A number of professional groups face the conflict of providing a service to their organisation as a whole, and wider to its clients, while continuing to develop their skills and knowledge professionally, in order to be able to perform effectively in their current role as well as future ones, within a certain amount of time available to them. The introduction of reduced-hours legislation under the European Working Time Directive for junior doctors has posed an organisational problem for NHS Trusts in the UK, who need to reconcile the training and service needs of the profession and the service within the more confined resource of time. This research has identified a distinct lack of clarification of the concepts of training and service in the literature, and no understanding of how these are linked to the activities that junior doctors participate, nor to the working system in which they exist. It uses a constructivist mixed method approach to exploring what is meant by training and service, how this is linked to the operational day-to-day activities in the working lives of junior doctors and how changes in these working and training practices affect the nature and type of service and training activity for the medical workforce and organisational system as a whole. Its contributions to knowledge are multifaceted, ranging from the contributions to exploring the concepts of "training" and "service" and how they relate to activity, an understanding of the system, Its entities and relationships, as well as a new application of a business modelling technique. While it uses junior doctors at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust as the specific area for study, Its findings are generalisable to the organisational context of other NHS Trusts, as well as other professional groups.

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The Chinese shipping industry is one of the fastest developing sectors in the Chinese economy. However, few studies have explored the changes within it, especially concerning its human resource element - seafarers - and the newly formed crewing agencies through which they are employed. This research seeks to explore the contemporary experience of Chinese seafarers and especially how this is impacted by the management strategies of Chinese crewing agencies. In doing so, it contributes to debates about changes in Chinese society - that is, whether the economic reform has led to a new market economy in China. The idea of the emergence of a modernized, free Chinese seafarer labour market is critically examined through research into the employment and labour supply strategies of two ship crewing agencies, which have been reformed to different degrees, and the experience of the seafarers who work for them. The research utilises qualitative methods, with twenty-two managers and fifty seafarers being interviewed extensively, supplemented by documentary research. It seeks to explain why China's seafaring labour export is far lower than people have expected. It is seen that it is difficult to characterise China's seafarer labour market as a free market. The state has limited the liberalization of the market by granting foreign manning qualification to less than sixty state-owned crewing agencies. It is seen that institutions at higher levels still intervene in the operation of the agencies, with their management consequently showing a lack of market orientation to different extents, which constrains the development of China's labour export. It is also difficult to characterise the movement of Chinese seafarers in the labour market as free movement. The argument that Chinese economic reform leads to the transformation of Chinese seafarers into freelancers, which implies a substantial increase of seafarer export due to the attractiveness of working in foreign shipping companies, is too simplistic. In addition, the wages of Chinese seafarers working in the global labour market are lower than the international benchmark rates and are not necessarily higher than the payments by domestic shipping companies. This weakens the willingness of Chinese seafarers to work in foreign shipping companies.

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This thesis pays particular attention to the management of knowledge workers in the local context. Using a survey questionnaire and an in-depth semi-structured interview, an investigation of knowledge workers was carried out based on three main perspectives, namely knowledge management, human resource management and the government development agency. The empirical focus is the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) status companies in Malaysia. By examining 171 usable responses to self-administered questionnaires and in-depth semi- structured interviews with 78 knowledge workers, the findings from the study are analysed to answer the following research questions: How do knowledge workers perceive the current definition of "knowledge workers" by the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC) and what are their opinions on being classified as knowledge workers; How do knowledge workers perceive the current practices and the movement towards the importance and actual implementation of knowledge management in Malaysia; What are the factors affecting the successful implementation of knowledge management in Malaysia; What is the role of human resource management in managing knowledge workers and lielping knowledge management to meet its objectives to achieve competitive advantage; Finally, what is the role of the government development agency in ensuring the successful implementation of knowledge management in Malaysia. Several key findings are derived from this study, including opinions of agreement and disagreement with the definition of "knowledge workers". This then leads to the development of several alternative definitions of knowledge workers, which may further assist the Malaysian government in providing the real picture of the current needs of knowledge workers. It has also been found that knowledge workers have distinctive characteristics. They look for challenges, prefer freedom, like flexible hours, dislike hierarchical structures and are in great demand, frequently being "head-hunted". This information is very useful in producing competitive programmes and upgrading and supporting policy plans for human resource management, as well as for successful knowledge management implementation. Furthermore, even though MSC companies are considered to be high tech and knowledge-based, knowledge management is still in its infancy or in some cases non-existent. However, there are positive attitudes towards the importance of having knowledge management within companies to enable them to leverage their knowledge effectively. Most significantly, this study also indicates the relationship between knowledge management and human resource management. It has been revealed that the techniques of knowledge management are not sufficient without the support of appropriate human resource management practices. For example, it supports processes of knowledge transfer by creating a supportive organisational context and helps companies to retain staff and avoid high labour turnover. Finally, this thesis concludes that the current practice of human resource management could be improved and/or adjusted in order to become more compatible with the expectations of the current Malaysian high-tech industry.

Managing human resources successfully requires a comprehensive understanding of the influences of both internal (for example, size of the organization, nature of industry and organizational life stage) and external (for example, legal, economic and cultural systems) environments of the organization. Of these factors, culture is perhaps the most intangible one, but it has a powerful impact on the management and organization behaviours (Joynt and Warner, 1996). Budhwar and Sparrow (2002) proposed a number of mechanisms that can be used to study the influence of national culture on HRM. One of them is to study the influence of cultural values on HRM preferences. However, in the literature, many studies on culture and HRM are qualitative-based, which further lead to a tendency to either over-exaggerate or over simplify the influences of cultural values on HRM. Some scholars have used quantitative-based methods to analyze the relationships between cultural values and HRM preferences (Sparrow and Wu, 1998 Nyambegera et al., 2000 Chandrakumara and Sparrow, 2004) but little has been done in China. Based on 2852 questionnaires from 102 Chinese companies, this research has explored three research questions: 1. What are the cultural values of Chinese employees 2. What are the HRM preferences of Chinese employees 3. What are the relationships between cultural values and HRM preferences According to the research findings, first, China has a distinct pattern of cultural value orientations, for example, a 'hierarchical collectivism', which is significantly different from most Western cultures. Second, the HRM preferences of Chinese employees are different from that of Western employees, for example, there is a strong 'group orientation' and a strong emphasis on 'soft' factors. Third, based on the data above, the relationships between cultural values and HRM preferences have been analyzed. Some cultural values such as 'collectivism' and 'human nature' have greater predictive power on HRM preferences than other cultural values.

Over the past twenty years a range of diverse and sometimes competing political, economic and professional drivers have been forcing significant change in the education of United Kingdom healthcare professionals. These drivers have emphasised the importance of practical competence for the workplace and this in turn has placed a stronger emphasis on the assessment of competence in practice. The need for strong public accountability and maintenance of the standards and status of the professions has tended to emphasise a technical rational approach to assessment, where standards are pre-defined in detail and assessment is based on replication of the prescribed behaviours under reasonably standard conditions. At the same time the need to develop professionals with the skills and confidence to function in an autonomous and self-directed way has demanded the use of strategies that embrace reflection and self-assessment and test students' skills in relation to professional judgement. The work I have presented here encompasses four studies, which shed light on the tensions that exist in relation to the need to promote strong governance and accountability at the same time as self-direction and offer an insight into how healthcare professionals have tackled this challenge. Taken together my findings have enabled me to describe an approach to assessment that centres on dialogue as the key tool for addressing this challenge, ensuring development towards autonomy and effective governance throughout the student's journey to registration. My work is focused on the assessment of competence in dietetic practice but the findings have been applied both at a micro-level at the sites where the work was carried out and at a macro-level within dietetics across the UK and interprofessionally.