The Faculty of Business Administration will host its first Brown Bag Research Series of the fall, featuring presentations from Dr. Gordon Cooke and Mercy Oyet.

Rural Employment Issues: Learning from our Participation in the UArctic Extractive Industries Network

Dr. Gordon Cooke, Associate Professor, Labour Relations

Dr. Cooke will provide an overview of the first four seminar-style PhD courses that were arranged and presented by members of the University of the Arctic’s Thematic network on extractive Industries, which occurred in 2013 and earlier in 2014. The most active partners in this network are affiliated with i) the University of Tromsø(now called The Arctic University of Norway), ii) the University of Lapland (in Rovaniemi, Finland), and Memorial University (Faculty of Business Administration and Dept. of Geography). 

 

Dr. Cooke will also explore some of the regional development approaches available to governments in remote,  rural locations and will look at the similarities of the issues facing people in a number of Canadian and North Atlantic locations (whether Arctic, sub-Arctic or merely remote) and some of the different public policy responses.

 

This session will be light on formality and heavy on discussion.

Work-Family Facilitation and Family-Work Facilitation in Fly-in/Fly-out Employment: A Resource Perspective

Mercy Oyet, PhD candidate

In this conceptual paper, Ms. Oyet examines work-family/family-work facilitation in fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) employment. Extending ideas from positive organizational scholarship, she explores and conceptualizes a variety of work and family factors, and personal characteristics as resources that facilitate positive outcomes in both the work and family domains of individuals engaged in FIFO employment.

 

Furthermore, she proposes that the resources gained and developed in one domain can be transferred to the other domain, thus enhancing functioning in both domains. This process of facilitation, in turn, positively influences FIFO employees’ job and life satisfaction, job commitment and performance, marital quality and individual and family well-being. Ms. Oyet grounds these arguments on two key resource theories: the conservation of resource theory and the resource-gain-development theory.