Michael B. Charles

Top‐down organizational change in an Australian Government agency

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assist public sector organizations to carry out better change management strategies and thus achieve better change processes and also to provide a critique of top‐down change strategies, especially when employed by public sector agencies. Furthermore, the paper uses the case of one such public sector organization to highlight the need to complement top‐down change strategies with other approaches.Design/methodology/approach – The paper used a three‐year longitudinal case study approach to ascertain the efficacy of top‐down change in a large public sector organization. Data were collected by means of a series of employee focus groups and interviews with key management personnel. This was supplemented by organizational communication outputs.Findings – The paper finds that a top‐down change strategy needs to be coupled with other change strategies for change to become successfully embedded in the organization. Organizational factors and processes can limit the effect...

Innovation on small residential builders: an Australian study

Purpose – Through investigating the innovation‐adoption process in smaller construction industry firms, this paper aims to ascertain the drivers of innovation in Australian small residential building firms, and determine how such firms develop or adopt innovations. The research thus provides a more thoroughly nuanced understanding of the innovation‐adoption process within these firms.Design/methodology/approach – The research described in this paper was conducted among small residential housing contractors in South‐East Queensland, Australia. This was undertaken by means of a semi‐structured interview process, based on a questionnaire requesting information from owners or managers.Findings – Innovation in this sector is driven by general business concerns pertaining to maintaining overall competitiveness rather than specific client needs. The same firms also utilize supply‐chain relationships and broader industry associations as sources of external knowledge. Despite this, better pathways to transfer exte...

Editorial: Managing Competing Public Values in Public Infrastructure Projects

Governments are usually assumed to be responsible for providing public infrastructure. As a result of a policy shift from Keynesian to neoclassical economics during the early 1980s, assets and activities were transferred to the private sector through mechanisms such as public sector downsizing, privatization, contracting out, and public private partnerships (Megginson and Netter, 2001). A new dilemma has thus emerged: how can public values be maintained with increasing private sector ownership of critical ‘public’ infrastructure— for example, ports, transport, energy, water supply, telecommunications (Besley and Ghatak, 2001; Shiva, 2002)? Private ownership generally has profit as its primary motive. Yet many public values, such as accessibility, equity, reliability, environmental sustainability and safety, seem to conflict with this goal (Weintraub and Kumar, 1997). As a response, practitioners and academics have called for the safeguarding of public values by contracts, regulation, and oversight structures (see, for example, Beck Jorgensen and Bozeman, 2002). Since public values are emergent and compete with each other, this response is problematic and can even be counter-productive. The contributions in this themed edition explore alternative ways of resolving conflicts between the private provision and operation of public infrastructure, and the maintenance and safeguarding of public values. This editorial provides a starting point by defining the most salient concepts and examining the ways in which public values pertaining to infrastructure are identified and safeguarded. Furthermore, it discusses the practical and theoretical implications of the research findings reported in this themed edition.

Safe and Sound? The Public Value Trade-Off in Worker Safety and Public Infrastructure Procurement

Infrastructure previously overseen by public sector clients is now often in the hands of the private sector, thus blurring the definition of ‘client’ in public infrastructure provision. Since previous in-house governmental safeguards are often no longer maintained, new ways of achieving optimum safe work practices in the provision of public infrastructure are required. This research, conducted in an Australian industry context, examines safeguarding mechanisms that could be employed to realize the public value of worker safety in a changed infrastructure procurement environment.

Public values in Western Europe: a temporal perspective

Public values are still considered by some authors to be universal, that is, applicable to all settings and constant through time. Despite this, a growing number of publications have appeared indicating that they are in fact quite context dependent, highly mutable over time, subject to modification, and thus far from universal. This article focuses on the latter temporal aspect and demonstrates how technological competency, political structures, and availability of economic resources affect the institutionalization of public values by molding citizen/consumer preferences and expectations. The salience and indeed the existence of public values pertaining to infrastructure have varied quite considerably over the past 2,000 years in Western Europe, although commonalities emerge in cognate institutional settings. This article develops a line of thought as to how public values and the systems through which these are delivered are institutionalized following societal demand, which in turn is based on specific technological, political, and economic contexts. To demonstrate this argument, we have selected two policy areas in which public values can be recognized (transport infrastructure and access to foodstuffs) in four different Western European historical settings (the Roman Empire, Medieval England, 18th-century France, and Industrial England). We do not make any claim to completeness or representativeness, but aim to demonstrate how different public values have been conceptualized and institutionalized in different eras, and how wider societal forces color this institutionalization process. The article concludes with lessons for the present day.

T.R. – Int. J. of Sustainable Development

textabstractThe challenges facing developed countries in the coming decades require a fundamental reorientation and re-conceptualisation of our current socio-economic fabric. Resource scarcities, climate change concerns, ageing populations, economic shifts and globalisation are examples of trends that are increasing the pressure on various institutions and society in general, and will inevitably involve drastic changes. Necessary, and perhaps imminent, transformations in energy supply, production and consumption, welfare and health-care systems and mobility pose a significant challenge for governance scholars to develop an understanding of how such transitions arise, and how they may be influenced to engender more sustainable futures.

ELEPHANTS AT RAPHIA: REINTERPRETING POLYBIUS 5.84–5

The battle of Raphia, waged near Gaza between the Seleucid king Antiochus III and Ptolemy IV Philopater of Egypt in 217 B.C., represents the first time that the larger Indian elephant (Elephas maximus) would meet African elephants in battle. As is generally accepted, the larger African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana africana) was unknown to the ancients, which means that Ptolemys Africans would have been of the smaller forest variety (Loxodonta africana cyclotis). The forest elephant, which closely resembles its larger African cousin, is widely regarded as the African type used by both the Carthaginians and the Ptolemaic princes. This particular beast, now confined to the equatorial regions of the continent, was once relatively common in northern Africa until hunted to local extinction. To follow the general interpretation of Polybius, the Seleucid Indian elephants proved too intimidating for Ptolemys smaller African beasts.5 Moreover, Antiochus’ 102 elephants outnumbered Ptolemys seventy-three (Polyb. 5.79.2, 5.79.13), which were divided on both sides and placed on the wings.

Intelligence and anticipation: issues in security, risk and crisis management

This article deals with the way in which intelligence flows and other critical information can be embedded into a risk framework that will facilitate the early warning of emerging threat scenarios. That is, an organisation should be able to anticipate crisis triggers and know when a crisis situation will manifest itself. As an outcome, a conceptual framework that defines how to make sense of complex situations, datasets and real world anomalies is suggested.

Debate: Multi-criteria framework needed to assess alternative financing methods for large-scale projects

The minister was referring to the result of a tender exercise, what is in fact a procurement procedure called the ‘most economically advantageous tender’ (or ‘MEAT’). The MEAT procedure does not address the critical questions of effectiveness or benefits. To conclude that VfM is realized would require the contract to be complete and actual results compared to those anticipated in the original business case. Moreover, VfM is contingent on other factors, including the perceptions of stakeholders. What the minister could have said was that the procurement procedure had maximized the likelihood of VfM emerging.

An empirical analysis of the determinants of passenger rail demand in Melbourne, Australia

Considerable yet largely unexpected growth in passenger rail demand has occurred recently in Australian capital cities. This article uses historical data, together with modern time series methods, to examine empirically the factors that might have contributed to growth in passenger rail demand in Melbourne, Australia, and to gain greater insight into the relationships between the various explanatory variables. A cointegration approach is used to estimate the long-run rail elasticities, while an error correction model is used to estimate short-run elasticities. The study finds that the short – run rail elasticity is twice as low as the long-run elasticity, although both are highly inelastic. The inelastic nature of the demand suggests that a fare increase would not lead to a significant drop in boardings, and hence results in a rise in total revenue. In addition to the fare, city population, petrol price and passenger income exert a positive impact on passenger rail demand.