Newcastle Business School's Professor Mark Bray will be presenting a lecture this week at the University of Melbourne.

The lecture, titled The Ambiguities of Workplace Cooperation, forms part of Melbourne Law School's Workplace Relations Lecture Series. Professor Bray will explore the meaning of cooperation - "an ambiguous concept that is rarely defined with clarity and used interchangeably with related terms like collaboration, partnership and direct engagement", arguing that a key issue distinguishing the different approaches is the role given to employee representation. This account will then be used to shed light on recent contributions to Australian public policy and academic discourse.

According to Professor Bray, this public lecture is an important sign that the University of Newcastle is on Australia's national Industrial Relations map.

"The public lecture series is a prestigious forum and an invitation to present is a terrific opportunity to share ideas and build relationships with an important national professional community," he says. "It is a great opportunity to build links with key national institutions like the Fair Work Commission and to perhaps even influence the practice of industrial relations in this country."

Professor Bray has held the Foundation Chair in Employment Studies at the University of Newcastle since 1997. He is currently part of a research team (along with Dr Johanna Macneil, Dr Sarah Oxenbridge and Professor Andrew Stewart) working with the Fair Work Commission on a project entitled Improving Labour Productivity through Co-operative Workplace Relations: A Proactive Role for Industrial Tribunals in Australia?

Professor Bray has published extensively in the area of industrial relations, including lead authorship of a major textbook (Employment Relations, McGraw-Hill, Sydney, 2nd Edition 2011 - with Peter Waring and Rae Cooper) and empirical studies in a number of industries, such as road freight transport, air passenger transport, health care and manufacturing.

Professor Bray has a forthcoming paper co-authored with Professor Andrew Stewart in the Australian Journal of Labour Law entitled What is Distinctive about the Fair Work Regime?

For event details, see the University of Melbourne website.