The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) as a contributing factor in the process of organisational legitimacy assessment. The methodological approach in this study is supported by the application of content analysis to identify and examine the disclosed sustainability indicators of a major Australian financial institution (Westpac). The theoretical lens of legitimacy theory and the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) are used as points of reference to inform and structure the overall theoretical framework of this study. The results indicate that the four perspectives of a traditional BSC correlate with the main sources of influential inputs to Westpac's sustainability reporting. In addition, the SBSC presented in this article successfully illustrates focal areas of reporting practice, providing a succinct overview of an organisation's reporting activities. The primary contributions of this research are to the literature on social and environmental disclosures, including the research of Do, Tilt and Tilling (2007), and Baxter, Chua and Strong (2010) and the provision of a practical technique to illustrate the focal activity of an organisation's social and environmental reporting as part of the legitimisation process. KeywordsBalanced Scorecard, legitimacy, sustainability AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) as a contributing factor in the process of organisational legitimacy assessment. The methodological approach in this study is supported by the application of content analysis to identify and examine the disclosed sustainability indicators of a major Australian financial institution (Westpac). The theoretical lens of legitimacy theory and the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) are used as points of reference to inform and structure the overall theoretical framework of this study. The results indicate that the four perspectives of a traditional BSC correlate with the main sources of influential inputs to Westpac's sustainability reporting. In addition, the SBSC presented in this article successfully illustrates focal areas of reporting practice, providing a succinct overview of an organisation's reporting activities. The primary contributions of this research are to the literature on social and environmental disclosures, including the research of Do, Tilt and Tilling (2007), and Baxter, Chua and Strong (2010) and the provision of a practical technique to illustrate the focal activity of an organisation's social and environmental reporting as part of the legitimisation process.
Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate faculty and academic staff perceptions, experiences and expectations with respect to a voluntary, bilingual peer assisted learning (PAL) program, which operates for the benefit of students studying in the Faculty of Business at a regional Australian University.Design/methodology/approach -A survey instrument and semi-structured interviews were used to faculty executive and academic staff in order to collect information about the perceived benefits of the program and identify opportunities for improvement.Findings -Based on an analysis of student results, the bilingual PAL program is shown to have a positive effect on performance of students participating in the program. Results from interviews with executive and academic staff indicate a high level of support for this type of student learning program.Originality/value -Although the value of both bilingual teaching and PAL has been explored in the teaching and learning literature, few studies have examined the integration of these two approaches. This research contributes to the literature by exploring the practical contribution of integrating these approaches. This research also provides valuable information regarding executive and academic perceptions of PAL programs, which is infrequently addressed in the literature. Findings may be used to inform institutions of the value of bilingual PAL programs in relation to international student retention and learning support and provide a starting point for discussions around the practical implications of such programs.
Postgraduate education in China bears the dual mission of "high-end talent supply" and "scientific and technological innovation" as delegated by the Ministry of Education of China (2017). Improve the quality of postgraduate student training and management is essential for Chinese universities to meet this requirement. This paper investigates the practical effectiveness of using a specially designed, internationally collaborative research training workshop to enhance new Chinese postgraduate students' scientific literacy and self-efficacy. The research results show that the workshop, which integrates seminar presentations and both individual and group-based student activities, is of practical significance for improving the experiences of first-year postgraduate students. The findings indicate the application of enactive mastery and vicarious learning strategies in research training workshop effectively boost students' motivation, confidence and feeling of accomplishment at their early research career, and can provide ongoing benefits to support Chinese students to further develop research skills and capabilities. The positive findings in this exploratory study can inform future research projects to examine the transferability of this research training workshop model in the broader Chinese higher education context.
Training a game-playing reinforcement learning agent requires multiple interactions with the environment. Ignorant random exploration may cause a waste of time and resources. It's essential to alleviate such waste. As discussed in this paper, under the settings of the off-policy actor critic algorithms, we demonstrate that the critic can bring more expected discounted rewards than or at least equal to the actor. Thus, the Q value predicted by the critic is a better signal to redistribute the action originally sampled from the policy distribution predicted by the actor. This paper introduces the novel Critic Guided Action Redistribution (CGAR) algorithm and tests it on the OpenAI MuJoCo tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the sample efficiency and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code can be found at https://github.com/tairanhuang/CGAR.
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