A failure to properly perceive commercial conditions requiring innovation and a failure to understand the underlying nature of technological change are typically said to engender a reluctance to innovate. Explanations of why mature firms in particular, are slow to innovate, frequently draw upon technological, economic or strategic descriptions. However, human interaction and understanding are suggested as being 'at the heart' of the process. Consequently, this thesis considers the cognitive and social nature of managerial vision and its role in stimulating innovation within ICI Paints. Drawing upon a Situated Cognition perspective, a broad exploratory account of the role of the cognitive and social mechanisms of vision and the role of agency and structure by which technology is shaped and developed, suggests several conceptual areas where a cognitive approach may complement sociological approaches to technological change. The account suggests that the content of managerial vision is shaped through a personal discourse, shared practice and 'apprenticeship' learning and remains open to revision within the boundaries of 'ground rules and agreed prejudice'. Beliefs concerning future innovation opportunity are exchanged, modified and appropriated through a continuous social narrative, with an order of shared meaning provided by the cultural heritage of the firm, the specification of a particular technology and the 'legitimising' influence of 'communities of practice'. Consequently, the construction, development and transmission of 'vision' is situated within the meaning that existing practice and technology has for individuals.

The research presented in this thesis identifies problems related to project management that could lead to delay in construction projects and seeks to provide practical solutions. Its main aim is to improve construction planning practice by implementing practical solutions to eliminate or reduce the impacts of causes of delay in Saudi Arabia. It begins by analyzing work by other researchers in the field to identify the state of the art. Causes of delay are examined to gain insight into the controllable managerial factors related to poor project management and to seek practical solutions. This involves investigation of the available solutions, where the theory and the practice of current project management, particularly construction planning, are examined. The literature reveals that traditional project management tools and practices are inadequate in the current era of speedy and complex projects. Accordingly, the implementation of innovative Lean Construction principles and techniques is proposed. Among these, this research tests the applicability of the best known technique, the Last Planner System (LPS). To implement such techniques and so overcome the many problems in construction practice, including delay, there is a need for approaches more effective than traditional research methods such as interviews, observation and questionnaires. These new approaches should allow researchers to influence practice and play an active role with practitioners. Consequently, this research study is based on action research, i. e. a collaborative effort between participant organisations and the researcher as facilitator. In practice, the work examines the effectiveness of implementing LPS to improve the construction planning and control process, aiming to minimize related causes of delay by bringing together empirical data showing the implementation of Lean Construction techniques in two state-funded construction projects in Saudi Arabia. The work synthesises two action research studies, examining and interpreting the results of interviews and questionnaire surveys, then makes recommendations to relevant parties for the implementation of Lean Construction in Saudi Arabia. Major benefits are demonstrated in terms of improving management practice, while various causes of delay can be identified and dealt with regularly. Results of interviews, observations and questionnaires reveal the benefits achieved, the critical success factors and the potential obstacles to the implementation of LPS. The findings reinforce those of LPS studies in other countries, with some differences. In the light of the benefits achieved, it can be stated that LPS is a universal technique applicable to different contexts. The results also indicate that Lean principles provide convenient tools for improving management practice in construction projects. It is evident that their adoption via action research helps construction practitioners to understand their problems better, thus providing satisfying solutions. Further, the management process can be enhanced through continuous improvement and assessment, thus improving project delivery in terms of cost, time and quality.

In the existing literature, studies of innovativeness usually focus on individual characteristics with little concern for aggregated behaviour; the central role of innovativeness, opinion leadership, and geographic location have not been fully reflected in diffusion models; most diffusion models either make simplified as-sumptions to model aggregated trends or concern individual behaviours exces-sively as being ‘toy models’; understandings of the diffusion forces bifurcate into explanations on social contagion effect and self-conformity effect and few diffu-sion models have tried to combine these two streams of thinking. In order to contribute knowledge to these fields, this study seeks to model the diffusion process from an agent-based perspective, with a specific focus on the effects of organisational innovativeness, opinion leadership, and geographic location. The proposed model is a focusing tool that helps interpret and organise the empirical observation. In turn, the model’s results could raise further questions for empiri-cal exploration. The result from the model simulation echoes a number of existing works on in-novation strategies with further quantitative implications for both industry policy makers and managers in organisations. It is found that the statistical distributions of organisational innovativeness and opinion leadership are both important fac-tors in diffusion; the level of information flow between organisations with differ-ent innovativeness levels influences the diffusion process significantly; to cluster organisations in one area changes the interactions between them and increases the diffusion rate, even when the average interaction level of the system is con-trolled. The model also indicates that organisations’ self-effort is the only way for being innovators; that factors that are related to interactions with others are more important for laying in the majority category; and that laggards normally adopt innovations by ‘luck’.

This research project is an exploratory, qualitative study focusing on knowledge sharing practices from an inter-organisational perspective in a context where organizations engage simultaneously in competitive and cooperative relationships. It addresses the lack of prior empirical research on the paradoxical competitive-cooperative environment of the tourism and hospitality industry and the need for theories in this area, which has been largely neglected by the discipline of Knowledge Management. This study deploys a four stage research design based on Grounded Theory principles. Throughout the first three stages a series of semi-structured interviews with hotel managers in the city of Madinah was conducted and analysed simultaneously as expected in the Grounded Theory approach. The result is a theory of knowledge sharing practices among five star hotels for the religious tourism and hospitality industry of Saudi Arabia. The research analysed the formation of a clique of five star hotels, which engage in intense cooperation despite the fact that they are competitors. Informal membership of the clique was found to be restricted by similarity, competition and status, and took place within the context of a market structure known as oligopoly. This type of market is characterized by few suppliers, a strategic interdependence between these competing suppliers, and a state of tension between actions that will benefit them individually and what will benefit the industry as a whole. Collective advantages benefit all clique members, and include areas such as standardisation, in which the hotels align their service levels and average out their prices; bargaining, with outside bodies, such as suppliers or industry regulators; and image promotion of the five star hotel market; finally, they also seek to assist each other by circulating amongst themselves details of potential and unwanted employees whom they wish to market to their fellow clique members, as well as information regarding troublesome clients. Thus, there exists interdependence between five-star hotels, which stems from the fact that there are few of them and each with a large share of the market. As a result, each hotel faces a conflict between the wish to compete - by seeking to increase market share and maximize profits independently - and the possibilities of cooperation with other, similar hotels, whereby all can jointly maximize profits and jointly protect their elite status. The theoretical model produced in this research places great emphasis upon the existence of this cooperative-competitive tension. A theoretical contribution of the model is the employment of oligopoly theory, to explain the way in which inter-organisational knowledge sharing occurs within this context. Another contribution is that it develops an analysis based on elements of game theory, particularly the Prisoner's Dilemma. As is predicted in the Prisoner's Dilemma, there are short-term gains to be met by agreeing to one course of action and then following another, as long as other firms do not deploy the same tactics. However, the same theory illustrates the mutual benefits of cooperation, which work to build bridges and create a basis for long-term success and protect and maintain the elite status of the clique. Accordingly, this research demonstrates that, similar to successful strategies within the Prisoner's Dilemma, hotels choose to cooperate because it is a better long-term strategy than seeking to divide the market through competition.

Developments in information and communication technologies have opened up new possibilities for organising and supporting learning activity. Appropriate evaluation methodology is required to help practitioners understand how and why their implemented learning designs work, so that they can improve their practice. It is argued that progress in learning about good practice in this domain has been slow because of inadequate methodology for inquiry into the complexity of organised learning activity. Methodology is needed to develop a better understanding of the social factors that influence learning and its outcomes, and the role of technology in this process. This research has investigated the use of systems thinking in evaluation methodology. It is argued that using systems thinking to underpin evaluation practice provides a theoretically robust evaluation methodology. The research principally draws from critical systems theory to rationalise an approach to integrating ideas from different systems models, frameworks and methodologies, in particular those from social systems theory (Churchman 1971), Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland 1981), cybernetic systems from a human-centred perspective (Beer 1972, 1979, 1982, 1985) and Critical Systems Heuristics (Ulrich 1983). The central contribution is evaluation methodology that has been found to work in practice and has been rigorously tested through an action research approach across multiple cases. It is argued that the methodology helps to further clarify the complexity associated with evaluating organised human activity, for example associated with the roles, relationships and activity of multiple stakeholders with an interest in the activity being evaluated and the evaluation activity, and the relationship between strategies at different levels of organisation such as projects, programs, and the wider society in which they are situated. This leads to improvement in the relevancy of information generated by evaluation for answering different questions of interest to these multiple stakeholders.

Small and medium sized enterprises' (SMEs) environmental performance and action have been often of great concern toward sustainability although they are playing a critically important role in economic and industrial development. Among lots of initiatives to engage SMEs into sustainability framework, environmental supply chain management (ESCM) of large companies has a great potential to persuade SMEs to undertake environmentally improved activities. ESCM approaches have been increasingly popular in today's large companies' businesses for their competitiveness, compliance with regulation and social responsibility. SMEs may be confronted with these environmental pressures as suppliers to large companies in the market. This research investigated the relations and dynamics between the ESCM approaches of large companies and the environmental activities of SMEs in the Korean electronics industry. A methodological triangulation approach adopting postal questionnaire survey and interview was used to describe these phenomena and to explore to the reasons, obstacles to implement ESCM approaches, and identify key critical factors in ESCM approaches and SMEs beyond ESCM pressures. This study found that ESCM approaches of large companies have positive impacts on SMEs' environmental activity, and the collaborative approach was more effective than the arm's-length approach. Furthermore, when ESCM approaches fitted the internal conditions of an SME, the conduct of its environmental activities improved. Appropriate compensations and the environmental awareness of a CEO could make the SMEs undertake environmental activities by going beyond the criteria suggested by customers.

Sustainability entrepreneurship is the process of creating new enterprises that survive and thrive by contributing to human wellbeing and the functioning of ecological systems. This study is an investigation of the principles, processes, and paradigms of successful sustainability entrepreneurship. Based on a critical realist perspective, a multiple, embedded case study strategy was used to explore the unique design histories of successful sustainabilitydriven enterprises in four different regions and industries - one each in Europe, North America, East Africa, and Asia-Pacific, and in the marketing and finance, hospitality, training, and export-import-wholesaling sectors. Qualitative data consisting of interviews, documents, and observations from site visits were collected and analysed using combined comparative and narrative analyses. These methods enabled the actor logics that guided the unfolding enterprise design process to be identified and described. Institutional theory was used to educe the implications of these logics for the character and performance of emerging enterprises. The first of three principal findings of this study is a cognitive model of sustainability entrepreneurship that specifies five design principles that guide problem solving. The second principal finding is a process model of sustainability entrepreneurship that demonstrates the way these design principles and the underpinning values become embedded in the enterprises' formal and informal structures, allowing the enterprises to maintain their intended purposes and character while necessarily evolving to ensure survival into the future. The third principal outcome is the proposition that this distinct approach to enterprise design represents the emergence of a new organising paradigm that eschews the dualistic divide between'opportunistic' business and 'altruistic' charity in favour of a new logic based on the coproduction of multiple benefit streams through the perpetuation of human and natural resource quality.

No description available.

Knowledge has been a central part of development discourses in the last 40 years. Development organisations have been concerned with its production and dissemination across developing countries with the purpose of eradicating poverty. This thesis focuses on the processes of knowledge production and dissemination for development in the work of consultants and advisors in two organisations in Bolivia. In particular, it examines and analyses the perceptions and reflections of consultants, advisors, and, to some extent, beneficiaries/clients; how they are framed by institutional and organisational discourses; and the apparent limits to reflexivity within the development assistance field. The thesis uses qualitative methods and draws on interview and documentary data collected in the east and central part of Bolivia. It examines the activities of consultants and advisors in two organisations: a Bolivian based development consultancy company Centro de Estudios y Proyectos (CEP) and a Dutch development agency (SNV). Using, as a conceptual framework, the notions of knowledge/power and discourse developed by Michel Foucault and aspects of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, the thesis finds that knowledge engagements are heavily framed by dominant development discourses although they are potentially more productive when the different actors share meanings about the world. This, however, is not usually the case, and the engagements are marked by fundamental differences between the actors. The thesis also finds that consultants, advisors and beneficiaries/clients reflect, learn and hence produce rich knowledge individually but this is not openly shared with their organisational hierarchies because it can potentially challenge the development discourses that frame what the organisations do. The thesis concludes that, in order to overcome constraints imposed by dominant development discourses, it is necessary to build shared meanings between the actors where these do not exist, while recognising that their differences are also the source of new knowledge.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how public sector clients engage with external clients on information technology projects. It does so by gathering documentary and interview information from clients and consultants on five public sector IT projects. The data were analysed using thematic and template analysis, resulting in a potential model of how project participants build engaged relationships. Little research has investigated the client-consultant relationship on IT projects and a literature review revealed little theoretical basis to model engagement between participants arriving new to a project with no pre-existing relationships. By drawing on related literature and qualitative research data, the thesis develops a conceptual model of engagement with components that explain engaged relationships in terms of interaction between conditions and behaviours. Emerging behaviours are identified as sharing, sense making and adapting and these behaviours arise from conditions of environment, participants and expertise. Sharing and sense making behaviours reinforce each other, and lead to adapting, and a consequence of adapting is the potential to change conditions. Adapting conditions alters behaviours, which in turn can alter conditions, thus implying that once started, engagement is a dynamic self-replicating phenomenon with cycles that a manager or consultant can identify and alter for the benefit of the project. The research contributes to theory by offering an understanding of the phenomenon of engagement between participants on projects, demonstrating the self-reinforcing role of conditions and behaviours and adding to theories of client-consultant relationships. The research findings offer consultants and their clients a means to identify how they can deliberately alter engagement to improve a project’s process.