During the past 50 years, much has been written about the notions leadership and management. The last twenty years, however, has seen a strong research shift towards business leadership. For the most part, this research has been conducted in the West and focused on Western leaders. These findings have in turn been 'exported' to the developing economies of the world, mainly through Western educators, consultants, books and more recently, the Internet. However, as far back as thirty years ago, the transferability of such ideas was challenged on the basis of culturally differing values and beliefs giving rise to different behaviours. Much has since been written about cultural diversity. Most of these studies have been comparative in nature, with conclusions being drawn from cultures observed in isolation, rather than in the context of multicultural interaction. In more recent years, however, a growing interest has emerged in multicultural work groups. With this interest has emerged a growing recognition that culturally diverse teams, when managed well, can outperform their homogeneous counterparts. This finding has critical implications for business leaders, who now increasingly find themselves operating and living beyond their domestic boundaries. This thesis is therefore about leadership in multicultural situations. More specifically, it is about senior level leadership within teams comprised of Hong Kong Chinese and Australian or British managers, working together in Asian-based, multinational organisations. The thesis will present arguments which challenge some of the conventional thinking about leadership, when applied to multicultural situations. The thesis will also provide new perspectives on the pitfalls of cultural stereotyping, identify underlying tensions which exist within multicultural executive teams, and the associated behaviours. However, most important of all, the thesis will add to our body of knowledge, by addressing what is arguably one of the most compelling business challenges for the new millennium, multicultural leadership.

The earlier part of the thesis investigates the reasons for the considerable increase in take- overs within Britain during the 1950s. The most important of these reasons was the section of the Companies Act 1948 which enabled take-over bidders to by-pass the directors of a company and appeal directly to its shareholders. This new opportunity coincided with circumstances which made shareholders more likely, than was previously the case, to accept offers for their shares. These circumstances are discussed together with other events, such as fiscal changes, which affected take-over activity. Once the possibilities provided by the new situation became realised , companies we re taken over for a large number of different reasons so one chapter is devoted to classifying these reasons, with examples of each. Because a noticeable feature of take- overs has been the often substantial discrepancy between the value of the offer and the stock exchange price prior to the bid, a chapter has been devoted to considering factors to be taken into account when evaluating an offeree company. Bidders have problems such as financing the take-overs, winning the acceptance of shareholders and coping wit h possible counter-bidders so one chapter mentions these difficulties and the techniques evolved for overcoming them. Directors not wishing their companies to be taken over have developed a variety of defensive measures, these have been classified and divided into two main groups, steps taken before a bid has been made for the company and ad hoc measures to stave off an actual offer. The final chapter deals with some of the results of 20 years of take-overs, together with conclusions which have been drawn. The author's contention is that the effect of post-war take- overs has been mainly beneficial though there are still some abuses which require remedying.

The purpose of the thesis was to seek a general explanation of merger activity. Methodology: A multitude of explanatory theories existed and it was deemed necessary to determine explicitly the criterion to be used in developing a general theory of mergers. An analysis of major categories of merger theory indicated that the analysis of motive is essential to the provision of an adequate explanation. The theory of the managerial firm was chosen for analysis since it is both logically prior to market explanations and richer in motivational possibilities. Difficulties in testing a theory had been exposed by "growth of knowledge" methodologists. It was decided to utilise the propositions for theory testing and development proposed by Lakatos. Two samples of firms were drawn: quoted companies engaged in the supply of consumer goods from 1970 to 1978, and 100 firms engaged in merger activity in 1978 or 1979 and a control group of 50 firms not involved in mergers. Univariate statistical analysis, multiple regression and discriminant analysis were then involved in determining the financial and structural characteristics of firms with respect to merger behaviour. Findings The claim by Lakatos that knowledge could be advanced in a rational and progressive manner was not substantiated. The view that growth and profit are opposing aims of the managerial firm was rejected. Takeover victims could not be identified with failing firms. Shareholders do not benefit from increasing growth and profits proportionately. The theory of the managerial firm (distinguished from that found in the literature) receives some support. Shareholders seem more concerned with security than is compatible with wealth maximisation theory. Merger activity is best understood as a normal form of investment activity. The development of merger theory requires further analysis of the growth strategies of firms in oligopolistic markets under uncertainty.

Development in the post/colonial world is premised on the twin logics of modernization and nation-building, of which the latter has received little attention in post-development studies, and relatedly Management and Organisation Studies (MOS). This thesis interrogates – historically and critically – the imaginaries of modernity and nationalism, and later nation-building, that have animated development in post/colonial India. It draws on the history of philanthropy of the Tata Group, one of India’s leading global business group. In Part I of the thesis, the shifts in these imaginaries are mapped and explained; the history of organisation and management of development is presented in Part II; and the purposive organisation of history and historiography is presented in Part III. The thesis makes the following contributions: empirically, this research revises critically and updates the history of the Tatas’ philanthropy. It makes a methodological contribution by drawing attention to the constructed nature of history and historiography, which is used purposively towards maintaining the Group’s identity. Conceptually, this is ‘a’ history of development in post/colonial India; which it is argued can be interrogated substantively though Chatterjee’s reconceptualisation of civil society, political society, and population. It draws attention to the ‘pedagogic reflex’ of the elite and the crucial role of corporate philanthropy in the constitution of the ‘population’ as part of development. Departing from Chatterjee’s demarcation of civil and political societies as empirically distinct, the thesis makes a case for using these as conceptual apparatuses. The thesis provides a corrective to post-development studies and related work in MOS, by instantiating the national question at the centre of development in post/colonial India. Displacing ‘Third Worldism’, it traces the origin and history of development-management in another place and time, outside postWorld War II and Cold War geo-politics. The thesis makes a modest but generative theoretical contribution by drawing attention to Chatterjee’s remarkable work and provides an alternate set of conceptual resources, hitherto little used in MOS.

This thesis reconsiders some of the most widely debated controversies in game theoretic modelling of oligopolistic competition, and proposes modifications of existing models and concepts demonstrating how these controversies can be addressed in the presence of uncertainty. The first part of the discussion is concerned with competition by product design in heterogeneous goods' markets, as captured by the Hotelling framework. The most prominent difficulty here is the model's lack of robustness to changes in the transportation cost specification, and the fact that the only universally tractable quadratic formulation induces an implausible and socially undesirable 'maximum differentiation' outcome. The problem is addressed in Chapter Two, by considering a model with uncertain consumer demand and general linear-quadratic costs. It turns out that, for uncertainty big enough, the presence of a linear component in the cost function no longer rules out an analytical solution to the game. In particular, I characterize a subgame-perfect equilibrium in which the firms' locations converge to the socially efficient ones in the limit as uncertainty increases, regardless of the curvature of the cost function. Thus, the presence of substantial demand uncertainty makes the market more competitive, by reducing the excessive equilibrium product differentiation and the resulting prices. In fact, Chapter Three demonstrates that this also holds when the firms do not know the exact distribution of consumer demand fluctuations, but resolve the resulting ambiguity using the Arrow and Hurwicz alpha-maxmin criterion. This is because firms that are sufficiently pessimistic, in the sense of assigning a large weight to the lowest profit scenario, locate closer together in equilibrium under uncertainty, where it is argued that operating on such a pessimistic premise could become prevalent via strategic commitment, elimination of underperforming firms or as a result of taxation. This discussion is complemented by the second part of the thesis, which is concerned with competition in homogeneous goods' markets. In particular, Chapter Four reconsiders the so far unresolved discrepancy between the Cournot model of quantity competition and the alternative Bertrand price setting specification. To this end, I propose a model evaluation criterion, based on a recent generalization of the von Neumann-Morgenstern stable set concept. In particular, a restriction of the players' strategy sets is said to constitute a stable convention when no one has an incentive to unilaterally violate it, while faced with strategic uncertainty about the counterparts' exact choices within their restricted strategy sets. Applying the criterion to a simultaneous move quantity-price game reveals that Cournot competition is a stable convention when production costs are high relative to the number of firms and difficult to recover for unsold output. In contrast, Bertrand competition is never stable.

The empirical evidence relating to the stock market reaction to domestic joint ventures (JV) announcements suggest that the mean abnormal returns (MARs) and cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) are consistently positive, whilst those of international joint venture (IJVs) are mixed. One neglected but obvious influence of the stock market response to IJV announcements is the way they are financed. The preference for project finance over corporate finance in the financing of IJVs may have a role to play in this context. Compared with capital structure theories, this gap is seen as quantifying the role of the type of structure or debt (project or corporate finance) plays in shareholder value creation upon announcement. Using a cross-sectional study comprising of a finnal sample of 394 IJV announcements made from the years 2005 to 2010 and retrieved from the Securities Data Company (SDC) database, an event study methodology was used to derive MARs and CARs in a 2l-day window (-10,+10). The MARs and CARs are integrated into regression analyses to examine the specific role the type of finance plays in shareholder value creation upon announcement by controlling for project specific, host nation characteristics and sponsor-specific variables. The findings of the research establish that IJVs on average create value upon announcement but does not have a lasting impact on stock market valuation. As expected, the financial markets' response to IJV announcement during and after the global financial crisis (2008-2010) was not favourable. It was also found that the choice of finance matters in the market response to IJV announcements with project finance having a higher probability of eliciting a significant positive market reaction. Finally, the study revealed that whilst sector and gearing has an impact on MARs and CARs, the legal origin of the host country of the IJV did not make an impact upon announcement.

Knowledge is a source of competitive advantage which strengthens multinational corporations’ (MNCs) market position, and thus they set up overseas subsidiaries partly to access other firms’ knowledge which resides in local markets. From the MNC viewpoint, overseas subsidiaries have a chance to access local market information (LMI), develop new competences themselves and share this information with their headquarters; thereby contributing to the formation of MNCs’ competitive advantage. This study posits that the extent to which overseas subsidiaries reversely transfer local information is influenced by their knowledge transfer capacity and relational capital, both of which enhance the learning environment which facilitates the knowledge exchange process. In this context, the research objective is to identify the effects of factors encompassing knowledge transfer capacity and relational capital on the reverse transfer of LMI from subsidiaries within MNC networks. In addition, this study also tries to examine the different influences of those determinants on different sizes of organisation. Although study on reverse knowledge transfer (RKT) from subsidiaries to its headquarters is becoming increasingly prominent, the debate discussing the key determinants which affect it has not reached an academic consensus. By integrating both knowledge transfer capacity and relational capital as overarching theoretical lenses and exploring cause-and-effect relationships, this study fills certain extant research gaps. A conceptual framework is developed and then it is investigated empirically, using a sample of 432 subsidiaries operating in the Korean market. OLS regression and Spearman rank order correlation coefficients are used to interrogate the data. The OLS regressions find that knowledge development capability, subsidiary willingness and autonomy are critical factors affecting RKT within MNC networks. Both socialisation mechanisms and trust are the primary facilitators of relational capital between subsidiaries and MNCs and extend RKT from the former to the latter. In addition, the key drivers for RKT for large-sized subsidiaries are knowledge development capability, subsidiary autonomy and trust. For medium-sized subsidiaries, the key drivers are subsidiary willingness, trust and organisational distance. For small-sized subsidiaries, the key drivers of RKT are knowledge development capability, subsidiary autonomy and socialisation mechanisms. Based on the results, the contributions of this study are three-folds. First, the research identifies what determines RKT from subsidiaries to MNCs in the Korean context. Second, in doing so, it corporates both the relational capital and knowledge transfer capacity perspectives. Thus, it theoretically contributes to those perspectives. Third, it also elucidates the effect of organisational size on RKT.

This thesis is concerned with the problems met by the antitrust authority of the Anti-Monopoly Law (the AML 2008) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during its merger control assessment. It provides solutions to some of these problems with reference to EU competition law. Although the thesis cannot solve all the problems once for all, it does provide effective solutions to the two following important issues: Firstly, how to make the horizontal merger analysis in China better predicts the effects of merger on the competitive process? Secondly, how to improve the public transparency of antitrust merger assessment in China? Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law's horizontal merger assessment is still immature and experiencing further challenges for development. In order to establish a more appropriate and transparent merger control regime, the thesis chooses EU competition law to compare. Not only because it is more advanced, but also, because the AML 2008 is heavily influenced by the regime. However, it is noteworthy that the experience from EU cannot solve all problems met by Chinese antitrust authority; especially those are caused by Chinese political and economic structure which EU did not have. Nevertheless, by solving the problems met in the above two aspects, the thesis has contributed to a more effective and transparent horizontal merger control regime for Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law. Translations of titles, authors, and publishers from Chinese works are unofficial, and the laws in this thesis are up to date at 30 June 2013.