About
45
Publications
13,313
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
628
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
July 1999 - February 2020
Education
January 1995 - December 1997
Publications
Publications (45)
This conceptual paper responds to the call by Ahlqvist and Uotila (2020) for review of the philosophical assumptions that frame the theorization of the practice of strategic foresight. Challenging the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underpin the dominant (positivist) paradigm, their interpretivist perspective offers an alternative...
Paradoxical inertia is an organization condition that has received far less attention than organizational change. We investigate, ethnographically, an Australian Intellectual Property service firm, whose Board members proved to be unable to respond strategically to a rapidly changing environment that threatened their organization’s survival. In the...
Esta edición es una traducción del libro que publicamos bajo el título "Roots and Wings of Action Research for Territorial Development. Connecting local transformation and
international collaborative learning" en 2020.
En aquel momento nuestra apuesta fue escribir un libro en el que convivieran distintos idiomas, y cada persona elegimos en cuál qu...
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the relationship between the concept of the learning organization and that of the co-creation of value.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is conceptual in nature and draws on data from a case study of a small highly innovative Australian company.
Findings
The authors show that, from a value co-creation persp...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the role of abstract forms of power in organizational change by exploring the role of such forms of power in the recent structural transformation of an iconic Australian Intellectual Property law firm. The research literature reflects relatively few studies on the increasing...
The paper reports on a management initiative within an iconic global high-tech company to facilitate technical innovation within two teams (situated in different global locations of the company) that had been unable to produce any form of technical innovation over a period of several years. Experimenting with an action research strategy, this initi...
In this article, we examine the construct of ‘leadership’ through an analysis of the social practices that underpinned the Australian Broadcasting Corporation television production entitled The Code. Positioning the production within the neo-bureaucratic organisational form currently adopted by the global television industry, we explore new concept...
The paper describes two sets of Action Research within an iconic global high-tech company. Two teams within the organisation (one in New York and one in Sydney) were selected to participate, on the basis of their failure to have achieved any technical innovation over the previous three years. The Action Research had the practical goal of generating...
The paper explores the relationship between leadership, culture and innovation. Through an analysis of four enterprises, voted by their peers as having strong innovation-friendly cultures, we explicate the assumptions embedded in these innovation-supporting cultures, and outline the leadership practices that have created them. By locating the study...
Across the world, higher education is facing new challenges as governments cut subsidies, new technologies enable ‘massively open’ online courses, students are accessed from global locations, and the centuries-old mission of universities is commercialised. In spite of these profound changes, most institutions of higher education have remained unalt...
This paper outlines the leadership practices that support an organisation’s strategic intent to innovate through the creation of an innovation-conducive culture. By surveying the opinions of member organisations of the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), four companies (each within a particular revenue category) were selected by AII...
The paper explores the relationship between leadership, culture and
innovation. Through an analysis of four enterprises, voted by their peers as
having strong innovation-friendly cultures, we explicate the assumptions
embedded in these innovation-supporting cultures, and outline the leadership
practices that have created them. By locating the study...
As with higher education institutions in other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, Australian universities are facing significant challenges. One particular challenge is that of the declining quality of the teaching and learning experience within the academy. This paper describes an attempt to sustain the quality of a ‘...
Purpose
– This paper aims to report on case-study research that explores the role of leadership practices, in particular, in enhancing the capacity of an enterprise to learn to create new value from a diverse range of sources. The capacity to sustain value creation over time, and across turbulent environments, increasingly differentiates enterprise...
This paper offers three cases, from very different industries, where an organisation failed to realise the value of the talent that was recruited at significant cost to lead an attempt at innovation. In each case, the recruited talent was forced into an intrapreneurial role - one in which they had to operate below the management radar - in order to...
This paper explores the practices underpinning an enterprise's ability to generate and deploy intangible capital in support of its strategic intent to innovate. Drawing on two research projects, we focus upon enterprises that are able to innovatively leverage the intangible capital resources that are potentially available to them. Using a phenomeno...
The paper explores an attempt by a small team of staff within the School of Management at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to transform the only postgraduate third sector management program offered in Australia, in response to powerful external pressures for change. After analysing the nature of these contextual imperatives for the transfo...
In this paper, we outline a pilot project aimed at exploring the role of contextual factors in the facilitation of creativity and innovation within a range of South African art forms. Interviews with 11 people who have rich experience of the South African art domain delivered an insightful perspective on the contextual factors driving lifelong crea...
The paper outlines an action research project conducted within an Australian public sector organisation with the purpose of changing a key internal business process. Despite the significant challenges incurred by using a change methodology considered to be 'radical' within this conventional, hierarchically structured, organisation, the business pro...
The concept of social capital, and its role in the development of political stability and economic growth, has become a topic of increasing interest in state, business and community sectors alike. Within this body of discourse, though, it is generally assumed that the influence of social capital is from the ‘outside-in’: that social capital is gene...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of trust in the collaborative learning processes that underpin innovation as a competitive strategy in organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
As a conceptual paper, the argument is framed by academic perspectives, drawn from the academic literature on the topic and by professional and li...
This article draws attention to the structural inhibitors of effective service delivery within a South African public health organization and outlines a new initiative that aims to facilitate the decentralization of decision-making power in an attempt to transform the service offered by this organization. The intervention outlined utilizes a partic...
Profound change in the global business environment is foregrounding the need for new competitive strategies in organizations. The realization that success in the era of knowledge capitalism depends upon the creative productivity of knowledge workers is focusing attention on the forms of intangible capital that underpin creativity, learning and inno...
Purpose
The paper sets out to explore the leadership processes and dynamics of change management in a fragmented, and resource‐poor, health service in an impoverished rural region in South Africa.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper outlines an action research process aimed at assisting the stakeholders of two rural clinics to integrate psychiat...
. The post-implementation review (PIR) literature emphasizes the benefits of ex post evaluations of information technology (IT) projects. However, empirical studies of actual practice show that few organizations undertake any substantive form of ex post evaluation. This article presents the results of case study research in the Australian offices o...
Purpose
– To explore the collective means through which professional sports teams learn and generate new knowledge forms in order to remain competitive in challenging global arenas, and to examine the applicability of these means to business organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
– The objectives were achieved by drawing on the business and sp...
Purpose
This paper describes and analyses an attempt to engage in transformational learning, oriented to the development of a culture of innovation, at a medium‐size software development organization in Australia.
Design/methodology/approach
An action research methodology was used whereby continuous cycles of strategic social learning were collect...
This paper describes the transformation of a software development organization in Australia and theorizes the learning and knowledge construction processes which this entailed. Faced with changes to the regulatory environment of the organization, key stakeholders engaged in the processes of learning how to create the conditions under which a new 'i...
The paper reports the outcomes of one module of a collaborative learning project aimed at the development of leadership capacity in district health management teams in the East Cape province of South Africa. A work-based learning methodology was selected for the module with the intention of developing strategic and procedural knowledge bases within...
The paper explores an attempt by a small team of staff within the School of Management at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to transform the only postgraduate third sector management programme offered in Australia, in response to powerful external and internal pressures for change. After analysing the nature of these contextual imperatives...
This paper is a response to Gary Craig's (1998) overview of the current state of the community sector within a global corporate capitalist economy. It attempts two things: firstly, to contribute to an analysis of the factors underlying the current state of, what Craig (ibid: 2) calls, 'ideological confusion' within and beyond the sector, by explori...
The concept of a learning organization introduces a potentially radical strategic option to leaders of capitalist enterprises in the late 20th century. However the profound changes that it offers are seldom achieved in practice, primarily because of the reluctance! inability of leadership to confront the central issue of the transformation of power...
The article explores the possibilities for South Africa as a learning nation given its historical
context and current attempts to transform its political and social structures. It argues that the
satisfaction of international criteria by which a learning society is judged, will depend upon the
acceptance and promotion of non-formal educational proc...
As South Africa moves towards a democratic, non-racial constitution it faces a problem of massive social rehabilitation after the social devastation caused by the policy of apartheid. Apart from the children still within a seriously inadequate education system, millions of adults earlier received inferior, and in most instances destructive, educati...
One of the legacies of apartheid is a crisis in South African education. The existing formal structures of education cannot cope with the scale nor the nature of the educational needs of the vast majority of South Africa's population. This article explores the potential role that sports programmes can play in non-formal educational provision. Withi...
It is argued that all social action serves specific power interests and that the organisational form of social agencies is strongly influenced by the theoretical assumptions and practical aims of those who establish them. The paper presents the case of radical humanism, as an appropriate theory of social action within social democracies in the late...
The use of a school guidance service to transmit the economic and cultural interests of the ruling group(s) in a country is explored through the case-study of guidance in the Republic of South Africa, and in particular the introduction of guidance as a subject in Black schools in 1981. An analysis of the syllabus for guidance in Black schools revea...
This article discusses the present guidance and counselling services within South Africa and concludes that political and economic interests have influenced these services more than psychological theory.
The South African guidance service is an example of the way in which the population can be manipulated when a guidance service is used to serve the political and economic ends of a ruling group. The South African government views the guidance service as an ‘auxiliary education service’, the function of which is to ensure conformity to the official...
This paper reports on research into the introduction of a strategic project management office and project selection methodology into a large, hierarchically and functionally structured organization in Sydney, Australia. Initially, the logic of the new work practices led to little resistance to their introduction from executive managers. However, as...
In 2001, Eagle Datamation International (EDI), a leader in the Australasian customs clearance and freight forwarding software market, embarked on a process of cultural transformation in response to changes in its regulatory environment. The first phase of this transformative process involved the execution of a strategy of 'creative destruction' thr...
This paper presents the perspective of a range of practising South African artists on the contextual factors influencing the recent surge in artistic creativity and innovation in their country. In particular, the 'edginess' of the everyday contexts of artistic endeavour is seen as a source of transformative learning for those having the courage to...