Organisational knowledge integration: towards a conceptual framework

This study analyses organisational knowledge integration processes from a multi-level and systemic perspective, with particular reference to the case of Fujitsu. A conceptual framework for knowledge integration is suggested focusing on team-building capability, capturing and utilising individual tacit knowledge, and communication networks for integrating dispersed specialist knowledge required in the development of new products and services. The research highlights that knowledge integration occurring in the innovation process is a result of knowledge exposure, its distribution and embodiment and finally its transfer, which leads to innovation capability and competitive advantage in firm.

Variations on a routine : how selection-adaptation-retention dynamics create variety in organisational routines

The question "what causes variety in organisational routines" is of considerable interest to organisational scholars, and one to which this thesis seeks to answer. To this end an evolutionary theory of change is advanced which holds that the dynamics of selection, adaptation and retention explain the creation of variety in organisational routines. A longitudinal, multi-level, multi-case analysis is undertaken in this thesis, using multiple data collection strategies. In each case, different types of variety were identified, according to a typology, together with how selection, adaptation and retention contribute to variety in a positive or negative sense. Methodologically, the thesis makes a contribution to our understanding of variety, as certain types of variety only become evident when examined by specific types of research design. The research also makes a theoretical contribution by explaining how selection, adaptation and retention individually and collectively contribute to variety in organisational routines. Moreover, showing that routines could be stable, diverse, adaptive and dynamic at the same time; is a significant, and novel, theoretical contribution.

The acquisition of an artificial logographic script and bilingual working memory : Evidence for L1-specific orthographic processing skills transfer in Chinese-English bilinguals

Studies of orthographic skills transfer between languages focus mostly on working memory (WM) ability in alphabetic first language (L1) speakers when learning another, often alphabetically congruent, language. We report two studies that, instead, explored the transferability of L1 orthographic processing skills in WM in logographic-L1 and alphabetic-L1 speakers. English-French bilingual and English monolingual (alphabetic-L1) speakers, and Chinese-English (logographic-L1) speakers, learned a set of artificial logographs and associated meanings (Study 1). The logographs were used in WM tasks with and without concurrent articulatory or visuo-spatial suppression. The logographic-L1 bilinguals were markedly less affected by articulatory suppression than alphabetic-L1 monolinguals (who did not differ from their bilingual peers). Bilinguals overall were less affected by spatial interference, reflecting superior phonological processing skills or, conceivably, greater executive control. A comparison of span sizes for meaningful and meaningless logographs (Study 2) replicated these findings. However, the logographic-L1 bilinguals’ spans in L1 were measurably greater than those of their alphabetic-L1 (bilingual and monolingual) peers; a finding unaccounted for by faster articulation rates or differences in general intelligence. The overall pattern of results suggests an advantage (possibly perceptual) for logographic-L1 speakers, over and above the bilingual advantage also seen elsewhere in third language (L3) acquisition.

Australian television, popular memory and suburbia

Different archives of television material construct different versions of Australian national identity. There exists a Pro-Am archive of Australian television history materials consisting of many individual collections. This archive is not centrally located nor clearly bounded. The collections are not all linked to each other, nor are they aware of each other, and they do not claim to have a single common project. Pro-Am collections tend not to address Australian television as a whole, rather addressing particular genres, programs or production companies. Their vision of Australia is 'ordinary' and everyday. The boundaries of 'Australia' in the Pro-Am archive are porous, allowing non-Australians to contribute material, and also including non-Australian material and this causes little sense of anxiety.

The role of organisational concern for workplace fairness in the choice of a performance mesaurement system

Prior studies linking performance management systems (PMS) and organisational justice have examined how PMS influence procedural fairness. Our investigation differs from these studies. First, it examines fairness as an antecedent (instead of as a consequence) of the choice of PMS. Second, instead of conceptualising organisational fairness as procedural fairness, it relies on the impression management interpretation of organisational fairness. Hence, the study investigates how the need of senior managers to cultivate an impression of being fair is related to the choice of PMS systems and employee outcomes. Based on a sample of 276 employees, the results indicate that the need of senior management to cultivate an impression of being fair is associated with employee performance. They also indicate that a substantial component of these effects is indirect through the choice of comprehensive performance measures (CPM) and employee job satisfaction. These findings highlight the importance of organisational concern for workplace fairness as an antecedent of choice of CPM. From a theoretical perspective, the adoption of the impression management interpretation of organisational fairness contributes by providing new insights into the relationship between fairness and choice of PMS from a perspective that is different from those used in prior management accounting research.

New organisational leadership capabilities : transitional engineer the new designer?

Traditionally, design has been centred within the manufacturing and production areas of companies and or as a styling afterthought. Increasingly, design is viewed as a vital and important strategic business resource (Dell’Era, Marchesi & Verganti, 2010) and consequently companies worldwide look to design to help them innovate, differentiate and compete in the global marketplace. The role of the professional designer is evolving to a point where they are needed to work beyond being a specialist in the manufacturing and aesthetics of an artefact (Wrigley & Bucolo, 2011). This paper challenges the values held by academics and industry regarding the traditional role of designers in business. It investigates the emerging transitional engineering framework and puts forward a proposal for the next generation designer in the future era of design. Questions surrounding how designers will develop these new skills and how the Authors’ new framework of design led innovation can contribute to the future of design will be presented. This research is needed to better equip future designers to have a more central role in business.

The governance of inter-organisational decision-making : understanding the impacts of informal networks on formal decision-making regimes in the Brisbane Airport region

Airports and cities inevitably recognise the value that each brings the other; however, the separation in decision-making authority for what to build, where, when and how provides a conundrum for both parties. Airports often want a say in what is developed outside of the airport fence, and cities often want a say in what is developed inside the airport fence. Defining how much of a say airports and cities have in decisions beyond their jurisdictional control is likely to be a topic that continues so long as airports and cities maintain separate formal decision-making processes for what to build, where, when and how. However, the recent Green and White Papers for a new National Aviation Policy have made early inroads to formalising relationships between Australia’s major airports and their host cities. At present, no clear indication (within practice or literature) is evident to the appropriateness of different governance arrangements for decisions to develop in situations that bring together the opposing strategic interests of airports and cities; thus leaving decisions for infrastructure development as complex decision-making spaces that hold airport and city/regional interests at stake. The line of enquiry is motivated by a lack of empirical research on networked decision-making domains outside of the realm of institutional theorists (Agranoff & McGuire, 2001; Provan, Fish & Sydow, 2007). That is, governance literature has remained focused towards abstract conceptualisations of organisation, without focusing on the minutia of how organisation influences action in real-world applications. A recent study by Black (2008) has provided an initial foothold for governance researchers into networked decision-making domains. This study builds upon Black’s (2008) work by aiming to explore and understand the problem space of making decisions subjected to complex jurisdictional and relational interdependencies. That is, the research examines the formal and informal structures, relationships, and forums that operationalise debates and interactions between decision-making actors as they vie for influence over deciding what to build, where, when and how in airport-proximal development projects. The research mobilises a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods to examine three embedded cases of airport-proximal development from a network governance perspective. Findings from the research provide a new understanding to the ways in which informal actor networks underpin and combine with formal decision-making networks to create new (or realigned) governance spaces that facilitate decision-making during complex phases of development planning. The research is timely, and responds well to Isett, Mergel, LeRoux, Mischen and Rethemeyer’s (2011) recent critique of limitations within current network governance literature, specifically to their noted absence of empirical studies that acknowledge and interrogate the simultaneity of formal and informal network structures within network governance arrangements (Isett et al., 2011, pp. 162-166). The combination of social network analysis (SNA) techniques and thematic enquiry has enabled findings to document and interpret the ways in which decision-making actors organise to overcome complex problems for planning infrastructure. An innovative approach to using association networks has been used to provide insights to the importance of the different ways actors interact with one another, thus providing a simple yet valuable addition to the increasingly popular discipline of SNA. The research also identifies when and how different types of networks (i.e. formal and informal) are able to overcome currently known limitations to network governance (see McGuire & Agranoff, 2011), thus adding depth to the emerging body of network governance literature surrounding limitations to network ways of working (i.e. Rhodes, 1997a; Keast & Brown, 2002; Rethemeyer & Hatmaker, 2008; McGuire & Agranoff, 2011). Contributions are made to practice via the provision of a timely understanding of how horizontal fora between airports and their regions are used, particularly in the context of how they reframe the governance of decision-making for airport-proximal infrastructure development. This new understanding will enable government and industry actors to better understand the structural impacts of governance arrangements before they design or adopt them, particularly for factors such as efficiency of information, oversight, and responsiveness to change.

A distributed memory for networked livecoding performance

The symbolic and improvisational nature of Livecoding requires a shared networking framework to be flexible and extensible, while at the same time providing support for synchronisation, persistence and redundancy. Above all the framework should be robust and available across a range of platforms. This paper proposes tuple space as a suitable framework for network communication in ensemble livecoding contexts. The role of tuple space as a concurrency framework and the associated timing aspects of the tuple space model are explored through Spaces, an implementation of tuple space for the Impromptu environment.

Digital archives and cultural memory : discovering lost histories in digitised Australian children's literature 1851-1945

A recent Australian literature digitisation project uncovered some surprising discoveries in the children’s books that it digitised. The Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) Project digitised children’s books that were first published between 1851 to 1945 and made them available online through AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. The digitisation process also preserved, within the pages of those books, a range of bookplates, book labels, inscriptions, and loose ephemera. This material allows us to trace the provenance of some of the digitised works, some of which came from the personal libraries of now-famous authors, and others from less celebrated sources. These extra-textual traces can contribute to cultural memory of the past by providing evidence of how books were collected and exchanged, and what kinds of books were presented as prizes in schools and Sunday schools. They also provide insight into Australian literary and artistic networks, particularly of the first few decades of the 20th century. This article describes the kinds of material uncovered in the digitisation process and suggests that the material provides insights into literary and cultural histories that might otherwise be forgotten. It also argues that the indexing of this material is vital if it is not to be lost to future researchers.

Preserving the past in digital memory

The process of researching children’s literature from the past is a growing challenge as resources age and are increasingly treated as rare items, stored away within libraries and other research centres. In Australia, researchers and librarians have collaborated with the bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource to produce the Australian Children’s Literature Digital Resources Project (CLDR). This Project aims to address the growing demand for online access to rare children’s literature resources, and demonstrates the research potential of early Australian children’s literature by supplementing the collection with relevant critical articles. The CLDR project is designed with a specific focus and provides access to full text Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945. The collection demonstrates a need and desire to preserve literature treasures to prevent losing such collections in a digital age. The collection covers many themes relevant to the conference including, trauma, survival, memory, survival, hauntings, and histories. The resource provides new and exciting ways with which to research children’s literature from the past and offers a fascinating repository to scholars and professionals of ranging disciplines who are in interested in Australian children’s literature.

Uncovering the impact of organisational culture types on the willingness to share knowledge between projects

Current literature has established that organisational culture influences knowledge management efforts; however, it is only recently that research on project management has focused its interest on organisational culture in the context of knowledge sharing and some preliminary studies have been conducted. In response, this paper adds a significant contribution by providing rich empirical evidence of the relationships between culture and the willingness to share knowledge, demonstrating which cultural values are more and which are less likely to improve inter-project knowledge sharing behaviours. The use of interviews and the Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) (Cameron & Quinn, 2005) in the cross-case examination of culture in four participating cases has resulted in rich empirical contributions. Furthermore, this paper adds to the project management literature by introducing the Competing Values Framework (CVF) of Cameron and Quinn (2005) to evaluate knowledge sharing in the inter-project context.

Organisational culture in airworthiness management programs : developing a measurement model

All civil and private aircraft are required to comply with the airworthiness standards set by their national airworthiness authority and throughout their operational life must be in a condition of safe operation. Aviation accident data shows that over twenty percent of all fatal accidents in aviation are due to airworthiness issues, specifically aircraft mechanical failures. Ultimately it is the responsibility of each registered operator to ensure that their aircraft remain in a condition of safe operation, and this is done through both effective management of airworthiness activities and the effective program governance of safety outcomes. Typically, the projects within these airworthiness management programs are focused on acquiring, modifying and maintaining the aircraft as a capability supporting the business. Program governance provides the structure through which the goals and objectives of airworthiness programs are set along with the means of attaining them. Whilst the principal causes of failures in many programs can be traced to inadequate program governance, many of the failures in large scale projects can have their root causes in the organisational culture and more specifically in the organisational processes related to decision-making. This paper examines the primary theme of project and program based enterprises, and introduces a model for measuring organisational culture in airworthiness management programs using measures drawn from 211 respondents in Australian airline programs. The paper describes the theoretical perspectives applied to modifying an original model to specifically focus it on measuring the organisational culture of programs for managing airworthiness; identifying the most important factors needed to explain the relationship between the measures collected, and providing a description of the nature of these factors. The paper concludes by identifying a model that best describes the organisational culture data collected from seven airworthiness management programs.