Keynote Speakers

Professor Rowena Barrett

Rowena Barrett is Professor of HRM and Small Business at Leicester Business School, De Montfort University, UK. She is a member of the Small Business and Enterprise Research Group at De Montfort where she contributes her expertise on the organisation and management of work in small business. Her research has been funded by a range of sources including the Australian Research Council and has been published in journals such as Work, Employment and Society, Sociology, New Technology Work and Employment and Human Resource Management Review. Her latest book, the International Handbook of HRM and Entrepreneurship, co-edited with Dr Susan Mayson (Monash Uni.), is a collection of work by established and new academics which addresses the ‘people’ side of venture emergence and development, offering unique insights into the role that HRM plays in smaller and entrepreneurial firms.


Professor Richard Fletcher

Professor Richard Fletcher is Professor of Marketing at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. From 2003 to 2006, he was also Chair of the School of Marketing and International Business. His areas of expertise include international marketing, cross-cultural issues, doing business with emerging markets, ethics, international issues and the internet and national sovereignty. His research interests focus on social sensitivity in international business and on tapping markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ in emerging markets (including promotion in emerging markets and doing business with them via countertrade and offshoring), the macro impacts of globalisation, international ethical practices, environmental considerations, and sensitivity to national sovereignty. He has published in prestigious marketing and management journals He is principal author of the only Australian text in international marketing, International Marketing – an Asia-Pacific Perspective, now in its fourth edition. This text has been adapted for the European market and International Marketing for SME’s was released in the UK in 2004. Also published in 2004 was the text by Fletcher, R., Bell, J and McNaughton, R. International E-Business Marketing. This is the first text to consider what are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of using the Internetas a vehicle for international marketing.

Prior to becoming an academic, Richard was a Senior Trade Commissioner for the Australian Government and for over 25 years represented Australia’s commercial interests in New Delhi, Bombay, San Francisco, Jakarta, Teheran, Los Angeles, and Bangkok. In the late 1970’s he spent two years as Australia’s ambassador to Libya.