Editorial

Citation

Fong, P.K.W. (2018), "Editorial", Public Administration and Policy: An Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 91-93. https://doi.org/10.1108/PAP-11-2018-012

Introduction

Public Administration and Policy (PAP) – An Asia-Pacific Journal has progressed smoothly from printed version to e-version over the past seven years. In 2018, PAP makes a significant step forward to be published online on the Emerald Insight Platform with open access and global dissemination. We hope this will widen the journal’s readership and citations of our authors’ articles. During this seven-year period, we have published articles on various aspects of public administration and management as well as special issues on “health policies” and “tertiary education” (Fong, 2017). We plan to publish some more special issues in the next two years.

Public sector reforms and new public management triggered widespread changes in many public organisations as well as narrowed the gap in management practices between the public and private sectors in the last three decades. Organisational change is a fundamental theme in many public sector workplaces (Brunetto and Teo, 2018). However, implementing effective change is by no means easy. A lot of public sector organisations have experienced more failure than success.

Researchers have debated the dilemma of top–down/bottom–up approaches of change management for years. There is a need for better understanding of the depth and breadth of successful organisational change (Saetren, 2014). There are many complicated problems that require government actions and greater public and private sector collaborations. There is also a need to change governments focus on organisational structure and function to enhance employee motivations and provide incentives for public service delivery. Under these circumstances, it might be useful to widen the learning and borrow successful experiences from private sector organisations. In this issue, we include two case studies from the private sector, particularly, the successful change of culture in the Hong Kong Broadband Network. It is hoped that their experiences in overcoming resistance to change and achieve corporate strategic goals can shed some lights for managing change in public sector organisations.

This issue begins with Raymond Saner, Lichia Yiu and Laurel Rush’s article on the measuring and monitoring of human trafficking. Franky Choi then discusses how to establish a good government. The third article is by Yee-man Tsui and Ben Fong on waiting time in public hospitals in Hong Kong. The last two papers are on the private organisations. Adrian Low and Rollin McCraty present their research results on the dynamics of workplace stress of employees in a large organisation in Hong Kong. The final paper by Earnest Li is a case study of the critical success factors for organisational change of the Hong Kong Broadband Network. The following is a brief highlight of the papers in this issue.

Summary of articles

The first article is “The measuring and monitoring of human trafficking” by Raymond Saner, Lichia Yiu and Laurel Rush. This article discusses the difficulty of measuring and monitoring of human trafficking within the context of the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The challenges that come with monitoring an invisible crime such as human trafficking within the SDG context are due to the fact that the indicators pertaining to human trafficking fall into the category of “difficult to define and collect” type of data. The paper sheds light on these measuring difficulties and makes recommendations on how to overcome them. It brings to the attention of the international community that the current SDG indicators are inadequate for measuring human trafficking and need to be urgently improved. The study of human trafficking is put in the context of the SDGs and proposes seven action points to create inter-sectoral linkages and better data collection to gain a fuller picture on human trafficking.

The second article is “How to establish a good government? Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Deng Xiaoping in China” by Franky Choi. He explains how to establish a good but authoritarian government in the East. Dr Choi argues that it requires more than the western-style democracy and adopting universal suffrage to reach the ultimate goal of good governance in the East. Promoting socio-economic renovation can be seen as a prerequisite to have further meaningful political advancement in an Asian polity. He found that both Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping have contributed significantly to the success of the governance of Singapore and China. Authoritarianism to them was quite positive to help legitimise their governance.

The third article is “Waiting time in public hospitals: case study of total joint replacement (TJR) in Hong Kong” by Yee-man Tsui and Ben Fong. The authors review the causes of long waiting time in Hong Kong public hospitals and suggest solutions in the service, organisation, systems, financial and policy perspectives to solve the problem. They found that the average waiting time of semi-urgent and non-urgent patients in the accident and emergency departments of public hospitals is 2 hours, and that of specialist outpatient clinics is from 1 to 144 weeks. However, for TJR, it is much longer from 36 to 110 months. They recommend measures like government subsidisation programme for the replacement surgery and employing adequate physiotherapists, Chinese Medicine practitioners, clinical psychologists and nurses to reduce the waiting time. The over-reliance of public services has resulted in long waiting time in public hospitals in Hong Kong, particularly in the emergency services and specialist outpatient clinics. However, the consequences of long waiting period for surgical operations, though much less discussed by the media and public, can be potentially detrimental to the patients and families, and may result in more burdens to the already stretched public hospitals.

The fourth article is “Emerging dynamics of workplace stress of employees in a large organization in Hong Kong” by Adrian Low and Rollin McCraty. They found that research on workplace stress measurements varied without much accuracy and effectiveness. In their study, they introduced a new quantitative assessment tool emWave Pro Plus and compared the heart rate variability (HRV) results with the personal and organisational quality assessment and the perceived stress scale. Their study found significant positive correlations between emotional stress and HRV and between intention to quit and HRV. They have to make sense of the following surprising findings: the higher the emotional stress an employee faces, the healthier they are; healthier employees may have higher intentions of quitting their jobs. These results may be attributed to personality, culture, emotional regulation and age among others. This research validates quantifiable stress measurements especially in a corporate environment. The research also shows promising results and future studies should continue to tap into HRV as an objective measure of mental health and workplace stress in both private and public organisations.

The final article is “A case study of the critical success factors for organisational change of a public listed corporation: Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN)” by Earnest Li. He explains how an organisation can achieve successful change implementation with Kotter’s eight-step organisational change model and 3-H (heart-head-hand) theory. To create a talent culture, HKBN implemented two policies including mini-CEO management and talent engagement department). The former is a vertical management model to empower and enable department heads. The latter is a way to change the role of human resources department from passive to proactive. The implications of this case study are to encourage public and private organisations to rethink the factors including talent development and empowerment that can have positive impact on innovative work behaviour. Moreover, organisations can rediscover the value of a “unique” talent culture as a sustainable competitive advantage.

I wish to thank the authors for contributing their papers to this issue and the reviewers for their critical but constructive comments in helping authors to improve their papers. Finally, I thank Emerald and our editorial team as well as the international advisors for making this issue of PAP published on time with high quality. I welcome all academic scholars and students, public administration practitioners, business executives and professionals to contribute papers to this journal.