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(2020)ThesisOver the past 40 years of economic reform that commenced in 1978 with international economic exposure, China’s pace of economic development has been high and sustained. That rapid economic growth has not been uniform; urban regions have grown faster than rural regions, which has had several consequences. Three of those consequences that have caught the attention of the Chinese government are labour shortages in coastal areas, rural urbanisation and rural–urban income inequality. In that light, rural land tenure arrangements, as an important institutional factor, can affect rural households’ decisions about work locations and, in turn, their income. The Rural Land Registration and Certification (RLRC) program is pertinent in that regard. The program, in the context of the ‘three rights’ separation reform, aims to provide enhanced land tenure security, thereby encouraging labour movement and boosting household income. This thesis seeks to investigate the effects of rural land tenure arrangements, in particular the RLRC program, on Chinese rural households’ work location choices and income. For that purpose, rural households’ work location choices are divided into employment in distant urban areas (outside the county) and in local urban areas (within the county). Using primary data from a purpose-designed survey administered in Shandong and Hebei Provinces in September 2016, three models are developed in relation to work location choices. The first is a logit model of a household’s choice of a family member working as a migrant in distant urban areas, while the second model is a Poisson model of the number of migrants in a household. The third is a logit model that investigates an individual’s choice between working in local and distant urban areas. Finally, an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis tests the effects of land tenure arrangements on rural household income derived from different income sources. The findings suggest that the RLRC program has promoted rural to urban migration and has had some positive effects on household income. A third finding indicates that individuals prefer to work in distant urban areas, hampering urbanisation in rural regions. These findings have policy implications for the central and local governments in China.
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(2020)ThesisChina as the most populous country faces the dilemma of getting old before being rich. Its large elderly population coupled with China undergoing a transition from family-based care to a society-oriented welfare system is raising several issues on access to age care. The rapidly ageing population, many with limited income for retirement makes China a suitable case study on the challenges of providing aged-care to the elderly. This thesis investigated the aged-care provision in contemporary China from the perspectives of the State, the market, and the family. As part of the context, I first map the spatial distribution of the aged population in China. I found that the aged population in China is unevenly distributed across provinces, and that the spatial imbalance is expanding. Its underlying reasons include inter-province migration of the working-age population that has aggravated the rise of empty nesters with limited access to aged-care services from their offspring. Consequently, it has placed the urgency to accelerate the transition to a society-oriented aged-care system. In terms of the role of state in aged-care provision, I placed China's aged-care system within the international welfare state typology. The results show that the pension system of mainland China is of a conservative type, and that it is in transition to a hybrid conservative-universalistic mix. In terms of the marginal role of market for China's aged-care provision, I investigated the reasons for the low demand for aged-care services from the market. My analysis revealed that the development of the aged-care market is restrained by the traditional value of filial piety and the limited income of the elderly. The role of family in aged-care provision in China is reflected on the elderly's expectation for traditional practice of filial piety. Though filial piety has diminished with modernization, some Chinese elderly still expect their children to care for them in old age. I studied the factors responsible for the elderly's expectations for old-age financial support from their children. The results show that the Chinese elderly without adequate means and/or those with a closer relationship with their children have a greater expectation of financial support from their children. These findings have important policy implications for both China and other developing nations undergoing rapid ageing of their population.
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(2020)ThesisThis thesis is the first attempt to address the issue of aid effectiveness in Myanmar through a detailed qualitative study incorporating the views of the persons directly involved - donors, government and civil society. Through the perspectives of these different actors, the research investigates the practices and problems of aid management in Myanmar. The study is contextualised in a history of aid management in Myanmar and the current modes of providing aid by multiple donors. An analytical framework of good governance and accountability has been used to guide the data collection and analyse the results. The findings indicate a fragmented system of aid management in which accountabilities are weak and monitoring and evaluation is poorly developed to feed back into administrative reforms for improved aid management for greater effectiveness. Societal participation in aid-funded projects is low and transparency of information on aid is often lacking. The organisational culture of the government's bureaucratic also discourages practices that could contribute to enhanced aid effectiveness.
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(2021)ThesisRecent stakeholder pressure on company directors to balance trade-offs between short-term financial performance and long-term value creation (FCT Global, 2016, p.3) has prompted increased focus on long term non-financial performance measures (NFPMs) as an important component of management control systems (MCS). Of particular interest is the need to think beyond the immediate demands of corporate shareholders to satisfy the requirements of a broader set of stakeholders, including customers, employees and the communities in which organisations operate. Specifically, companies are increasingly required to demonstrate that they serve a “social purpose” (Fink, 2018). This study expands on the current management accounting literature to explore how the enabling and coercive design characteristics of NFPMs (Adler & Borys, 1996), along with contextual factors, impact the motivation of individual executives to pursue the long-term interests of the organisation. Understanding an executive’s perception of the design features of NFPMs relating to corporate social responsibility (CSR) provides insights into the contexts and conditions under which measures encourage long-term focus on a range of stakeholders rather than short-term financial decision-making. How the personal effects of such management accounting practices translate into organisational outcomes has not been previously tested (Hall, 2016; Wong-On-Wong et al., 2010). In response Hall (2016) suggested that Psychology theories may help to explain how MCS practices (for example, performance measures and incentive schemes) combine with other contextual factors to influence an individual’s psychological processes, including motivation and behaviours. In their research relating to enabling and coercive bureaucracies, Adler & Borys (1996) claimed that the conventional view of MCS is based on a flawed understanding of motivation as being either intrinsically or extrinsically derived. Responding to their call to understand MCS effectiveness an appreciation of motivation as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy (Ryan and Connell, 1989), this study provides evidence that executives may be intrinsically motivated by extrinsic factors (Deci et al., 1999), given the right context. By understanding how a cross section of executives perceive NFPMs, this study provides insights into specific psychological mechanisms that explain how management accounting practices impact satisfaction of basic psychological needs and motivation.
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(2020)ThesisOver thirty years, the Australian Public Service (APS) has been subject to many management and performance reforms. It was assumed that APS departmental chief executives – Secretaries - could implement reform changes uniformly and effectively across the large and dispersed APS. However, the central Finance Department recently concluded that a performance focus had not become embedded in the management of the APS. This thesis investigates the practice of implementing APS management reforms between 1984 and 2013 and identifies five factors that might explain the failure to embed the specific performance reform of program evaluation. The first factor involved a failure to bridge the gap between the APS centre and its eighteen constituent Departments, whose individual Secretaries exercise considerable management autonomy. The second was the gap between the Secretary commencing top-down reform from the centre in Canberra and the outcomes following implementation influenced by the APS’s geographic dispersion. A third factor involved the often-short term timeframe of many reforms, highlighting the need to consider implementing reform over an extended timeframe, potentially over decades, for the reform to become embedded. Fourth, was the failure of change management consolidators to maintain the momentum of reform changes over the long-term. Fifth, management reforms were often not designed or implemented effectively, highlighting the lack of evaluation program logic underpinning APS management reform. The thesis highlights the challenge for management reform in the APS if the senior change agent, the Secretary, did not stay in position long enough for the reform to become embedded. This study makes contributions to enhancing public sector management reform effectiveness in the APS by examining the consequences of geographic dispersion, the time frame required to embed reforms, the role of change consolidators, and the role of evaluation design in public sector reform.
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(2020)ThesisThe SECI model is one of most popular and systemic models of knowledge creation. However, its main application is in a set of routines (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization) that emphasizes internal sources of knowledge. This thesis explores how and when organizations locate external sources of knowledge. It uses routines as the main unit of analysis for understanding how each stage of the SECI model is impacted by different sources of knowledge. It argues that external sources of knowledge can be discovered and represented by a search routine. A search routine helps us understand, theoretically, why only certain rules (tacit knowledge) and products (explicit knowledge) are reinforced amongst organizational members. This thesis shows how routines are modified by these search routines when organizations take on the risk of acquiring external sources of knowledge, which involves technology unrelated to their own. The SECI model is explored in two stages: the first stage of the methodology explores the search routine outcomes of SECI using 20 small technology companies; and the second stage replicates those findings onto eight large consulting firms. The field study provided insight into the external sources of knowledge in the SECI model by classifying when its search routines arise under different competitive pressures. Findings suggest that organizations began with internal sources of knowledge, but search routines determined which external sources of knowledge should be distributed for SECI: socialization externalization, combination and internalization. The thesis explains what conditions make some search routines more prevalent than others when locating internal and external sources of knowledge. The author recommends that each stage of the SECI model still be explored, but under a different competitive environment. Building on these classifications of search routines would add to the explanation of why the search for knowledge beyond the organization is more necessary for some industries than others.
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(2020)ThesisA substantial body of research has explored emotional labour over the past three decades. Emotional labour involves commercialising employees’ emotions in exchange for wages and the much of the extant research has focused on Western employees. Examining emotional labour in a non-Western environment, such as Sri Lanka, provides a valuable opportunity to explore how different cultural and contextual factors shape emotional labour. Using a qualitative case study approach and drawing on 114 interviews, this thesis explores how public and private sector nurses and frontline hotel employees experienced and responded to emotional labour in Sri Lanka. This research examines the roles of managers, customers, third parties, colleagues, the work environment, culture and religion on employees’ experiences of emotional labour. High power distance and high uncertainty avoidance cultures in the private hospital and hotels led managers to actively control and monitor employees’ behaviour. This resulted in a sense of powerlessness among many hotel employees. Public hospital nurses worked in an environment of significant understaffing, limited resources and demanding patients. Having to constantly regulate their emotions while responding to customer misbehaviour and adverse working conditions, gave rise to job burnout amongst hotel employees and nurses. Further, these employees experienced work/family conflicts and increased workplace conflicts with co-workers. Women workers experienced these negative consequences more than males, highlighting the gendered nature of emotional labour. Hotel employees and nurses used a variety of coping strategies influenced by culture, religion and gender in response to the emotional labour challenges they experienced.
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(2022)ThesisPolicy capacity implies the presence of a range of individual skills, work activities and organisational abilities that combine to facilitate high-level performance of the policy function in an organisation. In the context of increasingly complex public policy issues and processes, high-level policy capacity is a key objective for public sector development in Australia and internationally. Since the late 1970s, several administrative reviews have assessed the ability of the Australian Public Service (APS) to meet the demands of a changing and increasingly complex public governance environment. Policy capacity has persistently been identified as an area for improvement in these reviews, resulting in repeated attempts to address deficiencies. Why APS policy capacity has failed to improve despite these attempts is unclear; however, persistent negative assessments of APS policy capacity suggest a failure of reformers to identify critical obstacles to the development of policy capacity in the APS environment. The importance of policy capacity to policy performance necessitates clarifying how the conditions for effective policy capacity can be shaped by environmental factors and how conditions might be engineered for improved performance. This study considers these issues through examination of policy capacity in APS social policy agencies. Performance and accountability instruments are key tools for establishing performance and behaviour in an institutional setting and have acted as key tools for reform of policy performance within the APS. However, how performance and accountability instruments determine the level of policy capacity in the APS environment, how policy capacity is built and the influence of contextual factors on policy capacity remain under-examined, implying some assumptions underlying past reforms of these instruments are untested. Performance and accountability instruments, like all administrative instruments, must meet multiple objectives in their implementation including administrative functionality and political ideological objectives. Those designed since 1980 are likely to have New Public Management (NPM) objectives at their core, such as efficiency and effectiveness, avoiding risk and performance measurement. However, these may be at odds with other objectives for policy work, such as the development of specialist skills, power-sharing, working across portfolios and systems, and working closely and responsively with the public. Social policy work objectives, in particular, can be hard-to-measure social wellbeing objectives that require working in ways that may be challenging for administrative efficiency such as working in consultative and inclusive ways and across multiple portfolios and their policy settings To examine policy capacity in APS social policy agencies, this exploratory study employs qualitative methods for content analysis of key APS performance and accountability documents and thematic analysis of interviews with APS social policy workers. The research framework is underpinned by critical realist principles and institutional theories. This study shows that while the APS performance and accountability framework builds social policy staff knowledge about policy capacity, it fails to enable social policy through an effective combination of hard and soft structures. This thesis argues that this failure to structure appropriately for policy capacity derives from competition between core expectations in the politico-administrative environment regarding the APS’ role in policy work and visions of policy capacity, suggesting that policy capacity is unrealistic in certain political and administrative systems. This argument suggests that policy capacity can face an uphill battle against the competing demands of political and administrative settings, even as the concept of policy capacity becomes more entrenched as desirable in academic and public sector discourse. This study contributes knowledge about building policy capacity, how context influences policy capacity and how performance and accountability instruments contribute to policy capacity, this study confirms principles in the extant public administration and institutional literature on the functioning and efficacy of administrative frameworks and NPM tools in shaping behaviour, knowledge, performance. The study also contributes new knowledge to the policy capacity and public administration literature regarding a concept of social policy capacity, how different types of performance and accountability structures shape the potential for policy capacity and can inform structural planning principles for developing policy capacity, and the influence of the politico-administrative context on policy capacity.
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(2021)ThesisJudicial officers in Sri Lanka belong to a professional category that is vulnerable to job burnout because of high workloads, long working hours and time pressures to finalise judgements. This thesis aims to understand how judicial officers in Sri Lanka attempted to mitigate their high job demands by drawing on available job resources and personal resources. Job resources include job autonomy, generous financial rewards and opportunities for career advancement and can buffer the effects of high job demands. Personal resources include judges’ self-evaluation of their resilience and sense of optimism and can complement job resources to mitigate the impact of high job demands on judges’ psychological and physiological health. This thesis found that Sri Lanka’s judiciary experienced low job controls and high levels of job insecurity because of political interference by politicians and senior government officials. High job demands for judges also included social isolation, corrupt behaviours by court staff and conflict with lawyers. Sri Lanka’s collectivist national culture though provided judges with considerable social support from co-workers and supervisors with legal cases and their personal problems and from extended family members with childcare and household responsibilities. Judges also developed their resilience and a sense of optimism and practiced meditation to mitigate the effects of high job demands. Judges’ personal resources were also maladaptive however and led to emotional venting by judges at court personnel and family members and increased dependency on sleeping medications. Female judges in Sri Lanka also experienced societal expectations to undertake the majority of household duties and child rearing responsibilities and faced additional workload pressures compared to male judges. Judges’ high job demands exceeded the job resources available to them and resulted in many judges’ experiencing long term psychological problems such as increased anxiety and depression and physiological problems that included fatigue, heart problems and diabetes.
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(2022)ThesisProjects account for 20%–40% of all economic activity (Schoper et al., 2018). They are the main vehicle for achieving organizational strategies (Kwak & Anbari, 2009). Despite this, the rates of project success remain low. Many researchers point to project governance as a key factor in improving project success (Crawford et al., 2008). In that light, a key focus in this thesis is the role of project sponsors in project governance, particularly their relationships with project managers and project teams by way of formal and informal governance mechanisms. However, little is understood about the interplay between two major types of governance mechanisms, formal and informal, regarded as either substitutes or complements. This lack of understanding can be attributed to two factors: (1) a lack of a holistic and dynamic perspective in developing project governance mechanisms and (2) little consideration of project sponsors’ cognitive barriers in implementing the governance mechanisms. This thesis draws on Yin-Yang and mindfulness theories to explore whether and how an appropriate balance can be established between complementary yet conflicting project governance mechanisms, with a view to project performance. Three Chinese case studies were conducted to verify the usefulness of Yin-Yang principles in guiding the interplay of formal and informal governance mechanisms and the importance of the project sponsor’s mindfulness in balancing the governance mechanisms. The case studies suggest this approach may enhance the project’s performance.