Management and Marketing - Theses
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ItemWe have not lived long enough: sensemaking and learning from bushfires in Australia( 2017)Why did the bushfires of 7 February 2009 in Victoria take so many lives? Why were those bushfires so extreme, so feral, so catastrophic, so devastating? What can be done to ensure that so many lives are not lost, that so much devastation is not caused, in such bushfires in the future? (Parliament of Victoria, Opening Remarks, Chair of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, 2009: 1) Victoria, Australia, is arguably the most fire-prone area in the world. Increasingly, with climate change, atmospheric scientists claim that we are experiencing longer drought periods, higher wind speeds and warmer temperatures which are giving rise to a greater bushfire threat in an already extremely bushfire-prone environment. Given such circumstances, it is likely that Victoria’s emergency management organisations will increasingly find themselves responding to bushfires characterised as complex, harmful and rare. Therefore, my study seeks to understand how emergency management organisations make sense of and learn from bushfires in Victoria so that they can be better prepared for bushfires in the future. To do so, I focus on the Royal Commission, which followed the “Black Saturday” bushfires, commonly referred to as Australia’s worst ever natural disaster. My study comprises a qualitative and interpretive methodology to explore how emergency management organisations implement recommendations emanating from public inquiries, and the role that sensemaking plays in this. In addition, given the devastating impact that disasters such as bushfires can have, I also explore how emotions influence the sensemaking process associated with implementing recommendations in such organisations. Through this dual-focused approach I build new theory in relation to the ways in which individuals in organisations make sense of and learn from public inquiry recommendations after disasters, while highlighting the role of both negative and positive emotions in this process.
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ItemToward an organisational theory of surprises: Institutions and uncertainty in Australian emergency management( 2016)How organisations deal with uncertainty is a core concern in organisation theory. This thesis examines the institutional sources of this problem by investigating emergency management organisations, focusing on the Australian State of Victoria. It shows how contradictions between different logics generate paradoxes that can be made evident in organisations when unpredictable events occur. It argues that developing a better understanding of ‘surprises’ is crucial for improving organisational decision-making in emergency management in particular, and for all organisations in general.
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ItemOrganizational innovation: the role of the board of directors in creating dynamic capability( 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.