One of the major economic themes which characterised the development of modern company law was the well-documented separation of ownership from control and the increase in management control brought about by the wide dispersion of share ownership in large public companies.The growth and complexity of the modern corporation with diversified ownership created the need for governance mechanisms to facilitate the monitoring of managers and to restrain them from acting inappropriately, while not unduly restricting their ability to make decisions. The issue of corporate governance has been fiercely debated in both the US and the UK for several decades. The impact of globalisation and the recent financial crises in East Asia and elsewhere have spurred on corporate governance reform, which is now being implemented in many jurisdictions around the world. In recent years, China appears to have adopted some of the basic corporate governance structures of the Anglo-American system. However, little comparative empirical work has so far been undertaken to document systemic differences in ownership structures, institutional arrangement and legal rules betweenthe current Chinese corporate governance system and the systems in the UK and the US, or to determine how a corporate governance regime can best be designed to overcome the agency problems created by the separation of ownership from control in the Chinese context. In this thesis, we investigate the characteristics of China's corporate ownership structure and assess how effective shareholders are in monitoring directors' activities; we examine how boards are structured and function to ensure the efficient running of the company; and we consider the legal duties imposed on directors and how these duties are enforced in China, drawing comparisons and contrasts with the UK. Also, given the distinctive features of the Chinese corporate governance system, we estimate a regression model to investigate the relationship between corporate governance and corporate performance in China. Our results indicate that the weakness of the Chinese corporate governance system is not only a consequence of the concentrated state-ownership structure. This weakness is also in part due to the ineffectiveness of internal monitoring rules, inadequate/incomplete law and poor law enforcement. Finally, we provide some suggestions for the Chinese government to improve the Chinese corporate governance system.

This research emphasizes the active influence of a firm on network outcomes through its networking behaviour: the antecedent efforts undertaken by the firm to develop, manage, and leverage its networks for actual value creation in enabling/driving internationalization. Networking behaviour at the level of the firm is investigated as a core explanatory factor in the internationalization of SMEs in this study. The influence of the key decision-maker on the networking behaviour of SMEs is also examined. Eight qualitative case studies and a quantitative survey were conducted respectively in two stages to draw empirical evidence from the Chinese context. The in-depth case studies provide rich information about the latent factors (variables) of the constructs of the study and their associations, from which hypotheses for quantitative research are formulated. Case findings also support more comprehensive interpretation of the quantitative results. Quantitative analysis of survey data allows statistical validation and generalization of the findings. Findings of key behavioural aspects of networking concerning the likelihood of SMEs achieving (rapid) internationalization are derived. Network resources are identified to have possibly negative in addition to positive influences on internationalization. The findings highlight the significance of deliberate networking behaviour undertaken by a firm in pursuit of rapid internationalization. The research conceptualizes a precise causal model capturing the networking behaviour of the firm as antecedent to explaining and predicting network outcomes in the specific context of internationalization. The research advances an integrative perspective – with theoretical underpinnings from the network perspective, the internationalization model and the resource-based view – to provide more comprehensive understanding pertaining to networks and the internationalization of SMEs.

The purpose of this thesis is to study corporate governance through a holistic approach by reviewing how the interests of shareholders, creditors and employees are protected and constrained throughout the life of a company. The thesis begins with the view that corporate governance is a control system with both an internal and an external governance scheme. By restructuring the parameters in both schemes, I set up a three-dimensional structure to study corporate governance. I first select shareholders, creditors, and employees as three factors of the axis of subjects. I then group social political issues, contracts, and laws and regulations as factors on the axis of constraints. After that, I define the third axis as the life cycle of corporate governance, parameters on which include corporate governance in the normal life, flotations, takeovers, and insolvency. By setting up this three-dimensional structure, I argue that corporate governance must be studied through a holistic approach integrating both the institutional perspective and the life cycle of corporate governance. The institutional perspective emphasizes the importance of social political issues in shaping the combination of constraints on the interests of stakeholders. The discussion in this thesis shows that different stakeholders have different combinations of constraints in safeguarding their own interests. On the whole, the current governance institution can provide due protection to stakeholders in different phases of the life cycle of corporate governance. One implication of this discussion is that company law is not the only relevant issue in corporate governance studies. In turn, shareholder primacy is a misleading conception in the institution of corporate governance even if it is a valid argument in the specific coverage of company law. The dynamic perspective on corporate governance points out that corporate governance also develops in a life cycle pattern. It is important to realize that, similar to the widely recognized path-dependence in corporate governance in comparative governance studies, the development of corporate governance practices in any company is also a continuous process in that existing governance practices and structures may make a difference to the occurrence of the later phases in the life cycle of corporate governance. Moreover, the dynamic perspective accentuates the importance of corporate governance around insolvency compared with that of other phases. Indeed, the solvency criteria which are legally prescribed merely in financial terms can not only exclude any serious consideration of non-financial interests but also reinforce the established finance oriented governance practices. This study also provides some thoughts on the current reform of corporate governance. In general, corporate governance is a multi-disciplinary issue and reform of corporate governance practices must be carried out with both an institutional and a dynamic approach. Accordingly, corporate governance reform can only be an ongoing and piecemeal process. Any abrupt change to the established system may only do a disservice and is thus inadvisable.

The objective of this research was to investigate the generation of uncertainty within industrial supply chains. Since the late 1950's it has been recognised that the systems used internally within supply chains can lead to oscillations in demand and inventory as orders pass through the system. The uncertainty generated by these oscillations can result in late deliveries, order cancellations and an increased reliance on inventory to buffer these effects. Despite the best efforts of organisations to stabilise the dynamics generated, industry still experiences a high degree of uncertainty from this source. Greater understanding of the generation of uncertainty within the supply chain could result in improved management of the systems and consequently competitive advantage being gained by organisations. The investigation used simulation models of real industrial supply chains to identify possible sources of uncertainty. The complexity of the models was adjusted by increasing the number of echelons and the number of channels in the supply chain. One source of uncertainty investigated was the generation of deterministic chaos and a methodology was developed to detect and quantify this within the supply chain. Parallel interactions, which occur between suppliers in the same tier in the supply chain, were also modelled and quantified. In addition to demand amplification, which has been recognised as a source of uncertainty by both academics and industrialists, two additional sources of uncertainty were identified: namely deterministic chaos and parallel interactions. The relationship between these causes of uncertainty was established and the original concept of the "supply chain complexity triangle" is proposed. The "average prediction horizon" was calculated by the use of Lyapunov exponents and was used to quantify the amount of chaos experienced by supply chain members. This chaos was found to be dependent on the number of echelons, which also impacts on the amount of chaos experienced by all members of the supply chain, both up and down stream. Parallel interactions impact on all the members of the supply chain resulting in reduced performance. However, the number of channels in the supply chain modelled had little effect on the amount of chaos. Implications for reducing supply chain uncertainty either by managing or removing these effects is also discussed.

This thesis examines jointly the domestic and international market activities of United Kingdom (UK) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The study seeks to extend the foundational arguments of international business and international entrepreneurship on differences between domestic and international market activities. It is shown that despite its foundational nature, this theme has received limited and fragmentary research attention. Moreover, none of the theme-related studies identified had applied the resource-based view (RBV) to explain performance, despite the fact that performance is a construct of fundamental research interest and the RBV largely guides management inquiry into the performance determinants. Drawing on the RBV, this research seeks to make a unique contribution towards the holistic understanding of firm performance by uncovering the effects of domestic and international firm resources and market learning on both domestic and international performance. This research pursues a positivist and mixed-method approach, combining qualitative case studies and a large-scale quantitative survey on UK SMEs. The qualitative research phase consists of six case studies, whereas the quantitative phase is based upon a sample of 307 SMEs. The statistical technique of linear multiple regression analysis is employed to analyse this sample and discover whether the hypotheses of this research are supported. The quantitative phase is central and the qualitative phase aims at pre-understanding and facilitating the research process. Hence, the case study research assists the hypothesis development and the interpretation of the survey findings in retrospect. The findings of this research have significant implications for theory and practice. Firstly, domestic and international resources and market learning are found to influence positively domestic and international performance, respectively. A valuable finding for future research on firm market learning processes is that these resources effects seem to be much stronger than the respective market learning ones. Secondly, international resources are found to have a lesser impact on domestic SME performance compared to the effects of domestic resources on domestic performance. Respectively, domestic resources are indicated to have a lesser impact on international performance. Conversely, the equivalent effects of market learning are not established. Lastly, it is intriguing that: a. a positive relationship between domestic resources and international performance is not supported; and b. a negative relationship between international resources and domestic performance is partially supported. These contributions provide a fuller understanding of the complex relationship between domestic and international market activities, and should stimulate further research on this important theme.

Risk Management has become an important part of Project Management. In spite of numerous advances in the field of Project Risk Management (PRM), handling uncertainty in complex projects still remains a challenge. An important component of Project Risk Management (PRM) is risk analysis, which attempts to measure risk and its impact on different project parameters such as time, cost and quality. By highlighting the trade-off between project parameters, the thesis concentrates on project time management under uncertainty. The earliest research incorporating uncertainty/risk in projects started in the late 1950’s. Since then, several techniques and tools have been introduced, and many of them are widely used and applied throughout different industries. However, they often fail to capture uncertainty properly and produce inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable results. This is evident from consistent problems of cost and schedule overrun. The thesis will argue that the simulation-based techniques, as the dominant and state-of-the-art approach for modelling uncertainty in projects, suffers from serious shortcomings. More advanced techniques are required. Bayesian Networks (BNs), are a powerful technique for decision support under uncertainty that have attracted a lot of attention in different fields. However, applying BNs in project risk management is novel. The thesis aims to show that BN modelling can improve project risk assessment. A literature review explores the important limitations of the current practice of project scheduling under uncertainty. A new model is proposed which applies BNs for performing the famous Critical Path Method (CPM) calculation. The model subsumes the benefits of CPM while adding BN capability to properly capture different aspects of uncertainty in project scheduling.

This research considers one of the most important of resources - knowledge. There is a widespread view that knowledge is important to organizations and this has led to the study of knowledge management. There are a plethora of definitions of knowledge and knowledge management, but knowledge sharing is recognised as being of fundamental importance. The literature shows the success of knowledge sharing is not only affected by factors including culture, management, technology, processes and structure but, more importantly, it is affected by how these factors interact and fit together. However there is little literature on alignment or strategic fit in knowledge sharing. This research adds to the literature by investigating the enablers and constraints of knowledge sharing and the possible effects of alignment. An interpretive approach using case studies triangulated with a survey is adopted, involving semi-structured interviews with 23 people across five organizations. The findings suggest that significant top management support and a strategy for knowledge sharing are necessary precursors of effective knowledge sharing. In the organizations which lacked this, there is little to encourage people to share and almost none of these organizations measured well on any aspect of knowledge sharing. There are widely varying uses of technology, but many are aimed at sharing data or information. Fewer uses of technology are geared to enabling or encouraging the communication necessary for knowledge sharing. The lack of senior management support may prevent any significant internal or external alignment so a possible approach to strategic fit for knowledge sharing is that strategy has to come first (and the management support that goes with it) and that this should lead to the embedding of the necessary behaviours for knowledge sharing. Only after this are processes and technology able to support knowledge sharing.

IS Security (ISS) has become a key element of business risk management and can itself create competitive advantage. Thus, organisations seek practical approaches to protect the operation of the business. Protecting the functionality of an organisation is a difficult task but it is the responsibility of both senior management and ISS functions to do so. An analysis of the ISS literature reveals a paucity of research of ISS management, and a need for research to develop a holistic model for managing ISS knowledge to overcome the ever-increasing number of negative security incidents. The ISS research community is restrained by small-scale technical questions as the social aspects of ISS are ignored resulting in fragmented research across the IS field. While several possible methods are scattered throughout the literature – they focus on the development of information systems. ISS professionals require a range of skills encompassing business knowledge, legal awareness, and organisational processes as well as technical security knowledge. Research to date has failed to provide an integrated approach to managing ISS knowledge. This study investigates how ISS could leverage the concept of knowledge management. It proposes a theoretical model derived from the ISS and KM literatures. Thus to address this gap in research, this study adopts an exploratory interpretive holistic case study approach using interviews and document analysis as data gathering methods. The study will focus on the relationship between ISS and KM and the proposed benefits that an ISS KM initiative would produce. An analysis of the approaches used by these specialised structures in managing knowledge within and across the two case studies facilitated the development of an integrated model. The interplay between the functions provided rich description of the approaches used to manage knowledge. This research builds on previous studies documented in the ISS literature, by providing a much needed model against which practitioners may diagnose problems, plan action and implement solutions. ISS models and standards today do not exhibit much flexibility, therefore managers make ISS decisions in a vacuum. ISS problems can be managed or reduced when the ISS functions and management are aware of the full range of controls available and implement the most effective. Unfortunately, they often lack this knowledge and their subsequent actions to cope with threats are less effective. The focus of ISS research to date has been technical and grounded in positivism and few, if any, studies utilise a qualitative approach, therefore eliminating holistic, in-depth rich descriptions of core issues within the field. Comparatively little work has taken a managerial point of view, covering broad organisational and social issues. This study acknowledges these issues and provides a solid conceptual foundation for future studies on ISS by answering calls for a theoretical model to guide research in the area. The study also identifies the positive and negative impacts of compliance and describes how organisations can apply the model to overcome these negative effects.

Spinoffs are companies based on university intellectual property established to commercialize university technology to the marketplace. The objective of this study was to examine the reasons for the rapid diffusion of spinoffs in the UK, as well as the potential effects of these companies on university resource acquisition. The study used two broad theoretical perspectives from the sociology of organizations: institutional theory and organizational ecology. It blended elements from other related perspectives such as organizational evolution and social exchange theory. Driven by the need to establish a full database of spinoffs for the first time, quantitative data collection and analysis techniques were predominantly employed. The emerging database comprised of nearly 9 million datapoints capturing the full population of university spinoffs (and their demographics) by all English and Scottish universities over a period of 15 years (1993-2007). Qualitative exploratory data collection methods were also used to supplement the design and structure of the study, including hypothesis formation. In total, 6 in-depth interviews with Technology Transfer Managers were conducted at a representative number of universities across England and Scotland. The study identified the role of certain environmental, institutional factors in shaping the decision by universities to adopt spinoff formation as a standard practice. Such factors were the role of networking, social compliance, industry associations, and media information providers. It also demonstrated that spinoff formation gradually but significantly enhanced university financial resources over time. The study finally discussed the process of coevolution of universities and spinoffs as distinct populations of organizations within the community of academic entrepreneurship. Specifically, the discussion moved towards building a new theory of “reciprocal legitimacy”.

Studies examining the issue of organizational field evolution, especially on cultural field's, have found that some events shape the process by acting as 'purveyors of legitimacy' (Anand and Peterson, 2000). However, no research is forthcoming on events such as international film festivals that serve a similar function. A new theoretical framework - field-configuring events (FCEs) by Lampel' and Meyer (2008) seeks to rectify the lack of attention paid to 'events' by organization scientists. . Adopting their framework, my research explicates one such event in cultural industries, particularly the global film in9ustry - international filin festival. Towards that end, my PhD thesis spawns four papers - one conceptual and three empirical papers. First, I articulate international film festivals as field-configuring events, and identify some of their key characteristics: spatial embededness, temporal recurrence, programming, premiership, juried competition, film markets, side bars, and accreditation. Second, I examine the organization, strategy, and performance of international film festivals. I propose that a prototypical international film festival is a competition of 'films, and its perfonnance is dependent on two resource streams: reputation of nominated films/film makers, and reputation of members of the jury panel. Third, I explicate the macro linkages between an FCE and national film institutions such as BFI through a process known as retrospective consecration. I propose that international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, and Berlin directly impact BFI's efforts of anointing the best British films of the 20th century or 'BFI Top Ido'. Finally, I focus on the micro linkages between international film festivals and BFI choices, particularly focusing on how the. choices emerge from a voting college. The BFI's 'Top 100' voting college consists of three groups of respondents or 'cultural hierarchies' - experts, peers, and the public, and I propose that international film festivals represent a fonn of critical recognition and shape expert choices.