Open Journal Systems at the Victoria University of Wellington Library
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The Future of Public Service and Strategy Management-at-Scale
Get PDFIncreasingly, government agencies and non-profit organisations are called on to address challenges that go well beyond any individual organisation’s boundaries and direct control. Strategic management for single organisations cannot respond effectively to these crossboundary, cross-level, and often cross-sector challenges. Instead, a new approach called strategy management-at-scale is required. This article compares strategic management with strategy managementat-scale. It responds to the question, what does strategy managementat-scale look like, and what seems to contribute to its success? The new approach helps foster – but hardly guarantees – direction, alignment and commitment among the multiple organisations and groups needed to make headway against the challenge
Epistemic freedom and situated theoretical perspectives in accounting research in African contexts
Get PDFPurpose: This essay advocates for epistemic freedom and the development of situated theoretical perspectives in accounting research relevant to African contexts. The paper underscores the urgent need to move away from the dominance of Global North frameworks, which often impose ethnocentric perspectives on African accounting practices, and foster research grounded in Africa's socio-political, economic, and cultural realities. The essay argues for the critical need for context-specific theorising in African accounting informed by African intellectual traditions.
Methodology: The paper is a reflective essay that intends to decolonise the study of accounting in Africa, allowing for more relevant and diverse insights into the continent's accounting practices and phenomena. It encourages African scholars to embrace their own intellectual heritage and contribute original, contextually grounded theories to the field.
Findings: The essay outlines that despite the increasing attention paid to African contexts, most accounting and finance research on Africa applies Global North theoretical frameworks without considering African countries' specific socio-cultural and political contexts. This results in a limited understanding of Africa’s accounting and finance practices and phenomena. The findings highlight the importance of African scholars taking inspiration from local intellectual traditions, philosophers, and social theorists to develop more relevant theoretical frameworks. The paper suggests drawing upon frameworks from prominent African intellectuals to shape more relevant and contextually grounded research.
Implications (optional): By advocating epistemic freedom, the paper encourages African scholars to rethink and reshape accounting theories to suit their contexts better, resisting the colonial legacy in academic research. The paper finally calls for a decolonial approach to finance and accounting research, urging a shift from the imposition of Global North theories to creating knowledge that reflects Africa’s realities.
Originality: This essay's originality lies in its emphasis on decolonising accounting research by fostering situated theoretical perspectives based on African contexts. It highlights the gap in African accounting research and proposes a movement toward epistemic freedom. Furthermore, it advocates for embracing African philosophical and intellectual contributions, a novel approach that challenges the dominant Global North paradigms in accounting research
Legislating for Gene Technologies: a Māori view of the hazardous substances and new organisms act
Get PDFIn Aotearoa New Zealand, gene technology is currently governed by the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996. Recent Tiriti-led research has resulted in nationwide collaborations with mana whenua towards the culturally inclusive development of gene technology for invasive species management. This article reviews the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act’s fitness for purpose from a Māori and Tiriti perspective. We make recommendations for future legislative review, including that regulation and policy ‘give effect to’ te Tiriti/the Treaty, that whakapapa and mauri considerations are accounted for in gene technology regulation, and that cultural impact assessments are based on whakapapa and mauri
Silencing Universities by Stealth: An Invisible Consequence of our University Crisis
Get PDFIndependent, well-informed experts from academia largely serve as bastions of evidence-based social and scientific commentary, ensuring integrity and accuracy amidst the deluge of false narratives. However, although it is enshrined in the legislature that universities should act as a critic and conscience of Aotearoa New Zealand, this role provides limited financial benefits to the university's bottom line. As financial drivers have become more influential in determining what is taught and how staff spend their time, this public good, which has always been on the periphery of staff tasks, is slowly disappearing. As an example, academics at Massey University have previously been active and vocal researchers, educators, and critics of the state of freshwater in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, Professor Russell Death and Dr Mike Joy, who have led the freshwater ecology team, have now both been pressured to leave, so in 2024, Massey University will no longer teach any courses in freshwater ecology. Neither of us was made redundant or directly asked to leave, but the constantly shifting teaching pressures and altered managerial priorities have left us both at Massey without time and/or support to continue our community outreach and public engagement. We will provide examples of the difficulty of being a critic and conscience at a university where the financial bottom line is the key imperative. Unfortunately, the dwindling number of freshwater ecology graduates being trained and the lack of critical commentary on Aotearoa New Zealand's freshwater crisis may go largely unnoticed. We believe the current university crisis will exacerbate the loss of this essential public good, with few people even aware of what has been lost
Poles Apart? Eileen Duggan and Katherine Mansfield
Get PDFAt first glance, there might seem to be few connections between Katherine Mansfield and her younger contemporary, Eileen Duggan, despite occasional critical efforts to link them within a tradition of women’s writing in New Zealand. The differences between the two women, in their lives and in their writing, are striking. In spite of those marked differences, Duggan wrote about Mansfield on a number of occasions and with considerable sympathy. One interesting connection between the two can be found in their youthful responses to two remote and controversial Polish figures – the writer Stanislaw Wyspianski and the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. In this article, I consider Mansfield’s “To Stanislaw Wyspianski” and Duggan’s “Rosa Luxemburg”, noting the very different circumstances of their composition, and suggesting what might have appealed to each of the poets in the subjects they chose to write about
Changing language hierarchies and ideologies in New Zealand dual language picturebooks: 1973-2020
Get PDFAotearoa New Zealand is a multilingual country with three official languages, Te Reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language, and English. The presence of Māori and English in picturebooks published in New Zealand between 1973 and 2020 offers a method of exploring and documenting the changing language hierarchies and ideologies across a 47-year period. This is of particular importance because of the contribution of children’s literature to developing language attitudes in child and adult readers. In this article, a sociolinguistic lens called Linguistic Landscape is used to analyse a sample of seven picturebooks, showing how picturebooks reflect language beliefs and attitudes to official yet minority languages in an English-dominant society. The picturebooks are analysed in terms of the relative space and dominance afforded each language. Links to language status in law and education are examined exploring the potential of picturebooks as a source for the study of changing language hierarchies and ideologies
Christian-Māoriesque – A Transcultural Pictorial Artform
Get PDFThis exploration develops the field of intercultural aesthetics by exploring the use of Māori motifs used by non-Māori artists, and looking at the use of those motifs in the context of Christian art.[i] It surveys a selection of paintings that blend Māori and Christian motifs, and critically evaluates their interculturality. It then looks at how intercultural artworks of religious subject matter can create an instance of pictorial transculturality. An identity for an artistic cross-fertilization between Christianity, Māoritanga, and Pākehā culture is linked with the defining principle of transculturality, and a new term is suggested to categorise this identity, the Christian-Māoriesque.
[i] By “non-Māori artists” I mean all artists who do not identify as Māori, that is, who do not have whakapapa
Modern Architecture and the Pioneers: Paul Pascoe and the New Zealand House, 1933–1950
Get PDFThe publication of the Group Manifesto, “On the Necessity of Architecture,” in 1948 is widely regarded as a defining moment in New Zealand architectural history. The Group’s ideal of a modern architecture shaped by the environment of their own country was, however, anticipated in the pre-war writings and subsequent buildings of the Christchurch architect, Paul Pascoe (1908–1976). Although unacknowledged by the younger generation of modernists, Pascoe highlighted unexpected parallels between colonial primitivism and modernist functionalism and helped to shape the intellectual climate in which architectural modernism developed in New Zealand during the post-war period
Gordon Crook: Banners and Wall Hangings
Get PDFGordon Crook was a British textile artist who came to live in Wellington in 1972, aged 51. Through contacts at the Dowse Art Museum and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Crook was commissioned by the architect Miles Warren to make banners for the New Zealand Chancery in Washington D.C. (1979–80), followed by banners and wall hangings for the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington (1981–83). Crook’s work was suigeneric, idiosyncratic in its imagery and development, a world feeding on itself. Outside any national or current artworld style, Crook extended and enriched New Zealand’s public visual art scene.[i]
[i] See my three articles on the work of Gordon Crook: “Gordon Crook: tapestries,” Tuhinga 31 (2020): 70–90; “Gordon Crook: The Pastel Triptychs,” Tuhinga 32 (2021): 120–34; and “Gordon Crook and the Wolf-Man,” Tuhinga 33 (2022): 1–29
Cabbages, Crumble and Sky Talk: Environmental and Planetary Issues in Art – Aotearoa New Zealand
Get PDFThe article describes changed approaches to environmental art in the face of our changing environment. Susan Ballard’s Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (2022) and Janine Randerson’s Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art (2018) propose that changed environmental conditions require, and are generating, new subject matter and new ways of making art. Their ideas are discussed in relation to an early example of public art, Barry Thomas’s Vacant Lot of Cabbages (1978), and works chosen from the oeuvre of Marilynn Webb (1937–2021), who saw her art as acts of spiritual and political protection of the land. The writing of Bridget Reweti in the recent exhibition catalogue Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills (2024) casts new light on Webb’s engagement with Māori understandings of the land
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