Economics - Theses
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ItemEmployee participation and industrial democracy in Australian government employment: 1983-1988( 1990-05)The subject of employee participation in the public sector has been neglected in the academic literature of Australia. The present research aims to redress this deficiency. Its explicit focus is employee participation in Australian Government Employment (AGE) in the first six years of the Hawke Labor Government, that is, the period 1983-1988. The choice of this period is an important one. The election of the Hawke Government marks a turning point in Australian public administration: this was a government committed to the thoroughgoing reform of the public sector and employee participation was integrated into its reform agenda, albeit in the guise of industrial democracy. In the first part of the thesis the discussion clarifies the meaning and relationship between the concepts of employee participation and industrial democracy. This is followed by a review of the overseas literature on employee participation in public employment. In the second part, the development of employee participation in AGE is dealt with at a general level. This account spans the period 1901-1988, however, the account of the sub-period 1983-1988 is more detailed. In the third and fourth parts, the exposition becomes more specific. Detailed case studies of Australia Post and the Australian Taxation Office, which provide an account of the development of employee participation ranging from the national to the workplace level of each organization, are presented. In the final part, the discussion is drawn together and the lessons of the recent experience of employee participation in AGE are spelt out.
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ItemInformation and coordination: the economic organization of tourism( 1997)This study set out to explain the nature of economic coordination in tourism and explore the reasons which have prevented the development of the supply-side analysis of tourism and engendered much debate about whether tourism is an industry or not. A survey of the economics and alternative literatures on tourism reveals a wide variety of interpretations about the fundamental nature of tourism coordination problems. It also sets the premises of the study which claims that tourism constitutes an excessively diverse and volatile sector in which novelty plays an inherent, critical, role. The methodology proposed does not concentrate the analysis on one aspect, as has been done in past tourism studies, but undertakes to tackle the broader coordination of such a fragmented and turbulent system. This is approached initially by reviewing alternative theories of the firm and of industrial coordination. It identifies a basic methodological divergence between models based on conventional equilibrium principles and evolutionary alternatives. In the latter, structural uncertainty plays a fundamental role and economic agents take steps to deal with the prospects of ignorance. The thesis subsequently develops a learning theory coordination combining elements of evolutionary-cognitive models of knowledge production and coordination. What emerges is a theory of choice between alternative learning strategies. The firm undertakes the management of dynamic tradeoffs between learning strategies. Its boundaries evolve as it must decide between combinations of product and process learning heuristics and mix internal and external learning channels. The thesis develops the important notion that inter-firm networking is an especially important external learning strategy in systems where abstract commodity concepts are ill-developed. In such circumstances, firms can develop product-or process- related competences in appropriating innovation rents in either dimension. If many networking strategies can be sustained by different firms and these affect the nature of products and process technological standards, variation will be sustainable and Schumpeterian competition (with respect to both product and process technologies) will dominate. The thesis contrasts the transaction costs and evolutionary perspectives on tourism. It shows that the former overlooks diversity and generates context specific statements incompatible with its deterministic intentions. The evolutionary-cognitive perspective produces an original framework for the analysis of tourism coordination which makes the novel and critical claim that inter-firm networks constitute the salient feature of tourism coordination. This is important because it allows to provide a genuinely broad outlook on tourism diversity and fragmentation, and explains the process generating and constraining variation. It also becomes possible to distinguish and categorise alternative, external and tourism-specific, learning strategies corresponding to attempts to formulate rent-generating commodity standards. These inter-firm networks match well the diverse, and incompatible, predictions found in the literature about organizational patterns and structural development. /An innovative empirical application to a regional tourism system shows that it is indeed possible to categorise inter-firm networking behaviour according to learning strategies. It does so by correlating patterns of connections with participation in markets in which tourist-consumers and products have distinctive attributes.