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    The interface between ethical leadership and food safety culture in Aotearoa New Zealand food businesses : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Management, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2025-05-20) Newport-Smith, Wendy
    Measuring, evaluating and improving food safety culture is a priority for Aotearoa New Zealand food businesses. This is driven by the desire to produce food of the highest quality that safeguards consumers, protects the reputation of New Zealand Inc., and meets the requirements of international standards and regulations. This is the first in-depth qualitative investigation into food safety culture and ethical leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand food businesses, including some of this country’s largest food exporters. Using a mixed methods approach this research has provided unique, contemporary understanding and insights, while simultaneously providing a novel contribution to the body of knowledge. Two research workstreams were used; the first a quantitative workstream involving a voluntary survey of manufacturing and distribution employees in New Zealand’s largest food business; a dataset of responses to food safety and ethical leadership questions from 1181 individuals. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) applied to Lickert-scale variables, combined with multivariable modelling, this research found a positive relationship between food safety culture and ethical leadership and evidence for differences in responses according to several respondee characteristics. These included associations between PCA coordinates that captured variation in individual responses to food safety and ethical leadership questions, and the supplementary variables: role (e.g. staff or supervisor), site and gender. Ethical leadership has been shown to improve effectiveness, performance and safety at an organisational and individual level. Therefore strategies to improve ethicality across Aotearoa New Zealand food businesses in order to improve food safety culture and ensure safer food outcomes are suggested: consultatively developing organisational values which are well communicated and lived; ensuring ethical considerations when hiring staff; ethical considerations when setting expectations, and in training and mentoring staff and managing performance processes including the use of consequences; and modelling good behaviour, making fair decisions, ensuring open, clear communication and giving employees a voice. While largely positive, the quantitative strand did reveal a level of dissatisfaction with both ethical leadership and food safety culture, suggesting room for improvement. Further research is needed to better understand management’s, supervisors’ and workers’ perspectives on both aspects. The second workstream involved one-on-one semi-structured interviews with 32 founders, owners and senior food safety and quality personnel from 31 Aotearoa New Zealand food companies with thematic data analysis resulting in five key themes: Values; Responsible Stewardship of Natural Resources; Māori Worldview; Ecosystem Pressures and Leadership. The issues identified to be important to Aotearoa New Zealand food businesses include: individual, managerial and organisational values; leadership and management commitment in influencing organisational, food safety and ethical climate and culture; inter-generational value-creation, sustainable practice and acting as kaitiakitanga meaning guardianship or protection. This research has also provided insight into the drivers for and primary challenges related to food safety for Aotearoa New Zealand food businesses. This research has contributed to an up-to-date understanding of the characteristics of ethical leaders in Aotearoa New Zealand, who, according to this study, are humble, honest, respect indigenous Māori values, and are not corrupt. They have a degree of relatedness, care about our natural environment, have a strong sense of identity or place, are collaborative, are fair, and are accountable. Our size, Indigenous Māori worldview, and our geographical isolation contribute to the unique interpretation and application of these leadership characteristics in Aotearoa New Zealand. Several limitations are acknowledged, not the least of which was the context for this research which began at the outset of the global pandemic, with both positive and negative consequences. The use of one, albeit large food business in the quantitative workstream is noted, as is the focus of the participants in the qualitative workstream. Broadening this research to all hierarchical levels in several food businesses would be of benefit, and this is one of a number of research recommendations for the future. The positive correlation between ethical leadership and food safety culture found in this research suggests that maintaining and improving the ethicality of leaders within Aotearoa New Zealand food businesses may positively influence food safety culture and therefore, the production of safer food.
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    Men's work : narratives of engaging with change and becoming non-violent : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024-07-26) Kean, Matthew Joseph
    Family violence continues to be a harsh reality for many families, whānau and communities around New Zealand. The primary aim of this project is to produce new possibilities for the violence prevention sector by linking theory and community practices supporting men, and their families, with pathways of change in relation to their cultural, gendered, socio-economic, and religious experiences of the world. In partnership with Gandhi Nivas, a community-based organisation providing early intervention support services to families in the Auckland region, I collaborate with men accessing Gandhi Nivas for support to bring to the fore an ethics of care empowering non-normative processes of change towards non-violence. Informed with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I provide an autoethnographic analysis of fieldwork experiences, 1:1 interviews, and a weekly men’s social support group, expanding on Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory to privilege narratives of events, felt experiences, and embodied memories of different institutional, legal, political, and socio-cultural forces conditioning men’s every day social worlds. With narratives as a form of re-remembering men’s sticky networks of affective memories, I experiment with nomadic subjectivity as a cartographic methodology capable of tracing sensorial data with enlivening moments of bodily sensation. This is not a straightforward task. A complex project, I craft a mosaic of affective connections with selections of notes, transcripts and events reverberating flows of materiality that produce changes to specific social, political, gendered, and cultural locations, enabling me to reflexively analyse what experiences follow me, what social processes I have articulated, and what processes are left off the page. I elaborate an understanding of nomadic subjectivity as a tactic enabling me to bear witness to both men’s capacities for violence and non-violence within men’s social world, by unfolding affective memories with a series of textually connected hesitations, pauses, and irruptions of social forces conditioning how we experience the world. Informed with Deleuzian political thought, nomadic narratives help me materialise different, unpredictable arrangements of fluxes, flows, and forces with indefinite processes of individuation, providing different potentials, capacities, and limits past the limits of normative knowability. Retrospectively evoking the complexities of following the affective movement of men, which we bring out into the community and to others, this research positions non-violence not just as the absence of violence, but as an iterative process of embodying variations in arrangements and connections of thought processes, propelling alternative modes of relations empowering an ethics of care and concern for others through which violence becomes less possible, reduced, and mitigated. Engaging with an organisation that celebrates difference within ethical frameworks of care informing a diversity of professional practices and experiences, this collaborative, community-oriented research project embraces embodied understandings of change processes men experience whilst in the care of Gandhi Nivas, and puts to work DeleuzoGuattarian non-normative subjectivities of affectivity and intensity as entry points to resonate embodied materiality I cannot know—but feel. With men invoking becomings of non-violence unable to be represented with normative masculinities and hegemonic notions of violence and non-violence, writing a nomadic subject enables me to attend to how different experiences of forces act on and through us, affirming empowering productions of a self with the material and discursive possibilities of men’s daily life.
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    What counts as consent? : sexuality and ethical deliberation in residential aged care : final project report 19 November 2020
    (Massey University, 2020) Henrickson, Mark; Schouten, Vanessa; Cook, Catherine; McDonald, Sandra; Atefi, Narges (Nilo)
    This report is intended as a summary of the three-year Royal Society Marsden Fund-funded project “What counts as consent: Sexuality and ethical deliberation in residential aged care” (MAU-1723). The project was funded for the period March 2018 to February 2021. The aim of the project is to interrogate and inform conceptualisations of consent in the domain of sexuality and intimacy in residential aged care. The project completed and exceeded all recruitment and participation goals. While there is a general consensus that sexuality is an intrinsic part of human identity, intimacy and sexuality in aged care remain misunderstood and contested issues. This is particularly so in respect of older persons living with dementia. Gender and sexually diverse communities constitute a significant invisible and invisibilised minority in residential aged care (RAC), and that invisibility means their intimacy needs remain largely unknown and unacknowledged. There are cultural issues in aged care unique to New Zealand: for instance, while 85 percent of residential aged care facility (RACF) residents identify as European and an estimated 5.5 percent are Mäori, 44 percent of staff identify as other than European, including 10 percent who identify as Mäori, and 10 percent Pasifika. The dominant position in the theoretical literature on the ethics of sex and intimacy is that consent is of fundamental importance. Consent has dominated not just the theoretical discourse but also public and legal discourses about the ethics of sex and therefore carers and staff make decisions based on the management of institutional risk rather than the wellbeing of the resident. Vulnerabilisation of older persons in order to protect them, however well-intended, effectively robs them of possibilities to exercise self-governance, depersonalises them, and increases their social isolation. How sexual consent in particular is conceptualised has significant ethical implications for the growing number of elders in Aotearoa New Zealand who are living with degrees of cognitive decline. The specific contribution of this project is to interpret how aged care stakeholders (residents, families, and staff) make sense of consent, to contribute substantively to ethical theory around consent, sexuality, and intimacy, and to inform practice and policy in aged care environments. The project interrogates and intends to inform conceptualisations of consent in the domain of sexuality and intimacy in residential aged care. Our goals were: (1) to analyse how people are making decisions in practice about sex and intimacy in aged care; and (2) to use this information to inform the literature on ethical theory and discourses on consent and wellbeing.
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    Applying welfare science to cetacean strandings : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Zoology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2022) Boys, Rebecca M
    Animal welfare science can provide critical knowledge to inform ethical wildlife management and human intervention efforts. Despite live stranding events being recognised by the International Whaling Commission as a major welfare concern for free-ranging cetaceans, little research has to date, been conducted on stranded cetacean welfare. Live cetacean stranding events offer a quintessential exemplar of wildlife management, where assessment or integration of welfare has been limited in the decision-making process. This thesis contributes new understanding of how welfare science can be applied to cetacean stranding events to inform decision-making processes. Here, the first welfare-centric data regarding live stranded cetaceans is presented. Specifically, this research presents novel contributions to science via: (1) conceptualisation of stranded cetacean welfare and survival likelihood; (2) recognition of key knowledge gaps and concerns that must be addressed to ensure optimal welfare and survival likelihood outcomes; (3) identification of potential valuable and practical indicators for assessing stranded cetacean welfare and survival likelihood; (4) evidenced feasibility of welfare indicator application to live cetacean stranding events; (5) incorporation of indicators to undertake holistic welfare assessments; (6) identification of potential welfare implications of strandings management, including efficacy of euthanasia; and (7) provision of key recommendations and requirements to ensure humane end-of-life outcomes for non-viable stranded cetaceans. This thesis documents inextricable links between animal welfare and survival likelihood of stranded cetaceans and demonstrates a clear need for integration of welfare science alongside conservation biology at live stranding events. Systematic, standardised data collection and welfare-centric assessment of stranded cetaceans can, if applied scientifically, inform intervention decisions, to ensure consistent guidance and improve strandings management to safeguard humane outcomes for affected cetaceans. Collectively, this research provides a significant contribution to the current scientific understanding of stranded cetacean welfare, by providing key knowledge required for the development of a welfare assessment framework that can support decision-making at stranding events.
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    Framing the financially literate subject : an analysis of financial literacy discourse in New Zealand : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2022) Chapelle, Peri
    The purpose of this study is to analyse the discursive framing of the financially literate subject and their needs within New Zealand. The first part of the study identifies and traces key themes within the framing of the financially literate subject, using documents derived from OECD publications and NZ governmental institutions. Working with the critical conjunction of rhetorical analysis and critical discourse analysis informed in part by the work of Foucault, the role of financial literacy in contemporary New Zealand society is addressed through analysis of a case study based on a public debate in New Zealand about the ethics of investment in munitions by providers of the government-supported pension plan, KiwiSaver. The first part of the thesis puts KiwiSaver in a broader policy context by examining documents from the OECD that were influential in setting the framework, rationale and approach for the New Zealand government’s initiatives to restructure pension plans and encourage a change in the population’s savings habits and citizens’ grasp of financial principles. As it happened, the introduction of KiwiSaver in 2007 coincided with the onset of the global financial crisis, which saw a shift in the framing of the validation of the financially literate subject from a saving imperative to a need to manage individual risks and protect the market. These capabilities of managing risk and protecting the market, depicted as inherent to financially literate populations, manifest through the expectation that all those who participate in the market would preserve it through informal regulation based on informed consumer choice. The second part of the thesis presents a case study of public reaction to the media exposé of a financial scandal that broke in August 2016 when it was discovered that KiwiSaver funds were being invested in companies manufacturing illegal munitions. Through analysis of selected newspaper articles and Twitter commentary, the thesis emphasises the complexity of the relationship between the expectations of financial literacy on the part of the government, OECD and financial sector, versus the realities of the financial marketplace. In tension with the emphasis on individual responsibility within official and institutional discourses of financial literacy, the exchanges via Twitter reveal the desire for, and partial practice of, a more civic-focused, collective way of interacting via the financial markets. The case study serves to illustrate the apparatuses of power operating in the field of financial literacy. Analysing the discursive production of the financially literate subject and the imperative rhetoric surrounding financial literacy will provide a fuller understanding of the construction and conceptualisation of the financially literate subject, the social power relations inherent in the drive towards improved financial literacy, and the strategic goals being pursued. Ultimately, the thesis will contribute to our understanding of financial literacy as an ideological framework.
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    Evaluating ethics in planning : a heuristic framework for a just city : a thesis presented for partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Resource and Environmental Planning at Massey University, Manawatū
    (Massey University, 2021) Ross, Joanna
    Many urban planners are engaged with the idea that cities should be ‘Just’: that is, planning should facilitate good outcomes for the people who choose to live and work in cities, particularly the least advantaged. The concept of a just city is an evolving planning paradigm which focuses on the needs of the least advantaged. This thesis revisits existing ideas of what constitutes a just city and explores why planners should care about the effects of ethics on its realisation. It extends conceptual understandings of what constitutes a ‘just city’, through a focus on care ethics and kindness. Then, by developing and applying the Just City Plan Evaluation Approach (JCPEA), it presents a heuristic framework to surface embedded ethics invoked in planning policy. Ethics in urban planning have not been systematically considered in practice for decades. This inattention can be partially attributed to the distancing of planners from their role as public interest advocates, the multiplicity of competing views about what ethics should or could inform planning policy, and the lack of a systematic, formal approach to evaluate them. Yet normative views of what constitutes right and wrong are central to theoretical debates about planning and are used to inform arguments for or against policy. For decades, ethics of justice have dominated these debates. However, increasing calls for virtue ethics to complement justice ethics present an opportunity for the planning profession to reimagine its role as advocates for the public interest. The JCPEA is based on a theoretical understanding of: (a) theories of justice (b) care ethics, and (c) Fainstein’s concept of the just city and her three just city principles (equity, diversity, and democracy). It enables ethical arguments in planning discourse to be evaluated against four criteria – extent, focus, merit, and power, using both political discourse analysis and a Foucauldian-type discourse analysis. The application of this dual-method approach, to a suite of planning documents from Auckland, New Zealand, proved useful in identifying and evaluating ethics and power in planning. The current intention to replace the Resource Management Act 1991, provides an opportune time to begin a conversation about ethics in plans, to focus on particular ethics, to address the silences, ruptures, and subsequent power imbalances in planning discourse, and to take steps not just towards the realisation of just city ethics and principles in practice, but also to reflect on planning more broadly. Drawing on and extending existing just city narratives, this thesis posits kindness, a practical response to the needs of others, as a principle to invoke in planning policy. This principle of kindness is grounded in an ethic of care, but also sits within an emerging post-secular and intersectional approach to address injustice. It is an ethic that was first signaled by New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 2018, when she called for ‘kindness’ as a means of pursuing peace, prosperity, and fairness, and which subsequently became part of the New Zealand response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Invoking kindness represents a step-change in ethics informing government policy and was a signal to the world that there is another way of governing. It is also an ethic that lends itself to planning practice. This thesis argues that exposing and discussing the ethical basis of planning discourse using this heuristic framework provides the means to give agency to planners to act as non-neutral arbiters of the public interest, and as parrhesiastes focussing on the needs of the least advantaged.
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    Supporting interprofessional collaborative practice through relational orientation : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education at Massey University, Albany Campus, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Vasilic, Branka
    Relational processes in the context of interprofessional collaboration are understood mainly in terms of individual action. This study argues that focusing on individual action limits our understanding of some of the most successful relationship-based collaborative practices. To shift the focus from individual action to co-action, this study investigated co-action oriented practices in multi-agency teams working with children and young people identified as living with High and Complex Needs (HCN). The methodology used in this study combined a relational research orientation with the principles of narrative theory, in order to engage HCN practitioners in dynamic conversations. Through dialogue, the HCN practitioners investigated their valued collaborative practices. These practices were then further explored in terms of how collaboration could shift from individual to co-action. The outcomes of the study highlighted a number of successful relationship-based collaborative practices that are often overlooked. These range from simply having small talk, being personal and flexible, to addressing more complex situations that might otherwise be avoided. Appreciative exploration was identified as a way to step outside of one’s own beliefs and become curious about how contradictory views might be valid within a community of understanding. Finding a respectful way to approach what we want to avoid holds arguably most potential for positive change. The study concluded that three aspects were critical to the engagement of practitioners in collaborative co-active practice: (1) paying attention to the process of relating; (2) acknowledging values, interests and concerns of practitioners in their daily practice, and (3) respecting current practices. Engaging with co-active practices in this way energised practitioners and fostered an innovation-seeking attitude and collective learning. As the practitioners in this study demonstrated, relational orientation opens up possibilities to shape co-action, and offers a unique tool for transforming collaborative practices. Put simply, the relational shift shows what we achieve together, we cannot do alone.
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    Becoming (non)violent : accountability, subjectivity and ethical non-violence in response to intimate partner violence : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Denne, Stephanie
    This thesis joins a movement of critical resistance and ethical activism problematising the increased institutionalisation of domestic violence interventions. A Eurocentric, capitalist, and neoliberal knowledge economy appears incapable of accounting for or accommodating the multiple, intersecting gendered social power relations and conditions of possibility that enable violence against women and children. Through a process of reflexive reading, I draw on the work of philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler, engaging with theories of accounting for oneself, subjectivation and ethical non-violence to analyse men and women’s narratives of (non)violence in the context of a men’s stopping violence programme. I interrogate the sociocultural regimes of intelligibility, subjectivity and morality that produce the accountability of gendered subjects of violence at sites of ethical exchange, and the consequences of such a production for those affected by, and responding to, domestic violence. Throughout the thesis, I question how systems of response and intervention reproduce power relations of domination and oppression through the production of fixed and inflexible identity categories of difference and dis-ease for targeted surveillance, regulation and discipline. Accounts of oneself are read critically as sites of embodied and embedded violence, where demands for narrative consistency and coherence enable the denial, minimisation and justification of men’s violence as a response to the risk of condemnation and subjective threat. I examine how patriarchal and colonising narratives tolerate, justify and encourage violence as a reiterative practice of hegemonic masculinity, where the embedded masculine subject self-regulates and disciplines their embodied subjectivity for authority and control within hierarchical gender binaries. I consider how feminine subjects are positioned as inferior to, or a ‘lack of’ the masculine ideal, enabling the dehumanisation, exclusion and silencing of women as objects and technologies for masculine privilege and domination. I conclude by advocating for ethical non-violence in domestic violence research and response, acknowledging our shared subordination and vulnerability to sociocultural regulatory regimes. I imagine how suspending the satisfaction of judgement and practices of patience can facilitate processes of articulation to exceed the constraints of violent subjectivities and engage in processes of ‘becoming’ within collaborative partnerships of resistance, transformation and non- violence.
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    Hijau : a mediation between conscious consumption and the contemporary media activism : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Master in Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Shari, Syamim
    The research project thus examines psychographic data to design for change to enable southeast iGen Asians become conscious consumers by using social media frameworks and techniques. iGens Asian are high consumer of fast fashion with limited knowledge of conscious consumerism. There is an identified gap in the sustainable fashion movement to address conscious consumerism. After outlining iGens’ key pain points and needs, the investigation examines the significant role of social media as a critical shaper in sharing collective knowledge, personal beliefs, desires, and hopes. It then explores how micro-narrative design can be employed to prompt a shift in attitudes towards sustainable fashion. The end goal is to elicit a long-term change starting with small habits. The methodology used in this one-year post-graduate research study encompassed naturalistic observation, in-depth semi structure interview and Instagram innovation. The design output in the form of face- filters provide an accessible platform for iGens in Malaysia to engage with conscious consumption. Furthermore, the flow of the project has been tested with three key participants. The study would be extended before the live release of the filters on Instagram.
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    Transnational corporations, corporate behaviour and corporate social responsibility and their roles in determining labour conditions in developing countries : a case study of the labour conditions experienced by Nike contract workers in Viet Nam : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of te requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies at Massey University, Turitea Campus, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2003) Fairbairn, Andrea Joy
    The role and responsibility of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) in determining labour conditions for developing country workers has been the topic of much debate, usually between corporations and social justice activists. The low cost/sweatshop labour debate is complex as a range of TNCs and labour conditions exist, offering an array of positive and negative contributions to labour conditions and development in developing countries. Developmental TNCs offer good work options to developing country workers, while also positively contributing to the development of its host country economies. TNCs can also act as positive role models for other industries and enterprises by offering superior labour conditions to domestic enterprises. Additionally, TNCs may offer education or developmental experiences to workers and utilise fair or ethical trading practices. In contrast, TNCs may also act in non-development ways. For example, many TNC sub-contracted factories are sweatshops, offering deplorable wages and working conditions, exploitation and human rights abuses. Moreover, some TNC factories do not offer positive spillovers to developing countries and furthermore, there are often detrimental impacts when developing nations are forcibly integrated into the global economy. It is important to make the distinction between core labour standards (international human rights and labour law) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) (moral and ethical judgements on how corporations should behave). CSR requirements are difficult to define and are not based in law. Nonetheless, increasing public expectations and the success of non-government organisation campaigns, have meant that CSR requirements are what the public expects of TNCs. Nike contributes to Vietnamese labour conditions and development through the creation of thousands of factory jobs and through FDI and its spillover effects. The Ministry of Labour comments that foreign TNCs and Nike frequently offer superior labour conditions to those of domestic enterprises. Yet, there are still many concerns with health and safety, wages and hours of work and human rights abuses in Nike contract factories. Nike argues that there are many external factors, which determine global labour conditions (for example, globalisation, free trade and neo-liberalism). Yet, TNCs have a great deal of influence on the global environment and overall, it is TNCs that determine the labour standards of developing country contract workers. Furthermore, there is significant potential for TNCs to meet core labour standards and CSR requirements.