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Globally, public management underwent substantial reforms over the past three decades. Known as new public management (NPM), reforms have sought to redefine the role of politicians and public managers, redesign public organisations for enhanced autonomy and effectiveness, and restructure service delivery by integrating private organisations to ensure competition believed as necessary for efficiency. Premised on tensional forces of public choice' and `managerialism' the NPM model potentially creates conflicts between managers and professionals. Developed in OECD countries, and applied to less developed countries (LCDs) with generally ineffective public sectors; and admittedly an engrained corruption culture, NPM reforms are typified by increased bureaucratic centralisation, which restricts professionals' discretion. Using semi-structured interviews and a range of qualitative analytic devices, this thesis examines the challenges professional managers encounter under senior managers, when some support functions were privately outsourced, in line with NPM, in two corporatised hospitals in Ghana. Findings suggest professionals feel by-passed, their discretion restricted, and their expertise ignored by senior managers, generating clashes over mediating the conflicting dualities of cost/quality, results/procedures, and output/outcome. Conceptualised as resistance strategies, professionals' response(s) to the encountered issues portrayed appreciable unconventionality and non-deviance, coming close to individualised version of work to rule, and professionalised version of weapons of the weak. Such professionals' resistance strategies elucidate the complexities of Ghana's embedded political, economic and socio-cultural context. The findings suggest the true outcomes of NPM reforms within this and similar contexts are masked, distorted by the refracting effects of corruption, producing a type of bureaucracy that encourages reduced devolution, tending to inhibit rather than aid effective delivery of public services.

Drawing upon the study of three Thai hotel chains, this research sets out to explore why these chains seek to deliver their products and services beyond the traditional boundaries of domestic markets and to investigate how factors in the environment of foreign countries and Thai hotel chains affect their decisions when they expand into new overseas markets. Once they had been identified, an attempt was made to determine if any relationship existed between these factors and choice of entry mode when the hotel chains in question attempted expansion into new international markets and chose one entry mode over others. This research has utilised the transaction cost approach (TCA) which insists, regarding hospitality organisations' modal choice, that organisations manage their assets -and' thus shape organisational structure - through a cost-benefit comparison of external market-based activity and internalising these activities within the organisations (Litteljohn et al., 2007). Moreover, the TCA has been widely used in studying international business and is particular useful in analysing and explaining various entry mode decisions in a more in-depth manner. Thus, the TCA helps to predict entry mode for hotel firms and identifies a number of determinants related to entry mode choices as the starting point for building the conceptual framework of this research. Additionally, this study adopted an exploratory study approach in investigating the internationalisation specifics of the three Thai hotel chains, and the semi-structured interview was the research method used. The findings suggest that there is a relationship between environmental elements and entry modes. In particular, the variables that emerged from the findings were found to be significant, such as support from local financial institutions, buying power of consumers, the role of the parent firm's owner. Therefore, this study attempts to develop and adjust Jones et aI's (2004) framework by adding some extra variables and entry modes that could not be captured in the existing literature but emerged into the framework from the findings. Also, this research provides new empirical evidence and extends the boundaries of existing knowledge in the developing-country internationalisation literature, especially as regards Thai multinationals and the internationalisation of Thai hotel chains.

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Supply chains are not new, but their importance has grown in recent years due to globalisation, tough competition and the increasingly networked nature of business. Simulation methods have long been applied in production-inventory systems and have found increased use in supply chain management. Given that supply chains are geographically distributed entities, 'it seems sensible to consider the application of distr~buted computation to their simulation. This proposition is based on several prospective advantages of dis!ributed supply chain simulation (DSCS) that seem likely to make this kind of modelling worthwhile. However, notwithstanding these potential advantages, favourabie application conditions and the genuine interest of academics and practitioners in DSCS, there is hardly any evidence that real-life applications are used in industry. This thesis considers five potential drivers that might make distributed supply simulation attractive and useful. These are used as the basis of an analysis of the relevant literature. The empirical part describes the DSCS implementation of an educational supply chain game as an example application, which allows investigation of the value of DSCS for the holistic analysis of collaboration, and also provides some insights into other application drivers. These include the possible implementations of information sharing in distributed settings; in particular, their effects on the dynamics of pipeline and network supply structures. The concluding research stages discuss the difficulties ofDSCS and the ways they may be overcome. Thus, the main research c~mtribution is the unbiased assessment of practical usefulness, potential, feasibility and difficulties of DSCS in industry derived from the perspectives of literature review and gained practical modelling experience.

The thesis contributes to the emerging critical perspective on CSR and development from the context of corporate-community relations in the Nigerian oil industry. I take a critical look at the link between oil multinationals' (MNCs) CSR initiatives and community development in the Niger Delta. This research focus can be attributed to the contested nature of the debate over the CSR-development relationship (i.e., theoretical concerns), and the inability of oil MNCs to secure their social licence to operate despite increases in community development spending in the region (i.e., policy and empirical concerns). Hence, unlike previous analysis, a stakeholder .analytical approach that focuses on- the 'social responsibility' of oil MNCs and the 'reciprocal responsibility' of other stakeholders was adopted for exploring the link between oil MNCs' CSR initiatives and community development. The research thus attempted to assess and understand the CSR-development nexus from a beneficiary perspective (i.e., host communities), a practitioner perspective (i.e., oil MNCs) and an institutional context perspective (i.e., government). The research carefully interrogates the issues of community perceptions, expectations and sociocultural mores with which they make sense oftheir relationship with oil multinationals (MNCs). Efforts were also made to explore the strengths and limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an effective vehicle for fostering community development and harmonious stakeholder relationship in the Nigerian oil industry. Finally, the research critically examined whether the Nigerian government facilitated or inhibited CSR practices and the possible drivers and constraints for CSR in the Nigerian oil industry. A combinatio~ of quantitative (e.g., household questionnaires) and qualitative (e.g., interviews and focus group discussions) methods informed the process of data collection during fi~ldwork in Nigeria and subsequent analyses presented in the thesis. Findings from the research suggest that the relationship between CSR and community development is often more complex than presently assumed, and the extent to which oil MNCs' CSR initiatives positively or negatively affect community development is best understood in terms of the interplay of corporate motivation and strategy, local culture and institutional context. The research synthesises. an explanation for the inability of oil MNCs to secure their 'social licences to operate', and proposes ways to strengthen oil MNCs' CSR initiatives to enable stakeholders to derive maximum benefits from CSR practices.

This thesis takes a resource based view on the relationship between organizational learning and excellence in business in small and medium size enterprises (SME). The focus of the research is SMEs in. the information technology sector (IT) in the Nordic countries. It looks at how these companies learn from leveraging their intangible resource base to increase their competitive advantage and achieve excellence in business. Businesses employ learning and�· knowledge when they process and generate information, formulate plans and strategies, make decisi?ns, monitor behaviour and experiences, and learn, create and use know-how. The importance of leveraging knowledge, as a key success factor in business, is captured by Drucker (1993) and there are further indications to the increasing importance of learning and knowledge in business. The Usbon meeting of the European Council in March 2000 has set the objective of making Europe the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world based on the arguments that the economy is rapidly becoming a global marketplace characterized by fierce competition, increasing consumer demands, and the need for value added products and services. The only way for enterprises to survive in this knowledge-based economy is to differentiate themselves by continuous innovation in order to improve their processes, products, services, networks, and reputation (RICARDIS 2006). The theoretical basis for the discussion is in organisational learning, as identified by Field and Ford (1995), Pedler, Boydell et al. (1989) and Senge (1990). It further looks at the idea of dynamic capabilities that is outlined by Teece, Pisano et al. (1997) and builds on the theoretical foundations of Schumpeter (1934) on innovation and Penrose (1959) on the resource based view of the firm. In particular, it agrees with the view that new products are the results of new combinations of knowledge and that competitive success arises from the development and utilization of firm-specific assets. The resource-based paradigm assumes that value is a function of the way in which resources are managed. The resource base perspective used; is that of intangible resources, intellectual capital, or intellectual assets. The concept of intellectual :<ssets is introduced by Hall (1992), as being assets whose essence is an idea or knowledge. The term intellectual capital is accredited to Stewart (1997) as the 'sum of everything everybody in your company knows that gives you a competitive edge in your marketplace'. Another perspective is the strategic viewpoint, where it is important for organizations to identify and map their value creation activities. This research reports on a group of IT companies in the Nordic countries that have systematically worked on ~rea~ing a common framework for identifying their intellectual capital and to measure it. The framework includes common indicators for measuring and reporting intellectual capital so as to enhance understanding of the value drivers within the companies. The objective of this work is to improve the competitive situation of the companies and their economic performance. This research confirms that there is a relationship between the perception of organizational learning and excellence in business. It also identifies that excellence in business is mostly affected by learning approach to strategy and self development within organizations.

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No description available.