The future of Australia as a post-industrial economy depends on how knowledge, skills and capabilities are learned and fostered. Every Australian will need to engage with the tertiary education system, both to acquire an initial qualification and to up-skill or re-skill over the course of their lives. The time has come to address the divide between vocational and higher education and implement a reform agenda that has been in development over the last decade. This will involve reforming th...

The majority of employees currently working in the private sector are now employed in small firms, yet little is known about their working conditions. This collection of essays addresses this gap. Based on theoretical analysis supported by contemporary empirical evidence, the book explores key areas of the employment relationship adding a new perspective to our understanding of contemporary work.

The majority of textbooks on HRM tend to focus on the administrative side of the subject and fail to examine its strategic importance. This book is intended to redress the balance and, taking strategy as its starting point, it looks at the overall role of HRM in the organization. The author explores strategic human resource management through chapters on managing change in strategy, structure, and culture; the role of human resource planning, and types of employment system. He also reviews...

The voluntary nonprofit sector is now involved in all aspects of people's lives. The management of such organizations has never been of more interest than it is now, and the sector as a whole is in a period of great change. Well-meaning amateurs are being replaced by highly committed and professional leaders, and one in every six employees in the service sector is now working in the voluntary sector. In this shifting climate, this enlightening book questions whether voluntary organizations...

An examination of the global economic crisis from the perspective of careValuing care and care work does not simply mean attributing care work more monetary value. To really achieve change, we must go further.In this groundbreaking book, Emma Dowling charts the multi-faceted nature of care in the modern world, from the mantras of self-care and what they tell us about our anxieties, to the state of the social care system. She examines the relations of power ...

How can we ensure high-quality public services such as health care and education? Governments spend huge amounts of public money on public services such as health, education, and social care, and yet the services that are actually delivered are often low quality, inefficiently run, unresponsive to their users, and inequitable in their distribution. In this book, Julian Le Grand argues that the best solution is to offer choice to users and to encourage competition among providers. Le Grand ...

The idea of social investment has obvious intuitive appeal. But is it robust? Is it built on sound philosophical principles and secure analytical foundations? Will it deliver better outcomes?For almost a decade, the idea of social investment has been a major focus of New Zealand policy-making and policy debate. The broad aim has been to address serious social problems and improve long-term fiscal outcomes by drawing on big data and deploying various analytical techniques t...

Health and wellbeing are significantly influenced by how professionals plan, design and manage the environment.This book supports those working in the built environment and public health sectors, with the knowledge and insight to maximise health improvement through planning and land use decisions. Supported by examples of policy and approaches, it focuses on implementation and delivery, and sets out what is needed to achieve healthier environments within the parameters of legislati...

Many social protection programmes, including cash transfers, public works programmes and asset transfers, target women as main beneficiaries or recipients of benefits. Extending social protection to rural populations has great potential for fostering rural women's economic empowerment. However, to tap into this potential, more needs to be done. There is much scope for making social protection policies and programmes more gender sensitive and for better aligning them with agricultural and r...

There are an estimated 40,000 international Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), working in an enormous global aid industry; official development assistance alone reached £90bn in 2014. This is supplemented by huge voluntary giving – the UK public, for example, give around £1bn a year to overseas causes.These organisations face a unique challenge from fraud and corruption. Operating in the world’s most under-developed and fragile environments, with minimal infrastructure and trust-...

The lives of all Australians are profoundly affected by the quality of social services available, but a long list of royal commissions and public inquiries have revealed them to be failing. In The Careless State Mark Considine shows that the preferred model of reform has failed to adapt and improve. In the 1980s Australian governments faced rapidly increasing demand for services in areas like employment assistance, aged care, childcare and vocational education and training; to res...

The Early Childhood Education sector around the world is constantly changing, whether because of the unprecedented demand for ECE services globally, accelerated social change, or the introduction of pedagogical and regulatory practices. Based upon empirical inquiry, Early Childhood Education Management examines the somewhat controversial concept of operating an early childhood service as a business. It challenges the assumption that an early childhood manager does not require spec...