bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The spinster teacher in Australia from the 1870s to the 1960s
Authors: Whitehead Kay
Published: May 2011

Beginning with the introduction of mass compulsory schooling legislation in the 1870s, and using age and marital status as key categories of social difference, this article provides an overview of issues surrounding the ‘woman teacher’ through to the postwar baby boom. It shows how women teachers were increasingly differentiated according to location (country and city) and level of schooling (kindergarten, primary and secondary), and it also casts them as somewhat threatening to the gender order. Firstly, the article describes the processes by which teaching in both city and country primary schools became normalised as single women or spinsters’ work with the advent of mass compulsory schooling. Part two focuses on the turn of the twentieth century, a period in which anxieties about single women, so many of whom were teachers, coalesced around the figure of the ‘new woman’. In this context I investigate what state school teaching might have meant for single women, be they unqualified ‘girl teachers’ in country schools or mature women whose qualifications and career paths brought them into city schools. The third section shows that the expansion of state schooling in the early twentieth century produced further differentiation of the ‘teacher’ as primary, kindergarten or secondary. Furthermore, in the interwar years new meanings of singleness for women were proposed by sexologists and psychologists, and spinster teachers became more stigmatised as women. Finally, I turn to the women who taught from the late 1930s into the postwar era.
Student activists at Sydney University 1960‐1967: a problem of interpretation
Authors: Barcan Alan
Published: May 2011

The student revolt of 1967 to 1974, which finally expired about 1978, retains its fascination and much of its significance in the twenty‐first century. But the seven or so years which preceded it are often passed over as simply a precursor, the incubation of a subsequent explosion; they deserve a higher status. The concentration of interest on the late 1960s and early 1970s arises from the driving role of students in the cultural revolution whose traumatic impact still echoes with us. As late as 2005 some commentators saw federal legislation introducing Voluntary Student Unionism as the culmination of struggles in the 1970s when Deputy Prime Minister Costello and Health Minister Abbott battled their radical enemies. Interest in these turbulent years at a popular, non‐academic level has produced a succession of nostalgic reminiscences. In the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Weekend’ for 13 December 2003 Mark Dapin pondered whether the Melbourne Maoists had changed their world views (‘Living by the Little Red book’.) In the Sydney University Gazette of October 1995 Andrew West asserted that the campus radicals of the 1960s and ‘70s had remained true to their basic beliefs (‘Not finished fighting’.) Some years later, in April 2003, the editor of that journal invited me to discuss ‘Where have all the rebels gone?’ My answer treated this as a twofold question: What has happened to the former rebels? Why have the students of today abandoned radicalism?
The focus wasn’t on ‘boomsa‐daisy’: sex education at Shepparton South Technical School, Victoria, 1973‐1986
Authors: Preston Lesley
Published: May 2011

School sex education has the potential to evoke a range of personal and political reactions. While it is usually agreed that sexuality should be ‘done’ in school, few agree on the best way of ‘doing’ it. This article provides a personal account of the development of sex education at Shepparton South Technical School, Victoria, Australia from 1973‐1985. It is supported by interviews with the people involved in those events and archival materials, including media reports. It also documents the efforts of extreme right activists to discredit and stop programmes, and the State Liberal government’s attempt to formulate a policy on sex education. First I provide a general background to technical schools in Victoria in the 1970s followed by a discussion of Shepparton South Technical School specifically. I then discuss the development of the sex education (social biology) programme, the pivotal role of the Social Biology resource Centre, and the networks involved. I also describe the attacks on the programme in the late 1970s, and their origins and impact. I conclude with a discussion of the outcomes of this intense public scrutiny, and the demise of social biology and the secondary technical schools, the ‘techs’ in the 1980s.
The politics of pedagogy: civics education and epistemology at Victorian primary schools, 1930s and 1950s
Authors: Macknight Vicki
Published: May 2011

Barry Down describes curriculum design in much the same way when he claims that in the years following World War Two Australian civics education was planned under ‘perpetual tension and conflict between the imperatives of capitalism and democracy’. The suggestion seems to be that an ideal democratic education is possible, if short‐term political and economic considerations had not prevented this. I argue that this suggestion is naive. The democratic idea is not static ‘short term prudential requirements of the moment’, whether concerned with war, imperialism, fear of communism, industrial development, or otherwise, create the conditions by which democratic society is defined. This definition is embedded in civics education with the hope that children might perfect that society in adulthood. But visions of the ideal society do not only concern civics education, lessons on right behaviour. Rather, the very world children are educated to see depends on the politics and economics at the time that curriculum is designed. The content of lessons, the way the lessons are taught, and the underlying assumptions about what the world is like ‐ all are constituted by politics. Therefore, to understand civics education it is important to delve deeper and locate the epistemological basis of social studies education in the political context of its time. What children are taught about the social world as a whole should be considered before civics education can make any sense. To make this argument I look at the two curricula used at Victorian primary schools in the mid twentieth century, put in place in 1934 and 1952
From idealism to realism: the Workers’ Educational Association of Victoria 1920‐1941
Authors: Dadswell Gordon
Published: May 2011

The article briefly covers the establishment of the Workers’ Educational Association in both England and Australia. The development of the Workers’ Educational Association of Victoria is discussed in the context of the work of Atkinson. The idealism paradigm as exemplified in the writings of Atkinson is described and the relationship between the paradigm and adult ducation is made explicit. The development of realism is then discussed including the role of Hancock where his conceptualisation of social class is made explicit. Next the reaction by Badger to the concept enunciated by Hancock and applied to adult education is described. The article concludes by discussing the role of Badger in seeking to remove the WEAV as a major provider of adult education in Victoria.
Khaki in the classroom: compulsory junior cadet training in Australian schools, 1911‐31
Authors: Stockings Craig
Published: May 2011

The aim of this article is to detail the day to day experience of the Junior Cadet component of the Australian scheme of universal military service from 1911‐31. Its focus, therefore, is on describing the administrative and practical functioning of the Junior Cadet system. It does not, for example, seek to address issues such as the social or psychological impact of the scheme or its long‐term effects on the development of education in Australia. Nor does it explore questions of how or why the system evolved as it did. Such matters have been the subject of past, and will no doubt be the focus of future research. As space precludes an in depth investigation of all aspects of the practical conduct of the Junior Cadet scheme, a number of important themes will therefore be traced that, taken together, provide a reasonably full picture of how the system functioned. Beginning with its origins, the article traces the evolution of its purpose, organisation/structure, teacher‐officer instructional staff, training activities, and the eventual dismantling of the scheme. Building on the practice of military‐styled ‘drill’ in many colonial schools prior to Federation, and embedded in the wider theory and practice of universal military service, this scheme was (and remains) a unique experiment in the history of Australian education.
The march to nation: citizenship, education, and the Australian way of life in New South Wales, Australia, 1940s‐1960s
Authors: McLean Lorna
Published: May 2011

This article probes the dimensions of a newly constructed, modern citizenship within the context of post‐war tensions between a national history that recognised and asserted sexual, racial, and cultural differences and an assimilationist state drive that enshrined one law and one way of life. In particular, I address the question of what we can learn about gender and race relations and their relationship to national identities and citizenship by studying government and educational policies and publications. As recent scholarship on education and citizenship has observed, issues surrounding national identity/identities, citizenship, and education in Australia were critical to state formation from the late 1940s to the 1960s. This research has done much to expand our understanding of the pedagogical and curriculum components of citizenship education and the central role of teachers within the education enterprise. As well, other scholars have informed our understanding of the related processes of post‐war social adjustment of young people. This article draws on a range of theories and perspectives from post‐colonial literature, cultural and performance studies, and critical ‘race’ and feminist theories to analyse the texts and images. A discourse analysis of these documents highlight the complex and competing forms of identity/identities, colonialism, ‘race’, and gender. In particular, I address the following questions: First, what representations of modern young citizens were featured as part of the ‘Australian way of life’ in both state education policies and publications? Second, in what ways were gender and ‘race’ constitutive of Australian citizenship? Third, how do the images and texts in these publications manifest the multiple performances of education in the 1950s and 1960s? Although this study focuses on education reforms, the results of the research speak to wider issues of historical representation, gender, and culture and the complicated relationship between state policy, nationalism, and reform.
Lest we forget: the Kapooka Tragedy 1945
Authors: Rushbrook Peter
Published: May 2011

This article explores an incident that raises questions relating to the making and unmaking of history, heritage and social memory. It also points to the role of the historian in unravelling forgotten pasts. On 21 May 1945, at the Royal Australian Engineers Training Camp (RAETC) Kapooka near the provincial New South Wales city of Wagga Wagga, twenty‐four ‘sappers’ or engineers, and their two ‘other ranks’ trainers, were killed in a demolitions training exercise gone terribly wrong. The accident remains the largest in Australian army history. However, following a brief flurry of national grief public memory of the tragedy soon slipped into historical obscurity. The article narrates the Kapooka story and then reflects on its role as an exemplar of how a society makes, unmakes or forgets its past.
Comprehensive post‐primary schooling in New Zealand: 1935‐1975
Authors: Lee Gregory , Lee Howard
Published: May 2011

In light of contemporary critiques of New Zealand comprehensive schooling published mainly in the popular press, it is timely to re‐examine the origins of and the rationale for the widespread adoption of this model of education. The comprehensive schooling philosophy, it was recently alleged, has produced a situation in which ‘as many as one in five pupils in the system is failing’ and where ‘there is a large group at the bottom who are not succeeding’. This group was estimated to include some 153,000 students out of the total current New Zealand student population of 765,000. In this context, however, Chris Saunders and Mike Williams, principals of Onehunga High School and Aorere College in Auckland respectively, have noted that having underachieving students in secondary schools in particular is not a recent phenomenon. A large ‘tail’ of poor performing high school students has long been a cause of concern, Williams suggests.
Timeless projects: remembering and voice in the history of education
Authors: Stephenson Maxine
Published: May 2011

I want to revisit also some of the ideas that linked memory and subjectivity that were popularised in the 1970s and 1980s response to limitations of the positivist tradition. I am concerned also with the relationship between the present and the past as it gets expressed in memory work to interrogate more fully not only ‘what happened’, but also how events come to be remembered in the ways that they are, and how they come to be understood as history. These ideas will be developed by drawing on some of what I consider to be key studies that use oral history, some directly related to education, some not. I will finish with voices that are not my own. These will be the voices of participants in an oral history project with which I have been involved. They will demonstrate in a more meaningful way, the ideas presented here and how a coming together of the fields of oral history and memory studies can enrich the understandings we have of experience in the history of education.
Voices from technical education: Shepparton South Technical School, Victoria, Australia
Authors: Preston Lesley
Published: May 2011

At Shepparton in the Murray electorate of Victoria in 2007, the Federal Liberal Member, Sharman Stone, announced that under a returned Coalition Government, Shepparton ‘would get a stand‐alone technical college’. One year earlier, the Victorian Minister for Education, Lynn Kosky claimed that ‘We lost something when technical schools [the ‘techs’] were closed previously. Yes, the facilities were not great but we lost something that was important to young people’. This article explores the development and demise of ‘South Tech’, Shepparton South Technical School, 1966‐86 to identify the ‘something’ that Kosky claimed was lost, and to argue that technical education is essential in a reconstituted system.
More than the ordinary domestic drudge: women and technical education in Auckland 1895‐1922
Authors: Shaw Louise
Published: May 2011

Like many of his generation George George, the director of Auckland’s Seddon Memorial Technical College (1902‐22), considered marriage and motherhood as women’s true vocation and believed in separate but equal education for girls that included some domestic training. In this regard, New Zealand historians often cite him as an advocate for the cult of domesticity, a prescriptive ideology that came to be reflected in the government’s education policy during this period. But as Joanne Scott, Catherine Manathunga and Noeline Kyle have demonstrated with regard to technical education in Queensland, rhetoric does not always match institutional practice. Other factors, most notably student demand, but also more pragmatic concerns such as the availability of accommodation, staffing and specialist equipment, can shape the curriculum. Closer scrutiny of surviving institutional records such as prospectuses, enrolment data and the director’s reports to the Department of Education, allow us to explore more fully who was given access to particular kinds of knowledge and resources, how long a particular course might take, the choices students made, what was commonplace and what was unusual, and what students might expect once they completed their studies.
Her civilising mission: discovering Hannah King through her textiles
Authors: Caughley Vivien
Published: May 2011

Hannah King occupies a unique place in missionary and colonial history, the history of education, cross‐cultural relations and material culture in New Zealand. She was the only woman from the first 1814 Missionary settlement of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in New Zealand to remain in New Zealand for the rest of her life, yet she does not have an entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and is rarely indexed in either New Zealand’s general historical works or even works more specifically related to the Missionary era. John and Hannah King were one of three artisan missionary couples who sailed with the Revd Samuel Marsden on his ship, the missionary brig ‘Active’, from Port Jackson, Australia to Rangihoua, in the Bay of Islands, in late 1814. Marsden’s 1814 Christmas Day service on the beach at Rangihoua is recognised as the beginning of missionary activity and planned European settlement on New Zealand soil.
When the English began to hate: the manufacture of German demonisation in British school history textbooks 1900‐1930
Authors: Crawford Keith
Published: May 2011

This article explores how within a climate characterised by a national moral panic and an institutionalised imperialist xenophobia school history textbooks in the early years of the 20th Century came to present an intensely hostile discourse of Germans and Germany. The approach is multi‐disciplinary as a single discipline approach would not provide a full and coherent understanding of the development of Germanophobia within school history textbooks. Consequently, the evidence base for this analysis is drawn from a variety of representations including political perspectives; popular culture; children’s literature; newspaper and magazine depictions. The purpose is to provide a framework through which to link cultural depictions of Germans and Germany with how history was taught, what was to be learnt and how this was mediated through school history textbooks.
Urged for more than fifty years: veterinary education in New Zealand, c1900‐1964
Authors: Burns Edgar
Published: May 2011

After the 1907 collapse of the new Otago University Veterinary School, a gap of over half a century elapsed before the Massey University Veterinary Faculty was opened in 1964. This interval means linear professionalisation accounts from pre‐modern animal care by farriers and cow leeches to modern cadres of scientific veterinarians are challenged by contingent and particular features in the New Zealand setting. The educational sequence is inevitably linked with other aspects of society, economy and workforce around the veterinary ‘professional project’. Limited research into veterinary development and education in New Zealand includes accounts by veterinarians ‐ Laing’s monographs,4 Shortridge, Smith and Gardner’s history of the veterinary profession, and Burns’ historical sociology thesis.
Constructing the good worker: policies, practices and assumptions informing Victorian technical schools division reform, 1967‐1973
Authors: Rushbrook Peter , Preston Lesley
Published: May 2011

In the late 1960s the Victorian vocational education sector was in crisis. The federal Martin Report into tertiary education excised many of the sector’s university‐level courses and relocated them into new Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs), leaving many ‘middle‐level’ and technician vocational courses in limbo. Junior technical schools also offered apprenticeship and middle‐level courses, further confusing where courses were, or should be situated, suggesting an overall ‘gap’ in program provision. This challenge came when the Technical Schools Division (TSD), the smallest of Victoria’s three division structure (primary, secondary and technical) continued its struggle to maintain sectoral identity through courting acceptance from private industry and the public sector for its credentialed programmes. With significant others, TSD Director Jack Kepert, followed by Director Ted Jackson, responded by designing policy to reshape the TSD’s structure and functions and its reporting relationships within a new technical college and junior technical school system. Jackson’s policy statement, The future role of technical schools and colleges (1970) facilitated these changes. The paper narrates the events constituting this period of policy innovation and evaluates their contribution to the creation of a more seamless
Re‐imagining teachers’ work: photographs of Blackfriars School, Sydney, 1913‐1923 as representations of an educational alternative
Authors: Associate
Published: May 2011

Visual representations of teachers and teachers’ work over the past century and a half, in both professional literature and popular media, commonly construct teachers’ work as teacher‐centred, and built around specific technologies that privilege the teacher as the active, dominant and legitimate principal agent in the educational process. This article analyses a set of photographs that represent an ‘alternative’ educational approach to normalised mainstream schooling, to explore the ways such practices might enact pedagogy within different social relations. Butler’s discussions of performativity and Foucault’s concept of technologies of self, offer a theoretical framework for understanding the educative and political work such visual representations of teachers work might perform, in the construction of capacities to imagine what teachers’ work looks like, with implications for capacities to enact teaching. The photographs analysed present a pedagogy in which the teacher is less visibly central and less overtly directive in relation to children’s learning than in normalised pedagogy. Thus, in important respects, they offer material from which to construct a different vision of what teachers’ work looks like, and, consequently, to enact teachers’ work differently. In this article I explore a set of photographs of Montessori methods at Blackfriars School in Sydney in the early twentieth century. I do so in order to establish whether such photographs offer a representation of teaching that differs significantly from conventional ‘normalised’ understandings of teachers’ work. This in turn is intended to inform one part of a transformative agenda to address problematic aspects of contemporary schooling.
Designing learning spaces that work: a case for the importance of history
Authors: Whitehouse Denise
Published: May 2011

This article explores the little understood practice of school interior design and the manner in which school interiors give form to ideas about what the work of children and teachers could and should look like. Its focus is a perceived link between the concepts of school work made material in the design of new twenty‐first century learning environments and those expressed in the design of Modernist progressive schools such as Richard Neutra’s Corona Ave, Elementary School, California. The article’s impetus comes from current interest in the inter‐relationship between the design of physical learning environments and pedagogy reform as governments in Australia and internationally, work to transform teaching and learning practices through innovative school building and refurbishment projects. Government campaigns, for example the UK’s Schools for the Future Program and Australia’s Victorian Schools Plan, use a promotional rhetoric that calls for the final dismantling of the cellular classroom with its industrial model of work so that ‘different pedagogical approaches and the different ways that children learn [can] be represented in the design of new learning environments’, in buildings and interiors designed to support contemporary constructivist‐inspired pedagogies.
Education and ambition in Anne of Avonlea
Authors: Trimingham Jack Christine
Published: May 2011

Researchers of the history of women teachers have included fiction, as well as memoirs and history, as an important part of that testimony. The aim of this article is to examine the novel, Anne of Avonlea (1925) by Lucy Maude Montgomery as both a source of information about the working life of a woman teacher and, due to the immense popularity of the book, as a shaper of how women understand and enact teaching. Anne is a young teacher in her first posting consisting of a rural Canadian one‐ teacher school. She struggles to resist using corporal punishment in favour of winning her students respect, stimulating their minds and finding a ‘genius’. However, the local community, fellow teachers and her students have different notions of how teachers should behave. Her beliefs are further undermined when in a fit of anger she succumbs to beating one her students. Her reflections on what drove her actions are realistic and contain warnings for contemporary teachers to appreciate the often fragile hold they have on their espoused educational philosophy. Another danger revealed is the unconscious leaking of the shadow side of the psyche in the necessary close but dangerous relationships between students and teacher thereby providing a complex view of what motivates young women to teach and how they approach their work.
Cold War, the universities and public education: The contexts of J. B. Conant’s mission to Australia and New Zealand, 1951
Authors: Campbell Craig
Published: May 2011

The tensions of the Cold War focussed attention on the role that universities might play through their science and technology expertise and research. At the same time the United States needed to secure its allies as the threat of a new European war, and the actuality of the Korean War, developed in the late 1940s and 1950s. These pressures contributed to the Carnegie Corporation’s assessment that the time was ripe to send a ‘key man’ to Australia and New Zealand.
Academic work in Australian universities in the 1940s and 1950s
Authors: Forsyth Hannah
Published: May 2011

When James Conant visited Australia in 1951 he unwittingly entered an existing, lengthy debate about the value of university‐based knowledge in Australia. The Second World War, with its significant reliance on academic expertise, had suggested that if knowledge could win wars, the labour of academic staff could be considered to normally have social and economic value to the nation. In 1951 Conant had no way of foreseeing that steps made, in this light, at Federal level during and after the war, would culminate in the 1957 Review of Universities in Australia, chaired by Sir Keith Murray, and the injection of a large amount of funding into the university system. Conant’s confidential report to the Carnegie Corporation does show that he saw the system in desperate need of funding, which wasa reality that everyone agreed upon.1 The long debate included options for university funding and the potential change to the character of universities if the community, rather than the cloister, was to determine the purpose and character of knowledge. Conant’s report reflects this debate, centring (as many other participants did as well) on the value universities would gain if they were more obviously useful and relevant to industry and if their reputation was less stained by elitism and arrogance. Conant could not gather sufficient data in his visit to identify the nuances of this long discussion nor could he see the depth and spread of its influence over the decade or so preceding his visit. As a result, his particular agenda seems to obscure the perception of the threat that change provoked to some of the traditional values associated with academic work. To consider the debate and the character of academic work in the university scene that Conant fleetingly visited, we need to look back just a few years to another, but very different, visitor to the Australian system.
A yarning place in narrative histories
Authors: Dean Cheree
Published: May 2011

In this article I will first explore current research definitions, uses and roles of yarning. From this I will argue yarning is undervalued and underutilised as a potentially rich source of data collection. Second, I will discuss how yarning can be used in research design development, application and data collection. Last, I will use my research in the history of education to demonstrate the effectiveness of yarning in historical narratives, in particular my study of an Aboriginal community’s journey towards Aboriginal student integration in Collarenebri, a small, remote and rural town, in northern New South Wales (NSW). I show how the local Aboriginal community lobbied successfully for their children to be transferred from a segregated Annex to the main school during the mid 1940s to the early 1950s. Utilising yarning as a research methodology added depth and relevance for participants, their local communities and the narrative paradigm that informs it.
Learning about empire and the imperial education conferences in the early twentieth century: creating cohesion or demonstrating difference?
Authors: Stephenson Maxine
Published: May 2011

Despite the exponential spread of the British Empire by the late nineteenth century, there remained in England a continued indifference to “the Empire”. In 1883, J.R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, had expressed concern because ‘we think of Great Britain too much and of Greater Britain too little’. People had to rethink their understandings of nation and empire, he suggested, and steps had to be taken to modify what he saw as a ‘defective constitution’. Seeley’s lecture series had prompted debate about ‘the imperial question’, but the ‘anomalous political arrangements’ and the reluctance of the people to think imperially persisted. Insularity was not exclusive to the people in Britain, however. Because of their preoccupation with their own local affairs, it was suggested, there had been little opportunity for people from other parts of the empire to devote much time to the larger questions of imperial and common citizenship.
Empire, state and public purpose in the founding of universities and colleges in the Antipodes
Authors: Sherington Geoffrey , Horne Julia
Published: May 2011

From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.
Thinking transnationally: interconnections and connectivity within and across Australia and New Zealand
Authors: Fitzgerald Tanya
Published: May 2011

In this article I examine the role of ANZHES and its contribution to the development of the field over the past 40 years. Drawing on a range of theories, I argue that the annual exchange (or pilgrimage) of academics between Australia and New Zealand has been a vital component in the nurturing of our intellectual geographies and the formation of ANZHES as an intellectual community of scholars. And while ANZHES might well be borderless, there has been a gradual emergence of a border zone as academic work, academic knowledge and the Academy has been increasingly fractured, partitioned and dispersed. What then is the disciplinary territory that historians of education now occupy? How has the landscape of our work shifted and changed? To what extent might these connections be represented in ANZHES’ academic journal?
Implementing service recovery through customer relationship management: identifying the antecedents
Authors: Robinson Leroy , Neeley Sue E. , Williamson Kathleen
Published: May 2011

Purpose

This study seeks to combine components of service failure recovery and customer relationship management. It aims to develop a model of the antecedents of successful service recovery that proposes relationships between employee empowerment, job satisfaction, self‐efficacy, employee ratings of the service firm's service recovery practices, and service technology usage.

Design/methodology/approach

An online survey tool was used to collect data. The hypothesized model was tested utilizing structural equation modeling.

Findings

Results support the hypothesized relationships between the empowerment of employees and their job satisfaction and perceived self‐efficacy, as well as the relationships between job satisfaction and self‐efficacy and service recovery.

Practical implications

Managers may improve the implementation of service technology and service recovery strategies by increasing employee empowerment.

Originality/value

The paper addresses a significant gap in the current literature by linking the well‐established constructs of employee empowerment, job‐satisfaction, self‐efficacy and adaptability with measures of service failure recovery and service technology usage.
The impact of service climate and service provider personality on employees' customer‐oriented behavior in a high‐contact setting
Authors: Mechinda Panisa , Patterson Paul G.
Published: May 2011

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to empirically test and extend knowledge of the determinants of customer‐oriented behavior (COB) of service providers in an affective, high contact service setting (healthcare).

Design/methodology/approach

The authors examine the relative effects of dispositional variables (e.g. personality of service provider), as well as service climate and job satisfaction on five dimensions of customer‐oriented behavior. The research hypotheses are tested using self‐report data collected from 270 nurses in five hospitals (public and private). Qualitative work, including three focus groups with nurses and a series of depth interviews with patients, was conducted to test the applicability of the scales.

Findings

Results support the role of personality, job satisfaction and service climate on employees' COB, but do not support interaction effects. Various personality traits have differing effects on different types of customer‐oriented behaviors. Service climate has effects on both technical and interpersonal behaviors whereas job satisfaction impacts only technical behavior.

Research limitations/implications

This study was conducted in an affective, high contact and high emotional labor setting, i.e. healthcare, and in an Eastern collectivist culture (Thailand). As a result, the generalizability of the findings into other service settings and cultures needs to be undertaken with care.

Practical implications

For service employees to display customer‐oriented behaviors, the organization must first recruit individuals with high levels of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and emotional stability. Second, the organization must create a climate for service that supports, encourages and motivates service employees to better serve their customers. This service climate at the unit/branch level includes inspirational leadership, providing appropriate tools and technology, training, and commitment from senior management to a truly customer (patient) centric organization. Finally, when the organization is successful in creating satisfaction among employees, then employees are more inclined to offer a better technical performance.

Originality/value

This is one of only a few studies that have examined the impact of personality and organizational variables on front‐line employee performance.
A strategic response to the financial crisis: an empirical analysis of financial services advertising before and during the financial crisis
Authors: Lee Taejun (David) , Chung Wonjun , Taylor Ronald E.
Published: May 2011

Purpose

This paper aims to investigate how the US financial services organizations (FSOs) provided marketing information and the way they strategically used various appeals through their advertising before and during the current financial crisis.

Design/methodology/approach

This takes the form of a content analysis examining a total of 2,480 financial services ads (FSA) in print magazines within two periods – the two years before the crisis (2005 to 2006) and the two years during the crisis (2007 to 2008).

Findings

This study showed three significant findings: because of the economic struggle, there was a significant decline across the two periods in the total number of yearly FSA; the economic crisis led to a significant increase in the use of informational message strategies across all FSOs; and financial value and atmospherics appeals were predominant after the crisis. However, each FSO used appeals in a different way.

Research limitations/implications

This study focused on only print media. A future research project aimed at other traditional media such as television and new media such as the internet or weblogs could provide additional analysis of financial advertising strategies.

Practical implications

The findings of this study suggest that FSOs may rely much more heavily on informational than on transformational approaches during an economic crisis. The findings may provide further valuable implications for non‐profit institutions and international marketers.

Originality/value

This study contributes in several ways to understanding of the strategic communicative reactions of FSOs during the crisis.
Examining mediating role of attitudinal loyalty and nonlinear effects in satisfaction‐behavioral intentions relationship
Authors: Jaiswal Anand K. , Niraj Rakesh
Published: May 2011

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the mediating role of attitudinal loyalty in the relationship between satisfaction and customer behavioral intentions such as willingness to pay more and internal and external complaining responses. It also seeks to examine the nonlinear effects in the relationship between satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty and behavioral intentions.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper adopted the structural equation modeling approach to test the hypotheses (sample size 202). It used Marsh et al.'s unconstrained method to test latent quadratic effects in the conceptualized relationships.

Findings

The results support the fully mediating role of attitudinal loyalty in the relationship between satisfaction and behavioral intentions. The paper also finds partial support for nonlinear effects in the relationship. Results support nonlinearity, and in particular diminishing sensitivity, in the link from attitudinal loyalty to willingness to pay more.

Originality/value

The paper adds to the existing literature by detangling the complex relationships between satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty and behavioral intentions such as willingness to pay more and external and internal complaining responses. In particular, this is the first study to simultaneously examine the nonlinear effects of attitudinal loyalty on multiple behavioral intentions constructs. This study also establishes the superiority of a fully mediated model, in which satisfaction affects behavioral intentions through attitudinal loyalty, over a partially mediated model.
Corporate image in the leisure services sector
Authors: Minkiewicz Joanna , Evans Jody , Bridson Kerrie , Mavondo Felix
Published: May 2011

Purpose

This paper seeks to empirically examine the relationship between corporate image and customer satisfaction in the leisure services sector. It also aims to examine the mediating impact of employees and servicescape on this relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected from a sample of 195 individuals who had visited an Australian zoological garden over a specified time period. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the validity of the measures, whilst structural equation modelling and multiple regression were used in hypothesis testing.

Findings

Findings reveal that corporate image has a significant positive relationship with customer satisfaction. Although the results indicate that the relationship between corporate image and customer satisfaction is not mediated by either servicescape or employees, they imply that corporate image and employees directly influence customer satisfaction.

Research limitations/implications

A single‐case study design was implemented, limiting the generalisability of the findings. This provides an opportunity for replication of the model in other leisure services environments and services contexts outside the leisure services industry.

Practical implications

The findings reinforce the need for leisure services operators to prioritise the development of a strong, clear corporate image. The extended analysis illustrates that the disaggregated dimensions of corporate image are valuable to consider in terms of directing managerial strategy. Employees and servicescape are key aspects of the service offer on which management needs to focus to ensure that their desired corporate image is communicated and reinforced.

Originality/value

This study addresses an identified need to further examine the relationship between corporate image and customer satisfaction. It also contributes to corporate branding research by broadening the conceptualisation of the corporate image construct. Moreover, this study contributes to the corporate image literature by examining the mediating factors of employees and servicescape.
Exploring a new perspective on service efficiency: service culture in retail organizations
Authors: Skinner Beitelspacher Lauren , Glenn Richey R. , Reynolds Kristy E.
Published: May 2011

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of retailer service culture. A service culture is the customer‐centric culture aimed at exceeding customer expectations and creating superior customer value through the development of service and related performance competencies.

Design/methodology/approach

In this research, surveys were conducted with key decision makers in various retail positions across the USA to develop a customer service‐based measure of service culture and test it against traditional retail management performance outcomes.

Findings

The results of this research demonstrate that service culture is a unidimensional construct and is positively related to increases in market performance and customer perceptions of quality for the retailer.

Practical implications

Service culture provides retailers with a new perspective to examine their service orientation internally. Additionally, service culture extends to the relationships that retailers develop with their suppliers.

Originality/value

Examining retailing from a customer service perspective is becoming increasingly important as marketing research shifts its focus from being product‐centered to more service‐centered. In an increasingly turbulent economy, retailers have to create value propositions that provide customers with higher levels of customer service than ever before. This research develops a new construct that explores how retailers can incorporate service values in their overall culture. Additionally, this research validates the measure for future researchers to continue this path of study.
LEAD: managing educational research in a business faculty
Authors: Taylor Paul
Published: May 2011

Purpose

The paper aims to introduce this special issue on LEAD, the research management system under which the papers collected in this issue were produced. The paper explains the background that led to the establishment of the system, presents a short history of LEAD, describes how it is managed, and details the various stages of a typical LEAD “cycle”. It concludes with a brief description of the papers to follow.

Design/methodology/approach

Reflective description.

Findings

LEAD is a successful collaborative system for organising “action research” in learning and teaching within a business faculty. The papers in this issue serve to demonstrate the system's outcomes.

Research limitations/implications

The paper is essentially descriptive. The described system illustrates one way of organising collaborative research in a university faculty, in this instance focused on research into learning and teaching in a business faculty.

Practical implications

LEAD provides a model for managing collaborative university research, one that could be applied in any university faculty and across different research areas. Apart from illustrating the potential of the system, each of the papers collected in this issue is of interest in its own right, as a study of learning and teaching in a particular disciplinary context.

Originality/value

The LEAD system is a novel way of organising learning and teaching research in a university context.
The personal dimension in teaching: why students value feedback
Authors: Rowe Anna
Published: May 2011

Purpose

Feedback is a central element of the learning experience yet, until recently, few studies have focused directly on what students think about feedback. This paper seeks to address this issue.

Design/methodology/approach

Data collected as part of a larger study investigating reasons for consistently low ratings of feedback across the higher education sector are reported. The larger study includes Rowe and Wood's Student Feedback Questionnaire (SFQ), which gathers quantitative data on student perceptions and preferences for feedback, but also includes two open‐ended questions inviting students to give written comments on why they believe feedback is important, and how the feedback they are getting could be improved.

Findings

Focusing on responses to the first open‐ended question and viewing comments in the context of the larger study and its findings, an analysis is offered of the students' responses, extracting seven different student conceptions of the function of feedback.

Research limitations/implications

Feedback serves a wide variety of functions in the lives of students, not limited to the implication of feedback for learning. Students are most likely to succeed in an environment where their broader social needs are met.

Originality/value

The findings reported in this paper contribute to an area of educational research previously neglected, drawing attention to: the importance which students attach to feedback as a teacher's personal response to them as individuals; and the need to take into account students' perceptions – both positive and negative – of the emotional aspects of feedback.
Does learning in statistics get deeper or shallower?
Authors: Bilgin Ayse A.B.
Published: May 2011

Purpose

While the natural expectation is that students seek greater depth of learning as they develop intellectually during their studies, some research calls this into question and even suggests that student learning can become shallower from year to year. The present study aims to investigate the relative depth of students' learning at different stages of their undergraduate studies by comparing second‐year with third‐year students in two statistics units.

Design/methodology/approach

A survey was conducted using Biggs's Study Process Questionnaire. The survey results were used to compare second‐ and third‐year groups, as well as to investigate other variables by comparing the performances of: international and domestic students, male and female students, students who worked and those who did not work, and students who intended to register for a higher degree and those who did not.

Findings

Significant differences in approaches were found between male and female students; and between students who intended to enrol in a higher degree and those who did not.

Research limitations/implications

Characteristics of the learning and teaching environment, including quality of teaching, were not investigated in this study. These and the possibility of students' mixed approaches to learning depending on the unit of study might have significant impact on the results. Additionally, this study is specific to one Sydney university; therefore the results might not be generalisable.

Originality/value

The findings from this study provide evidence that there is no significant difference between second and third year; or in international and local students' approaches to learning in statistics.