Management and Marketing - Theses

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    "Law, done differently”: Exploring the emergent legal organisational form of NewLaw in context
    Bennett, Judith ( 2022)
    QUOTE: The legal world will change “more radically over the next two decades than over the last two centuries” (Susskind, 2013, p xiii). QUOTE: NewLaw for me is several things. It's a mindset first and foremost. It's a shift from looking at the value of lawyers being their time to the value of lawyers being everything else, which is their ability to review, their ability to provide professional advice, their negotiation skills. And it's outcome driven. Then you start looking at legal technology [and] how they can deliver things in a more flexible, client-centric way. And the flow-on from there is value-based pricing and project scoping, project management, with always the end user in mind. And obviously then the end result is they're customer service driven. For me, that is what NewLaw means. I talk a lot around a tribe and language (Interview K1-F). Recent decades have seen disruptive and transformative forces of increasing globalisation, more demanding clients and markets with regulatory changes, changing workforce expectations and technological advances that accelerated exponentially in the 2010s. In this dynamic context the legal industry, dominated for centuries by the professional partnership, has seen the entry of heterogeneous and innovative competitors. Since the mid-2000s the phenomenon labelled “NewLaw” has emerged with its participants claiming it to be a distinctive legal organisational form delivering legal services in new and different ways with a range of business models, that is, “law, done differently”. Early industry definitions opposed NewLaw to taken-for-granted traditional legal organisational forms and then the profit-oriented “BigLaw” while later definitions saw it gaining more complexity (Furlong, 2014). Growing rapidly in numbers and market share, NewLaw has attracted much attention in the industry literature for its symbolic significance as a new legal organisational form that is “disruptive innovation” and having a “disproportionate impact” (Thomson Reuters (Aus), 2019). However, as yet, the industry offers no valuable explanation or conclusive definition as to what constitutes NewLaw as a legal organisational form nor how NewLaw relates to its context. Therefore this Thesis seeks to understand and conceptualise the novel legal organisational form of NewLaw in its context by exploring the different academic literatures relevant to investigating the professional organisational form. With a lack of research concerning the NewLaw phenomenon, it begins by reviewing the “classic” definition of professional organisational form yet finds this unsatisfactory with a selective use of the literature, a search for distinctive professional characteristics and “classic” assumptions. It turns to examining in more depth each of the three literatures that have long explored the professions and their professional organisational forms: the sociology of professions, archetype theory and institutional logics. It finds useful concepts and arguments in these literatures, and also significant gaps. These gaps include limited descriptions of characteristics, continued dominance of historical understandings of professionalism and centrality of expert knowledge, and lack of consideration of interaction with contextual influences. Based on this review, the Thesis formulates two research questions (RQs) that focus on conceptualising the contemporary phenomenon of NewLaw as a legal (professional) organisational form and how participants within and advising NewLaw understand its influences and relationship with its context. To answer these meaning-centred questions, a constructivist-interpretive philosophy with a qualitative methodology was chosen. This Thesis developed 42 Australian NewLaw case studies that drew on 37 interviews with NewLaw participants and industry experts, observations and site visits, as well as extensive secondary data including webpages, industry media and podcasts, social media, artefacts and visuals. Nine characteristics and six themes are identified in the findings. As the two RQs are tightly interconnected, the findings are analysed together in relation to each of the literatures to provide a greater understanding of the NewLaw organisational form. These show the NewLaw organisational form as a distinctive constellation with an overarching philosophy of purpose that, distinguished from BigLaw and TradLaw, values true professionalism, includes profitability and supports innovation, with multi-level characteristics. For NewLaw these characteristics are analysed to be an active design, client-centric approach with fit for purpose work, use and sharing of expert knowledge both legal and beyond, valuing of professional workers, pricing for value, mindset of innovation aided by technological tools as required, being privately owned and using six business models. Interlinking the academic and industry literatures with these findings, this Thesis makes a number of contributions to knowledge to critically enrich the understanding of NewLaw as an emergent legal (professional) organisational form in the contemporary context. Theoretical contributions at a macro level include renewing the concept (and re-labelling the institutional order) of professionalism with multiple dimensions, extending the content of and approaches to expert knowledge beyond a monopoly to include lawyers as interpreters and collaborators with empowered clients while exploring jurisdictional claims, and adding the influence of innovation - suggesting it as an eighth institutional order. Theoretical contributions at the meso level make a case for the NewLaw interpretive scheme as a purpose-based combination of renewed professionalism with balanced profitability, extended expert knowledge and intentional innovation. This is called the 2PI, building on the historically dominant schemes of P2 (professional partnership) and MPB (managed professional business). Combining these contributions means NewLaw is an actively designed and distinctive organisational form with the 2PI purposive interpretive scheme guiding and being guided by its multiple, multi-level characteristics. Empirical contributions show a difference between meaning-based symbols and values compared to their material manifestations, and also suggest that “levels” of logics have blurred boundaries. A practical contribution guides managers as to designing and operating a NewLaw organisational form. The Thesis suggests these contributions are transferable to other emergent and existing legal and perhaps other professional organisational forms, while the framework of an interpretive scheme and characteristics may assist in moving closer to a definitive definition of the legal organisational form. Finally, it re-examines the label “New” as understood by participants and the claim for the purposeful and innovative NewLaw organisational form as a positive disruption for the legal profession.
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    Organizational innovation: the role of the board of directors in creating dynamic capability
    Hom, Conan Lee ( 2015)
    Major streams of research on non-executive directors ("NEDs") have focused on their relationship with management and their resource provision function. However, when emerging changes go beyond the knowledge and current resources of the organization, such as when the changes are novel to the organization or require innovative responses, organizational dynamic capability -- the ability to sense external threats and opportunities, develop strategies in response, and transform the organization to carry out the strategies -- can be important to the organization's survival. There has been little attention to the role of the NEDs in ensuring organizational dynamic capability, essential as it may be to the organization. This thesis presents a model which offers that dynamic capability oriented activity (activity which, on its face, may influence organization dynamic capability), performed by the NEDs as a group (the board) or by any of the NEDs, predicts organizational dynamic capability performance which in turn predicts overall organization performance. In a survey-based investigation of the first element of the model, this thesis makes several contributions: (1) It provides a way to directly measure board (the NED part) activity and, in doing so, it responds to several decades of academic requests to advance and open new avenues of research on corporate boards by opening up the boardroom black box through direct examination of director activities; (2) it operationalizes the dynamic capability concept empirically along the sensing, seizing, and transformation elements provided by Teece (2007) which to date has mostly been limited to a theoretical concept; (3) it empirically finds that NED activities may exceed their compliance related governance duties and that some of the primary predictors of NED dynamic capability oriented activities may be NED (group) perceptions of the importance of their duties to provide resources, prevent downside events, and create upside potential, and NED (group) perceptions of themselves and the organization; (4) it finds that the relation between the duties and the DC-activities may offer an explanation for ambiguous results of prior studies of agency theory and the board; and (5) it provides empirical support for some of the activities that resource dependence theory presumes to be taking place. Copyright 2016 Conan L. Hom.
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    Customer co-production and its impact on new product success across strategic types
    Theilacker, Max ( 2015)
    The active participation of customers in a firm’s new product development (NPD) processes has long been discussed as a way to increase the alignment between the firm’s market offerings and its customers’ needs and preferences, and is ultimately suggested to create a competitive advantage for the firm. Yet, suggestions for when and how to engage in co-production activities are largely based on theoretical considerations and case-based research that tends to focus on individual methods for customer participation (e.g., focus groups, the lead user method, idea contests), and the according findings are ambiguous at best. This thesis represents one of the first studies to investigate how firms utilize co-production approaches on a larger scale—across different methods, across stages of the NPD process, across different firms, and taking into account internal resources relevant to customer co-production projects. Particularly, the thesis seeks to explain the mixed results found in prior literature by considering the firm’s overarching business strategy (represented by Miles & Snow’s strategic types) as a contingency factor. This dissertation substantially contributes to research on customer participation in NPD processes by integrating a business strategic perspective for the configuration and application of co-production approaches. In two empirical studies, we first investigate the existence of persistent archetypes of co-production approaches (Paper 1, Part A) and the performance implications of utilizing these approaches contingent on the firm’s strategic orientation (Paper 1, Part B). The second study (Paper 2) seeks to consolidate contradicting views on the benefits and impediments of utilizing customer co-production prevalent in prior research. Specifically, we propose that co-production constitutes a form of external (or market-based) slack, which, in combination with internal slack resources can either benefit or diminish the success for NPD projects. Further, we investigate the notion that the modifying influence of internal slack varies for firms following different strategic orientations. We find, in Paper 1, that the success implications of co-production are indeed largely contingent on the firm’s strategic stance. That is, firms that strive for innovative leadership tend to benefit more from utilizing approaches that involve customers in more extensive ways, while less progressive firms tend to benefit more from less extensive co-production approaches. The results of Paper 2 show that co-production is beneficial under low slack conditions but can hamper NPD efficiency and project discipline when internal slack is high—to a point where the negative effects of slack outweigh the positive effects of customer co-production. Consistent with the findings of Paper 1, this effect appears to be more pronounced for firms aiming for innovation leadership and less pronounced given defensive business strategy. Theoretical and practical implications as well as directions for future research are discussed.
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    Redesigning hospital care, an innovation implementation process
    ASHCROFT, MARK ( 2012)
    It is well observed that healthcare in Australia continues to face financial, operational, efficiency, reputation and quality challenges. The establishment of the Redesigning Hospital Care Program (RHCP) by the Department of Health Victoria (Department) in 2008 was commissioned to create a focus on improvements in efficiency, access and service quality innovations, to identify replicable, scalable and transferrable models which could be commissioned across the Victorian health system. Participating HCOs were assisted to assess their readiness for redesign, using a redesign readiness tool, and to inform a return on investment (ROI) discussion. Using a healthcare based total quality management (TQM) framework as a theoretical lens, this study uses multiple cross case analysis to research the success of the RHCP to date, including what has worked effectively and where there are opportunities for project improvement. A semi structured interview process was used for case analysis which followed a disciplined reference to the case protocol. This process was used due to the subject matter and richness and diversity of the case data. Thematic coding based on case interviews, field notes as well as organisational annual quality reports facilitated intra and inter - case / cross case analysis. The analysis of the qualitative data was conducted concurrently with data gathering and triangulated with case participant documents. The study also explores those HCO characteristics identified in the literature, with respect to innovation implementation and change management capacity. The case study organisations represented in this report have been nominated by the Department as exemplars of HCOs that have had varying degrees of success with respect to RHCP implementation to date. Finally, the study describes key elements identified throughout the case analyses, of critical success factors informing the profile of a redesign ready organisation. These findings include a focus on leadership, a commitment to improvement capability and systems, striking a manageable balance between innovation implementation and risk management, and having a clear focus on results through all levels of the organisation. It also identifies recommendations for further study.