Abstract

Industry sector analysis is generally static and framed narrowly in terms of composition, employment, and investment, thus ignoring the process and many outcomes of structural change as well as the distributional consequences. This chapter discusses an analysis of the Australian electricity sector, often hailed as the exemplar of global electricity sector liberalization, using a mixed methods approach. The research design was guided by the study’s theoretical framework – Régulation theory – which takes into account a wide range of factors driving change over time, and incorporates more than economic concepts. The chapter’s discussion covers the research design for the Australian study which transformed its theoretical framework to an empirical representation, the multiple data collection methods and data sources used, the steps taken to develop the study’s critical content analysis of documents, the key findings of the analysis, and some observations about the study’s analytical framework, triangulation, and mixed methods research design.