From valuing design to designing value

This paper presents findings of an embedded action research project within a small to medium sized enterprise (SME). Through the implementation of design-led innovation processes, this research aims to identify the changes experienced in the participating company during a shift in the perspective of design from a product focus towards a strategic focus. Staff interviews and a reflective journal were used as methods to collect data from a range of design interventions that were facilitated throughout the engagement. A shift in perspective of design was evident through three cultural changes within the firm. First, the perceived outcome focus of design became increasingly long-term. Second, the value of design outcomes became less directed towards current projects, and more directed towards future possibilities. Finally, the perceived tangibility of design outcomes shifted from tangible to intangible. For example, design activities which produced customer insights, rather than product features, became seen as beneficial to the firm. These three components are proposed as cultural stepping stones which describe how a company transitions from an exclusively product-focused perspective and utilisation of design towards design as a company based process. Implications of this research provide considerations for designers who are attempting to facilitate a similar transformation within a business in the future.

What parents value from formal support services in the context of identified child abuse

Parents whose children are identified as having experienced or being at risk of experiencing significant harm potentially provide an invaluable dimension to our understanding of the circumstances that result in child abuse or neglect and how best to respond to these invariably complex situations. This paper reports findings from a study of the experiences of six parents. In-depth interviews were conducted with four mothers and two fathers who had been referred to an intensive family support services by the Queensland statutory child protection authority. Using a critical ecological perspective, the study focused on identifying and understanding the experiences of the parents in using formal family support services, including aspects of service delivery that were helpful or unhelpful. Parents also commented on their experiences of statutory child protection services. Service components and worker qualities that parents identified as being helpful included being accessible, targeted and integrated and being able to meet a continuum of needs, from a micro to a broader level. Their reports provide invaluable insight into how formal family support services, including child protection services, can better meet the needs of parents in addressing the recurring problem of child maltreatment.

Introduction : Call Centres, the Networked Economy and the Value Chain

In July 2006, members of Monash University’s Australian Centre for Research in Employment and Work (ACREW) joined with colleagues from King’s College London to hold a conference focused on ‘Socially responsive, socially responsible approaches to employment and work’ (DeCieri et al., 2006). One of the five conference streams was devoted to work and employment in call centres and was organized by the lead author of this introduction (Rainnie). This special edition of the JIR includes a number of articles from that stream.

Value management in design planning : a systems-based framework for multi-disciplinary team involvement

This thesis investigates the Value Management processes used by construction project clients that effects project team involvement in VM workshops during the design stage of the projects. It is based on five case studies of the Malaysian international airport construction project packages. The focus of the research is on how issues related to infrastructure design that can improve construction processes on-site are being identified, analysed and resolved through multi-disciplinary team participation. The degrees of interaction, diversity of visualisation aids, certain cultural dimensions and the system thinking approach are found to have significant influence in maximizing participation among project team members during the entire VM workshop process.

The value of storytelling

Considering the embodied carbon in existing buildings where expenditure has already occurred, the retrofitting of existing buildings presents a significant opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint of our built environment. In Australia there is also a renewed awareness of the importance of our cultural heritage and the adaptive reuse of our historic buildings is increasingly discussed as a preservation strategy. The ‘design’ phase in building projects is credited with providing “an unparalleled window of opportunity to address environmental objectives” and fostering sustainable development, with up to 80% of overall environmental impacts determined by the decisions made at this stage. Both design and built environment professionals appreciate that a holistic and ‘whole systems’ approach is key in enabling transformation. The design process often comprises of many divergent and convergent activities, many of which seek to understand the people and context. The design process for heritage building adaptive reuse projects revolves around producing or referring to a conservation management plan that articulates what is and isn't heritage fabric. In an Australian context, and according to literature and the emerging results of a series of semi-structured interviews undertaken with designers of such projects, the key themes integral to success are: business case, vision, communication & collaboration, values, and storytelling.

Insight into the pain customer : how to improve the value proposition for community pharmacy

1. Shoppers Profiles- Are Grocery Shoppers any different to Pharmacy Shoppers? 2. Awaking the Sleeping Giants- Supermarkets push into OTC Medicines 3. Price versus Value for Money- What’s the Difference? Value and Perceived Quality 4. Consumer Decision Making Process- The Pharmacists ‘Trump’ Card

Degree of value alignment : a grounded theory of rural nurse resignations

INTRODUCTION: The shortage of nurses willing to work in rural Australian healthcare settings continues to worsen. Australian rural areas have a lower retention rate of nurses than metropolitan counterparts, with more remote communities experiencing an even higher turnover of nursing staff. When retention rates are lower, patient outcomes are known to be poorer. This article reports a study that sought to explore the reasons why registered nurses resign from rural hospitals in the state of New South Wales, Australia. METHODS: Using grounded theory methods, this study explored the reasons why registered nurses resigned from New South Wales rural hospitals. Data were collected from 12 participants using semi-structured interviews; each participant was a registered nurse who had resigned from a rural hospital. Nurses who had resigned due to retirement, relocation or maternity leave were excluded. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and imported into NVivo software. The constant comparative method of data collection and analysis was followed until a core category emerged. RESULTS: Nurses resigned from rural hospitals when their personal value of how nursing should occur conflicted with the hospital's organisational values driving the practice of nursing. These conflicting values led to a change in the degree of value alignment between the nurse and hospital. The degree of value alignment occurred in three dynamic stages that nurses moved through prior to resigning. The first stage, sharing values, was a time when a nurse and a hospital shared similar values. The second stage was conceding values where, due to perceived changes in a hospital's values, a nurse felt that patient care became compromised and this led to a divergence of values. The final stage was resigning, a stage where a nurse 'gave up' as they felt that their professional integrity was severely compromised. The findings revealed that when a nurse and organisational values were not aligned, conflict was created for a nurse about how they could perform nursing that aligned with their internalised professional values and integrity. Resignation occurred when nurses were unable to realign their personal values to changed organisational values - the organisational values changed due to rural area health service restructures, centralisation of budgets and resources, cumbersome hierarchies and management structures that inhibited communication and decision making, out-dated and ineffective operating systems, insufficient and inexperienced staff, bullying, and a lack of connectedness and shared vision. CONCLUSIONS: To fully comprehend rural nurse resignations, this study identified three stages that nurses move through prior to resignation. Effective retention strategies for the nursing workforce should address contributors to a decrease in value alignment and work towards encouraging the coalescence of nurses' and hospitals' values. It is imperative that strategies enable nurses to provide high quality patient care and promote a sense of connectedness and a shared vision between nurse and hospital. Senior managers need to have clear ways to articulate and imbue organisational values and be explicit in how these values accommodate nurses' values. Ward-level nurse managers have a significant responsibility to ensure that a hospital's values (both explicit and implicit) are incorporated into ward culture.

Setting the agenda, influencing public opinion, and advocating for social change

This study seeks to contribute to the systematic explanation of journalists’ professional role orientations. Focusing on three aspects of journalistic interventionism – the importance of setting the political agenda, influencing public opinion and advocating for social change – multilevel analyses found substantive variation in interventionism at the individual level of the journalist, the level of the media organizations, and the societal level. Based on interviews with 2100 journalists from 21 countries, findings affirm theories regarding a hierarchy of influences in news work. We found journalists to be more willing to intervene in society when they work in public media organizations and in countries with restricted political freedom. An important conclusion of our analysis is that journalists’ professional role orientations are also rooted within perceptions of cultural and social values. Journalists were more likely to embrace an interventionist role when they were more strongly motivated by the value types of power, achievement and tradition.

On the efficacy of key corporate governance recommendations in mid-tier companies : window-dressing or value-adding?

This paper examins the relationship between firm performance and key board and audit committee variables in a sample of mid-tier listed Australian firms. Unlike the UK where the corporate governance Code specifically outlines special arrangements for companies outside the FTSE 350 index, the ASX Corporate Governance recommendations make no special provisions for mid-tier companies. Consequently, mid-tier Australian companies may be expending scarce resources in conforming with recommendations that are not value-creating.

The value of tail risk hedging in defined contribution plans: What does history tell us

Hedging against tail events in equity markets has been forcefully advocated in the aftermath of recent global financial crisis. Whether this is beneficial to long horizon investors like employees enrolled in defined contribution (DC) plans, however, has been subject to criticism. We conduct historical simulation since 1928 to examine the effectiveness of active and passive tail risk hedging using out of money put options for hypothetical equity portfolios of DC plan participants with 20 years to retirement. Our findings show that the cost of tail hedging exceeds the benefits for a majority of the plan participants during the sample period. However, for a significant number of simulations, hedging result in superior outcomes relative to an unhedged position. Active tail hedging is more effective when employees confront several panic-driven periods characterized by short and sharp market swings in the equity markets over the investment horizon. Passive hedging, on the other hand, proves beneficial when they encounter an extremely rare event like the Great Depression as equity markets go into deep and prolonged decline.

Contextualising co-creation of value in electronic personal health records

This conceptual paper is a preliminary part of an ongoing study into take-up of electronic personal health records (ePHRs). The purpose of this work is to contextually ‘operationalise' Grönroos’ (2012) model of value co-creation in service for ePHRs. Using findings in the extant literature we enhance theoretical and practical understanding of the potential for co-creation of value with ePHRs for relevant stakeholders. The research design focused on the selection and evaluation of relevant literature to include in the discussion. The objective was to demonstrate which articles can be used to 'contextualise' the concepts in relation to relevant healthcare providers and patient engagement in the co-creation of value from having shared ePHRs. Starting at the service concept, that is, what the service provider wants to achieve and for whom, there is little doubt that there are recognised benefits that co-create value for both healthcare providers and healthcare consumers (i.e. patients) through shared ePHRs. We further highlight both alignments and misalignments in the resources and activities concepts between stakeholder groups. Examples include the types of functionalities as well as the interactive and peer communication needs perceived as useful for healthcare providers compared to healthcare consumers. The paper has implications for theory and practice and is an original and innovative approach to studying the co-creation of value in eHealth delivery.

Power and paradigms : the Dutch response to pressures for shareholder value

In recent years, research aimed at identifying and relating the antecedents and consequences of diffusing organizational practices/ideas has turned its attention to debating the international adoption and implementation of the Anglo-American model of corporate governance, i.e., a shareholder-value-orientation (SVO). While financial economists characterize the adoption of an SVO as necessary and performance-enhancing, behavioral scientists have disputed such claims, invoking institutional contingencies in the appropriateness of an SVO. Our study seeks to provide some resolution to the debate by developing an overarching socio-political perspective that links the antecedents and consequences of the adoption of the contested practice of SVO. We test our framework using extensive longitudinal data from 1992-2006 from the largest listed corporations in the Netherlands, and we find a negative relationship between SVO adoption and subsequent firm performance, although this effect is attenuated when accompanied by greater SVO-alignment among major owners and a firm’s visible commitment to an SVO. This study extends prior research on the diffusion of contested organizational practices that has taken a socio-political perspective by offering an original contingency perspective that addresses how and why the misaligned preferences of corporate owners will affect (i) a company’s inclination to espouse an SVO, and (ii) the performance consequences of such misalignment.This study suggests when board members are considering the adoption of new ideas/practices (e.g., SVO), they should consider the contextual fitness of the idea/practice with the firm’s owners and their interests.

Association hierarchy mining and its application for network traffic characterisation

This thesis presents an association rule mining approach, association hierarchy mining (AHM). Different to the traditional two-step bottom-up rule mining, AHM adopts one-step top-down rule mining strategy to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of mining association rules from datasets. The thesis also presents a novel approach to evaluate the quality of knowledge discovered by AHM, which focuses on evaluating information difference between the discovered knowledge and the original datasets. Experiments performed on the real application, characterizing network traffic behaviour, have shown that AHM achieves encouraging performance.

Examining the predictive value of combining the theory of planned behaviour and the volunteer functions inventory

The functions of the volunteer functions inventory were combined with the constructs of the theory of planned behaviour (i.e., attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control) to establish whether a stronger, single explanatory model prevailed. Undertaken in the context of episodic, skilled volunteering by individuals who were retired or approaching retirement (N = 186), the research advances on prior studies which either examined the predictive capacity of each model independently or compared their explanatory value. Using hierarchical regression analysis, the functions of the volunteer functions inventory (when controlling for demographic variables) explained an additional 7.0% of variability in individuals’ willingness to volunteer over and above that accounted for by the theory of planned behaviour. Significant predictors in the final model included attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control from the theory of planned behaviour and the understanding function from the volunteer functions inventory. It is proposed that the items comprising the understanding function may represent a deeper psychological construct (e.g., self-actualisation) not accounted for by the theory of planned behaviour. The findings highlight the potential benefit of combining these two prominent models in terms of improving understanding of volunteerism and providing a single parsimonious model for raising rates of this important behaviour.