast, public conceptions of librarians tend to remain embedded within what might be called the book stamping paradigm. The senior library assistant in Between the Stacks (a satirical novel about library life), shows that he has his finger on the pulse of public opinion, when he says:

The topic of this paper focuses on proactive versus reactive business ethics performance in the marketplace. The internal perception of a corporation and the external perception of the same corporation are used as generic determinants of business ethics performance. In turn, they are underpinned by evolutionary and contextual issues in the marketplace. The authors provide a generic conceptual framework of proactive and reactive business ethics performance. Case illustrations underpin the positives and negatives of proactive and reactive business ethics in the marketplace. A profile analysis process of proactive and reactive business ethics performance is also outlined. The gap between the internal and external perceptions of a corporation’s actions becomes crucial to achieve successful business ethics performance in the marketplace. Therefore, a corporation’s current business ethics performance should always be regarded as an on‐the‐spot‐account that is either proactive or reactive. An important insight of this research is that business ethics performance requires the ongoing re‐connection with reality by corporations.

Non‐response bias is rarely explored in business research utilising annual reports. Such studies may reach incorrect conclusions in instances where there are systematic differences between companies who respond and those who do not. A global study into airline accounting practices by Tan, Tower, Hancock and Taplin (2002) enabled examination of this important research issue because a database provided an independent source of annual reports. The results indicate minimal response bias in a sample of annual reports obtained from a mail request. Publically listed airline companies that did not respond to a request for their annual report tended to use accounting methods that are considered least favourable by the industry. Therefore, caution needs to be exercised and the assumption that non‐respondents' accounting policy choices are aligned with those of respondents should be tested. Increased availability of annual reports on the internet also raises questions of possible database bias.

The purpose of this paper is to test the new Fama and French (2015) five-factor model relying on a thorough sample of hedge fund strategies drawn from the Barclay’s Global hedge fund database.

The authors use a stepwise regression to identify the factors of the q-factor model which are relevant for the hedge fund strategy analysis. Doing so, the authors account for the Fung and Hsieh seven factors which prove very useful in the explanation of the hedge fund strategies. The authors introduce interaction terms to depict any interaction of the traditional Fama and French factors with the factors associated with the q-factor model. The authors also examine the dynamic dimensions of the risk-taking behavior of hedge funds using a BEKK procedure and the Kalman filter algorithm.

The results show that hedge funds seem to prefer stocks of firms with a high investment-to-assets ratio (low conservative minus aggressive (CMA)), on the one hand, and weak firms’ stocks (low robust minus weak (RMW)), on the other hand. This combination is not associated with the conventional properties of growth stocks – i.e., low high minus low (HML) stocks – which are related to firms which invest more (low CMA) and which are more profitable (high RMW). Finally, small minus big (SMB) interacts more with RMW while HML is more correlated with CMA. The conditional correlations between SMB and CMA, on the one hand, and HML and RMW, on the other hand, are less tight and may change sign over time.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors are the first to cast the new Fama and French five-factor model in a hedge fund setting which account for the Fung and Hsieh option-like trading strategies. This approach allows the authors to better understand hedge fund strategies because q-factors are useful to study the dynamic behavior of hedge funds.