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This thesis uses institutional ethnography to explore the text-based regulatory framework of the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. Training Packages are national competency standards used to assess local workplace practice. The Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) is a national compliance framework used to audit local learning and assessment practice. These texts operate in a ‘symbiotic relationship’ to achieve a policy goal of national consistency. The researcher explicates the social relations of VET starting from her disquiet as a practitioner. The thesis argues that Training Packages and the AQTF socially organise the content and delivery of local learning and assessment activities. VET practitioners struggle to use these texts to support good practice, and their hidden work maintains an unstable VET system. Yet the extralocal mode of ruling offers no room to challenge VET policy. The thesis explicates three themes. Interview data is used to explore the contrast between the institutional language of Training Packages and the vernacular of workplaces in which these texts are activated. Many practitioners and participants simply do not understand Training Package competency standards. Using these texts to judge employee performance shifts the policing of workplace practice from local sites to external VET authorities. A second theme emerges as the analysis explores why VET practitioners use this excluding language in their work with participants. Interview data reveals that local training organisations achieve different readings as they engage with ruling VET texts. Some organisations use the national texts as broad frameworks, allowing practitioners to create spaces for meaningful learning. Other organisations adopt a narrow and rule-bound reading of national texts, displacing practitioners’ authority over their own practice. A third theme is explored through examination of a sequence of VET texts. The review and redevelopment of the mandatory qualifications for VET practitioners identified the language of the competency standards as a significant accessibility issue. These concerns were reshaped and subsumed in an official response that established the use of this language as a compulsory assessable requirement and a language and literacy benchmark. The thesis presents a new understanding of VET as a regulatory framework established through multiple levels of ruling texts that connect local sites to national government agendas. While some individual practitioners are able to navigate through this system, there is an urgent need for practitioners as a profession to challenge national hegemony.

In common with many Western nations, Australian governments, both state and federal, have increasingly embraced network-based approaches in responding to the effects of globalisation. Since 2001, thirty one Local Learning and Employment Networks (LLEN) have been established across all areas of Victoria, Australia in line with recommendations of a Ministerial Review into Post Compulsory Education and Training Pathways. That review reported that, in the globalised context, youth in transition from schooling to independence faced persistent and severe difficulties unknown to previous generations; it also found problems were frequently concentrated in particular groups and regions. LLEN bring together the expertise and experience of local education providers, industry, community organisations, individuals and government organisations. As a result of their local decisions, collaboration and community building efforts it is intended that opportunities for young people will be enhanced. My research was conducted within an Australian Research Council Linkage Project awarded to Deakin University Faculty of Education in partnership with the Smart Geelong Region LLEN (SGR LLEN). The Linkage Project included two separate research components one of which forms my thesis: a case study of SGR LLEN. My data was generated through participant observation in SGR LLEN throughout 2004 and 2005 and through interviews, reflective writing and archival review. In undertaking my analysis and presenting my thesis I have chosen to weave a series of panels whose orientation is poststructural. This approach was based in my acceptance that all knowledge is partial and fragmentary and, accordingly, researchers need to find ways that highlight the intersections in and indeterminacy of their empirical data. The LLEN is -by its nature as a network -more than the contractual entity that gains funding from government, acts as the administrative core and occupies the LLEN office. As such I have woven firstly the formation and operational structure of the bounded entity that is SGR LLEN before weaving a series of six images that portray the unbounded LLEN as an instance-in-action. The thesis draws its theoretical inspiration from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Despite increased use of notions of networks, local decision-making and community building by governments there had been little empirical research that explored stakeholder understandings of networks and their role in community building as well as a lack of theorisation of how networks actually ‘work.’ My research addresses this lack and suggests an instituted network can function as a learning community capable of fostering systemic change in the post compulsory education training and employment sector and thereby contributing to better opportunities for young people. However the full potential of the policy is undermined by the reluctance of governments to follow through on the implications of their policies and, in particular, to confront the limiting effects of performativity at all levels.

The development of the digital content industry is the key factor affecting the international competitiveness. However, there are still lots of problems and difficulties, and the most important of them is the cultivation of professional talents. The first purpose of this research is surveying the demand and supply and the gap between domestic digital industry and the cultivation of digital content talents. Second, explore the relative effect between the third party software vendors and the output of whole digital content industry. Through causal analytical method to find out problems and interviewing experts to establish the model of digital content service quality gap. Furthermore, use questionnaires to prove the hypothesis. After doing the research, we found out that digital content industry is different from general industry. There are four players, including the students, training organization of digital learning, factories of tool software develop and digital content service industry. And it truly have some gap between each player. First, the service that training organizations provide is discord from students¡¦ feeling. Second, services that students actually receive is different from they knew in the beginning. Third, students¡¦ cognition of software¡¦s price is disagree with the supplier. The result of research can be put in use of plan and execution. It not only can save the training time and human resources but increase the strength of training talents and is helpful to international development.

M. Tech. Business Administration / In April 2014, ICASA, South Africa's communications regulator, reduced mobile termination rates (i.e. tariffs mobile service providers can charge for terminating calls on each other's networks) from 40 cents to 20 cents per minute. Furthermore, mobile number portability has enhanced mobility of subscribers across networks. Mobile number portability means that subscribers can switch mobile network service providers without changing their mobile number despite it being issued by the network they are leaving. The price war amongst service providers means that all mobile network operators offer mobile voice calls and access to mobile data at comparable rates. There is now little differentiation between mobile network service providers, and mobile network service providers have to seek other sources of sustainable competitive advantage. It is against this background that the purpose of this research is to measure South African mobile phone consumers' perceptions and expectations of the service provided by mobile network service providers.

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published_or_final_version / abstract / Japanese Studies / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Dissertation submitted in compliance with the requirements for the Masters Degree in Technology: Business Administration, 2008. / The aim of the study was to identify causes of churning, to find ways of managing it and to diagnose customers‟ communication needs. Furthermore the research tested the impact of messaging services on customer retention and whether these services could compensate for the declining revenue or become new cash cows for service providers. The units of analyses were young people of ages ranging from 15 to 24. This group was chosen because it was found, during the study, that they used new services more often than any other age group. The initial plan, however, was to interview the entire population of cellphone users. Stratified random sampling was used to randomly select the units of analysis. Interviews were conducted at the homes of respondents, in the streets and at a shopping centre. Causes of customer churning were found to be billing by service providers that confused customers and „better phone deals offered by the competitors‟ resulting in some of the respondents switching providers. Other aspects about which respondents complained and which therefore could cause churning are „poor network quality‟, „confusing pricing structure‟ and „long waiting on customer care line‟. The respondents indicated that their communication needs could be satisfied by services that are easy to use, a helpful customer care agent and being able to retain a number when switching a service provider. Therefore churning could be managed by removing or reducing the causes of it and attracting the customers by meeting their communications needs, which are, improving customer care service and designing services that are easy to use. The research was inconclusive on the messaging services. Of the three new messaging services that were studied, only one was extremely popular, while the other two were hardly used. Instant messaging was the second most used service to voice and SMS and it was also ranked second, in order of importance. The other two messaging services, mobile email and MMS, received low rankings from the respondents. In addition more than a quarter (27%) of the respondents had never used mobile email. The implications of these findings are that service providers should improve their customer care service and design services that are easy to use.