Clare Archer-Lean

It is well established that literary work can promote insights that result in future change, whether on a personal or an institutional level. As Umberto Eco (1989) notes, the act of reading does not stop with the artist but continues into the work of communities. The papers delivered in this panel consider the regenerative role of literature within culture, arguing that the special properties of literature can convey an important sense of nature (Bateson 1973, Zapf 2008). These concepts are discussed in relation to writing about Australian flora and fauna. Using an ecocritical focus based on ideas about the relationship between literature and the environment the paper considers Australian works and the way in which literature enlivens this complex intersection between humans, animals and the environment. This engagement is investigated through three modes: the philosophical, the literary, and the practical. The novels discussed include Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Richard Flanagan's Wanting, and Sonya Hartnett's Forest, as well as a range of fictional and non-fictional works that describe the Blue Mountains region in New South Wales. The paper closes with a discussion of the role of story-telling as a way of introducing the public to specific environmental locations and issues.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems standardise and streamline all functional areas of business in order to improve communication and thereby increase efficiency. They require a large technical architecture that has huge storage needs, networking requirements and specific hardware/software requirements. This paper explores the impact of ERP implementation on a different type of organisation, the Government Owned Corporation (GOC). This research-in-progress paper seeks to begin discussion of ERP implementation issues in GOC by changing the way we perceive such organisations. The authors seek to begin explanation for GOC end users' failure to comply with or fully exploit the potential of the ERP. This paper builds on Hobson et al's (2005) statement that past ERP research has been primarily technologically determinist and that the research has largely ignored what these authors term the social system . A GOC case study is presented and explored in terms of the ERP and GOC literature. Exploring existing cultural studies approaches, this paper examines why end users in a GOC are neither complying with nor fully exploiting the potential of ERP. The contention is that discourses of operational level staff is significantly different to that of managerial staff and also ERP implementation processes and that effective IT systems require the input of the end users.