The need for a strategic shift in senior management philosophy which encourages and promotes a culture of total employee involvement towards the attainment of service quality is one of the major competitive challenges facing the Australian banking industry in the 1990s. Some of these issues are...

A key strategic objective behind the introduction of TQM centres on ensuring employee commitment and participation in continuous process innovation for the purpose of improving operational efficiencies and developing a competitive edge within the expanding and dynamic marketplace. Uses the...

Summarizes the main objectives of the Australian Best Practice Demonstration Program and identifies a number of key human resource (HR) management issues. Argues that there has been a general shift in HR strategy away from the more adversarial, tightly controlled work regimes towards work...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the early stages of change and the way that stories can open up forms of collaborative dialogue and creative thinking among divergent stakeholders on known but “intractable” problems by enabling multiple voices to be heard in the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore time dilemmas in ethnographic research and develops a facilitating frame for thinking about temporality. Core concepts developed include: temporal awareness that refers to widening of the understanding and sensitivity to time issues; temporal...

New empirical research is presented on the human resource management implications of introducing a service excellence programme into an Australian optometry company. The case study is used to demonstrate the difficulties of changing employee behaviour and illustrates how the rhetorical hype...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that too often decisions concerning change are made on the basis of partial understanding, limited data and unreflective assumptions about people and organizations. In the discussion of the Socratic dialogue the aim is to uncover a useful method...