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Introduction
As the pace of globalisation has increased over the last 15 years and Transnational Corporations are seeking to meet the new demands and changes, a parallel development has been occurring in the public sector globally as governments are attempting increasingly to apply the logic of market forces to government activity. According to three New Zealand authors these 'experiments' can be categorised in three ways; commercialisation; corporatisation and privatisation (Spicer et al, 1996).
Commercialisation is the 'weakest' of the three attempts at economic reform and "involves the restructuring of government departments and functions so as to introduce accountability and economic efficiency into government commercial activities". Corporatisation involves the transfer of trading activities of government departments or enterprises to state-owned corporations. Privatisation is the highest level of reform and involves the "withdrawal of the state from the ownership of the production of goods and services and typically involves the state selling off assets or its equity in corporatised trading entities".
The importance of these developments within the process of globalisation is crucial. For example, they facilitate transnational ownership and increasingly prepare a level playing field for the operations of transnational corporations, including the stimulation of more 'mergering' activity across national borders. The impact of government public sector economic reform in general and 'commercialisation' of government activity specifically, however, presents substantial organisational development and human resource management problems. The concern of this paper is with the organisational and human resources impact of the `commercialisation' of government activity on a particular type...