Organizational change in the public sector: augmenting the demand control model to predict employee outcomes under New Public Management

This study identifies the environmental and personal characteristics that predict employee outcomes within an Australian public sector organization that had, under New Public Management (NPM), implemented a variety of practices traditionally found in the private sector. These are more results-oriented, and their adoption can be accompanied by increased strain for employees. The current investigation was guided by two complementary theories, the Demand Control Support (DCS) model and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, and sought to examine the benefits of building on the DCS to include both situation-specific stressors and internal coping resources. Survey responses from 1,155 employees were analysed. The hierarchical regression analyses indicated that both external and employee-centred variables made significant contributions to variations in psychological health, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. The external resources, work based support and, to a lesser extent, job control, predicted relatively large proportions of the variance in the target variables. The situation-specific stressors, particularly those involving harmful management practices (e.g., insufficient time to do job as well as you would like, lack of recognition for good work), made significant contributions to the outcome measures and generally supported the process of augmenting the generic components of the DCS with more situation-specific variables. In terms of internal resources, problem and emotion-based coping improved the capacity of the model to predict psychological health. The results suggest that the impact of NPM can be ameliorated by incorporating the dimensions of the augmented DCS and coping resources into the change programme.

Foucault's 'What is an author' : towards a critical discourse of practice as research

A vexed issue for many artistic researchers is related to the need for the artist/researcher to write about his or her own work in the research report or exegesis. In the creative arts, the outcomes that emerge from an alternative logic of practice are not easily quantifiable and it can be difficult to articulate conclusions objectively given the emotional and ideological investments and the intrinsically subjective dimension of the artistic process. How then, might the artist as researcher avoid on the one hand, what has been referred to as 'auto-connoisseurship', the undertaking of a thinly veiled labour of valorising what has been achieved in the creative work, or alternatively producing a research report that is mere description or history?

In this paper I suggest that a way of overcoming such a dilemma is for creative arts researchers to shift the critical focus away from the notion of the work as product, to an understanding of both studio enquiry and its outcomes as process. I’d like to draw on Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What is An Author ‘ to explore how we might move away from art criticism to the notion of a critical discourse of practice-led enquiry that involves viewing the artist as a researcher, and the artist/critic as a scholar who comments on the value of the artistic process as the production of knowledge.

Foucault’s essay provides artistic researchers with a template for more objective and distanced discourse on the practice-led research process and its writing. It allows researchers to locate themselves within contexts of theory and practice and provides an analytical framework though which researchers might locate themselves and their work within the broader social arena and field of research, As I will show with reference to the work of Donna Haraway and a number of commentaries on Pablo Picasso’s Demioselles d’Avignon, an application of Foucault’s ideas need not negate those subjective and situated aspects of practice as research.

Triangulation in organizational research : a re-presentation

This paper extends the discussion of postmodern thinking in organizational theory through a re-presentation of the concept of triangulation in organizational research. Initially triangulation is defined through the contrasting lenses of positivism and post-positivism/postmodernism and analysed as a metaphor for fixing and capturing the research subject. Subsequently triangulation is ‘re-presented’ as ‘metaphorization’—in terms of process and movement between researcher-subject positions. Rethinking the lines and angles of enquiry in triangulation, the paper suggests a shift from the ‘triangulation of distance’ tradition to a more reflexive consideration of ‘researcher stance’. This movement is represented across three perspectives: the researcher as a follower of nomothetic lines; the researcher as the taker of an ideographic overview; and the researcher as the finder of a particular angle. The implications of this re-presentation are then discussed in terms of perspective, data capture, reflexivity and metatriangulation.

Applying external solutions to organizational development : elearning as a platform for internal growth

Innovations in technology have facilitated eLearning process development, bringing significant impact into education. eLearning is not simply putting study materials online on the Web, nor is it a substitute for traditional classroom teaching (KPMG, 2002). Businesses worldwide have been using eLearning as a facilitator in organisational development through knowledge sharing, especially in the area of web based training and project management. eLearning has also become a large area of potential business for many organisations. In this study, we explore how eLearning has helped an organisation based in India – Tata Interactive Systems (part of TATA conglomerate), which provides eLearning solutions for businesses locally and globally. In this single case study, we explored how the organisation has not only utilised eLearning as an internal development process, but also successfully converted this learning into business opportunities for itself. To study the development process, we have applied the process theories of Van De Ven and Poole (1995).

Knowledge development and creation in email

Newly created knowledge is increasingly viewed as a highly valuable source of competitive advantage for business. Email is explored in its recently recognized role as a place of organizational knowledge development and creation, employing discourse analysis of email conversations as the research approach. This paper describes a knowledge development lifecycle derived from the empirical study, and provides insight into the nature of knowledge development and creation in organizations. We found that in selected email conversations, employees naturally and intuitively build purpose driven new knowledge incrementally and iteratively, crystallizing knowledge under construction by submitting it repeatedly to a range of key stakeholders for comment, until a 'consensus' is reached regarding the outcome. Our findings identify the process of knowledge qualification in organizational knowledge creation, and suggest that organizational knowledge may be politically constructed. The research results have the potential to assist organizations in understanding and facilitating processes and conditions for knowledge creation and development. The study also highlights the potential for email as a key component in a company's formal KM strategy.

Progressive discourse in mathematics classes - the task of the teacher

This paper uses data from two mathematics lessons to explore the nature of progressive discourse and examine critical features of teacher actions that contribute to mathematics classrooms functioning as communities of inquiry. Features found to promote progressive discourse include a focus on the conceptual elements of the curriculum and the use of complex, challenging tasks that problematised the curriculum; the orchestration of student reporting to allow all students to contribute to progress towards the community's solution to the problem; and a focus on seeking, recognizing, and drawing attention to mathematical reasoning and justification, and using this as a basis for learning.

Governing employees in the "Bank": a discourse analysis of strategic change

This paper reports the findings from a study of ‘Transform’, a Bank’s strategic change program. The study was carried out by developing and applying a discursive model of strategic change to Transform. Findings are presented about how Transform was constructed from ‘grand discourses’ of business and science that were drawn on by senior management, and how a ‘local discourse’ of the self was formed at the intersection of these grand discourses. This paper is concerned with how senior management has attempted to govern employee identity and practices through the construction of Transform. In this respect Transform can be understood as a discourse which was designed to regulate identity and influence employee practices by constructing and disseminating a particular reality for the Bank and its employees.

Does organizational structure matter? The behaviour of Australian Building Societies pre-and post-demutualization

Financial performance measures, provided by accounting-based financial ratios, of the major mutual building societies in Australia are used to explore their behaviour pre-and post-demutualization in the 1980s and 1990s. The theoretical and empirical literature has suggested that mutual deposit-taking institutions would have lower profitability and higher operating expenses than their publicly listed counterparts. Common accounting ratios are observed over time to investigate if ownership change in a mutual deposit-taking organization accounted for any discernable differences in profitability and cost efficiency of the firms after conversion.

Organizational decoration : a new metaphor for organization development

The authors call for the introduction of a new metaphor, organizational decoration, to provide a way of conceiving organizational development (OD) as an aesthetic endeavor. First, this is a response to recent calls for fresh and more interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about the practice of OD. Second, it is a provocation, for their choice of decoration is also a call for greater humility in OD’s ambitions. Rather than seek a more strategic or architectural role for OD, organizational decoration works instead at the surface and in the realm of the aesthetic. And within that realm the authors have deliberately chosen decoration over design (a term far more familiar to OD) because decoration more closely represents the ordinary and often temporary contributions that the authors advocate. Implications of moving OD down-market are discussed.