Kai Ostwald

This project traces the evolution of policy responsiveness in Singapore using novel text corpora that covers legislative discourse and public opinion from 1955 to 2010. In particular, this article quantifies significant shifts in policy responsiveness that emerged in late 1980s Singapore, and also identifies qualitative changes in the way public opinion is expressed. I propose two primary factors explaining these developments: (1) the rise of new participatory institutions in the late 1980s, namely the Feedback Unit and the Citizens’ Consultative Committees (CCCs), which encouraged the flow of public policy-related information into more controlled, less politically contentious domains; and (2) a transformation in the government’s strategy for addressing policy demands, moving towards private, direct engagements between the government and individuals, a shift brought about by the change in political leadership. This meant that the government began addressing public grievances and policy demands preemptively — before these grievances could be discussed in public or in Parliament, thereby restricting the availability of such information for non-incumbents. I argue that this shift entailed fundamental changes in how public discussion occurs, neutralizing the political nature of most policy demands without silencing them. To quantify these changes in policy responsiveness, the project analyzes over 125,000 public letters in newspapers and 20,000 parliamentary records from 1955 to 2010. These text corpora were assembled through extensive web scraping and OCR, refined via natural language processing (NLP) tools, and then analyzed through semantic embeddings generated by the Ada-002 model. The alignment between public letters and parliamentary records, quantified via calculating Euclidean distance between embeddings, provides a measure of policy responsiveness. Other pieces of evidence are sourced from the archival documents or available biographies of political elites. Overall, the 1980s Singapore presents a case in which increased policy responsiveness is delinked from democratic accountability and democratic contestation. Instead, the broadening of avenues for public policy demands went alongside a strategic redirection of policy-related information flows, ultimately consolidating the incumbents’ authority over this key information channel. The findings of this project, although specific to Singapore’s political history, shed light on the importance of information control for authoritarian resilience.

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Business organizations are increasingly pressured to move beyond conventional sustainable development approaches and embrace transformative change. Within these organizations, internal sustainability change agents play a crucial role in championing sustainability initiatives. These change agents operate within the landscape of organizational cultures, which significantly influence their motivations and actions. This study examines how organizational culture shapes the motivation of sustainability change agents and addresses two research questions: (1) Is there a significant relationship between organizational cultures and the motivation of sustainability professionals to implement sustainability? (2) What organizational culture factors motivate and demotivate sustainability change agents, and how do these factors differ between firms in Canada and Malaysia? To answer these questions, a combination of surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Surveys were collected from 60 sustainability professionals in Canadian firms and 62 in Malaysian firms. Additionally, 17 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 8 sustainability professionals from Canadian firms and 9 from Malaysian firms. The empirical results reveal a prevailing sense of motivation among sustainability professionals, driven by the nine predefined organizational culture factors. These factors shape organizations' approaches and adaptation strategies to sustainability, influencing the types of challenges faced by sustainability professionals. Notably, organizational culture factors, such as long-term orientation, a unified sustainability goal, and supportive colleagues, consistently motivate sustainability professionals across both countries, underscoring their relevance to sustainability professionals as an occupation, regardless of their specific organizational context or country of origin. The interviews also revealed country-specific motivating factors. In Canadian firms, aspiring to an egalitarian culture, inclusive leadership emerged as a strong motivator. In contrast, Malaysian firms, driven by their collectivist culture, found motivation in top-down approaches and collective efforts aligned with shared values. These findings present opportunities for cross-cultural learning and emphasize the need for context-specific strategies to address the unique challenges faced by sustainability professionals in their respective settings. In conclusion, this study brings attention to the critical role of organizational cultures in motivating sustainability change agents and highlights the significance of organizational culture factors in driving sustainable practices. By understanding these factors, organizations can cultivate a motivated and proactive workforce of sustainability professionals.

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