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There is an assumption that the ways in which teachers engage with policy are known, yet there is very little evidence to demonstrate how teachers engage with new policies and how this engagement patterns their approach to curriculum development (Kulinna, Brusseau, Cothran, & Tudor-Locke, 2012). Previous research has not clearly distinguished between teachers’ understanding of policy discourses and their subsequent enactment of curriculum. An opportunity to do so arose with the introduction in Scotland of a new curriculum. This new curriculum, Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), intended to provide a framework within which teachers would exercise professional judgment and engage in School Based Curriculum Development (SCBD). The Scottish Government determined the overarching policy for education and Local Authorities were responsible for overseeing the development of the curriculum. CfE intended to empower teachers by encouraging innovation with the proviso that key experiences deemed to be central for pupil learning were addressed. This study aimed to provide insights into the process of SBCD in physical education as teachers prepared for the first year of teaching CfE. The research questions therefore focused on developing an understanding of how the lead teachers tasked with designing the physical education curriculum, within a newly formed curriculum area of health and wellbeing, had engaged with policy and enacted the curriculum. In order to gain a fine-grained understanding of curriculum leaders’ experiences of SBCD, this study drew its sample from a single local authority. The study adopted a research design of repeated interviews with nine teachers who led curriculum development in their respective schools. Two related orders of SBCD as reported and experienced by curriculum leaders emerge from the study: first order SBCD pertains to the process of engagement with policy discourses; and second order refers to the activities associated with the enactment of the curriculum. The findings reported in this thesis showed that events organised by the local authority to support teachers led to the development of a professional learning community which facilitated teachers' active engagement in SBCD. This active engagement required careful tailoring of new developments to the constraints and affordances of their individual schools. First order SBCD was a complex process of engagement/active interpretation and reinterpretation of policy as teachers considered the context for SBCD. These processes led to teachers viewing the broad aims of CfE as a reinforcement of existing practice and curricula. Discourses of accountability appear to have had the most influence in curriculum design decisions, overshadowing the discourses of health and wellbeing within CfE. Teachers’ professional judgements were influenced by regimes of accountability at national and local levels which patterned but did not determine schools’ and teachers’ responses. This is because second order SBCD reflected teachers’ perceptions that a wholescale transformation of physical education was not required or possible within the constraints of their contexts. Curriculum leaders concentrated their efforts on covering the broad aims of CfE and the ‘experiences and outcomes’ outlined in CfE through focusing on their approach to teaching and learning the existing physical education curricula. Thus, they saw health and wellbeing as only one element of physical education rather than as the key focus of their enactment of the curriculum. Teachers’ collective efforts at curriculum enactment were therefore depicted as pragmatic innovation as this encapsulates their responses to policy discourses as they developed a curriculum that would in their view effectively address the broad aims and purposes of CfE while taking account of the constraints of their local context. In contrast to preceding work, a more nuanced account of teacher agency is revealed; teachers were neither wholly the subject of policy discourse nor were they wholly free agents. It follows that if policymakers are seeking transformational change in physical education and an orientation of the subject towards health and wellbeing, there is a need not only for mechanisms to support professional learning, but also for regimes of accountability such as the inspection framework to reflect the policy aims of health and wellbeing more closely.

It can be stated that performance measurement is the foundation of performance management in any construction organisation. Traditional financial performance measurement is not capable of capturing the true performance of an organisation. Thus the results of such financial performance measurement can not be used by managers to derive future performance in their organisations. The balanced scorecard (BSC) performance measurement approach used in other industries has been proposed for construction, as it takes into account critical wider perspectives. However, the construction BSC consists of four perspectives that are highly suitable for construction industry, namely business development, stakeholder management, process management, and innovation and learning. The primary objective of the research is to develop a balanced scorecard framework for construction contractors and measure performance of contractors using that framework. The results of the questionnaire s urvey carried out and follow-up interviews conducted among 34 senior managers in Melbourne revealed that the above performance measurement framework is appropriate to use in a contracting organisation. The respondents perceive that the process management perspective measurement is more desirable than others. The stakeholder management perspective received moderate rating, while business development and innovation and learning perspectives both received average importance rating by the respondents. An actual performance measurement carried out on seven contractors in Melbourne to illustrate the use of the BSC performance as a strategic performance management tool in construction reveals the following: 1. Contractors' current performance levels in regard to process management and business development are moderately high, while stakeholder management and innovation and learning performance are perceived to be average. The contractors also perceive that performance in regard to stakeholder management is of higher significance for their business success, and 2. Performance with regard to managing employees and launching knowledge management initiatives was found to be low, so there is much room for improvement. Human resource management (HRM) is managing employees to develop and utilise their full potential in alignment with organisational objectives. It is recommended that contractors have to introduce new strategies for HRM. The HRM strategies should focus on recruitment, training and development activities of employees. Apart from HRM, the knowledge management (KM) also needs attention. The KM can be stated as effective use of available resources to increase the level of learning and innovation in the organisation. To enhance performance of KM contractors have to conduct project reviews on completion of every project and document useful information. This would enable managers to discuss company-wide performance at management meetings and further scrutinise this information. Having separate Balanced Scorecards for HRM and KM is expected to bring enormous advantages for a contracting company.

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The rapid convergence of collaborative technologies, democratisation of digital communication and consumerisation of Smart Grid infrastructure (i.e.: smart metering and distribution substation automation) have faltered the efficacy of centralised command-and-control and its insular sub-culture. For complex firms in today's creative economy, this infers that management innovation (MI)—“an induced managerial capacity to search for novel ways to create value”, is rapidly becoming liabilities unless it is innovatively managed for overcoming the inertia of discontinuity opportunities. The raison d'être of this thesis is to investigate the generative managerial processes through which MI can be fostered for experimentation and innovatively managed for acceleration. It comprises four qualitative case studies that involved in-depth interviews, surveys, public records and archival documentaries of four Canadian energy and utilities organisations. The conclusions are fascinating both expected and unanticipated. I found that many, if not most, of the contemporaneous routines of pyramidal target-setting and benchmark-driven cultures are ubiquitously evident. Business planning and risk management still function, albeit the objects of those tenets are different. These quasi-objects include, but are not limited to, organic structures, web-enabled paradigm, pragmatic mindset of middle-down-up crowdsourcing and fragmented evaluation of efforts to evoke the innovative management of management innovation (IMMI). Further adjacent to the quest for driving renewed growth, a new governing dynamic is hinging upon the IMMI that forges a pattern for resiliency and sustainability. Managers capitalise on the epistemic IMMI to regain competitive advantage while enduring endogenous fiefdoms and exogenous disruptions. They catalyse information semantically, harness collective capability effectively, stage prolifically faster MI experimentations and accelerate the cycle of MI more pervasively. I henceforth propose a unified managerial process, dubbed the "Cloverleaf 4S Model" (Strategise—Synchronise—Steward—Sustain). Implicit in this approach, managers believe that their finely-tailored practices epitomise an evolutionary process of deliberate selection in the pursuit for distinctive MI capabilities and expanding authority dynamics in the managership. This allows for self-adaptive mechanisms shifting from silos to swarming as well as the indigenous aspects of IMMI practices—exaptation, cognitive flexibility, speed to adaptation and executional excellence. The implication of this study presents heuristical insights to managers in galvanising perennial innovation and unlocking their IMMI to build an agile, intelligent enterprise.

This thesis reports on the development of a generic online system to support learning and teaching at the University of Melbourne. New online technologies, the fostering of innovation at national and university levels and my position within a central educational unit provided the opportunity in 1996 to adapt a previous software package for online use. My observations of the problematic nature of computer-facilitated learning (CFL) production led me to take an open approach to the development, seeking both a practical product and enhanced understanding. A series of formative questions defined the scope and goals of the study, which were to: *produce a generic online learning system; *increase understanding of the workplace experience of that development; and *develop an organisational model for the further development of generic CFL systems. Given this multi-disciplinary focus, many paradigms in the literature could potentially have guided the study. A number of these aligning with the research purposes, context and constructivist philosophy of the study, were reviewed from the perspectives of learning, CFL development and the organisation.

The inquiry documented in this thesis is located at the nexus of technological innovation and traditional schooling. As we enter the second decade of a new century, few would argue against the increasingly urgent need to integrate digital literacies with traditional academic knowledge. Yet, despite substantial investments from governments and businesses, the adoption and diffusion of contemporary digital tools in formal schooling remain sluggish. To date, research on technology adoption in schools tends to take a deficit perspective of schools and teachers, with the lack of resources and teacher ‘technophobia’ most commonly cited as barriers to digital uptake. Corresponding interventions that focus on increasing funding and upskilling teachers, however, have made little difference to adoption trends in the last decade. Empirical evidence that explicates the cultural and pedagogical complexities of innovation diffusion within long-established conventions of mainstream schooling, particularly from the standpoint of students, is wanting. To address this knowledge gap, this thesis inquires into how students evaluate and account for the constraints and affordances of contemporary digital tools when they engage with them as part of their conventional schooling. It documents the attempted integration of a student-led Web 2.0 learning initiative, known as the Student Media Centre (SMC), into the schooling practices of a long-established, high-performing independent senior boys’ school in urban Australia. The study employed an ‘explanatory’ two-phase research design (Creswell, 2003) that combined complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to achieve both breadth of measurement and richness of characterisation. In the initial quantitative phase, a self-reported questionnaire was administered to the senior school student population to determine adoption trends and predictors of SMC usage (N=481). Measurement constructs included individual learning dispositions (learning and performance goals, cognitive playfulness and personal innovativeness), as well as social and technological variables (peer support, perceived usefulness and ease of use). Incremental predictive models of SMC usage were conducted using Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modelling: (i) individual-level predictors, (ii) individual and social predictors, and (iii) individual, social and technological predictors. Peer support emerged as the best predictor of SMC usage. Other salient predictors include perceived ease of use and usefulness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals. On the whole, an overwhelming proportion of students reported low usage levels, low perceived usefulness and a lack of peer support for engaging with the digital learning initiative. The small minority of frequent users reported having high levels of peer support and robust learning goal orientations, rather than being predominantly driven by performance goals. These findings indicate that tensions around social validation, digital learning and academic performance pressures influence students’ engagement with the Web 2.0 learning initiative. The qualitative phase that followed provided insights into these tensions by shifting the analytics from individual attitudes and behaviours to shared social and cultural reasoning practices that explain students’ engagement with the innovation. Six indepth focus groups, comprising 60 students with different levels of SMC usage, were conducted, audio-recorded and transcribed. Textual data were analysed using Membership Categorisation Analysis. Students’ accounts converged around a key proposition. The Web 2.0 learning initiative was useful-in-principle but useless-in-practice. While students endorsed the usefulness of the SMC for enhancing multimodal engagement, extending peer-topeer networks and acquiring real-world skills, they also called attention to a number of constraints that obfuscated the realisation of these design affordances in practice. These constraints were cast in terms of three binary formulations of social and cultural imperatives at play within the school: (i) ‘cool/uncool’, (ii) ‘dominant staff/compliant student’, and (iii) ‘digital learning/academic performance’. The first formulation foregrounds the social stigma of the SMC among peers and its resultant lack of positive network benefits. The second relates to students’ perception of the school culture as authoritarian and punitive with adverse effects on the very student agency required to drive the innovation. The third points to academic performance pressures in a crowded curriculum with tight timelines. Taken together, findings from both phases of the study provide the following key insights. First, students endorsed the learning affordances of contemporary digital tools such as the SMC for enhancing their current schooling practices. For the majority of students, however, these learning affordances were overshadowed by the performative demands of schooling, both social and academic. The student participants saw engagement with the SMC in-school as distinct from, even oppositional to, the conventional social and academic performance indicators of schooling, namely (i) being ‘cool’ (or at least ‘not uncool’), (ii) sufficiently ‘compliant’, and (iii) achieving good academic grades. Their reasoned response therefore, was simply to resist engagement with the digital learning innovation. Second, a small minority of students seemed dispositionally inclined to negotiate the learning affordances and performance constraints of digital learning and traditional schooling more effectively than others. These students were able to engage more frequently and meaningfully with the SMC in school. Their ability to adapt and traverse seemingly incommensurate social and institutional identities and norms is theorised as cultural agility – a dispositional construct that comprises personal innovativeness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals orientation. The logic then is ‘both and’ rather than ‘either or’ for these individuals with a capacity to accommodate both learning and performance in school, whether in terms of digital engagement and academic excellence, or successful brokerage across multiple social identities and institutional affiliations within the school. In sum, this study takes us beyond the familiar terrain of deficit discourses that tend to blame institutional conservatism, lack of resourcing and teacher resistance for low uptake of digital technologies in schools. It does so by providing an empirical base for the development of a ‘third way’ of theorising technological and pedagogical innovation in schools, one which is more informed by students as critical stakeholders and thus more relevant to the lived culture within the school, and its complex relationship to students’ lives outside of school. It is in this relationship that we find an explanation for how these individuals can, at the one time, be digital kids and analogue students.