Melbourne Business School - Theses

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    Money: a personal and private currency
    Wilson, Valerie Ann St. Clair ( 1996)
    This thesis confronts the ‘taken-for-granted’ nature of money. It explores the word ‘money’ itself, contrasting the way it is used/defined in the economics discourse with the way it has been approached in the psychological discourse. The thesis crosses disciplinary boundaries in an attempt to come closer to the everyday, personal experience of money. It unwraps the childhood history of money, showing how adult money attitudes emerge from unconscious predispositions and childhood experience. It demonstrates the importance of ‘control’ as a variable and the lifelong balancing act which takes place between spending and saving. Today, the form of money is in the process of change. It has undergone significant changes before: the nineteenth century adoption of paper money upset the bullionists as much as plastic or virtual money can unsettle traditionalists at the end of the twentieth century. Attitudes to the underlying substance 'money' remain relevant, whatever physical form the currency takes. Thus, gold and silver coins, the treasure of childhood pirate stories, may retain mental currency long after their demise as physical currency. Indeed, the more money becomes abstracted from something tangible, the more it is necessary to understand the primal nature of the underpinning attitudes that are affected.
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    Effects of physical environmental factors and individual differences on role stress, environmental stressors, workspace satisfaction and work behaviour of office employees
    Nimran, Umar ( 1989)
    An integrative model of effects of office characteristics and individual differences on workspace satisfaction and work behaviour was developed and tested using survey data from 139 office employees working for four organisations. Workspace experiences, role stress, environmental stressors, and interpersonal interaction were treated as intermediary variables. The variables employed in this study were derived from previous research as well as self-developed, and were divided into seven group variables. The group labels and their respective variables are: (1) office characteristics: office openness, shared office, and number of people sharing; (2) individual differences: job level, organisation tenure, and Type-A behaviour pattern; (3) workspace experience: privacy and distraction; (4) role stress and environmental stressors: role ambiguity, role conflict, superior stressor, co-worker stressor, and physical stressor; (5) interpersonal interaction: attention, social relation, and listening; (6) workspace satisfaction; (7) work behaviour: task performance and friendliness.