Communication models of institutional online communities : the role of the ABC cultural intermediary

The co-creation of cultural artefacts has been democratised given the recent technological affordances of information and communication technologies. Web 2.0 technologies have enabled greater possibilities of citizen inclusion within the media conversations of their nations. For example, the Australian audience has more opportunities to collaboratively produce and tell their story to a broader audience via the public service media (PSM) facilitated platforms of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). However, providing open collaborative production for the audience gives rise to the problem, how might the PSM manage the interests of all the stakeholders and align those interests with its legislated Charter? This paper considers this problem through the ABC’s user-created content participatory platform, ABC Pool and highlights the cultural intermediary as the role responsible for managing these tensions. This paper also suggests cultural intermediation is a useful framework for other media organisations engaging in co-creative activities with their audiences.

Collaboration, connections and consequences : a study of cultural intermediation within the ABC Pool institutional online community

This thesis addresses the question of what it means to be a public broadcaster in the context of a rapidly changing media landscape, in which audiences no longer only watch and consume but now also make and share media content. Through a close investigation of the ABC Pool community, this thesis documents how the different interests of the stakeholders within an institutional online community intersect and how those interests are negotiated within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It demonstrates a new approach towards the cultural intermediation of user-created content within institutional online communities. The research moves beyond the exploration of the community manager role as one type of intermediary to demonstrate the activities of multiple cultural intermediaries that engage in collaborative peer production. Cultural intermediation provides the basis for institutional online community governance.

The “Engineers without Borders” Challenge : does it engage Australian and New Zealand students with sustainability?

This paper explores the rationale, experience and impact of thirteen Australia and New Zealand universities that have integrated the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) challenge into their first year engineering curriculum. EWB is a national competition for university students, who work in teams to develop conceptual designs for real sustainable development projects across the globe. This project investigated “what works and what doesn’t” in engineering curriculum renewal, utilising content analysis, multiple in-depth interviews with students and staff (coordinators, lecturers, tutors) and observation. EWB comprises between 25 to 100% of the total assessment items. This paper specifically focuses on student’s experience of EWB, documenting how the project teaches sustainability and systems-thinking approaches, engages students with different cultures, and fosters teamwork, new ways of thinking and communication skills. We identify key benefits and challenges of EWB, as well as mechanisms and contexts that foster student engagement and learning outcomes.

Storylines of institutional responses to climate change as a transformative stressor : the case of regional planning in South East Queensland, Australia

Institutional responses to climate change stresses through planning will require new and amended forms of governance. Institutional framing of change imperatives can significantly condition associated governance responses. This paper builds on scholarly conversations concerning the conceptual role of ‘storylines’ in shaping institutional responses to climate change through governance. It draws on conceptual perspectives of climate change as a ‘transformative stressor’, which can compel institutional transformation within planning. The concepts of storylines and transformative stressors are conceptually linked. The conceptual approach is applied to an empirical enquiry focused on the regional planning regime of South East Queensland (SEQ), Australia. This paper reports and examines three institutional storylines of responding to climate change through planning governance in SEQ. It concludes that the manifestation of climate change as a transformative stressor in SEQ prompted institutional transformation, leading to a dominant storyline focused on climate adaptation as an important facet of regional planning governance.

Public Economics and the Assessment of Tourism Developments and Policies

Public economics covers both topics in welfare economic of social (as opposed to private) interest and aspects of public finance. This chapter considers the application of two methods of social economic evaluation of tourist developments, namely, social cost-benefit analysis and economic impact analysis. The role of social cost-benefit analysis in the assessment of tourism is illustrated by its application to the evaluation of inbound tourism. This is followed by a discussion of taxes on tourism and subsidies to promote it. The principle focus is on hotel room taxes. The analysis of taxes on tourism involves both public finance and welfare economics issues. The scope for and desirability of applying the user-pays principle to tourism is then examined.

Technical efficiency of mainstream airlines and low-cost carriers : New evidence using bootstrap data envelopment analysis truncated regression

Between 2001 and 2005, the US airline industry faced financial turmoil while the European airline industry entered a period of substantive deregulation. Consequently, this opened up opportunities for low-cost carriers to become more competitive in the market. To assess airline performance and identify the sources of efficiency in the immediate aftermath of these events, we employ a bootstrap data envelopment analysis truncated regression approach. The results suggest that at the time the mainstream airlines needed to significantly reorganize and rescale their operations to remain competitive. In the second-stage analysis, the results indicate that private ownership, status as a low-cost carrier, and improvements in weight load contributed to better organizational efficiency.

Creative industries : a new pathway

The creative industries have become a key part of the economic development of many nations, with a particularly lively debate in the developing world taking place now.

A new approach for evaluating the benefits of smart grid development

In this paper, the inherent mechanism of benefits associated with smart grid development is examined based on the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) model from resource economics. The emerging types of technology brought up by smart grid development are taken as pressures. The improvements of the performance and efficiency of power system operation are taken as states. The effects of smart grid development on society are taken as responses. Then, a novel method for evaluating social benefits in energy saving and CO2 emission reduction from smart grid development is presented. Finally, the benefits in a province in northwest China is carried out by employing the developed evaluation system, and reasonable evaluation results are attained.

Academics and the new public intellectual

In this essay, we outline an emerging form of public intellectualism in the humanities sector of Australian higher education. We argue that debates over public intellectualism and its relation to the academy in Australia have largely been focused on the tension between polemics and politics. These debates have also tended to ignore or overlook policy drivers within the sector and alternative or new media sites of public intellectualism. Shifting the focus towards policy drivers in the knowledge economy—such as knowledge transfer and third-stream funding—and understanding the nature of the university as a public sphere in itself reveals a new economy of the public intellectual as a professional knowledge worker. This new economy, we argue, may well render obsolete many of the previous debates over public intellectualism in the humanities. However, we anticipate that it will generate new debates over the relationship between the individual and the institutional, and between the concepts of public profile and public role—debates that will affect, in particular, early career academics who are the inheritors of this new economy of the public intellectual.

Evolutionary Perspectives

The standard approach to industrial economics starts with the industry’s basic conditions, then runs through the structure–conduct–performance paradigm of industrial organization, and finally considers government regulation and policy. Most creative industries segments have been studied in this way, for example in Albarran (2002) and Caves (2000). These approaches use standard economic analysis to explain the particular properties and characteristics of a specific industrial sector. The overview presented here is different again. It focuses on the creative industries and examines their economic effect, specifically their contribution to economic evolu -tion. This is an evolutionary systems approach to industrial analysis, where we seek to understand how a sector fits into a broader system of production, consumption, technology, trade and institutions. The evolutionary approach focuses on innovation, economic growth and endogenous transformation. So, rather than using economics to explain static or industrial-organization features of the creative industries, we are using an open systems view of the creative industries to explain dynamic ‘Schumpeterian’ features of the broader economy. The creative industries are drivers of economic transformation through their role in the origination of new ideas, in consumer adoption, and in facilitating the institutional embedding of new ideas into the economic order. This is not a novel idea, as economists have long understood that particular activities are drivers of economic growth and development, for example research and development, and also that particular sectors are instrumental to this process, for example high-technology sectors. What is new is the argument that cultural and creative sectors are also a key part of this process of economic evolution. We will review the case for that claim, and outline purported mechanisms. We will also consider why policy settings in the creative industries should be more in line with innovation and growth policy than with industry policy.

Criminological research and institutional ethics protocols : empowering the indigenous other or the academy?

Indigenous commentators have long critiqued the way in which government agencies and member of academic institutions carry out research in their social context. Recently, these commentators have turned their critical gaze upon activities of Research Ethics Boards(REBs). Informed by the reflections on research processes and by Indigenous Canadian and New Zealand research participants, as well as the extant literature, this paper critiques the processes employed by New Zealand REBs to assess Indigenous‐focused or Indigenous‐led research in the criminological realm.

The impact of a congestion charging exemption on the demand for new low‐emission vehicles

Numerous initiatives have been employed around the world in order to address rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions originating from the transport sector. These measures include: travel demand management (congestion‐charging), increased fuel taxes, alternative fuel subsidies and low‐emission vehicle (LEV) rebates. Incentivizing the purchase of LEVs has been one of the more prevalent approaches in attempting to tackle this global issue. LEVs, whilst having the advantage of lower emissions and, in some cases, more efficient fuel consumption, also bring the downsides of increased purchase cost, reduced convenience of vehicle fuelling, and operational uncertainty. To stimulate demand in the face of these challenges, various incentive‐based policies, such as toll exemptions, have been used by national and local governments to encourage the purchase of these types of vehicles. In order to address rising GHG emissions in Stockholm, and in line with the Swedish Government’s ambition to operate a fossil free fleet by 2030, a number of policies were implemented targeting the transport sector. Foremost amongst these was the combination of a congestion charge – initiated to discourage emissions‐intensive travel – and an exemption from this charge for some LEVs, established to encourage a transition towards a ‘green’ vehicle fleet. Although both policies shared the aim of reducing GHG emissions, the exemption for LEVs carried the risk of diminishing the effectiveness of the congestion charging scheme. As the number of vehicle owners choosing to transition to an eligible LEV increased, the congestion‐reduction effectiveness of the charging scheme weakened. In fact, policy makers quickly recognized this potential issue and consequently phased out the LEV exemption less than 18 months after its introduction (1). Several studies have investigated the demand for LEVs through stated‐preference (SP) surveys across multiple countries, including: Denmark (2), Germany (3, 4), UK (5), Canada (6), USA (7, 8) and Australia (9). Although each of these studies differed in approach, all involved SP surveys where differing characteristics between various types of vehicles, including LEVs, were presented to respondents and these respondents in turn made hypothetical decisions about which vehicle they would be most likely to purchase. Although these studies revealed a number of interesting findings in regards to the potential demand for LEVs, they relied on SP data. In contrast, this paper employs an approach where LEV choice is modelled by taking a retrospective view and by using revealed preference (RP) data. By examining the revealed preferences of vehicle owners in Stockholm, this study overcomes one of the principal limitations of SP data, namely that stated preferences may not in fact reflect individuals’ actual choices, such as when cost, time, and inconvenience factors are real rather than hypothetical. This paper’s RP approach involves modelling the characteristics of individuals who purchased new LEVs, whilst estimating the effect of the congestion charging exemption upon choice probabilities and subsequent aggregate demand. The paper contributes to the current literature by examining the effectiveness of a toll exemption under revealed preference conditions, and by assessing the total effect of the policy based on key indicators for policy makers, including: vehicle owner home location, commuting patterns, number of children, age, gender and income. Extended Abstract Submission for Kuhmo Nectar Conference 2014 2 The two main research questions motivating this study were:  Which individuals chose to purchase a new LEV in Stockholm in 2008?; and,  How did the congestion charging exemption affect the aggregate demand for new LEVs in Stockholm in 2008? In order to answer these research questions the analysis was split into two stages. Firstly, a multinomial logit (MNL) model was used to identify which demographic characteristics were most significantly related to the purchase of an LEV over a conventional vehicle. The three most significant variables were found to be: intra‐cordon residency (positive); commuting across the cordon (positive); and distance of residence from the cordon (negative). In order to estimate the effect of the exemption policy on vehicle purchase choice, the model included variables to control for geographic differences in preferences, based on the location of the vehicle owners’ homes and workplaces in relation to the congestion‐charging cordon boundary. These variables included one indicator representing commutes across the cordon and another indicator representing intra‐cordon residency. The effect of the exemption policy on the probability of purchasing LEVs was estimated in the second stage of the analysis by focusing on the groups of vehicle owners that were most likely to have been affected by the policy i.e. those commuting across the cordon boundary (in both directions). Given the inclusion of the indicator variable representing commutes across the cordon, it is assumed that the estimated coefficient of this variable captures the effect of the exemption policy on the utility of choosing to purchase an exempt LEV for these two groups of vehicle owners. The intra‐cordon residency indicator variable also controls for differences between the two groups, based upon direction of travel across the cordon boundary. A counter‐hypothesis to this assumption is that the coefficient of the variable representing commuting across the cordon boundary instead only captures geo‐demographic differences that lead to variations in LEV ownership across the different groups of vehicle owners in relation to the cordon boundary. In order to address this counter‐hypothesis, an additional analysis was performed on data from a city with a similar geodemographic pattern to Stockholm, Gothenburg ‐ Sweden’s second largest city. The results of this analysis provided evidence to support the argument that the coefficient of the variable representing commutes across the cordon was capturing the effect of the exemption policy. Based upon this framework, the predicted vehicle type shares were calculated using the estimated coefficients of the MNL model and compared with predicted vehicle type shares from a simulated scenario where the exemption policy was inactive. This simulated scenario was constructed by setting the coefficient for the variable representing commutes across the cordon boundary to zero for all observations to remove the utility benefit of the exemption policy. Overall, the procedure of this second stage of the analysis led to results showing that the exemption had a substantial effect upon the probability of purchasing and aggregate demand for exempt LEVs in Stockholm during 2008. By making use of unique evidence of revealed preferences of LEV owners, this study identifies the common characteristics of new LEV owners and estimates the effect of Stockholm's congestion charging exemption upon the demand for new LEVs during 2008. It was found that the variables that had the greatest effect upon the choice of purchasing an exempt LEV included intra‐cordon residency (positive), distance of home from the cordon (negative), and commuting across the cordon (positive). It was also determined that owners under the age of 30 years preferred non‐exempt LEVs (low CO2 LEVs), whilst those over the age of 30 years preferred electric vehicles. In terms of electric vehicles, it was apparent that those individuals living within the city had the highest propensity towards purchasing this vehicle type. A negative relationship between choosing an electric vehicle and the distance of an individuals’ residency from the cordon was also evident. Overall, the congestion charging exemption was found to have increased the share of exempt LEVs in Stockholm by 1.9%, with, as expected, a much stronger effect on those commuting across the boundary, with those living inside the cordon having a 13.1% increase, and those owners living outside the cordon having a 5.0% increase. This increase in demand corresponded to an additional 538 (+/‐ 93; 95% C.I.) new exempt LEVs purchased in Stockholm during 2008 (out of a total of 5 427; 9.9%). Policy makers can take note that an incentive‐based policy can increase the demand for LEVs and appears to be an appropriate approach to adopt when attempting to reduce transport emissions through encouraging a transition towards a ‘green’ vehicle fleet.

Externally oriented capabilities and corporate entrepreneurship : institutional and managerial contingencies

This research adopts three different theoretical lenses- the attention-based view, institutional perspective and network theory- to investigate the effect of externally oriented capabilities (absorptive capacity and networking capabilities) on corporate entrepreneurship. Based on an Australian and Iranian sample of mining equipment, technology and service providers, this thesis provides new understanding of why some firms are able to generate higher levels of corporate entrepreneurship than others and opens new directions for more capabilities-oriented research in corporate entrepreneurship. In particular, this research provides new insight into how entrepreneurial management, institutional context and external knowledge search breadth shape the relationship between externally oriented capabilities and corporate entrepreneurship.

A public perspective on the adoption of microgeneration technologies in New Zealand: A multivariate probit approach

The growing demand for electricity in New Zealand has led to the construction of new hydro-dams or power stations that have had environmental, social and cultural effects. These effects may drive increases in electricity prices, as such prices reflect the cost of running existing power stations as well as building new ones. This study uses Canterbury and Central Otago as case studies because both regions face similar issues in building new hydro-dams and ever-increasing electricity prices that will eventually prompt households to buy power at higher prices. One way for households to respond to these price changes is to generate their own electricity through microgeneration technologies (MGT). The objective of this study is to investigate public perception and preferences regarding MGT and to analyze the factors that influence people's decision to adopt such new technologies in New Zealand. The study uses a multivariate probit approach to examine households' willingness to adopt any one MGT system or a combination of the MGT systems. Our findings provide valuable information for policy makers and marketers who wish to promote effective microgeneration technologies.