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(2022)ThesisData-driven decision making is everywhere in the modern sporting world. The most well-known example of this is the Moneyball movement in Major League Baseball (MLB), which built on research by Sherri Nichols in the 1980s, but sport analytics has also driven major changes in strategy in basketball, the National Football League, and soccer. In Australia, sports analytics has not had quite the same influence in its major domestic codes. In this thesis, we develop tools to assist the analytics community in two major Australian commercial sports. For Australian Rules Football, the largest commercial sport in Australia, data was not readily accessible for the national competition, the Australian Football League (AFL). Data access is fundamental to data analysis, so this has been a major constraint on the capacity of the AFL analytics community to grow. In this thesis, this issued is solved by making AFL data readily accessible through the R package fitzRoy. This package has already proven to be quite successful and has seen uptake from the media, fans, and club analysts. Expected points models are widely used across sports to inform tactical decision making, but as currently implemented, they confound the effects of decisions on points scored and the situations that the decisions tend to be made in. In Chapter 3, a new expected points approach is proposed, which conditions on match situation when estimating the effect of decisions on expected points. Hence we call this a conditional Expected Points (cEP) model. Our cEP model is used to provide new insight into fourth Down (NFL) decision-making in the National Football League, and decision-making when awarded a penalty in Rugby League. The National Rugby League (NRL) is the leading competition of Australia’s second largest commercial sport it is played on a pitch that is 100m long and 70m wide, and the NRL have provided us with detailed event data from the previous five seasons, used in academic research for the first time in this thesis. We found that NRL teams should kick for goal from penalties much more often than is currently the case. In Chapter 4 we develop a live probability model for predicting the winner of a Rugby League game using data that is collected live. This model could be used by the National Rugby League during broadcasts to enhance their coverage by reporting live win probabilities. While most live probability models are constructed using scores only, the availability of live event data meant we could investigate whether models constructed using event data have better predictive performance. We were able to show that in addition to score differential that the addition of covariates such as missed tackles can improve the prediction. Clubs use their own domain knowledge to test their own live win probability theories with the R scripts that are provided to the NRL
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(2022)ThesisDigital work exemplifies the impact of Information Systems (IS) on everyday life in the modern world. Digital nomadism is an extreme incarnation of digital work, entailing knowledge workers mobilising — from fixed life and work arrangements in one place, to a lifestyle of travel and mobile, location-independent work — facilitated by digital technologies. Many see digital nomadism as a promising alternative to entrenched patterns in society, particularly in how workers relate to organisations and how citizens relate to nation states. However, others may critique and question digital nomadism for its shortcomings and ethical issues. This thesis engages with this fragmented discourse on digital nomadism by making contributions through the lens of critical theory. As this thesis outlines, critical theory is an intellectual tradition that sensitises scholars to critical-theoretic perspectives: Empowerment and Emancipation; Exploitation and Marginalization; Systems and Structures; Agency and Technology; Environment and Sustainability; Ethics and Morality. This thesis is comprised of four related papers. The first paper presents an overview of different types of theorising in critical-theoretic IS research, revealing a diverse philosophical landscape of intellectual foundations that can help scholars make sense of the interplay between critical-theoretic issues and IS phenomena like digital nomadism. The second paper then leverages the findings of the first paper, to present a literature review of digital nomadism from a critical theory perspective. The second paper reveals that critical-theoretic knowledge claims are already visible in the scholarly literature on digital nomadism but have yet to be fully understood, thus suggesting the need for future research. Based on this foundational understanding of the literature on digital nomadism and the literature on critical-theoretic IS research, the third and fourth papers make contributions based on empirical findings from fieldwork in major digital nomad destinations. The third paper employs the empirical findings to envision the future of post-COVID-19 knowledge work, based on a Hegelian dialectical perspective; and the fourth paper employs the empirical findings to reveal how digital nomadism entails an avenue for achieving workers’ emancipation that constitutes a departure from the traditional conceptualisation of emancipation in the nation state.
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(2022)ThesisInformation systems (IS) projects sometimes take a long time to complete. Particularly in the context of e-government projects in emerging countries where there is a lack of clarity as well as transparent structure and order, such projects may continue for many years. Moreover, it is not unusual for a seemingly non-performing e-government project to keep going. Running an IS project for an extended period of time requires the project team to navigate the present and future challenges. To do so, the project team need to have a sense of events and situations related to their project. The project team then can respond by taking appropriate action on what is happening (retrospectively) as well as anticipating what is yet to come (prospectively). Using qualitative methods, a longitudinal study was conducted using the interpretive approach to investigate the sensemaking process by the project team of an e-government project in Indonesia. The study focuses its investigations on two observed phenomena faced by the project team and related to sensemaking; escalation of commitment and prospective sensemaking. Escalation of commitment refers to situations where people continue with what appears to be a questionable endeavour regardless of its probability of achieving the expected outcome. On the other hand, prospective sensemaking refers to people trying to make sense of future events so they can anticipate them. Drawing from Goffman's framing theory and conceptualisation of frame alignment mechanisms, the study reveals how the project team sensemaking process includes a couple of mechanisms of frame alignment; frame transformation and frame extension. The aligned frame allows the project team to reacquire their sense of the project's situation, both recently and in the long run. This thesis seeks to make a theoretical contribution in several ways. First, the literature on the escalation of commitment by offering an alternative view of escalation phenomena as a resolution of the dilemma. Second, to the literature on sensemaking by providing empirical support for prospective sensemaking. Third, the literature on framing explaining how to frame alignment mechanism plays out as part of the sensemaking process, both retrospectively and prospectively, for an extended time; lastly, the literature on e-government by shedding more light on the social process behind e-government projects, particularly in the context of emerging countries.
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(2022)ThesisThe Operations Management (OM) and Environmental Psychology (EP) literature have examined consumers’ recycling behaviours to address the sustainability crisis. Social influence is a crucial driver impacting recycling behaviours that are identified by the EP literature but has been overlooked in OM research. In contrast, EP studies ignore a firms’ operational decisions when examining consumer recycling decisions. This research analyses both social influence and the firm’s optimal decisions to provide a comprehensive understanding of consumers’ recycling behaviours, which is essential for unlocking the full potential of remanufacturing. This research models a closed-loop supply chain consisting of a manufacturer selling a single product to a community of consumers. A consumer’s recycling decisions depend on the recycling reward offered by the manufacturer as well as sociallyinfluenced emotions of pride and guilt that arise from community interactions. These psychological factors are captured through a pair of coefficients representing the utility/disutility of feeling proud/guilty, and the community interactions are modelled using an evolutionary game. With a homogeneous community, stronger emotions of pride always increase the manufacturer’s profit, whereas stronger feelings of guilt can hurt the manufacturer when the prevailing recycling rate is low. Moreover, inducing a stronger emotion of pride increases (decreases) the overall recycling rate in equilibrium when this rate is low (high), and the impact is reversed for guilt. Interestingly, when consumers discount future recyclability, a win-win pathway benefiting the manufacturer and the environment exists. Furthermore, it is shown that the main results in this research can be extended to a heterogeneous community, with new insights derived regarding the impact of heterogeneity. Finally, this research considers the closed-loop supply chain problem subject to extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation. It is shown that under some conditions the EPR legislation can encourage the manufacturer to undertake effective interventions to improve both profit and the recycling rate. This study bridges sustainable OM and EP literature by analysing how sociallyinfluenced emotions of pride and guilt affect the recycling rate and the manufacturer’s optimal decisions and profitability. The results provide essential insights fo rsocial planners in designing effective and efficient socially-influenced-based interventions to improve recycling rates.
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(2022)ThesisOperations management research predominantly models humans as rational and self-interested, with the ability to optimise objectively. However, human decision-making typically deviates from prescribed profit-maximising behaviour. For instance, decision biases in supplier and retailer contracting can lead to lower profits for suppliers, due to preferences for a more equitable distribution of profits between supply chain partners. Supply chain decisions and strategies are ultimately crafted and implemented by managers who are influenced by contextual elements of the decision-making environment. This thesis focuses on contextual factors like lead times, supplier locations, social relationships, and probable disruptions, which all influence perceptions of psychological distances. Using controlled experiments, this thesis addresses the research question of whether psychological distances affect the supply chain managers’ decision making and if so, how? The first study evaluates how psychological distance impacts managers’ trade-offs between cost and sustainability that were accentuated by the pandemic. The second study explores the effect of naturally occurring social and spatial psychological distances in domestic and international collaborations. The third study examines the effects of temporal and hypothetical psychological distances on inventory orders and allocations when engaging in dual sourcing. Overall, this work establishes that psychological distances arising in supply chains significantly influences managerial decisions.
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(2022)ThesisAll work is seemingly becoming digital: office, manufacturing, service, and even agricultural work. Despite the prevalence and far-reaching implications of the digitalisation of work, few studies have examined how digital work is performed in practice. This dissertation investigates digital work that is performed nomadically. Existing organisational and information systems research on the changing nature of work suggests that the essential qualities of work remain unchanged, with only secondary characteristics undergoing transformations. However, this dissertation reveals that in digital nomad work, the meaning of work—as well as by whom, where, when, and how work is performed—is continuously in becoming. To unpack and theorise digital configurations of work, I carried out a multi-sited ethnographic study of digital nomads. Digital nomads are a group of highly skilled professionals who leverage digital technologies to work remotely and lead an independent and nomadic lifestyle. Using participant observation, interviews, and online fieldwork, I examined how people become digital nomads and traced the practices and processes involved in performing digital nomad work. In Chapter 2, I trace people’s journeys of becoming digital nomads by revisiting the concept of identity. In Chapter 3, using the concept of leading, I shift to the community aspect of digital nomadism and explore a prominent community to unpack emerging directions for organising the global digital nomad movement. In Chapter 4, I analyse a set of digital nomad work practices and show how they are performed as appropriate in practice by elaborating on the concept of legitimation. In Chapter 5, I trace my own journey in becoming a process-oriented information systems researcher by reflecting on five methodological moves that I have followed to study digital nomad work. This dissertation aims to extend our understanding of new forms of digital work by reimagining organisational concepts via the performative process perspective. First, I develop an in-depth understanding of digital nomad work that goes beyond the existing research on digital work in conventional organisational settings and precarious gig work. Second, I propose the idea of “working as becoming” based on the performative process perspective, according to which work is always changing and does not have an underlying core or essence that remains stable. Third, by experimenting with several novel methodological practices grounded in the performative process perspective, this dissertation contributes to the development of process-sensitive research methods.