Sandra Harding

Changing Times, Changing Universities: Leadership, Governance and Management in a Dynamic Environment

Universities worldwide are being challenged to be more focused, efficient and effective to meet the demands of a globally situated, technologically enabled, higher education market place. Governments are increasingly applying the rhetoric of markets to higher education public policy as they seek to enhance research and higher education as essential platforms for a knowledge economy. For their part, universities are engaging a business enterprise focus to ensure survival in the context of resource scarcity and frequent change in their operating environment. The key challenge for universities is to retain their academic integrity and their institutional, other-regarding, nature, including their accountability to the community, while maintaining their financial sustainability. To do this, those charged with leadership, governance and management of universities must negotiate inherent tensions within universities while operating in a dynamic environment. This paper draws on the experience of James Cook University in Australia to explore these inherent tensions and identifies the value of institutional distinctiveness and clarity of institutional vision in meeting the demands of change.

State of the Tropics 2017 Report: Sustainable Infrastructure in the Tropics. Report. James Cook University, Townsville.

[Extract] Sustainable, resilient and inclusive infrastructure lies at the heart of global development. Appropriately developed and managed, infrastructure is a powerful catalyst for promoting economic growth, social inclusion and environmental stewardship. The development of sustainable infrastructure can be transformative for communities and nations, lifting people out of poverty and providing access to services, products and markets to facilitate trade and productivity, promote health and wellbeing, and improve education outcomes. Although the world has made notable progress in recent decades in delivering key infrastructure, significant gaps persist. Meeting the challenge of bridging these deficits is likely to increase as the world faces several major transformative trends. Growing human populations, increasing affluence, rapid urbanisation, and global challenges such as climate change, make the timely development of sustainable infrastructure one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Estimates of the global infrastructure deficit vary but all agree it is immense, with recent predictions suggesting the world will need to spend up to

Profit, Trust, and Contract: Alternative or Complimentary Logics in Market Exchange?

60 trillion by 2030 to meet key infrastructure needs (McKinsey & Company 2011; OECD 2015).The importance of infrastructure development is highlighted by several recent global initiatives centred around three primary challenges: stimulating economic growth, promoting sustainable development, and addressing the impacts of climate change (Bhattacharya et al. 2016). These challenges are reflected in ambitious global targets as set out in the UN’s groundbreaking 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations 2015c), the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development (United Nations 2015a), and the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change (United Nations 2015b). The challenges and opportunities for investment in infrastructure provide are broadly recognised by both the public and private sectors. New infrastructure initiatives such as the UN’s Global Infrastructure Forum, led by multi-lateral development banks in close collaboration with the United Nations, aims to bring together multiple stakeholders to bridge the infrastructure deficit by identifying and addressing key requirements and highlighting opportunities for investment and cooperation, including through the facilitation of public-private partnerships. The most significant global challenges relating to infrastructure development are shared, but their relative importance and how they may be addressed differ within and between nations and regions. In general, developing and emerging economies face different priorities and have different constraints and challenges. Starting from significantly lower baselines their infrastructure deficits are more acute with many nations lacking basic facilities and services such as adequate transport, reliable energy supplies, and water and sanitation facilities that are taken for granted in more developed economies. While there are significant investment opportunities in developing nations, significant challenges in the enabling environment in terms of institutional capacity, technical knowledge and skills, and governance structures act as impediments to investment and development. More developed economies face somewhat different challenges including ageing infrastructure, high costs of infrastructure development and uncertainty over long term economic growth prospects impeding investment. Although they play out differently between nations and regions there are shared challenges and responsibilities, including the impact of universal transformative trends such as urbanisation, the logistical and financial challenges of provision of adequate infrastructure to people in rural areas, and the pervasive impacts of climate change that require infrastructure that facilitates mitigation and adaptation. This report explores these issues from a tropical perspective. It takes stock of the current and historical status of infrastructure development across the tropical zone by sector and explores the particular challenges and opportunities nations and regions of the Tropics face in terms of improving the provision of adequate services and facilities to their populations. In doing so, the report demonstrates that the region is becoming increasingly important, and highlights that the extent to which nations of the Tropics develop sustainable, resilient and inclusive infrastructure will in large part determine whether the world achieves its ambitious development goals.

Broader rationalities and alternative forms of organisation : Sociological insights into social strategic action

Economic sociologists have concluded that social embeddedness, characterized by trust and reciprocity, is widespread in organization-to-organization exchange. There remains, however, a tension between theorists who pose trust as an alternative logic to asocial price negotiations or contractual arrangements and empirical work that suggests that these theoretically distinct logics generally occur simultaneously in exchange relationships. We use data on a representative sample of Australian organizations, observing the multiplex content in network ties among suppliers and buyers and thereby generating generalizable evidence on both the extent of exchange embeddedness and the tension between alternative and complementary logics of exchange. We focus on price/profit expectations, trust, and formal contracts as all potentially flowing through and organizing market exchange ties. We find that while embeddedness is fairly widespread, it is not an exchange logic in opposition to the price/profit calculus or even contractual arrangements. On the contrary embeddedness and price/profit expectations tend to reinforce one another, while contracts rarely inhibit or substitute for trust. Only on the margins do expectations of trade-offs between price and trust appear.

The categorical generation of organizational inequality: A comparative test of Tilly's durable inequality

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue that the legacy of instrumental rationality has had a profoundly impoverishing effect on rational accounts of organisation, and that even though non‐rational accounts move beyond instrumental rationality, they remain tied to economist assumptions. The paper outlines the broader Weber and Habermass model of rationality, and demonstrates its application.Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on verbatim quotes from a sampling of 35 in‐depth interviews, the paper reveals the range of very different rationalities expressed in the social relations of work, of four very specific types of organisation: a bureaucracy, an entrepreneurial unit, a producer co‐operative and a worker co‐operative.Findings – The paper outlines two ideal sets of findings, ideal in the sense that in two of the organisations the rationalities, social relations of work and associated outcomes fit well with the Weber and Habermas model of instrumental strategic action and social strategic acti...