Doctoral Scholars
A listing of ICRODSC former doctoral scholars.
University of Melbourne
Belinda Allen
Examining the Identity Processes of Professionals who are Temps: Behavioural and Attitudinal Implications for Work and Careers
Belinda Allen's PhD research examines how temporary employment affects the professional identity, performance, affective reactions and careers of individuals.
Utilising a role identity framework, the primary goal of the research is to integrate the literature on employment status and role identity to achieve a more comprehensive analysis and understanding of temporary workers' perceptions and experiences of their daily work practice.
The research also seeks to explore the subjective process of sense-making which leads to individual constructions of identity and career, with specific attention being given to exploring the notion of a 'boundaryless' career.
It is hoped that ultimately results of the research will be used to generate theories that better reflect the contemporary work experiences of individuals, in particular those individuals who are employed on a temporary basis.
Valerie Cotronei-Baird
An Examination of the Extent that Academics Intergrate Employability Skills in the Business Curriculum
The current economy and labour market is defined by constant change and an increasing emphasis on hiring graduates who possess more than discipline specific knowledge and skills. In this economic climate, universities are now expected to play a role in the development of student’s employability skills.
Yet, despite this expectation, there continues to be a divergence between promotion and practice. Consequently, a graduate skill gap appears to continue as a result of a mismatch between industry skill requirements and the curriculum.
While universities have put in place a range of policies and initiatives that seek to foster a commitment from academics to integrate employability skills within the curriculum, there is less understanding of academic’s actual experiences of integrating employability skills within the curriculum.
The proposed study aims to develop an understanding of what actually happens in practice for an academic asked to integrate graduate employability skills into their curriculum. The methodology proposed is a qualitative research approach which aims to utilise three complementary methods: semi-structured interviews, content analysis and direct observation in order to make sense of academics teaching experiences and practice in the design, delivery and assessment of employability skills of business graduates.
Nicholas B de Weydenthal
Doing Risk Like a State
Emergencies such as bushfires, floods and heatwaves occur frequently in the state of Victoria and their impacts are devastating for people, property, infrastructures and environments. In this context, Nicholas de Weydenthal will explore how risk is used as a device with which governmental departments and agencies organise, in preparing for, responding to and recovering from disastrous events.
Interrogating risk practices empirically and philosophically opens up a range of conduits through which it is possible to analyse how people and places, natures and cultures are ordered and valued in particular ways.
This investigation develops a set of interconnected concepts of (social) science that make up part of the conceptual scaffolding for the concept of risk which, when opened up from the inside, shows how the state is 'done' in new ways.
Shelley Domberger
The Social Construction of Career: A Comparative Case Study
The definition of a career has been a source of continuous debate within the careers literature. Researchers have often assumed that career is synonymous with advancement in an organisational hierarchy. More recently, it has been suggested that a career can encompass a more varied set of work experiences, including those which occur outside organisations.
Shelley Domberger's thesis will explore how the concept of career comes to take on such meanings. Particularly, the research will compare how two occupational groups – life coaches and counselling psychologists – socially construct the meaning of career. It will also explore how individuals within these two groups create a story of their own career, and to what extent they must negotiate with prevalent meanings of career in the telling of this story.
Graham Dwyer
Public Inquiry Sense-making in Victorian Emergency Management Organisations
The organisation studies literature has recently encouraged scholars to research how sense-making can be understood from a prospective rather than a retrospective standpoint, especially when significant and damaging disasters are triggered by turbulent environments.
This study therefore examines sense-making by emergency organisations that deal with bushfires in Victoria and, specifically, how they made sense of the Royal Commission on the Black Saturday bushfires with a view to preventing such emergencies in the future.
Using an interpretive and qualitative methodology, the study will examine three gaps in the literature. Firstly, how do emergency management professionals implement recommendations from natural disasters emanating from public inquiries, and what role does sense-making play in this? Secondly, how do cognitive loading and associated emotions influence the sensemaking process associated with implementing recommendations in such organisations? Thirdly, does hierarchy influence the sense-making process in these organisations?
Peter Fleming
Cass Business School, City University, London
Peter Fleming completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2004, being awarded the Chancellors Award for Excellence for his PhD thesis.
Before joining the Judge Institute, Peter held academic positions at the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the University of Melbourne (Australia).
His research interests include the historical, economic and cultural dimensions of contemporary work patterns, with a special emphasis on the critical analysis of organisational politics, conflict and democracy.
Paul Finn
Entrepreneurship as Organisational and Social Creativity
The aim of the research is to extend the boundaries of entrepreneurship theory and practice by reframing ‘entrepreneurship as managerial economic activity’ to ‘entrepreneurship as organisational and social creativity’.
In doing so, the research seeks to distance entrepreneurship from how it has become represented in enterprise discourse, namely as a rationalised form of profit-making and a particular form of self-governance.
Instead, entrepreneurship becomes a more critical and reflective process that creates a space for play or invention within an established order of things. This space allows for the actualisation of new practices that creatively (re)organise ideas, materials and actions.
These practices stimulate new forms of thinking and behaving through the creative destruction and reconstruction of previously unquestioned norms and activities. Entrepreneurship within this context becomes ‘entrepreneuring’: a form of social and organisational creativity, linking different actants in different ways.
Primo Garcia
Shifting Organisational Identities in a University: A Discursive Perspective
The mainstream literature has portrayed organisational identity in functionalist terms, despite claims of identity being social. It is argued that the theoretical and empirical depictions of organisational identity are problematic as they marginalize the social construction processes involved in organisational identity construction and organisational identification processes.
In this way, they ignore the fragmentation, instability, and complexity of organisational identity, as well as the role of power in identity construction.
To address these problems, this research will adopt discourse analysis to investigate the nature of organisational identities and identifications in a university setting, unpack the relationship between individual and organisational identities, and identify the material practices that arise from the identity construction and identification processes.
Lauren Gurrieri
The Social Construction of Cool: Implications for Organisations and Consumers
Cool has become one of the dominant ideologies of contemporary consumer capitalism and the favoured language of popular and consumer culture. However despite its pervasiveness, cool remains an elusive concept.
Based on a conceptualisation of cool as a social construct, established and maintained in part by language, this thesis aims to understand how meanings of cool can be constructed in organisational and consumption discourses.
The particular actors that are the focus of this research are cool-hunting agencies, a new type of marketing organisation that purports to be able to interpret youth and consumer culture and use this knowledge to construct a brand as being cool, the organisational clients that employ them and the consumers who are the focus of their efforts.
The research has two primary aims - to integrate the wide and fragmented literatures on cool, so as to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the topic, and to overcome the gap between the growing recognition of the importance of cool for practitioners and the limited number of academic studies on the topic.
Steve Jaynes
A Discursive Approach to Strategic Change
This study develops a discourse approach to examine how processes of change are shaped and effected in strategy. This approach is based on a model of change that is designed to investigate how discourses construct an organisational 'reality' and produce identities and subject positions for employees.
This model is applied to study a financial services organisation, in which the acceptance, appropriation and rejection of strategy discourse is explored in the context of a strategic change program. These discursive processes are viewed as central to the enactment of change.
The development of a discursive approach is argued to bring explanatory value and critical insight to the study of strategic change in organisations, which is not provided by the mainstream approaches. The contribution that this approach promises lies in its study of language to explore how discourses pervade and inform the lives and experiences of people in organisations, in ways that are often taken for granted.
Nuzhat Lotia
Department of Management & Marketing, University of Melbourne
Nuzhat Lotia's research examines the learning process within collaborations from a critical perspective and attempts to explore the implications of power for the process of learning.
The central argument is that the processes of collaboration and learning within collaborations are inherently influenced by dynamics of power that result as a consequence of the interactions among collaborating organisations.
Her research presents a theoretical basis for considering the impact of power on the learning process at the collaboration level and set forth some propositions that provide an agenda for future research.
Muhammad Nadeem Dogar
Leadership Change Management Approaches in Social Sector Organisations in Pakistan
The aim of this research is to study leadership change management approaches in the social sector of Pakistan, including to identify the nature of the change management, to assess and analyse the leadership strategy for managing the change, and to assess the impact of the leadership of the change management on the various stakeholders involved.
A qualitative study of three case studies will be conducted in order to identify insights (strengths and weaknesses, success stories and failures, facilitation and exploitation of human capital) into change management practices.
Interviews will be conducted with leaders to find out relevant information about their change management approach and focused group discussion will be conducted to engage other team members to find out their concerns, while interviews will be conducted with key stakeholders. The different cases will then be subjected to comparative analysis to identify factors related to different leadership success and failures.
Daniel Nyberg
Organisational Culture as Practices
Understanding organisational culture has become increasingly important for organisations after recent corporate scandals and the entrance of the term into corporate law. The dominant perspectives on organisational culture are unable to satisfactorily explain the production and reproduction of organisational culture.
This research aims to respond to these weaknesses by researching organisational culture as practices. This shifts the focus from stable and static symbols to fluid and dynamic nexuses of actions.
The case study investigation uses direct observations, document analysis and interviews to explore how organisational culture processes are produced and maintained over time.
Zelinna Pablo
Towards a Power-Based Interpretation of ICT in Organisations
This study draws from social constructionism from a critical perspective to argue that information and communications technology (ICT) in organisations is not predominantly a material phenomenon, but is largely subjectively interpreted and appropriated through emergent patterns of use that are underpinned by socially negotiated meanings.
It is also argued that ICT in organisations is continuously socially constructed, such that the dichotomy between design and implementation is analytical rather than ontological, that resulting interpretations are heterogenous and conflicting (albeit coexisting) rather than consensual, and that such interpretations are (re)created based on power dynamics among different stakeholders.
It is proposed that the study be grounded through an ethnographic study of specific areas of the Development Gateway, which is a web-based, knowledge-intensive virtual organisation enmeshed in a complex network of stakeholder relationships.
Kanti Pertiwi
Business Relationships with Government in Indonesia: What does Corruption Mean?
Corruption is commonly seen as the root cause to social problems around the world. The mainstream literature discusses corruption by focusing on the individual (bad apples), the organisation (bad barrels), and the society (bad larder) as contributing factors to corruption.
Moreover, it treats corruption as having an inherent ‘dysfunctional’ characteristic and that it results from the inability of individuals to ‘reason’ and subsequently act otherwise. Unlike mainstream research, this study acknowledges the importance of individuals’ construction of corruption and the complex way in which context influences individuals to engage in corruption.
The research focuses on the variety of meanings of corruption ascribed by business actors while being embedded in their cultural settings. The study adopts an interpretivist perspective, which will allow the study of intersubjective meanings of corruption to actors situated in context, and will contribute to the organisational corruption literature by furthering the understanding of the nature of corruption and how actors arrive at a behaviour many label as corrupt.
Dean Pierides
Institutions, Organisations and Expertise in the Field of Emergency Management
On Saturday, February 7, many people died and many more suffered across the Australian state of Victoria as sweltering weather and bushfires overwhelmed the land and its inhabitants.
Dean Pierides is researching how emergencies such as this one pose organisational problems for management, those attempting to institutionalise, resist or evade the project of managing society and nature, as well as those producing knowledge about such management.
This study assembles an institutional analysis of the rise and legitimacy of emergency management as a response to disaster, a critique of this analysis as an account of organisation, and makes a case for the centrality of organisation studies and management in policy interventions that seek to reduce vulnerabilities.
Heather Round
Organisational Creativity
Understanding creativity and innovation has become increasingly important for organisations operating in a dynamic and increasingly competitive environment.
Much of the research to date has adopted a positivist approach, focusing on the products of the creative process as well as measuring factors that influence these products. To complement this understanding of organisational creativity, this study aims to explore organisational creativity and innovation from a social constructionist perspective.
The case study investigation uses direct observations, document analysis and interviews how creativity is defined, the social process of producing a creative artefact and the unintended consequences of this process.
Andre Spicer
Cass Business School, City University London
Andre Spicer is a professor in organisational behaviour at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom after gaining his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2004.
His research examines the rise and contestation of globalisation discourse in Australia's largest public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and he has published in Organization, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Ephemera and Philosophy and Management.
The main focus of his research is examining organisations as spaces of political movement and struggle. This involves a number of research projects including the developing a 'post Foucauldian' theory of power and resistance, examining the mobilisation of discourse during port disputes, charting the organisation of new social movements, and looking at the struggle around organisational space.
Dinuka Wijetunga
The Social Construction of Technology in a Consumer Culture
Current literature on the social construction of technology is predominantly focused on processes that are assumed to be moving towards the stabilization of an artefact with regard to its meaning and functions.
In this research, it is argued that a technology could also develop through processes that perpetuate interpretative flexibility, where the artefact never really stabilizes. It is also argued that this phenomenon could be prominently visible in the context of a consumer culture, where the market and consumption plays a dominant role in social processes.
The symbolic aspects of consumption characteristic of a consumer culture provide many avenues to increase the interpretative flexibility of an artefact. Technological products in particular have associated connotations of novelty and progress that support the perpetuation of interpretative flexibility. Both marketing and consumption contribute to this meaning creation. Hence, this research will study the dynamics between marketing and consumption in relation to the social construction of mobile telephones.
University of Sydney
Mina Askovic
Corporate volunteering: The karmic paycheck?
Corporate volunteering is a topic of growing importance in workplaces around the world, with increasing numbers of workplaces supporting employee volunteering programs as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) objectives. Activities that increase a company’s CSR objectives are those that take into account multiple stakeholders, maximizing performance in not only a company’s financial, but social goals. Yet, most of the evidence about the benefits of corporate volunteer programs is anecdotal. This research will add to our understanding of corporate volunteering and its role in creating shared value for organizations, not-for-profits (NFPs) and the communities they serve. It is being undertaken with the Credit Union Foundation of Australia, a NFP working with communities in the Asia-Pacific region to lift them out of poverty by developing and supporting financial cooperatives.
Maegan Baker
Entrepreneurial capacity building in indigenous communities: an engaged critical realist approach to collaborative social empowerment
The complex environment of Australian social policy development and implementation has contributed to the historical and ongoing marginalisation of Indigenous Australian populations. The proliferation of identity constructs have further reinforced this marginalisation, and a relatively undeveloped social discourse has created false dichotomies between the idealised positions of being Indigenous and being Australian. When generalised statistics concerning Indigenous Australians are considered comparative to national data, vast gaps in education, employment, health and welfare all point to a need to re-examine these dichotomies from multiple perspectives as a precursor to meaningful social change. The initial objective of this research is to examine whether entrepreneurship can provide a space to collaboratively engage in this re-examination. The subsequent objective is to actively use entrepreneurial education as a mechanism by which to co-develop and co-facilitate the achievement of business objectives that concurrently reorient understandings of identities and how they interact with values, beliefs and behaviours at a broader socio-political level. The final objective is to determine whether and how this approach may translate to different contexts in the instance it is agreed by participants to have been successful.
Max Baker
Enabling Strategic CSR with the Use of Accounting
Max’s thesis explores the role of accounting in enabling Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) within a large packaging company.
This exploration takes on three different perspectives: functional, critical, and a post-modern perspective. In utilising a functional view, the research explores how this case study organisation uses new forms of accounting to promote CSR.
These new forms of accounting include performance metrics, operating procedures and strategy documents, which enable a set of business initiatives that were both socially responsible and profitable.
In utilising a critical view, the research then explores the tensions in the organisation between these new forms of accounting and more traditional uses of accounting, which focus strictly on financial performance.
The aim of this critical view is to see whether these new forms of accounting provide – or fail to provide – a level of accountability to key stakeholders. Lastly, Max uses a post-modern view to explore the subjective effects of CSR as it is implemented through these new forms of accounting. This third perspective explores how CSR and these new forms of accounting can change the way individuals identify with their organisation’s financial goals.
Fannie Couture
Tackling Grand Challenges Through Multi-Sectoral Collaborations
Fannie’s thesis is focusing on understanding how organizations respond to complex strategic issues transcending organizational boundaries. Managing the implications of such ‘wicked problems’ are increasingly critical for firms and their leaders. Examples of such challenges include food, water and energy security; climate change (Lê, 2013); political instability and terrorism; disaster and environmental resilience; poverty and inequality; etc. The sheer magnitude and scope of these issues mean that organizations often form meta-organisational collaborative arrangements to address these problems innovatively. Fannie’s research focuses on one such arrangement: a cross-industry partnership involving NGOs, mining firms, an agriculture consortium, government regulatory bodies, universities and a consultancy firm, that is seeking to monitor and report the cumulative impact of the human footprint on an Australian water system. This Basin is of critical strategic importance to the region, including the organizations involved. Fannie focuses particularly on how members of this cross-industry collaboration delimit, manage and strategize around meta-problems while simultaneously attempting to build trust, facilitate collaboration between partners and learn from both successes and failures. This research project is designed to produce clear and inspiring insight into the practices and processes through which cross-industry groups learn about and attempt to tackle wicked problems.
Jarryd Daymond
The multimodality of strategy work: How practices of materiality and discourse combine in the strategy process
This research adopts a multimodal lens to explore how materiality and discourse combine in the strategy process. Multimodality recognises and embraces the semiocity of strategy work and therefore can provide insight into the strategy-materiality nexus by demonstrating how different modes of materiality combine in strategy work. This research continues the tradition of integrating discursive scholarship with the theoretical domain of sociomateriality. The approach addresses the underlying problem of how actors discursively use and react to strategy materials such that they facilitate group sensemaking and discourse-crafting organisational activities.
Stephanie Dunk
Towards an ethic of economic relations
Using the food industry as an entry into economic relationships more broadly, Stephanie’s thesis suggests that purchasing is always an ethical act, and that the ethics are constantly negotiated. The thesis represents a gesture towards an ethic of economic relationships based on the mutual obligations of citizenship rather than the individual utility-maximising of a company/consumer relationship. Finding both the Corporate Social Responsibility literature and the consumer behaviour literature narrowly focused in the responsibilities of the company and consumer respectively, it turns to the work of philosopher Martin Buber to explain the construction of the self in relationship with nature. This will frame the empirical work which is to come.
Gaia Grant
How top management teams experience paradoxical demands in strategising for sustainable innovation
Rapid change and complex contemporary environments have led to inherent ambiguities and related tensions in organisations. This can be particularly challenging where there are conflicting goals or needs, which can lead to the need to simultaneously deal with multiple paradoxical tensions. The push towards the need for innovative new ideas and products (eg through breakthrough innovation) can, for example, conflict with the need to manage and improve on current systems and practices (eg through incremental innovation). This is known in the literature as an exploration / exploitation innovation paradox. Simultaneously, the need for sustainability over the long term can conflict with the need to drive through profitability for stakeholders. There is a clear need for top management teams to identify and address these tensions for sustainable innovation and growth. This study identifies specific tensions relating to sustainable innovation paradoxes that emerge over time and explores how top management teams make sense of the competing demands.
Janine Holgate
Governance Arrangements for Enterprise Information Protection: An Australian Critical Infrastructure Perspective
The protection of corporate information assets within rapidly changing business, regulatory and technical environments presents a considerable challenge to organisations of all kinds.
This work provides an interdisciplinary examination and analyses of the theoretical contributions to information protection governance (IPG) made in different disciplinary domains and examines the institutionalisation of IPG in organisations.
Susan V. Keyes-Pearce
IT Value Management in Leading Firms: The Fit Between Theory and Practice (Awarded the 2006 ACPHIS Information Systems PhD Medal)
This research addresses the perpetual problem raised by many firms of how to improve management of value from information technology (IT), particularly from strategic IT-enabled initiatives.
The research specifically addresses the question of how firms leading in B2B (business-to-business) e-business can improve the management of value from IT. It focuses on value identification, creation and capture from strategic IT-enabled business initiatives such as e-business.
Sarah Kim
Post Merger Integration in Professional Service Firms
This doctoral research relates to post-merger integration in professional service firms. Over the past decade, there has been a wave of mergers and acquisitions across a number of industries. However, the relevant literature suggests that almost two-thirds of all merger deals fail to deliver their intended benefits.
A key theme of the existing literature is that the way in which the integration process is managed can have a significant impact on the relative success of merger and acquisitions.
The object of this thesis is to investigate the role that post-merger integration phase plays in determining merger outcomes in professional service firms - specifically accounting and consulting firms- and examine the factors associated directly or indirectly with the integration that impact on overall merger success.
It is expected that this study will provide insights into post-merger integration process both in the professional service firms and more generally.
Sebastian Kinne
Discourse and the Construction of Corporate Culture: Professional Service Firm Amalgamations
This thesis explores the role that discourse plays in the social construction of corporate cultural change.
Professional Service Firm Amalgamations have been chosen as the context for the study for two reasons.
Firstly, Professional Service Firms, due to their unique features and characteristics are believed to exhibit 'strong cultures' and secondly, organisational amalgamations are seen as among the most intense moments of organisational/cultural change.
A distinct analytical focus on language and how social realities like culture are brought to life through its use is believed to enhance our understanding, not only of organisational cultural change processes during Professional Service Firm Amalgamations, but may also yield insights that could contribute to organisation culture literature more generally.
Jane Gyung-Sook Lee
The Experiences of Immigrant Female Korean Workers in the Australian Labour Market: A Narrative Analysis
This research explores the labour market experiences of Korean migrant women in Australia, aiming to hear their otherwise unheard accounts.
Through discourse and narrative analysis of interviews with 30 women in their native language, the research both resists and embellishes existing conceptions of barriers to labour market participation for Asian migrant women.
Existing research suggests two main barriers to the Australian labour market for these women: English language skills and cultural and historical notions of identity and femininity.
The research investigates to what degree these two barriers are a discernable external reality, limiting and shaping the behaviour of Korean migrant women in Australia.
It also aims to hear their individual stories and interpretive realities (perceptions) to allow for alternative conceptualisations of the Australian labour market.
Helena Liu
Leadership through Crisis
Since August 2008, a 'global financial crisis' discourse has thrown economies into heightened states of anxiety and uncertainty.
One consequence of this has been that business leaders in the banking sector in particular have experienced increased media attention, and in some cases, shifts in how they are portrayed.
This research examines the ways in which leadership images of CEOs in the Australian banking sector are constructed in the print media before and after the financial crisis.
In recognising that media discourse increasingly employs visual devices in addition to the written text to convey meaning, the analysis of media texts will encompass the visual elements of layout design and photography in its interpretation of leadership image portrayal.
Sujatha Rao
The impact of Professional Contractual Work on Knowledge Management Practices within Organisations
This research seeks to explore the knowledge sharing behaviours of professionals employed as contractors within organisations.
In the contemporary workplace there is an increasing reliance on knowledge workers, while at the same time there is an increased prevalence of non-standard employment practices including contract work, particularly among professionals.
This research aims to integrate the literature on professional work, transient employment and knowledge management, by determining the conditions under which organisations can capture and utilise the knowledge of professional contractors and the conditions under which professional contractors contribute to the knowledge of the organisation.
It is expected that the study will contribute to a better understanding of the changing nature of employment and knowledge management practices of professionals within organisations.
Fanny Salignac
Reconciling Ethical and Profit-seeking Behaviour? A Discourse Analysis of the Fair Trade Movement
Fairtrade can be understood in terms of its primary aim of reducing the gap between rich and poor countries via the creation of an alternative market that provides fairer price and trading conditions for third world producers.
In both the academic and popular press, the fair trade phenomenon has been dominated by the debate between supporters and critics.
Those against argue that nothing could be more fair than free trade, and that fairness is not a characteristic that prices convey.
On the other hand, the advocates of fair trade focus on the idea of justice and the moral righteousness of the alternative market, aiming at a socially responsible and sustainable world trade.
This research goes beyond the debate between free and fair trade by examining fair trade as a socially constructed discourse. In particular, it focuses on how retailers that participate in the fair trade movement construct their behaviour as fair using comparative case studies.
Tony Stapledon
Offices as Tools for Organisational Sustainability
This cross-disciplinary doctoral research explores links between organisational sustainability and office-based working environments.
It investigates key areas of concern to directors and managers seeking competitive advantage through the development of sustainability as an organisational competency and an intangible asset, including organisational purpose, culture, identity and image, change, learning and innovation and corporate social responsibility.
The research is centred on a case study of the world's leading firm in corporate sustainability, examining its search for sustainability and how it is using a major new office co-location project to enhance those characteristics common to sustainable firms.
Its approach is compared and contrasted with that of other high rating firms within Australia, using data derived from about 40 semi-structured interviews with employees at executive and senior management levels and with the firms' design and workplace consultants, and from various publications of and about the firms.
Paul Scifleet
Making Sense of the Digital Content Object: A Common Denominator for Discourse
Paul's research focuses on the phenomena of changing human communication that is present in the widespread re-engineering of documents, and categorisation of digital content that is occurring within many different types of organisations, as they adapt to the management of information resources that are primarily digital in form.
The study investigates the challenges organisations face in digital document design and the impact that underlying architectures for semantic information systems are having on information management in practice.
Jeaney Yip
Branded Religion: the Discursive Construction of a Mega-Church's Corporate Identity through Artefacts and Performance
Jeaney's thesis explores the corporate identity construction process of a mega-church through its artefacts, practice and performance.
Mega-churches are a secularised form of religious organisation which, in highly developed societies, is often perceived to be a product of modernity.
This has led to the commodification of religion but the process of just how religion becomes a branded product which is consumed remains unclear.
This doctoral research explores how churches, as fluid organisations, are required to construct a marketable and polysemic corporate identity amidst competition from alternative spiritual providers and declining religious trends.
Using discourse analysis with a focus on language and semiotics, the thesis demonstrates how contemporary church artefacts such as music are both culturally and organisationally constructed. In other words, how theology, secular and organisational discourses are reconciled in a church brand.