Increasing the security of e-Business is best achieved by considering the environment in which e-Business applications need to be implemented and used; this implies that e-Business should be viewed as a complex socio-technical system with three interconnected and interacting elements: stakeholders, enabling technology, and business processes. This multiple perspective has rarely been captured by previous studies of e-Business security which perceive security from a narrow, single-sided technical view. This thesis argues that the predominant technical security approaches consider neither the multifaceted nature of e-Business security nor the requirements and influences of the various stakeholders involved in its context. In Jordan e-Business adoption is still in its early stages and is gaining the attention of several parties. Therefore, the primary approach in this research is an interpretive stakeholder analysis in which notions of a socio-technical perspective are employed as required in order to develop a conceptual framework for better understanding of e-Business security in the context of Jordan. In other words, an interpretive approach has been adopted as a mean of inquiry aiming at developing a holistic understanding of e-Business security in relation to its context as well as considering all the stakeholders in the problem area. This methodological choice was influenced by three factors: the nature of the research problem, the researcher's theoretical lens, and the degree of uncertainty in the study environment. Consequently, four major stakeholders were identified and their security implications were explored. The study's findings provide rich insights into the security of e-Business by identifying and interpreting the roles, the perceptions, and the interactions of several groups of security stakeholders. The theoretical contributions include: an explanatory framework of organisational, legal, human and technical factors affecting security in e-Business environments which was developed by employing an inductive stakeholder analysis as well as the identification of several organisational aspects, such as governance, communication, power conflict, awareness, and resistance to change, and their relationships to security as well as their practical implications at individual, organisational, and national levels. Additionally, the findings provide insights into the customers' side of the security problem and explain its relationships with other stakeholders, including government, business and technology providers. This is a sound practical contribution which can help these stakeholders to design better security approaches based on a deeper understanding of customers' security requirements.

This thesis aims to develop further understanding of organisational sustainability in the voluntary sector, as a complex and dynamic phenomena inextricably linked to capacity for survival. In taking a holistic approach to exploring the dynamics of sustainability, the study considers the influencing factors, both internal and external, that can drive strategic change within voluntary organisations through an extensive multi-method research programme incorporating exploratory focus groups, descriptive survey fieldwork and multiple-case studies. Specifically, the research outlines the major internal and external systems that are important for voluntary organisations to consider when developing strategies for sustainability and, perhaps more importantly, explores the interconnections between them. The thesis departs from much of the dedicated voluntary sector literature, which often adopts a rationalist prescriptive approach to organisation and management. In aiming to advance something of a more critical approach, which considers what may be termed the 'emotional' side of strategy, the study makes a key contribution to the voluntary sector strategy literature. Ultimately, the author argues that to study, govern and manage voluntary organisations involves thinking about philosophy, politics and ethics. In the context of developing strategies for sustainability, this equates to considering who says what the job is, how it should be done, and how people are affected by doing it one way rather than another. In this regard, it would appear that acceptance and legitimisation of certain (pluralist or unitary) approaches to strategy and change is associated with the coherence between that approach and the social values expressed in the organisation's service work. It is argued that there is potential for voluntary organisations to utilise the strategy process to surface, articulate and test assumptions across organisational functions and hierarchy. This is especially relevant because of the turbulent environment that many organisations in the voluntary sector face and the diversity of the many stakeholders who have an interest in the organisation's long-term ability to achieve its mission. In these circumstances, it is unlikely that those individuals at the apex of the organisation (be they trustees and/or senior management) will be able to 'figure it out from the top' and have everyone else 'following the orders'. The practical implication of the thesis is that if strategy is, at least partly, about collective purpose and shared visions of the future, trustees and managers of voluntary organisations must recognise this explicitly in the way they create strategy. Indeed, the study demonstrates how some voluntary organisations have deeply involved individuals throughout the organisation in the strategy process as a means of creating, raising and sustaining commitment to a cocreated future vision of the organisation.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore in what way might the concept of common sense inform leadership action? The thesis takes as a starting point typical dictionary definitions of common sense and moves on to critically review related literature from, Delaney (2001), Gerber (2001), Lissack & Roos (2000), Rausch (2009), Zhao (2009) and gains an appreciation of the different aspects of common sense to understand how the implicit nature of common sense influences leadership actions within the context of a large family owned business. A description of Common Sense as something 'positive and desirable' (Fulton, 2006) whilst at that same time something taken for granted which offers the prospect of development according to Rausch (2009) and the possibility of an advanced form of Common Sense (Delaney, 2001) or Critical Common Sense (Watson, 2006) is also considered. The common sense literature is reviewed against the past theories of leadership and using Bryman's (2006) leadership framework the interconnecting elements of both strands of literature are pulled together to form a model of common sense leadership incorporating: trait, style, contingency, and new leadership. The model of common sense leadership integrates common sense with people management, the character and competence of the leader and the new leadership aspects of transformation, vision, and charisma. The research is undertaken predominantly using semi structured interviews and building on an 'interpretative and subjective' general analytical inductive methodology, it contributes to both theory and management practice by making more explicit an aspect of leadership often overlooked - a common sense approach.

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A computer simulation model has been developed of a manufacturing system which produces a multi-style, multi-size product range, and which utilizes multiple stations machines. Manufacturing systems of this type can be found in the shoe and textile industries. The model has been used to examine such a system in relation to its major variables, and under different operating and control rules. The utilization of a factorial design has allowed the identification of the main effects and interactions between the major variables, which provided information about the mechanisms governing the system's behaviour.

Attempts to manage knowledge of innovative organizations may prove to be complex, as such is assumed to be one of the main variables whilst a distinguishing factor of such organizations to survive within a marketplace. As their main asset is the Knowledge of certain highly motivated individuals that appear to share a common vision for the continuity of the organization. Satellite technology is a good example of that. From early pioneers to modern day mini/micro satellites and nanotechnologies, one can see a large amount of risk at every stage in the development of a satellite technology, from inception to design phase, from design to delivery, from lessons learnt from failures to those learnt from successes, and from revisions to design and development of successful satellites. In their groundbreaking book The Knowledge Creating Company (1995), Nonaka et al laid out a model of how organisational knowledge is created through four conversion processes, being from: tacit to explicit (externalisation), explicit to tacit (internalisation), tacit to tacit (socialisation), and explicit to explicit (combination). Key to this model is the authors' assertion that none are individually sufficient. All must be present to fuel one another. However, such knowledge creation and diffusion was thought to have manifested and only applied within large organizations and conglomerates. Observational (questionnaire-based) and systematic (corpus-based) studies-through case study elicitation experiments and analysis of specialist text, can support research in knowledge management. Organizations that manufacture, use, and maintain satellites depend on a continuous exchange of ideas, criticisms, and congratulations. One can regard such organizations from NASA to SSTL as amongst a class of knowledge-based organizations. Through selective use of the previously stated approaches, and case study research methodology, we are to investigate on how knowledge flows in a finite organizational setting and could be modelled by specialist text. We aim to describe in this thesis our understanding of the nature of a specialist organization in a quantifiable manner. We have examined how knowledge flows and is adapted between commercial and research types of corpora. One of the major results deduced from the observational study was that knowledge diffusion is paramount within the lifetime of an organization, and could be supported by information systems. Leading us to investigate on how Knowledge diffusion takes place, in an empirical way. Our analysis shows that research papers (created within educational institution) and commercial documents (created within spin-offs of such higher education institution) can be distinguished rather on the basis of single word and compound terms. These two lexical signatures show the potential for identifying points of mutual interest in the diffusion of knowledge from the research institution to the commercialization process, thus to application(s) within a domain.

The thesis is a study of the effect of socio-cultural factors upon business organisations. The study attempts to test a wide range of hypotheses about the differences between British and American manufacturing organisations by comparing a sample of British businesses with some comparable American firms operating in the United Kingdom, The study begins by examining the validity of the dominating analytical framework of industrialism that has frequently been used to investigate the effects of cultural variables upon business behaviour. The analysis points to the logical and empirical weaknesses in the industrialism thesis, and attempts to show how industrialism has almost always been confused with capitalism. The advantages of viewing both societies and both groups of firms from the perspective of the capitalist mode of production is emphasised. The use of culture as an explanatory variable in economic analysis is analysed along with a range of conceptual problems in such analyses. The third chapter attempts to trace the growth of the capitalist economic order in the context of the pre-existing socio-cultural structure in both societies. It is from this section that the majority of the study's hypotheses are drawn, although further hypotheses are taken from a study of American executives working in Britain which is also reported. The major findings are reported in three chapters: The first of these concentrates upon the organisational structures and processes of the firms studied; the second examines some aspects of the characteristics and behaviour of the managers employed; the last presents some data on the organisational climates of the two groups of firms. In the final chapter the findings of the whole study are discussed in terms of their effect upon economic performance, both at the level of the society and the individual firm.

Many critisisms have been made on the usefulness, of input-output analysis and the whole possibility of representing an economy by simple motionless coefficients in a single inter-industry table. The assumption of constant coefiicients can only be a first approximation to the more complex production functions of the real world. Changes in product mix, input substitutions and technological innovations all do occur but the question of real importance is "Are the errors involved in using the simplifying assumption, satisfactorily small?" Tests have already been performed in the United States and Japan (1) (2), but not in England, as to the stability of coefficients and Leontief has tried to quantify changes which do occur over time (3). Carter (4) sums up the real need in input/output analysis in taking into account these changes:- "As detailed planning and forecasting become standard practice for business and government the integration of ideas on new techniques, trends and commonsense business judgement in a consistent economic framework is required. Blending of these disparate elements is not possible in a highly aggregative system or in terms of net factor inputs alone. Working with details of intermediate as well as primary input requirements has the advantage that it permits the absorption of a great deal of fragmentary information from extra-economic sources". I have tried to disaggregate one sector in the input-output table by combining technical information on the one hand and economic analysis on the other. The input-output coefficients have been produced by a systematic approach forming the framework of a timeless. model taking into account the factors of product mix, input substitutions (price changes) and technological innovations.

The aim of this case study is to develop a quality expectations instrument (QEI) to measure expectations based upon subjectively perceived quality, utilising a customer perspective and perception for a small medium sized (SME) multidisciplinary law firm (law firm) which incorporates a tax service function. The thesis is structured into a theoretical and a practical part. The aim of the theoretical part is to investigate the necessary scientific theory. The investigation was conducted to answer the question what characterises modern quality management (QM) and furthermore to indicate the methodology of this case study. The question as to what characterises modern QM is best answered by a literature review. In the literature review the concept of quality will be examined, service quality models will be analysed and the question how quality can be planned, generated, controlled, measured and improved will be answered. The literature review ends by combining two existing models of QM, the Model of Donabedian (1966) and the GAP-Model of Parasuraman et al. (1985). Both assumptions were derivated into one theoretical dimension-oriented QEI, which focuses on customer expectations. The section "Methodology" explains the philosophical phenomenological approach of this case study and the reason for the most suitable mixed method approach that was used to operate the findings of the study. The empirical data collection by an interview and a questionnaire survey is described and criteria to ensure face validity, reliability and validity are given. In the practical part, data were first collected by a semi-structured interview which was further developed from the theoretical non-empirical findings. Both, non-empirical findings and the qualitative empirical findings and the evalued data were used to develop a questionnaire. The quantitative empirical collected data were valued by factor analysis as data reduction technique. The outcome was used to develop a QEI to measure expectations utilising the example of a tax service system and process of a German multidisciplinary law firm. The case study ends by giving recommendations for the evaluation and by illustrating the limitations of this case study. This case study is the first step in the process to produce a quality measurement instrument (QMI).

Increased political pressures towards a more efficient public sector have resulted in the increased proliferation of electronic documents and associated technologies such as Digital Signatures. Whilst Digital Signatures provide electronic document security functions, they do not confer legal meaning of a signature which captures the conditions under which a signature can be deemed to be legally valid. Whilst in the paper-world this information is often communicated implicitly, verbally or through notes within the document itself, in the electronic world a technological tool is required to communicate this meaning; one such technological aid is the Digital Signature Policy. In a transaction where the legality of a signature must be established, a Digital Signature Policy can confer the necessary contextual information that is required to make such a judgment. The Digital Signature Policy captures information such as the terms to which a signatory wishes to bind himself, the actual legal clauses and acts being invoked by the process of signing, the conditions under which a signatory's signature is deemed legally valid and other such information. As this is a relatively new technology, little literature exists on this topic. This research was conducted in an Action Research collaboration with a Spanish Public Sector organisation that sought to introduce Digital Signature Policy technology; their specific research problem was that the production of Digital Signature Policies was time consuming, resource intensive, arduous and suffered from lack of quality. The research therefore sought to develop a new and improved method for creating Digital Signature Policies. The researcher collaborated with the problem owner, as is typical of Participative Action Research. The research resulted in the development of a number of Information Systems artefacts, the development of a method for creating Digital Signature Policies and finally led to a stage where the problem owner could successfully develop the research further without the researcher's further input.