Research

This paper analyzes the structural causes of New Zealand’s housing affordability crisis, which has made homeownership increasingly inaccessible, particularly in Auckland (the world’s seventh least affordable city). While demand is partly driven by demographic shifts and cultural preferences for homeownership, the crisis is primarily shaped by speculative investment, distorted fiscal incentives, and binding supply constraints. Historical tax advantages, low interest rates, and restrictive urban planning have inflated prices and diverted capital away from productive sectors. The paper argues that the crisis is not a simple shortage but a systemic market failure. It proposes an integrated policy framework to restore balance: taxing capital gains, introducing deposit insurance to protect savers and limit moral hazard, reforming tenancy laws to make renting viable, relaxing density regulations, and streamlining building approvals. Together, these fiscal, regulatory, and urban policies could reduce volatility, reorient incentives toward social efficiency, and rebuild affordability for future generations.

This article examines how government incentives shaped France’s long-standing reliance on diesel, creating both economic advantages and unintended social and environmental costs. After WWII, diesel tax cuts supported recovery by lowering costs for farmers, haulers, and artisans. In the 1980s, facing Japanese competition and a surplus of unused diesel, the government reinforced these incentives, aligning fiscal policy with manufacturers specialized in diesel engines. The result: by 2018, 61% of French cars ran on diesel — one of the highest rates in Europe. Yet diesel’s hidden costs soon surfaced: higher fine particulate emissions, greater public health risks, and an estimated 10,000 premature deaths per year. When the state sought to reverse incentives by equalizing diesel and petrol taxation, it triggered widespread protests and the Yellow Vest movement. This paper analyzes the role of incentives in this crisis, evaluates alternative strategies, and explores policy options for a sustainable, health-conscious transport future.

This paper analyzes Sir Ernest Shackleton’s leadership during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition through a human resource management lens, using the Investors in People framework. Despite the expedition’s failure to achieve its original goals, Shackleton’s people management became a historic example of leadership under extreme adversity. The analysis examines how leadership behaviours shaped the crew’s risk posture, adaptive capacity, and exposure to both capability strengths and gaps under volatile conditions, identifying patterns without attributing causal influence to specific decisions. Findings reveal high maturity in sustaining morale, building trust, and providing emotional stability, yet highlight structural shortcomings in delegation, leadership development, transparency, and anticipatory capability-building. Shackleton’s approach is portrayed as both robust and limited: emotionally intelligent and stabilizing, but highly centralized in ways that narrowed the team’s option-set when conditions deteriorated. The paper concludes with actionable recommendations to strengthen empowerment, feedback culture, and transparency — offering insights into how organizations can build resilience and expand strategic options when operating in environments dominated by uncertainty.

This paper analyzes Microsoft’s large-scale organizational transformation initiated by CEO Satya Nadella in 2014, following years of internal competition, stagnation, and declining innovation. Using Lewin’s Force Field Analysis and Bolman and Deal’s Four Frames, it assesses how Nadella reshaped Microsoft’s culture, structure, and leadership style to foster collaboration, agility, and innovation. The study finds that Nadella’s approach—centred on empathy, empowerment, and cross-functional cooperation—effectively removed restraining forces, unified fragmented divisions, and revitalized employee engagement. Structural decentralization, shared performance metrics, and cultural initiatives like the global Hackathon reinforced Microsoft’s mission to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” The paper concludes that Nadella’s success derived from addressing both human and systemic dimensions of change, aligning leadership behaviour, organizational design, and symbolic culture toward a sustainable learning organization.