Diffusion of corporate risk-management characteristics: perspectives of chief audit executives through a survey approach

This study examines how corporate risk-management characteristics in Australian public universities have diffused under an environment of conflicting management cultures. The findings reveal that corporate risk-management characteristics have diffused in a pluralist form to satisfy stakeholders of different management approaches across its governance levels as opposed to a unilateral form aligned to the corporate approach. The accepted practice of this adapted version challenges the existing notion that the adoption of corporate control processes in the public sector is problematic, and provides insights into the emergence of a hybrid control process to address the needs of multiple stakeholders. These findings have policy implications for defining a new hybrid governance-control paradigm for the public sector as an alternative to the corporate-influenced control paradigm, and provide avenues for further research to confirm the phenomenon with other corporate control processes, public-sector entities, and if so its impact on effective governance.