Search

No abstract supplied

Teams and team working within a manufacturing organisation play a critical role in the innovation process. The argument is that team members, through cooperation and collaboration, may develop new and innovative ideas and solutions that are intended to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation. However, there have been comparatively few studies that have focused on innovation at the team level. In particular, there have been few attempts to associate the different types of innovation with the different team classifications. This paper reports on a study undertaken in order to explore the relationship between the different types of innovation and the state of operation linked with the various team classifications. The study was conducted within a unit of an Australian automotive components manufacturer. The paper concludes that there is strong evidence to support the analytical framework that was developed for investigation and provides a basis for further research.

No abstract supplied

The New Public Management (NPM) is the label applied to a literature which posits the need to recast the management of public bureaucracies on the lines of business enterprises. This approach has been adopted in the Australian Public Service (APS). While the roots of reform can be traced back to the 1975 Report of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (RCAGA), the reform process has accelerated since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996. This paper sets out the key principles of NPM and the predicted implications for the employment relationship. It then examines the APS reform process and employment outcomes. We conclude on the available but limited evidence that there are significant centralist deviations from the NPM model and that in the more recent period of reform increasing emphasis has been placed on efficiency at the expense of equity.

No abstract supplied

No description

No abstract supplied

Victorian local government reform has occurred in two waves. In the first wave, which focused on the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering and performance management, there was a rapid growth of outsourcing. The second wave of reform under the label of Best Value qualifies the pressures to outsource but retains the focus on performance management. In this paper we explore the management of risk in the contractual environment which now characterises local government. We do so by concentrating on one risk exposed area (outdoor space) across two contracts.

This article outlines changes in the character of Australian federal public service unions, from in-house staff associations to constituents of the broader union movement. The extent to which the strategies adopted by the union that covers most Australian federal public servants, the CPSU, are part of the agenda for change in the broader union movement or a reaction to changes in public sector administration is investigated. We conclude that although the changes have been in step with the broader union movement, the constant trigger has been government policy. Most significantly, New Public Management policies have imposed particular pressures to the point that the CPSU is now struggling for survival. The impact of the union renewal strategy, and the adoption of the organising model to underpin this strategy, remains uncertain.

The events in New York in September 2001 (and London in July of this year) have smoothed the progress of state-sanctioned invasions of privacy, making possible incursions in the workplace that would have been unacceptable only months before. The trick for legislators and business is to balance the interests of all concerned. Attempts to address anxieties about intrusions into privacy have been largely ad hoc or implemented as a result of external pressure on the Government by Australias trading partners. Copyright 2005 Julian Teicher, Anne ORourke and Amanda Pyman. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

No abstract supplied

The industrial relations framework in the Australian Public Service (APS) has moved from highly proceduralised and collective relations to direct employer-employee relations which flexibly respond to the needs of the agency. This change has occurred as part of the adoption of the New Public Management (NPM) principles in which quasi-private sector disciplines are imported to the public sector. This paper examines the evolution of industrial relations in one area of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), an organisation which has attempted to move from a bureaucratised administration to a responsive provider of services, in order to contribute to an assessment of the impact of NPM at the workplace level. The industrial relationship in the ATO has moved a considerable distance from a highly regulated and collective relationship towards a flexible and more individualised relationship. HRM strategies of controlling work through values, behaviours and performance are on the ascendancy, but in practice they are facing significant barriers to their effective implementation.

Empirical support for the competing theories of efficiency wages has been sought by conducting surveys of firms in the U.K., the U.S.A., and Sweden. This survey of Australian firms found qualified support for the shirking model of efficiency wages proposed by Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984). While little support was found for the adverse selection model strong support was found for the turnover model, consistent with the surveys of Blinder and Choi (1990) and Bewley (1995,1999). All the surveys find pervasive support for the notion of fairness as an explanation for wage rigidity endorsing efficiency wage theory as developed by Akeriof(1982, 1984) and Akerlof and Yellen (1988, 1990).

No abstract supplied

Studies about the social impact of Internet and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are usually focused on private sector organizations. However, under the rubric of e-government, developments in the public sector are proceeding at a similar if not greater pace and are giving rise to a range of important issues which impact on the internal (organisational and managerial) and external (relations between government and citizens and clients) dimensions of public sector management and administration. Despite the importance of these developments, there is a dearth of academic critiques with the major contributors to the literarture being public managers and consultants. This paper is the result of a Spanish-Australian collaboration to investigate the development of e-government and its implications for public management and society at large. At first glance a comparative paper on Spain and Australia may seem surprising, however, the pervasiveness of the ideas of the New Public Management (NPM) and the univeral character of the set of innovations described as e-government suggests that a comparison of similar developments across divergent cultural, political and economic contexts may generate valuable insights into the character of both NPM and e-government, both separately and with respect to their interaction with each other. This paper proceeds on the hypothesis that governments in the two countries are making rapid advances in their use of e-government, but that this is not matched by the pace of change in the management process and the relations of governments and citizens. It is evident that public managers in both countries have welcomed Web sites and other Internet uses but it is necessary to ask whether these changes represent substantive rather than superficial advances. We suggest that, despite some notable exceptions, the development of ICT in Australia and Spain is actually improving unidirectional services rather than making innovations to online services and providing for interaction with citizens. This paper is in three parts. The first provides a comparative overview of developments in e-govenment in Australia and Spain. The second employs case study analysis of the leading e-government experiencies at the different levels of government in the two countries to explore the limitations of e-government in developing the information and knowledge society. Finally, as a result of interviews with managers, webmasters, ICT experts and public policy specialists from Spain and Australia about future trends and problems concerning e-government, we raise some questions for further discussion. The key issues here are: facilitating citizens access to ICTs, adapting organizations to ICTs and opening the internal structure of government to the social and political environment.

The New Public Management (NPM) is the label applied to a literature which posits the need to recast the management of public bureaucracies on the lines of business enterprises. This approach has been adopted across the Australian public sector including the Australian Public Service (APS). While the roots of reform here can be traced back to the 1975 Report of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (RCAGA), the reform process has been concentrated on the period since 1983 and has accelerated since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996. This paper sets out the key principles of NPM and spells out their predicted implications for the employment relationship. It then examines the APS reform process in terms of the precepts of NPM before considering the implications of these reforms for the employment relationship. We conclude on the available but limited evidence that there are significant centralist deviations from the NPM model and that in the more recent period of reform increasing emphasis has been placed on efficiency at the expense of equity.

No abstract supplied

No abstract supplied

No abstract supplied

Alcohol and illicit substance abuse in the workplace is increasingly becoming a major human resource and employee relations issue. Whilst more sophisticated measures have been developed to test and monitor drug use in the workplace, and despite tacit union support on the grounds of occupational health and safety (OH&S), the implementation of drug testing procedures remains a contentious issue. This paper firstly examines the arguments for and against drug testing, and secondly, examines the issue through two case studies in the Australian mining industry where the introduction of the drug testing resulted in industrial disputation that was resolved in very different outcomes.

Sophisticated human resource management strategies, underpinned by a unitarist (rather than a pluralist) frame of reference, have the potential to undermine the role and function of trade unions. This has forced unions to `rethink' their strategies to maintain a position of relevance in this new environment. In this context, the Organising Model of unionism has emerged as a possible panacea for membership decline and a mechanism for self-transformation and renewal. This case study explores the strategic response of a union to sophisticated human resource management strategies, in the broader context of a major industrial dispute.

The Workplace Relations Act (WRA) constitutes a profound change in Australian workplace relations. As a result, the current legislative environment challenges trade unions in a myriad of ways, as does the continual decline in trade union density. However, comparatively few studies have investigated the relationship between the WRA and the decline in union density at the federal level in Australia. This paper examines the impact of the WRA on five Australian trade unions by investigating the relationship between the legislation and declining union density. The findings suggest that the WRA has not had a direct and immediate impact on trade union density, yet has impacted indirectly, on the union movement as a whole. This is demonstrated by a 'cultural shift' toward individualised workplace relations. The paper concludes that the relationship between the WRA and declining union density warrants further attention, given the emergence of an individualistic mindset at the broader societal level, and the continual challenges confronting Australian trade unions.

In this paper we examine how discourses are mobilised and deployed by actors in a domain during a critical incident. In particular we examine the changes and the continuities in the way that the major parties in the Melbourne port dispute of 1997-98 related to each other. We focus on the discourses used to structure the ways that these organisations related. We adopt perspectives from critical domain theory and discourse theory, and derive our main concept and unit of analysis, what we call the discursive domain. The main process that occurs in a discursive domain is actors' 'mapping' discourses onto concepts, and concepts onto objects, in order to make certain courses of action rational and sensible. We propose that different mapping processes occur in differently organised domains. We employ case study method. Data was gathered from an analysis of media reports about the port of Melbourne during 1997-98. These texts are used to examine the kinds (number and diversity) of discourses used by each of two main networks of organisations in the domain during that period. The main finding is an unexpected association between the 'organised' domain and the 'complex' mapping performed by actors. Our contribution is to build on previous understandings of the role of discourses in domains by examining the complexity of 'mapping' by domain actors during critical incidents such as a major industrial dispute. We conclude by drawing implications of the discursive domain approach for domain theory and discourse theory.

Australia has witnessed a rapid growth in outsourcing over the last decade with the public sector being the clear leader in these initiatives. Explanations of the rise of outsourcing tend to emphasise economic and human resources management factors and neglect the political dimension. Here it is argued that outsourcing forms part of a broader neo-liberal agenda which includes labour market deregulation and public sector reform. This can be seen clearly from the experience of the state of Victoria and in particular its electricity generation industry where a carefully implemented program of downsizing and outsourcing played upon existing divisions in the workforce eliciting a pragmatic, survival oriented response from the major unions involved in the outsourcing of the maintenance of coal mining and electricity generation plant.

No abstract supplied

Australia's role in being one of the world leaders in moves to e-government is widely acknowledged. Put simply, E-Government in Australia appears to be looking good and, logically such leadership in the use of ICT-assisted forms of governance is particularly apt. Australia is a nation where "size and geographical diversity... has presented the country with particular problems of communication and travel" (Smith, 1999:301). It is also the examination of these problems which clearly identify the need to examine the success of e-government innovations at all three levels of government within Australia. An overview of this larger task was undertaken in an earlier paper (see Teicher, Hughes & Dow, 2002; Teicher & Dow, 2003) and the results presented suggest moves to e-government are not uniform amongst the three levels. The initially positive finding that all 78 Victorian councils had websites was quickly replaced with the reality that most of what these sites provided was classified at the lowest levels of sophistication and largely informational only. What emerges clearly at this level of government are a number of questions about what e-government really means for the organisation embracing it. From the provide perspective we have at this stage it appears local e-government may not be very advanced but it is looking fairly good in terms of potential. The question then is, what about the perspective from the user end of these services? Focussing on the level of local government, this paper presents results of a content analysis websites to further investigate what the implementation of E-Government actually means in terms of the public interface and access initiatives at the regional level. The results of the analysis provide further evidence of Australia being a long way from the concept of 'joined-up-government'. More importantly, there are clear indications that a much greater dept of research at the case study level is required to investigate the range of internal and external interactions - internally in terms of changing organisational structures and support services as management/worker relationships and externally in terms of changing relationships between local government and the public they service.

No abstract supplied

The terms 'new public management' (NPM) and 'managerialism' are much used in the public management literature, though generally with little precision. Broadly, these terms refer to the adoption of a private sector management model emphasising the accountability of managers and a results orientation. The specific features of the model vary with the author, though in some versions NPM comes very close to a 'new right' project of a minimalist state with the public service confined to policy provision. Whether this model is applicable to local government and in what manner has received little attention in the literature. Accordingly, this paper reviews the principal tenets of NPM and considers their applicability to local government. En doing this we focus on Victoria, where the Liberal-National state government (1992-1999) pursued a radical reform agenda at both state and local government levels. In particular we argue that there are two models of managerialism, liberation and market-driven, and that the process of local government reform was conducted using the rhetoric of liberation whereas the reality was closer to market-driven managerialism. The principal implication of this argument is that the freedom of managers to form and implement strategy was more illusory than real.

While 'outsourcing' tends to be thought of as a private sector initiative often taken in conjunction with downsizing, in Australia outsourcing has been most commonly adopted in the public sector, particularly among the utilities: gas, water and electricity. The development of outsourcing has led organisations to question the provision of services once seen as exclusively in-house and is no longer delimited in terms of non-core activities. In the public sector during the 1990s the rise of outsourcing was typically associated with privatisation through contracting out and competitive tendering and was also a catalyst for the spread of non-standard employment in the public sector (Industry Commission, 1996; Teicher & Van Gramberg, 1998). For the trade union movement the development of these patterns of work has proved a serious challenge. In this paper we explore union responses to outsourcing in the context of one major public utility in the state of Victoria, the power industry. Here the outsourcing of what were ostensibly non-core functions was almost inseparable from the process of selling the major generation and distribution assets of the industry. Interestingly, outsourcing sometimes directly involved asset sales with businesses being excised from the former State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) and sold to contracting companies which provided those services to the power generators both before and after their privatisation. Many former SECV employees were hired by the contractors nominally leaving the power industry but performing similar duties for a private employer on different wages and conditions. The central task of this paper is to explain the atypically pacific union response to these major changes. From the 1960s industrial relations in the Victorian power industry were volatile and the generation sector was characterised by shop-floor militancy which had little regard for the views of the official trade union movement. Underlying this militancy were a series of longstanding divisions both within the SECV workforce and between the multiplicity of unions. During the 1990s, as the SECV management implemented a major restructuring, these divisions came to the fore. Instead of a militant confrontation, these divisions were a major contributor to a response which, following Foster & Scott (1998), can only be described as 'pragmatic compliance'. In order to understand the union response two other factors need to be taken into account. Firstly, a process of union restructuring occurring at the same time as the upheavals in the electricity industry and this absorbed resources and diverted the unions into internecine struggles. Secondly, an uncharacteristically proactive management strategy created a groundswell in favour of accepting voluntary redundancy rather than resisting the process of downsizing and outsourcing. In retrospect both the unions and the workforce have had cause to reflect on the wisdom of their responses over the course of the 1990s. The research on which the case study draws is part of a larger project on the industrial relations and labour process implications of Australian privatisations. Interviews with key informants among management (including former managers), union officials and delegates are the primary resource. These interviews were conducted over the period January 1998 to July 2000. The most recent interviews provided an opportunity to focus more narrowly on the issues pertaining to the process of downsizing and outsourcing. This resource was supplemented with various public record documents including government reports and newspaper articles.

E-government can help improve governance and service delivery by refocusing consideration of the purposes and tools of government. However, E-government initiatives pose challenging questions of management, especially about coordination in government and the design of services for citizens. Progress towards implementing e-government raises critical questions about preferred styles of governance and about how governments relate to citizens. At present, interactions between citizens, the institutions of government and Information and Communications technology raise more agendas than governments can handle. However, trying to find ways through these agendas is to confront questions of wide interest to citizens. At the very least, e-government helps improve governance and services by asking questions.

No abstract supplied

Governments in Australia are increasingly relying on private sector service providers to increase efficiency in public services delivery and entering into various business partnerships with those providers. This paper examines the effectiveness of public-private partnership models used in delivering public services and suggests that partnership initiatives have increased efficiency at the micro management level but have not been able to establish trust among the partners as public servants determine the performance criteria and the means of control and accountability. Community participation in policy formulation and in building trust among the clients and the providers has not been given due emphasis as an important factor for developing a sustainable partnership model. The concept of public value has not been used as a useful way of setting out public service goals. This tentative conclusion rests on an examination of two cases where partnerships have affected operating and management practices.