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This paper explores how education and training systems can support a digitally-enabled workforce for the Australian manufacturing sector.

The study is based on interviews with 17 sector-level manufacturing stakeholders from industry, government and education/training organisations. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gain an in-depth understanding of how education and training systems currently support a digitally-enabled manufacturing workforce as well as opportunities for alternative configurations or developments.

Analysis revealed three themes reflecting core dimensions of a supportive education and training system: partnerships, pedagogy and prospects. Cooperative, integrated and sustained partnerships are needed between vocational education and training (VET) institutions, universities, government, industry, high schools and private training providers. Pedagogy emphasises the vital importance of infusing curriculum with digital and technology skills and capabilities, alongside innovative and experiential delivery modes including simulated environments, online learning, on-the-job training, flexible delivery and micro-credentials. Prospects reflects the need for forward-looking assessment and planning to respond to industry trends and develop associated qualifications, skills and investments required to meet future industry needs.

With growing demand for digitally-enabled skills to support manufacturing, an industry which is acknowledged as critical for economic prosperity and national sovereignty, the findings contribute novel insights into current limitations and future opportunities to bridge the gap between skills shortages in the manufacturing industry, and education and training systems that deliver graduate readiness and a digitally-enabled workforce.

Employee reward is central to contemporary debates about work and employment relations; and in the context of ongoing wage stagnation, benefits represent a growing proportion of total reward value. Past studies have shown that when employees perceive benefits as unfair, this has a negative impact on engagement, performance and retention. Yet no previous studies have explored the components of a benefits system that influence employees’ fairness concerns. Using organisational justice as a theoretical lens, the purpose of this paper is to examine how dimensions of an employee benefits system influence the fairness perceptions of employees.

This paper reports on a qualitative, inductive case study of the benefits system in a large finance and insurance company, drawing on three data sources: interviews with the company’s benefits managers, organisational documents and open-text responses from a benefits survey.

Three dimensions of the benefits system strongly influenced fairness perceptions – constraints on accessing and utilising benefits; prosocial perceptions about the fairness of benefits to third parties; and the transparency of employee benefits.

The study informs organisations and benefits managers about the important role of supervisors in perceived benefits usability, and how benefits may be managed and communicated to enhance employee fairness perceptions.

This study makes a conceptual contribution to the benefits literature through a detailed exploration of the type of organisational justice judgements that employees make about benefits; and identifying for the first time prosocial fairness concerns about the impact of benefits on third parties.

This mixed‐method study aims to determine the extent to which the career paths of senior managers conform with the traditional versus protean elements described in the careers literature and whether these paths vary by gender.

A total of 15 senior managers (seven women and eight men) in a large public sector agency in Australia were interviewed about their career trajectories to date. Data were coded according to four major areas which characterise and distinguish between traditional and protean careers: development, orientation of the employee, definition of success, and organisational environment. A total of 81 managers (34 women and 47 men) from the same organisation were also surveyed. Variables of interest were those that could be triangulated with qualitative data such as the availability of career opportunities.

Results suggest that, contrary to much existing literature which proposes that all careers have been fundamentally altered, the traditional career which relies on length of service, geographic mobility and a steady climb up the corporate ladder, is still the dominant model in some organisations. However, the trend towards protean careers is evident and is more pronounced for women than for men.

The specific nature of the organisation (large, male‐dominated, public sector) may limit the generalisability of results.

The framework used to explore career paths according to traditional/ protean elements in this study may assist human resource practitioners to develop appropriate strategies which maximise the professional development of employees.

The results of this research challenge the universality of change in the nature of careers, particularly in public sector environments.

Critical scholarship on work‐life balance (WLB) and its associated practices maintains that workplace flexibility is more than a quasi‐functionalist response to contemporary problems faced by individuals, families or organisations. Beginning with Fleetwood's contention that WLB discourses have become “detached” from their associated practices, this paper aims to explore how workplace practices support or challenge dominant WLB discourses evident in socio‐cultural, political and organisational sources.

The authors analyse individual and group interview transcripts derived from 122 white‐collar employees in two different organisational contexts (one public, one private) in the construction industry in Australia.

Four major themes were identified in the data, which illustrate discourse practice gaps. First, the demands facing this particular industry/sector were framed as heightened and unique. Second, productivity was prioritised, dominating employees' care‐giving and lifestyle concerns. Third, employees' caring responsibilities were communicated as personal and individual choices. Fourth, commitment and efficiency were judged on the basis of presence in the workplace.

Even in industries that have embraced WLB, workplace practices legitimate and reinforce the status quo, and maintain a gap between the promises of WLB and its potential to ameliorate conflict and assist workers to span the boundaries of paid work and other life domains.

While the practices demonstrated in the research are focused on one industry, the study provides a critical analysis of how the contextually‐influenced meaning of WLB is constructed, created and contested in these workplaces and the effects it produces.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the strongly entrenched connection between hegemonic masculinity and participation in full‐time employment. It subsequently examines the extent to which male flexible workers in local government represent a challenge to this orthodoxy.

The paper reports on findings from interviews with 12 men and 13 women undertaking flexible work in a local government authority in Australia.

It was found that while two of the male flexible workers articulate alternative discourses of masculine subjectivity dissociated from participation in full‐time work, the remainder demonstrate the continued centrality of a full‐time presence in the workplace to hegemonic masculinity.

This paper argues that these findings are indicative of the continued dominance of masculinities in local government organisations.

Organisational work‐life policies and programs allow employees to have greater control over how, when and where they work but these policies are often under‐utilised, particularly by men and career‐oriented employees. In what is largely an atheoretical area of literature, the paper aims to theoretically integrate the empirical literature related to the uptake of organisational work‐life policies.

The paper links three related areas of literature: the associations between work‐life policies and individual/organisational outcomes; explanations for the low uptake of work‐life policies in many organisations; and preliminary studies which have explored organisational culture and its relationship to work‐life policies. These literatures are integrated to develop a five‐dimensional construct, “organisational work‐life culture”, for testing in future research.

It is suggested that the following five dimensions underlie this aspect of organisational life: lack of managerial support for work‐life balance; perceptions of negative career consequences; organisational time expectations; the gendered nature of policy utilisation; and perceptions of unfairness by employees with limited non‐work responsibilities.

The development and validation of the organisational work‐life culture construct requires further research and may result in specific organisational strategies and policies which address the barriers to work‐life policy utilisation.

Based on existing empirical evidence, the paper suggests an original theoretical proposition: that organisational work‐life culture is underpinned by five dimensions and explains much of the provision‐utilisation gap in work‐life policy.

This study seeks systematically to investigate the extent to which the documented aims of formal work‐family policies are being achieved at the level of individual employees.

Consistency between policy and practice in the case study organization was explored via an analysis of organizational documents which described work‐family policies and 20 interviews with employed women with dependent children.

Results show that the use of flexible work arrangements was consistent with aims related to balance and productivity. However, women’s experiences and perceptions of part‐time employment conflicted with policies aiming to support the same career opportunities as full‐time employees.

The nature of the organization and its policies as well as certain characteristics of the sample may limit the generalizability of findings to other sectors and groups of employees.

The research highlights the need to assess whether work‐family policies are experienced as intended, a process which may contribute to future policy development and assist human resource specialists to promote genuine balance between work and non‐work responsibilities.

The results inform the current understanding of how organizational policy translates into practice.

Research into the dark side of online brand-managed communities (OBCs) and, specifically, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) conflicts within this context are scarce. This paper aims to explore the different forms of C2C conflicts in OBCs, measure their direct impact on observing consumers and brands and investigate their appropriate moderation by exclusively focusing on two actors: brands versus consumers.

This research adopts a sequential exploratory approach. First, the authors capture different forms of C2C conflict via netnographic observations of five brand-managed communities. Second, the identified forms of C2C conflict are used in an online experiment to examine their impact on OBCs’ social and commercial outcomes. Third, further two online experiments were used to assess how brand versus consumer conflict moderators impact perceived credibility and conflict de-escalation.

The authors uncover three prominent forms of C2C conflict based on whether conflict occurs between supporters, non-supporters or outsiders of the OBC. The authors further show that these affect consumers’ engagement behaviours and emotional responses, while brands suffer from diminished credibility and could be targets of unfavourable electronic word-of-mouth. Finally, for managing C2C conflict, the findings confirm that brands are perceived as more suitable, while under certain conditions consumers can also be viewed as appropriate moderators.

This research used a range of participant self-selected brands and is limited to brand-managed (as opposed to consumer-managed) communities on Facebook. While beyond the scope of this paper, the dynamics for consumer-managed communities may differ.

This article offers guidance to marketing practitioners on the different nuances of undesirable consumer interactions in brand-managed communities on social media, their impact on customer engagement and brand perceptions and when/whether brands or consumers may be suited to moderating these.

This paper makes novel contributions to the literature on consumer (mis)behaviours and OBC management. The findings are among the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to examine the direct social and commercial consequences of C2C conflicts and to provide comparative insights into the appropriateness of two different moderators in OBCs.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an international survey of hospital executives and administrators’ perspectives on the contributions of their affiliation with a Ronald McDonald House (RMH) as an example of accommodation in family-centered care to the hospital’s mission, operations and patient experience.

RMHs worldwide provided the names and e-mail addresses of the people holding key leadership positions in their main hospital partner, who in turn were invited to complete an internet-based survey (530 participants; response rate of 54.5 percent).

Hospital leaders reported very positive opinions about the contributions of their RMHs affiliation to their ability to serve seriously ill children and their families. This included such important outcomes as increasing family integrity and family participation in care decisions; and decreasing psychosocial stress and hospital social work resource burdens associated with lodging, food, transportation and sibling support. Hospital chief executive offices (CEOs) and medical directors reported very strong and positive opinions regarding the value-added of their RMHs affiliation in many areas, including enhanced marketing of hospital specialty services and reduced length of stay.

Survey response bias is a limitation, although the results are still useful in terms of identifying multiple ways in which RMHs are perceived as contributing to hospitals’ operations and provision of family-centered care.

Overall, the results suggest that, internationally, hospital leaders believe that RMHs play a key and valued role in their provision of family-centered care to seriously ill children and their families.

Family accommodation is more than the simple provision of lodging and plays an integral role how hospitals approach family-centered care.

This international study contributes to the general literature on the role of family accommodation in hospitals’ provision of family-centered care and the specific and very sparse literature on RMHs in particular.

This study aims to adapt and validate the need satisfaction and frustration scale (NSFS) for the Brazilian gig work context and investigate the distinctiveness of the constructs of basic needs satisfaction and frustration among Brazilian gig workers.

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were conducted on a sample of 351 Brazilian gig workers.

Results from EFA supported a three-factor structure, while results from CFA psychometrically supported a six-factor correlated model. The items that constitute the NSFS presented good discriminant validity (heterotrait-monotrait ratio) and internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega coefficients). Results regarding criterion validity partially support previous empirical evidence that considers needs satisfaction and frustration independent in relation to well-being and ill-being while reinforcing the need for further investigations. The Brazilian version of the NSFS is shown to be an instrument with robust psychometric qualities to assess workers’ perception of basic needs satisfaction and frustration in Brazilian gig work context.

This study broadens the scope of research on basic psychological needs by introducing a valid and reliable instrument to assess workers’ perceptions of needs satisfaction and frustration in the Brazilian gig work context, a population that has been neglected in self-determination theory research.

O presente estudo teve como objetivos (1) adaptar e validar a Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale para o contexto brasileiro de gig work e (2) investigar a distinção dos construtos de satisfação e frustração das necessidades básicas entre os trabalhadores gig brasileiros.

A análise fatorial exploratória (AFE) e a análise fatorial confirmatória (AFC) foram realizadas em uma amostra de 351 trabalhadores gig brasileiros.

Os resultados da EFA apoiaram uma estrutura de três fatores, enquanto os resultados da AFC apoiaram psicometricamente um modelo correlacionado de seis fatores. Os itens que constituem a NSFS apresentaram boa validade discriminante (razão heterotraço-monotraço) e consistência interna (coeficientes alfa de Cronbach e ômega de McDonald). Os resultados relativos à validade de critério apoiam parcialmente as evidências empíricas anteriores que consideram a satisfação e frustração das necessidades independentes em relação ao bem-estar e mal-estar, reforçando a necessidade de mais investigações. A versão brasileira da Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale mostra-se um instrumento com qualidades psicométricas robustas para avaliar a percepção dos trabalhadores quanto à satisfação e frustração das necessidades básicas no contexto brasileiro de trabalho gig.

Este estudo amplia o escopo da pesquisa sobre necessidades psicológicas básicas ao introduzir um instrumento válido e confiável para avaliar as percepções de satisfação e frustração das necessidades dos trabalhadores no contexto brasileiro de gig work, uma população que tem sido negligenciada nas pesquisas da teoria da autodeterminação.

el presente estudio tuvo como objetivos (1) adaptar y validar la Escala de frustración y satisfacción de necesidades para el contexto del trabajo gig brasileño, y (2) investigar el carácter distintivo de los constructos de satisfacción y frustración de necesidades básicas entre los trabajadores gig brasileños.

se realizaron análisis factoriales exploratorios (AFE) y análisis factoriales confirmatorios (CFA) en una muestra de 351 trabajadores gig brasileños.

los resultados de EFA respaldaron una estructura de tres factores, mientras que los resultados de CFA respaldaron psicométricamente un modelo correlacionado de seis factores. Los ítems que componen la NSFS presentaron buena validez discriminante (relación heterorrasgo-monorrasgo) y consistencia interna (coeficientes alfa de Cronbach y omega de McDonald). Los resultados con respecto a la validez de criterio apoyan parcialmente la evidencia empírica previa que considera la satisfacción y la frustración de necesidades independientes en relación con el bienestar y el malestar, al tiempo que refuerzan la necesidad de más investigaciones. La versión brasileña de la Escala de Satisfacción de Necesidades y Frustración se muestra como un instrumento con sólidas cualidades psicométricas para evaluar la percepción de los trabajadores sobre la satisfacción de las necesidades básicas y la frustración en el contexto del trabajo gig brasileño.

este estudio amplía el alcance de la investigación sobre las necesidades psicológicas básicas al presentar un instrumento válido y confiable para evaluar las percepciones de los trabajadores sobre la satisfacción y la frustración de las necesidades en el contexto del trabajo gig brasileño, una población que ha sido descuidada en la investigación de teoría de la autodeterminación.