The Charismatic Organization: Vision 2000 and Corporate Change in a State-Owned Organization

British Telecom’s 1984 partial privatization set in motion the privatization and deregulation of many international state-owned telecommunications carriers. Most previous research on the privatization and deregulation of state-owned telecommunications carriers has focused on the economic outcomes. However, this was also a time of changes in managerial practice and thinking influenced by organizational theory. This article presents an analysis of the use of the prescriptions of Rosabeth Kanter in the attempted reform of the organizational culture of Australia’s largest business in the 1980s: the government-owned telecommunications monopoly Telecom Australia (now Telstra). It details the attempt to transform Telecom under the incipient threat of the introduction of competition to the telecommunications market and demonstrates how the country’s largest change management program, Vision 2000, represented an alternative approach to telecommunications reform.

Impact of university reform on research performance aggregated and disaggregated across research fields: a case study of the partial privatization of Japanese National Universities

This study quantitatively estimates the impacts of the partial privatization of Japanese national universities (as implemented in 2004) on research performance outcomes, which are aggregated and disaggregated across research fields. Japanese private universities can be viewed as counterfactuals not targeted by the reform for the same period, which provides within-country variations in this governance/managerial change. Difference-in-differences estimation strategies using private universities as control groups show that the partial privatization of national universities has resulted in a deterioration in the quality and quantity of national universities’ research output, as constructed using publication records from 1999 to 2009. The study then estimates the effects of partial privatization disaggregated by research field and finds that only medical science is negatively affected by the partial privatization. This study is the first to provide a quantitative assessment of whether the partial privatization of Japanese universities has been favorable for research performance using an identification strategy based on a quasi-experiment. It also reveals the heterogeneous impacts across research fields and departments.