Playing catch up? An exploration of supplementary work at home among Australian public servants

Working at home has conventionally been understood as a formal, employer-sanctioned flexibility or ‘telework’ arrangement adopted primarily to promote work–life balance. However, work at home is now most commonly performed outside of normal working hours on an informal, ad hoc basis, to prepare for or catch up on tasks workers usually perform in the workplace. Scholarly assessment of this type of work has been sparse. To fill this gap, we undertook secondary analysis of a large data set, the Australian Public Service Employee Census, to explore the personal and organisational factors associated with middle-level managers regularly taking work home to perform outside of and in addition to their usual working hours. We conceptualise this as ‘supplementary work’. The analysis shows how supplementary work is a flexibility practice associated with high workloads and poor organisational supports for work–life balance, distinguishing it from other forms of home-based work. Whereas previous studies have not found gendered effects, we found women with caring responsibilities had higher odds of performing supplementary work. These findings expand understandings of contemporary flexibility practices and the factors that affect them, and underline the need for more nuanced theories of working at home

Representative bureaucracy and unconscious bias: Exploring the unconscious dimension of active representation

Representative bureaucracy theory explores the effects of representation on bureaucracies, but less attention has been paid to date as to how agents represent values or interests. Addressing this omission, this article highlights the unconscious dimension of active representation and, more specifically, the role of unconscious bias in representation. Unconscious bias has received limited attention to date in public administration, but has clear relevance for understanding how representation occurs at the individual level. This article proposes a framework for understanding unconscious bias. Drawing on Bourdieu's habitus, but making explicit its unconscious dimension, I argue that unconscious bias enhances our understanding of how active representation occurs in bureaucracies today. The article applies these insights to the case of unconscious gender bias as found in the Australian Public Service (APS) and concludes by exploring the methodological challenges involved in building a research agenda into tackling unconscious bias

Neuroliberalism:Cognition, context, and the geographical bounding of rationality

Focusing on the rise of the behavioural sciences within the design and implementation of public policy, this paper introduces the concept of neuroliberalism and suggests that it could offer a creative context within which to interpret related governmental developments. Understanding neuroliberaism as a system of government that targets the more-than rational aspects of human behaviour, this paper considers the particular contribution that geographical theories of context and spatial representation can make to a critical analysis of this evolving governmental project.authorsversionPeer reviewe

The impact of employee level and work stress on mental health and GP service use: an analysis of a sample of Australian government employees

BACKGROUND: This study sought to identify the extent to which employee level and work stressors were associated with mental health problems experienced by Australian government employees, and with their use of primary care services. METHODS: 806 government employees aged between 40 and 44 years were surveyed as part of an epidemiological study conducted in Australia. Data collected from participants included sociodemographic attributes, physical health, psychological measures and work stressors relating to job control, job demands, job security and skills discretion at work. For 88% of these participants, information on visits made to general practitioners (GPs) for the six months before and after their survey interview was obtained from health insurance records. RESULTS: When work stress and personal factors were taken into account, men at more junior levels reported better mental health, more positive affect and used fewer GP services. Women at middle-management levels obtained less GP care than their more senior counterparts. Both men and women who reported higher levels of work stress were found to have poorer mental health and well-being. The impact of such stressors on GP service use, however, differed for men and women. CONCLUSION: Measures of work stress and not employee level affect the mental health and well-being of government employees. For governments with responsibility for funding health care services, reducing work stress experienced by their own employees offers potential benefits by improving the health of their workforce and reducing outlays for such services

Mechanisms for inclusive governance

How mechanisms for inclusive governance are understood is built on the framing choices that are made about governance and that which is being governed. This chapter unpacks how governance can be understood and considers different historical and contemporary framings of water governance. A framing of “governance as praxis” is developed as a central element in the chapter. What makes governance inclusive is explored, drawing on theoretical, practical and institutional aspects before elucidating some of the different mechanisms currently used or proposed for creating inclusive water governance (though we argue against praxis based on simple mechanism). Finally, the factors that either constrain or enable inclusive water governance are explored with a focus on systemic concepts of learning and feedback

Heuristics for practitioners of policy design: Rules-of-thumb for structuring unstructured problems

This article is an attempt to bridge the divide between academics and practitioners. Informed by both design theory and the reality of policy work, its focus is on ‘problems’. From a practitioners’ perspective, policy design is both an intellectual and political process, an inevitable oscillation between ‘puzzling’ and ‘powering’, in which ‘messy’ or unstructured problems are re-structured from problems as webs of ‘undesirable situations’ to problems as specific, time-and-space bound ‘opportunities for improve- ment’. This requires a questioning habitus in practitioners of policy design. Using a socio-cognitive theory of problem processing, this paper shows how policy design is an iterative process of problem sensing, problem categorization, problem decompos- ition and problem definition. For each of these stages, appropriate rules-of-thumb for questioning and answering can be suggested that induce thought habits and styles for responsive and solid policy designs