The primary aim of this research is to understand how the multiple levels within networks influence the organising dynamics in an intentionally formed network through the measurement of tie strength. This is a significant contribution because previous research is based on network studies in which only one level is considered, most of the research is conceptually undeveloped in the area. The research also addresses the measurement of the strength of relationships rather than just their existence or non-existence. Furthermore, this study examines intentionally created networks – an area where there is currently very little research. Thus the study is significant because the new data contributes to the marketing research environment and can be presented to examine findings in other research contexts, including the social policy and not-for-profit sectors. To address the aim and context of the study it was necessary to understand a national programme which had global objectives. The research involved a multi-method approach that utilised a single case-study strategy with multiple embedded cases consisting of three interdependent, intentionally formed networks, each with a central broker, in the elite and high-performance sport sector in New Zealand. The overall contributions of the research were: (1) The identification of a new network type, termed here as a structured network. (2) The finding that networks that are intentionally created and managed can be durable and effective, and this is dependent on the role of the central broker. This finding has obvious implications for practitioners involved in such networks and for governments that are interested in creating them. (3) The finding that cross-level pressures influence network effectiveness. (4) The finding that relationships developed at the pre-network formation stage contribute to network effectiveness. (5) And finally, the identification of a new stage of intentional network formation. This stage was taken by the New Zealand government issuing a tender in order to gauge the level of interest and the resources available to provide a network of services before establishing it.

The primary aim of this research is to understand how the multiple levels within networks influence the organising dynamics in an intentionally formed network through the measurement of tie strength. This is a significant contribution because previous research is based on network studies in which only one level is considered, most of the research is conceptually undeveloped in the area. The research also addresses the measurement of the strength of relationships rather than just their existence or non-existence. Furthermore, this study examines intentionally created networks – an area where there is currently very little research. Thus the study is significant because the new data contributes to the marketing research environment and can be presented to examine findings in other research contexts, including the social policy and not-for-profit sectors. To address the aim and context of the study it was necessary to understand a national programme which had global objectives. The research involved a multi-method approach that utilised a single case-study strategy with multiple embedded cases consisting of three interdependent, intentionally formed networks, each with a central broker, in the elite and high-performance sport sector in New Zealand. The overall contributions of the research were: (1) The identification of a new network type, termed here as a structured network. (2) The finding that networks that are intentionally created and managed can be durable and effective, and this is dependent on the role of the central broker. This finding has obvious implications for practitioners involved in such networks and for governments that are interested in creating them. (3) The finding that cross-level pressures influence network effectiveness. (4) The finding that relationships developed at the pre-network formation stage contribute to network effectiveness. (5) And finally, the identification of a new stage of intentional network formation. This stage was taken by the New Zealand government issuing a tender in order to gauge the level of interest and the resources available to provide a network of services before establishing it.

Industrial pollution is one the most critical environmental problems facing Thailand at the present time. Therefore, control of industrial pollution is of the highest priority to the Thai government. Problems associated with industrial pollution place significant limitations on the potential growth of manufacturing industries in Thailand, because international trade today requires not only manufactured products of a high quality but also a commitment to high environmental standards by manufacturing companies (European Commission Environment Directorate-General, 2001; Ken, 2004). This thesis investigated the major dimensions of the quality of the Environmental Management System (EMS) in large size manufacturers, that are located both inside and outside of industrial towns in Chonburi Province, Thailand. In particular, the research examined whether different stakeholders had the same or different perceptions about these dimensions. The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect information from four groups of stakeholders: Thailand's government officers in the government agencies concerned about environmental policy; top management within manufacturers; the manufacturers' staff at management level; and the local communities. A survey was carried out involving the government officers and top management staff within manufacturers. The qualitative data were collected from documentaries, interviews and observations. The triangulation of methods and data permitted the comparison of the perceptions of the manufacturers' staff, from both inside and outside of industrial towns. The data were structured into the four major parts of an EMS: the performance agreement for the environmental programme; the plan for transformation implementation; the standards and processes; and the continuous improvement process. The survey results show that manufacturers in the Town use ISO 14001. Two of the three manufacturers, outside the Town use TQM / TQEM as their EMS and the other manufacturer, also from outside the Town, does not have any EMS within their company. The results also show that the factories in the Town, that used IS0 14001 and the factories outside of the Town that used TQM ITQEM, are similar in the four major parts of the EMS. However, they still have some processes which are notably different, such as the manufacturers that use ISO 14001 have better documentary systems, additional budgets for training staff and larger budgets to publicise, to the local communities, the companies' activities relating to their environmental management. However, the TQM / TQEM and Thailand's environmental legislation are more flexible and they allow companies to create environmental management activities. Finally, the results suggest that there are three main factors that may effect the achievement of environmental management within manufacturers in Thailand. They are: the human factor (knowledge and awareness about the environment); the processes factor (green production and EMS processes); and the legislation factor (environmental standards, monitoring and enforcement systems).

This study concerns self initiated volunteer expatriation. Drawing on data from interviews and test results from a cohort of 48 New Zealand Volunteer Service Abroad volunteers, it explored their experiences as overseas volunteer development workers. Most literature concerning expatriates focuses on the expatriate assignment of managers. By comparison volunteer development workers remain an under-researched group. Moreover, much of the expatriate management literature and the volunteer development worker literature adopts a positivist approach using quantitative methodologies and large scale studies and consider expatriates from a managerial perspective, leaving the perspective of the individual relatively unexplored. This study seeks to focus on volunteer development workers, using qualitative as well as quantitative methodology and considering individual rather than organisational attitudes and behaviour. As a theoretical backdrop, the concepts of "protean" career, (Hall, 2002), "hero's journey", (Osland, 1995) and "career competencies" (De Fillippi & Arthur, 1996) were used as frameworks to assist understanding. The study was longitudinal, and focused on a one-year cohort (2001) of volunteers who provided information on three occasions - before, during, and immediately after their assignment. The study used a mixed- methodology design i.e. was both quantitative and qualitative using both in depth interviews and psychometric testing. The study suggests alternative ways of exploring volunteer expatriation with a specific focus on repositioning the individual at the centre of the study. The study began by focusing and identifying the personalities, (as indicated by the Five Factor Model NEO- PR questionnaire) career values, (as indicated by the Career Orientation Inventory, previous career, attitudes to career and motivation to volunteer (the last two being assessed by a pre-departure structured interview. The experience of VSA assignments was explored by means of a mid-assignment email questionnaire. A second post assignment interview elicited further data on volunteers' experience of VSA, their evaluation of that experience in retrospect, and their plans for further career development. The NEO and COI were re-administered to check changes over time. The study indicated that self direction, challenge, adventure and personal resilience were dominant themes in the attitudes to career, motivations and experiences of the VSA assignment. Openness and agreeableness, significantly greater than population norms were dominant and stable personality traits. In addition, the study reported volunteers' perceived effects of the VSA experience relating to self and career in the forms of increased technical and personal skills, self awareness and challenges to their values. Such outcomes of the study support the use of the "protean "career model (Hall, 1976; Hall, 2002; Briscoe & Hall, 2003) as a way to understand the career transitions made by the volunteers. It also substantiated Osland's (1990; 1995) notion of the metaphor of the hero's journey as an adventure and framework to understand volunteer expatriation and VSA phenomena. In addition, the outcomes supported a model of understanding career competencies as career "capital" used as a framework to understand volunteer motivation and the VSA assignment experience as a career episode.

Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face enormous financial risk when embarking on a new product launch. SMEs are less likely to implement more formal risk minimization strategies for new product development (NPD) such as StageGate, often citing reasons of resource constraints or the more prevalent notion that “this stuff doesn’t apply to us”. Two key elements of any such risk minimization strategies are an early emphasis on benchmarking competitors and a thorough study of the attitudes and behaviours of potential customers. The SME’s investment of time and resource in early acquisition of this knowledge is a critical factor for success (Cooper 2001). Armed with this information, the SME is able to adopt a Customer Focused Design (CFD) strategy, whereby the product development effort is remains focused on the external customers wants and needs through all phases. SMEs that are able to satisfy these needs more effectively enjoy an obvious competitive advantage (Matzler and Hinterhuber 1998; Lüthje 2004). SMEs are often challenged by these tasks (Freel 2000; Larsen and Lewis 2007; Owens 2007). They may be overwhelmed by the prospect of expected costs, lack of expertise, and financial pressures to rush to market. Too often the more conventional path is chosen, whereby a solution is proposed, developed and tested in the market to “see if it sticks”. Such methodologies are less effective and subject the SME to increased financial risk. International studies of SMEs attitudes and behaviour towards NPD reveal common challenges of resource limitations, skills deficiencies and organizational issues (Xueli, Soutar et al. 2002; de Jong and Vermeulen 2006; Siu, Lin et al. 2006; Murphy and Ledwith 2007; Owens 2007). New Zealand firms are no exception, and are burdened with similar challenges as their international counterparts. This study aims to propose a simple framework for small firms who wish to acquire knowledge about their target markets and potential customers with limited time and resources. The framework enables SMEs to incorporate customer focused design principles into their product definition phase, and better orient themselves to the consumer marketplace. The study makes use of a New Zealand based case study to evaluate how the framework may be employed to identify quick and inexpensive efforts that can reproduce some elements of more sophisticated CFD and benchmarking methods. The obtained results are incorporated into a product design specification and embodied into a physical prototype to further illuminate the process. In addition to the primary area of study, prospects for new adjacent product lines and new potential markets for future development are also gained from the research.

The New Zealand innovation sector is dominated by Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). SMEs make up more than 97% of all businesses and account for about 30% of total employment. There is, however, limited research available on the New Product Development practices of these companies. For New Zealand to compete with major economies of the world, investment in innovation is paramount. This can be achieved by effective management of New Product Development practices and systems. This report presents findings of the research based on the “Establishing an NPD best practices framework” survey which was designed to conduct similar studies in the US, UK and Ireland (Kahn, Barczak and Moss 2006). The study identified seven dimensions of New Product Development practices – strategy, process, research, project climate, company culture, metrics & performance measurement and commercialisation. The survey was designed to measure the relative importance of each of the seven dimensions. The survey further listed various characteristics under each of the seven dimensions and respondents were asked to identify which of these constituted poor, good, better and best practices. Strategy was ranked the highest among the seven dimensions followed by commercialisation, research, company culture, process, project climate and metrics. The results were broadly consistent with those from the US, UK and Ireland which ranked strategy the highest and metrics the lowest. Commercialisation was ranked the second most important dimension where as in the US, UK and Ireland studies, research was ranked above commercialisation. Respondents indicated that a formal strategy helped reduce processing time. Decisions were taken quickly because the head of the firm was directly involved in the product development process. A vision statement for the company which incorporates NPD was also cited as an important part of the overall NPD strategy. This includes “well-defined NPD goals and long-term strategic support for NPD projects”. The study also considered the characteristics of the seven dimensions of NPD. Respondents were asked to review those characteristics and indicate whether they reflected a Poor, Good, Better or Best NPD practice. The US, UK and Ireland samples indicated that poor practices were more well-known than best practices were each of the seven dimensions. There was one significant difference between NZ results and those from the US, UK and Ireland. NZ professionals identified best practices for the Metrics dimension. This indicated that even though Metrics as a dimension ranked the lowest among the seven for NZ professionals, there was a general awareness of the characteristics that constitute best and poor practices for this dimension.

Loss of life resulting from road accidents incurs an immeasurable social and financial cost on society every year. Fortunately, the number of road injuries and fatalities has been reducing in most industralised countries for the past three decades due to the ongoing improvement of the engineering of roadways, the safety of vehicles and the changing attitudes and behaviour of drivers. Governments are constantly developing innovative tactics to further reduce the number of road accidents. One such initiative has been the adoption of marketing theory and specifically, advertising, by transport agencies in Australia and New Zealand into their road safety strategies. The Governments of both countries have proclaimed the campaigns to have been a success. However, the two road safety advertising campaigns have been studied by a number of researchers with conflicting results and conclusions about their efficacy. The studies have varied in form, estimation, outcomes, and data, making the comparison of their claims often very difficult. Policymakers and the public rely on the research of road safety experts when deciding on the best actions to undertake. However, the experts have each in turn argued that their approach was the most appropriate and that other researchers had done something wrong to reach their conclusions. The objective of this research was to identify a robust measure of road safety advertising effectiveness to take the confusion out of the ongoing debate. Using a single set of data and a range of advertising forms and road safety outcomes, previous evaluations of the New Zealand campaign were replicated and extended to discover which approach provided the best explanation of the value of road safety advertising. A further refinement was then made that addressed a potential problem with the original methods. Therefore, the research exhausted all the appropriate single and multiple equation approaches to the econometric evaluation of the effectiveness on road safety advertising using non-experimental data. The research shows that using one data source and a range of road safety outcomes, a robust and consistent measure of advertising effectiveness could not be identified among the approaches investigated. Furthermore, there is no objective way of knowing which of the models tested best reflects the actual situation. Therefore, it is claimed that a viable solution to this dilemma is to implement an experimental approach to identify the true effect of road safety advertising on driver behaviour.

Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face enormous financial risk when embarking on a new product launch. SMEs are less likely to implement more formal risk minimization strategies for new product development (NPD) such as StageGate, often citing reasons of resource constraints or the more prevalent notion that “this stuff doesn’t apply to us”. Two key elements of any such risk minimization strategies are an early emphasis on benchmarking competitors and a thorough study of the attitudes and behaviours of potential customers. The SME’s investment of time and resource in early acquisition of this knowledge is a critical factor for success (Cooper 2001). Armed with this information, the SME is able to adopt a Customer Focused Design (CFD) strategy, whereby the product development effort is remains focused on the external customers wants and needs through all phases. SMEs that are able to satisfy these needs more effectively enjoy an obvious competitive advantage (Matzler and Hinterhuber 1998; Lüthje 2004). SMEs are often challenged by these tasks (Freel 2000; Larsen and Lewis 2007; Owens 2007). They may be overwhelmed by the prospect of expected costs, lack of expertise, and financial pressures to rush to market. Too often the more conventional path is chosen, whereby a solution is proposed, developed and tested in the market to “see if it sticks”. Such methodologies are less effective and subject the SME to increased financial risk. International studies of SMEs attitudes and behaviour towards NPD reveal common challenges of resource limitations, skills deficiencies and organizational issues (Xueli, Soutar et al. 2002; de Jong and Vermeulen 2006; Siu, Lin et al. 2006; Murphy and Ledwith 2007; Owens 2007). New Zealand firms are no exception, and are burdened with similar challenges as their international counterparts. This study aims to propose a simple framework for small firms who wish to acquire knowledge about their target markets and potential customers with limited time and resources. The framework enables SMEs to incorporate customer focused design principles into their product definition phase, and better orient themselves to the consumer marketplace. The study makes use of a New Zealand based case study to evaluate how the framework may be employed to identify quick and inexpensive efforts that can reproduce some elements of more sophisticated CFD and benchmarking methods. The obtained results are incorporated into a product design specification and embodied into a physical prototype to further illuminate the process. In addition to the primary area of study, prospects for new adjacent product lines and new potential markets for future development are also gained from the research.

During the past two decades Supply Chain Management (SCM) has become a popular topic of business discussions. SCM presents a business philosophy of improving the long-term performance of individual companies and the supply chain (SC) as a whole and, as a result, attains or sustains a company's competitive position. The practical implementation of SCM has a number of constraints. The basic problems facing SCM are difficulties in adopting a SCM philosophy, the lack of general theory, difficulties of system thinking, and the unique characteristics of agribusiness SCs. Contemporary SCM theory is mainly descriptive and modern SCM research is predominately deductive. Research on SC performance measurement systems (PMSs) has not provided co-ordinated measurement of the bi-directional system flows (material, financial and informational). Available systems do not provide quantifiable measures for the network optimisation decision-making process. In this study an alternative approach to SCM problem resolution was developed. The three SC flows were integrated through the evaluation of their normalised performance measurements (NPMs). The NPM system was developed based on the primary concept that the performance of each SC flow within a SC may be uniformly measured using comparable sets of characteristics. This primary concept was then used as a basis to evaluate higher levels of system performance such as two-party contractual performance and then the performance of the total SC. Special attention was paid to the strategic level of SC analysis and optimisation. The suggested methodology was used to demonstrate how performance improvement of the SC as a whole is interrelated to the performance improvement of individual companies. Case evaluation of the proposed methodology allowed identification of the supply chain wave effect. This effect quantifies how the performance of one chain member affects the performance levels of other system participants. The application of game theory to the methodology indicated that a stable optimum SC strategy might be reached when business performances are balanced along the chain. The case study suggested that chain participants tend to move toward a stable optimum strategy over time. This research may be used as a prescriptive tool for a range of agri-food chain studies. Extended case evaluation is required to test the robustness of the suggested methods.

Logistics has became one of the most important activities for all companies where has been treated as strategic function to gain competitive advantage over a companies' competitors. Agribusiness as any other business is also using logistics tools in their supply chain to reduce their chain cost and more important to improve their business efficiency as a whole. Transportation is one of the logistics activities that most influences price of product which in some cases can represent 25% of the final price. Milk collection for a dairy business plays an important part in the overall performance of the company. A poor milk collection system jeopardise the entire chain as it is the first stage of the manufacturing process. The main purpose of this work is to identify and describe the possible differences and similarities between a Brazilian and New Zealand Dairy Company regarding their logistics of milk collection. Even though the two companies are in the same business segment they are inserted in different environments/markets therefore need to deal with different issues regarding milk collection such as companies' structure, milk production's cycle, and routing and scheduling applications. However, both understand the importance of the logistics activities and apply tools in their chain to improve their efficiency. Due to its size and market share the New Zealand Company has a better collection system in place than the Brazilian Company. Both have implemented some changes in the last few years that brought some improvements for their milk collection.