The last two decades have seen an evolution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capabilities in the public sector which facilitates the adoption of several IT innovations. Electronic government is one of these strategic innovations that many government agencies have considered adopting to deliver government information and services and support the modernisation of government’s administrative tasks. This research investigates an e-government adoption process as represented by the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) adoption process. XBRL constitutes one of the key components of the electronic regulatory reporting process in HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Companies House (CH). A comprehensive conceptual framework is developed to examine XBRL adoption process and the influential technological, organisational, environmental factors and e-government challenges that affect this process. The contribution of this comprehensive framework is that it develops various relationships among these factors, challenges and stages of the adoption process which have not been identified in the IT adoption or e-government literature. The framework for e-government adoption in the public sector is useful in multiple ways. The major benefit is to contribute to understanding the adoption process, identify the technological infrastructure, and emphasise the importance of the organisational readiness and impact of the environment on the adoption process. The framework can also help government decision makers to visualise a suitable strategic action plan for the future of electronic government by identifying the key issues and potential challenges associated with adopting e-government projects.

This dissertation reports the results of case studies on innovation and new product development in eight Scottish food companies and a subsequent triangulation survey of 85 innovative Scottish companies. The case studies are carried out using qualitative research methods and a realistic inductive research strategy. It is found that the case study companies use an informal and cross-functional innovation process, which is independent of the age of enterprise. It is also discovered that these companies develop new products, often luxuriant variants of their existing products, which are mainly indulgences rather than healthy foods and are sold mostly to large retailers. Use of production methods that are amenable to quick changes in final products and networking with customers, suppliers, other food companies and Scottish Enterprise is also observed. Creative people with high innovative proclivity, who often travel to new locations in search of product ideas, drive the process. The case study companies are high-variety-low-volume businesses, possess good understanding of customer needs and circumstances and are able to achieve a good fit between needs of the market and their own resources. Not facing financial constraints, these companies are able to attract and retain talent, needed to develop new products. Continuously learning from their NPD endeavours, they sell their products without any major advertising or marketing effort. The subsequent triangulation survey of 85 innovative Scottish companies, from food as well as non-food sectors, confirms most of the above-mentioned findings. Contrary to the case study results however, the survey discovers that innovative Scottish companies face financial constraints while developing new products, do not sell most of their new products to large retailers or undertake travel to new locations in search of product ideas. The main contributions to knowledge by this research include crystallisation of the new product development practices in Scotland, highlighting difference in product innovation between various sub-groups of enterprises, a new conceptual construct within which all notions and definitions of innovation can be accommodated and identification of a basic flaw in the present innovation policy in Scotland.

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The thesis focuses on those factors which affect firm growth in the setting of the Chinese transition economy, such as size, age, entrepreneurship, resources, and environment. As regards the complexity of the business expansion mechanism, an interdisciplinary approach combining the fields of economics and management is adopted. Using fieldwork methods, new data were gathered in face-to-face interviews with 83 owner-managers of the Chinese privately owned firms in P. R. China in 2004, as well as in follow-up telephone interviews in 2006. The unique body of qualitative and quantitative data in terms of firm operation, human resources management, finance, technology and innovation, enterprise culture and competitive environment, were collected by a specially designed survey instrument, and enabled a number of new hypotheses to be tested in both economic and managerial aspects. With respect to the modern developments of Gibrat’s Law (1931) and Jovanovic’s Learning Theory (1982) in economics, the effects of two “stylized factors”, namely size and age, along with a vector of firm-specific, environmental and selection bias variables, on firm growth, were examined in Heckman’s (1979) two-step selection model with the correction for sample selection bias and heteroscedasticity. The results indicated that the “stylized facts” that smaller and younger firms grew faster were also valid in the setting of China. This thesis also explored managerial factors contributing to firm growth – viz. entrepreneurship theory, resource-based view in strategic management, and contingency theory in organizational behaviour. A variety of statistical methods were utilized to operationalize entrepreneurial orientation (EO), intangible assets (IA), and contingency factors (e.g. structure, environment, strategy, etc), and econometric models were estimated to examine their relationship with firm dynamics. The evidence suggested that IA might be more capable of facilitating firm growth than EO. However, when both were disaggregated into a lower level of attributes, the influences on growth may vary. Further, contingency theory, originally proposed for the case of larger firms in the west, was also validated in this study on the Chinese sampled firm. The combination of organizational forms and contingency configurations presented a higher power to explain business expansion. It implied that “the good fit” of contingency factors influenced firm dynamics only in a moderate way, whereas “the badness of fit” in configuration could engender either the highest or lowest firm growth, subject to their organizational structures.

Study of the critical factors for TQM implementation throughout the years, and longitudinal analysis of secondary quality winners of prestigious awards such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), is important. The longitudinal analysis in this research will enable verification that there are generic critical factors (CFs) for TQM implementation and generic critical areas of measurement (CAM) that if implemented fully and successfully will deliver excellence. Also, it will enable verification that these generic CFs help to ensure sustainable performance and this could help in answering how excellent organisations sustain their performance constantly. By studying what excellent organisations measure and what they place emphasis on throughout the year, the study will document measurements that have been used to sustain excellence and will consider empirically how these have led to tangible results over a period of twenty years; the study will examine MBNQA winners from 1988 until 2008. Finally, an excellence maturity assessment tool 'assessment software' was developed as result of examining winning case studies over a long period of time, lists of critical factors of implementation (CFI) and critical areas of measurement (CAM) were extracted and used accompanied by the EFQM Excellence Model, and Zairi's two model 'Index of Excellence' and 'Ladder of Excellence'. This formed the basis of the assessment tool developed; companies through this will be able to understand their level of excellence implementation and their position compared to world class organisations.

This research project seeks to explore aspects of the post-reporting phase of the public inquiry process. Central to the public inquiry process is the concept of legitimacy and the idea that a public inquiry provides and opportunity to re-legitimate the credibility of failed public institutions. The current literature asserts that public inquiries re-legitimise through the production of authoritative narratives. As such, most of this scholarship has focused on the production of inquiry reports and, more recently, the reports themselves. However, in an era of accountability, and in the aftermath of such a poignant attack upon society, the production of a report may represent an apogee, but by no means an end, of the re-legitimation process. Appropriately, this thesis examines the post-reporting phase of the 9/11 Commission’s public inquiry process. The 9/11 Commission provides a useful research vehicle due to the bounded, and relatively linear, implementation process of the Commission’s recommendations. In little more than four months a majority of the Commission’s recommendations were passed into law. Within this implementation phase the dominant discursive process took place in the United States Congress. It is the legislative reform debates in the House of Representatives and the Senate that is the focus of this research project. The central research question is: what rhetorical legitimation strategies were employed in the legislative reform debates of the post-reporting phase of the 9/11 Commission’s public inquiry process? This study uses a grounded theory approach to the analysis of the legislative transcripts of the Congressional reform debates. This analysis revealed that proponents employed rhetorical strategies to legitimise a legislative ‘Call to Action’ narrative. Also, they employed rhetorical legitimation strategies that emphasised themes of bipartisanship, hard work and expertise in order to strengthen the standing of the legislation. Opponents of the legislation focused rhetorical de-legitimation strategies on the theme of ‘flawed process’. Finally, nearly all legislators, regardless of their view of the legislation, sought to appropriate the authoritative legitimacy of the Commission, by employing rhetorical strategies that presented their interests and motives as in line with the actions and wishes of the Commission.

The public sector project is particularly a demanding undertaking, with the requirement to meet diverse demands. Despite huge investment, public sector projects tend to complete behind schedule, indicating shortfall in various project factors. This research was grounded on an empirical study of the Malaysian School Computer Laboratory Programme (SCLP) to examine the project success factors throughout the project life span. The extensive SCLP was divided into six zones, spanning urban and remote environment throughout Malaysia. Its implementation was staggered into several phases, two of which covered in this study, namely phase-1 and phase-2. This research aimed to fulfil three research objectives: i) to discover the project management’s success factors; ii) to determine the product’s success factors that encompass various stakeholders; and iii) to identify project characteristics that influenced the project success. A comprehensive review of literature suggested 20 relevant project success factors to be investigated. Those factors were examined using a newly constructed framework, whereby the project life span was clustered into two segments – project process and project product. The study adopted a qualitative paradigm; nevertheless it utilised both qualitative and quantitative approaches of data collection, which were triangulated to provide a wider scope of interpretation. The quantitative data for a total sample of 357 projects were sourced from Likert-type questionnaire and secondary resources, while qualitative data were sourced from combination of semi-structured interviews with 38 respondents representing 10 groups of project stakeholders and secondary data from various documents. The results demonstrated that the project management of the SCLP was improperly administered. Out of five success factors investigated to verify the project conceptualization, only two namely project goal and project scope, were reasonably defined. One factor, stakeholder participation, was inadequately defined, while the other two factors, resources assessment and risk management, were not even taken into consideration by the project decision-making committee. There were also some deficiencies in the project planning. From six success factors tested, two were acceptably planned, i.e. project design and project costing. The other four, namely distribution of authority and responsibility, contractor selection, project scheduling, and project documentation, were insufficiently planned. The inadequacies in the project definition and project planning were reflected in the project execution as only two out of six factors, i.e. administrator effectiveness and communication, contributed to the project success. The other four, known as supervising team efficiency, contractor competence, integrity and external influences were negatively affected the project. Despite some deficiencies in the project management, the outcome or product of the project was found to be successful particularly in the judgement of the target group, the users; they were satisfied with the SCLP deliverables. They also appreciated the benefit from the utilisation of the products, which greatly changed the approaches of teaching and learning. However, the SCLP completion time was not as successful as planned, believed to be a result of unrealistic scheduling during the planning stage. Nonetheless, there were cases of genuine delays due to various factors in the earlier stages. The results also suggested that some of the project success factors were particularly influenced by project characteristics explored in this studied. The influences of these two characteristics, geographical zone and the project award method, could be seen in both the project management process and the project’s product. Overall, this thesis contributed to extant body of knowledge in various ways. A newly constructed research framework, with the concept of duality of project process and product, added depth to the longstanding idea of project success and expanded premises of the existing theory. This framework offered a better platform to identify when particular factors take place and affect the project along the project life span. This study also added a new insight to the Malaysian public sector projects management strategies in particular and to the other countries with the similar situations in general. A new paradigm in project decision-making by adopting a bottom-up concept rather than traditionally top-down alone during the project conceptualisation and a more realistic resource-based approach during the project planning, is suggested. In addition, this research proposed an ideal way to deal with various critical success factors in a huge programme.