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Background: Amidst the difficulty and contentiousness of improving hospitals, a relatively new approach is the Relational Model of Organizational Change (RMOC). However, this approach has its own challenges, including reports that its focus on communication and relationships is undervalued despite evidence supporting its use to facilitate practice improvements in hospitals. Research suggests power dynamics in hospitals influences how the RMOC is used, but the precise mechanisms through which this occurs have not been fully examined. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how power dynamics shaped the implementation of a program using the RMOC in a hospital: the QPH RC Program. Methodology: Institutional ethnography was applied to explicate textually mediated ruling relations (power dynamics) and examine how they exerted their influence on the QPH RC Program. This involved interviewing people and analyzing texts embedded in work processes that organized the implementation of the program. Results: The QPH RC Program was embedded in a cluster of ruling relations comprising an economic rationalist and scientific discourse and project management methodology. These ruling relations exerted their power via textually mediated social processes that influenced the focus and management of the program. Conclusion: The ruling relations functioned to align the QPH RC Program with the priorities of the hospital, suggesting that financial objectives were prioritized over objectives to improve communication or culture. Practice Implications: Future research and practice change should include investigating and addressing the intersection of institutional contexts and the application of the RMOC to facilitate practice improvements in health care organizations, particularly hospitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the reception of Judith Brett's landmark study, Robert Menzies' Forgotten People, on its publication in 1992, a moment when many Australians living under neoliberal economic reform and recession were rethinking what it meant to be middle class. Brett argued that Menzies thought it meant individuals living the best lives they could, lives defined by independence and the possession of superior moral qualities. Her account resonated with contemporary Australian experience and remains highly influential. Yet within political history, reviews were mixed as traditionalists resisted the psychoanalytic theory Brett employed to understand Menzies' public language. Her strategic defence of her interdisciplinary approach has ultimately helped to keep the idea of moral liberalism alive in political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative analysis of catchment management dams in Cork, Ireland and Brisbane, Australia to demonstrate how interactions between municipal government and expert advisors for public infrastructure administration can constrain community climate adaptation. The analysis highlights how neoliberal economic rationalism can appropriate public value choice under the guise of technocratic expertise. Experts are often considered responsible agents for the effective administration of public infrastructure, even when ostensibly technical decisions concerning infrastructure management seem to demand normative, political input. Technocratic administration arising from economic rationalist priorities can thereby exacerbate the hazards presented by climate variability and advancing climate change. Climate risk managers in both cases over‐relied on operating protocols and the expertise of engineers to administer public infrastructure in pursuit of economic priorities. When operating protocols proved insufficient in the face of climate extremes, however, blame was assigned to experts despite their making all available attempts to avert disaster. Through analysis of these cases, the paper discusses the need for normative transparency in expert‐led public administration and better integration of multi‐level governance for climate resilience when pursuing economic rationalist imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study that inquired into the journeys of sixteen Indigenous Australian athletes from their first touch of the footy to the Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL) that identified two distinct stages of their journeys. These were: (1) the development of expertize and of a distinctly Aboriginal style of play from their first touch of a footy to around the age of thirteen and, (2) a process of cultural transitioning toward and into the AFL and NRL. This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to focus on the second stage of transitioning into the world of professional sport and sport as business. Identifying this as a process of cultural transitioning from local Aboriginal culture to the culture of professional sport provided insight into this transitioning process while illuminating the profound importance of culture in this process. It also helped identify the ways in which tensions between local approaches to 'footy' as play and cultural expression and professional sport as work, within the global culture of sport-as-business, were manifested in the challenges that the participants had to overcome. This article thus contributes to knowledge about Indigenous development of sporting expertize, of the specific challenges they face in transitioning into the global culture of commodified sport and how they succeed from a cultural perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past century, economic theory and public policy based thereon has oscillated between big and small government, with economic rationalism being the driving force latterly. 'Blowback' has led to unintended consequences and an unequal society. New thinking is required informed by complexity theory and employing scenario planning. Using the latter, while we might not be able to predict the future, we could plan for it and would know that whatever it might hold, we could cope with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate how organizational changes based on economic rationalism can affect the process of producing hyperlocal information and impact how things work on the periphery of regional daily press newsrooms in France. They identify new ways of disseminating local news on the fringes of established media and at a microlocal scale. Faced with restrictions imposed by management, key actors in the collection of “small news” are sometimes forced to sidestep newspapers in order to continue doing what they like to do: circulate information in rural areas.

Karl Polanyi's main thesis is the effective separation of society and economy, placing the economy above the society. This artificial separation will be carried out by a series of theoretical tools and mechanisms -the introduction of fictitious goods and economic rationalism as a social premise- that will blind an overall view of the social panorama, focusing only on the economic aspects of it, causing that way, an unprecedented human crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse of Australian public policy refers regularly to the concept of ‘efficiency’ as though the meaning of this term is self-evident and shared by all stakeholders in the policy process. Efficiency is constructed as a primary objective of policy, as an ambition which is unequivocally ‘good’. This focuses discussion on what policy change is needed to maximise efficiency, rather than the more pertinent question, of ‘Why efficiency?’ This article examines how efficiency is described and justified in a collection of Australian policy documents produced in the past 25 years by government departments, agencies and inquiries, and by mainstream lobby groups and consulting firms. These policy documents portray efficiency as essential in raising consumers’ living standards. In turn, living standards are narrowed, centring on satisfaction of consumers’ wants through markets, by firms. I build on Pusey’s argument that efficiency injures, rather than improves, quality of life for many people. Measures in the interests of maximising efficiency, such as casualisation, outsourcing and disaggregation of jobs, have contributed to an increasingly insecure existence for many, particularly those on society’s margins. As a result, I argue that rather than seeking to maximise efficiency for the betterment of society, efficiency is pursued in spite of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on an edited transcript of a speech at The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) conference in Melbourne in December 2016, summarises the criticisms of ‘economic rationalism’, cum neoliberalism, that emerged from the ‘economic rationalism debate’ in Australia of the early 1990s to the present. Economic rationalism reversed Australia’s historic nation-building legacy. Free market neoliberal doctrines have captured the central Canberra policy-making apparatus and radically reduced the coordinating role of the state in most areas of public policy. Economic ‘reform’ is seen primarily as a political project led by international and domestic corporate interest groupings and aimed at the transformation of Australia’s institutions. The neoliberal orthodoxy continues to distort the policy process as it has become functionally indispensable for the process of policy making and government, despite its failing intellectual legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the impact of global economic crises and, more recently, the international shockwave of populism, neoliberalism persists as a framework for policies, policymakers and social orders. In Australia, debate about neoliberalism was largely initiated by the publication of Economic Rationalism in Canberra in 1991. This special section of the Journal of Sociology has been compiled to mark the impact of this seminal text over the past quarter of a century. The contributions to this section outline the evolution and transformative impact of neoliberalism locally and globally, and especially highlight current work by early-career researchers in Australia. As well as acknowledging competing interpretations of neoliberalism, this introduction summarises emerging scholarship in economic sociology by focusing on: the rhetoric of policymaking; the rollout of neoliberal policies in Australia and comparisons with international experiences; the impact of neoliberalism on social movements and social activism; and its ongoing role as a frame of reference for everyday work and life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hillsong Church has received significant scholarly attention, which has observed the church’s rapid local and global growth. Several other Australian-based Pentecostal churches demonstrate a similar growth trajectory to Hillsong Church, namely: C3 Church, Citipointe Church, Planetshakers, and Influencers Church. To further scholarly understanding of aspects of this rapid growth, this paper discusses the emergence of economic rationalist policies which led to the neoliberal governance context in Australia. The paper argues that the emergence of this policy context, which emphasises marketization and privatisation, provided opportunities for suburban-based Pentecostal churches to expand activities beyond conducting worship services. The paper analyses materials produced by Hillsong Church, C3 Church, Citipointe Church, Planetshakers, and Influencers Church and associated educational, charity, and financial organisations. Through this analysis, the paper finds that the emergence of a neoliberal governance context in Australia provided opportunities for these churches to expand activities beyond traditional worship ceremonies to include additional activities such as running schools, Bible colleges, community care organisations, charity ventures, and financial institutions. The paper shows how economic rationalism and neoliberalism assisted in providing a context within which Australian-based suburban Pentecostal churches were able to take opportunities to grow aspects of church organisation, which helped to develop a global megachurch status. In this way, these churches took up opportunities that changes in political circumstances in Australia provided, developing a theology of growth actualised in expanding church-branded activities around the globe.

Markets are powerful mechanisms for social coordination but critics claim that there are potential negative impacts. Market exchange can exacerbate inequalities in society. The invisible hand of market decision-making can lead to major social choices not being publicly aired. Market mechanisms can crowd out moral motivations with negative consequences. Water markets have long been promoted as one of the most efficient ways to reallocate water by economists. Focusing on an exemplary implementation of the water market in Australia, our results suggest that some features of the way market-based governance systems work match the concerns of market critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impending demise of passenger motor vehicle manufacturing in Australia provides a good opportunity to view the trajectory of industry policy since the Whitlam government commenced the process of tariff cuts in 1973. It is argued that industry policy over this period demonstrates the effects of path dependence and a lack of policy learning. In the industry policy context, the path dependence perspective suggests three key factors in explaining policy effects: the importance of initial conditions; the role of cumulative causation in the interaction between policy settings, actors and firms; and the shaping role of networks. While political or electoral factors could, on occasion, generate support for threatened industries, overall, neo-liberal policy ideas guided decision-making. An examination of Australian defence industry, and a comparison of the Australian and New Zealand dairy and milk processing industries reinforces the importance of institutionally shaped path dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]