The thesis is driven by the strategic importance of crude oil, and aims to contribute to the knowledge on crude oil pricing and markets by conducting three investigative undertakings. The first examines the ability of crude petroleum to act as a safe haven asset for investors in equity markets around the start of international violent conflicts and wars. The second investigates the price differentials between US domestic benchmark crudes and the global marker Brent around the start of upstream production disruptions. The third empirical examination explores the presence of abnormal behaviour in the vicinity of the start dates of US sanctions on net exporting and importing nations, and builds on these findings to estimate gains accrued to, and losses inflicted on, the US economy. The thesis reports a number of findings. First, it shows that crude oil prices register a significant abnormal rise around the start of violent conflicts and wars. The significant portion of this abnormal increase accumulates well before the outbreak of crises. The thesis also reports a significant abnormal decline in the valuations of US and international equities around the start of these events. Secondly, the thesis builds on these findings, and demonstrates that crude oil possesses the ability to act as a safe haven from stock markets around the start of these events. Third, the thesis reports significant tightening in the price spreads around the start of unscheduled production outages. These findings are shown to be robust even after accounting for extreme weather conditions, changes in petroleum stocks, and costs of logistics. Fourth, the thesis reports significant abnormal changes in the valuations of crude oil around the start of US sanctions. The direction and magnitude of these changes depend on whether the targeted nation is a net exporter or importer. Fifth, the thesis builds on these findings, and reports gains and losses to the US economy due to the imposition of sanctions. These findings contribute to the academic literature, and highlight a number of implications for equity investors, insurance companies, oil traders, and policy makers in the US and other net importing and exporting nations. These implications concern the energy security of the US and other nations, the use of oil in hedging and diversification, the role of benchmarks in pricing, and the economic consequences of the US foreign policy.

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This thesis assesses the importance of different types of political connections for both British companies and individual directors sitting on the boards of these companies. Overall our findings suggest that directors' educational ties to politicians are important for companies, but directors that bring in these connections are not compensated differently compared with other directors in the same company. Chapter 2, provides evidence that political connections formed via a shared educational backgrounds between company directors and politicians are valuable for UK companies. Firms connected to the Conservative party tend to increase in value significantly more than those connected to the Labour party in response to an increase in the Conservatives' lead in the opinion polls in the run-up to the 2010 UK( General Election. Connections to both houses of the UK Parliament are valuable. Political connections are more valuable when they involve a powerful director, a powerful politician or are based on a stronger social tie. In the third chapter, we examine whether there is a link between political connections, assumed to be established via directors' individual political donations, and company value. We also use more commonly used measures of politically connected boards and corporate donations. We do not find any of these potential forms of political connectedness to be associated with changes in company value. Using data on political connections from chapters 2 and 3, in the fourth chapter we test the impact on director pay of education ties between directors and parliamentarians (MPs and Lords); directors' individual political donations; and directors' past (or current) parliamentary positions. Initial results suggest that education ties between directors and parliamentarians are associated with higher director compensation, but once we control for firm fixed effects this is no longer the case, implying that the higher compensation can be explained by unobservable firm characteristics.

Until recently the Saudi telecommunications market was controlled by a single stateowned organization. This monopoly is now broken so that the Saudi market to day, contains two telecommunications companies as competitors, namely, Saudi Telecom Company, the former monopoly, and Etisalat Consortium, the new operator (CITC, 2006). This research will examine how Saudi Telecom Company (STC) can cope with the competitive market, enhance the customer services activities and establish policies and activities, which lead STC to be a customer centric organization in order to retain its customers, position, and market share. The following section will provide a primary background to Saudi telecommunications market as well as the Saudi Telecom Company. A brief introduction of contact centers at Saudi Telecom Company which are under this study will be discussed in the following sections. Customer centricity for organizations is a very essential subject and considered to be one of the corner stones to most of the companies. The importance of this approach will also be discussed briefly in the next section.

This thesis focuses on the different liquidity issues specific to the sovereign Credit Default Swap (CDS) market. As a first step, we present an empirical study of the pricing effect of liquidity and systematic liquidity risk in the sovereign CDS spreads. We do find a large evidence that the risk premium priced above the sovereign default risk is mainly driven by both bond and CDS liquidity risk, which implies that liquidity plays an important role in CDS spread movements. Secondly, we use a factor model in order to decompose sovereign CDS spreads into default risk, liquidity and correlation components. The main objective is to measure the weight of liquidity in the CDS spreads not by using liquidity proxies such as bid-ask spreads or volumes but by calibrating the model to the data. Our analysis reveals that sovereign CDS spreads are highly driven by liquidity (55.6% of default risk and 44.32% of liquidity) and that sovereign bond spreads are less subject to liquidity frictions and therefore could represent a better proxy for sovereign default risk (73% of default risk and 26.86% of liquidity). Our empirical results advance the idea that the increase in the CDS spreads observed during the crisis period was mainly due to a surge in liquidity rather than to an increase in the default intensity. Finally, we focus on the dynamic properties of the risk neutral liquidity risk premium embedded in the term structure of sovereign CDS spreads. We show that liquidity risk has a non-trivial role and participates directly to the variation over time of the term structure of sovereign CDS spreads. Our results show that CDS buyers earned a liquidity premium only during the pre-crisis period.

In the last three decades universities have experienced major changes, which have affected both their research objectives and their sources of funding. Universities are increasingly asked to contribute to economic growth by increasing their commercialization and technology transfer efforts. The relationship between university and industry has attracted a great deal of interest because of both the opportunities that can be generated by collaboration and the controversy surrounding universities‘ commercial activities. Previous research has analysed in depth these issue at the level of institutions and universities. Collaborating with industry, however, constitute discretionary behaviour for academics: while literature has examined the role of individual characteristics such as demographics and productivity, aspects related to psychological traits, perceptions and social influence are poorly understood. To address this gap, I employ an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the drivers of university-industry interactions at the level of the individuals. The analysis draws upon data on the characteristics and activities of a sample of academic scientists in different scientific disciplines in Italy and in the UK. The datasets integrate information collected through surveys, as well as data on scientists, department and universities gathered through several secondary sources. Results show that researchers‘ evaluation of potential benefits and costs of collaboration with industry are a major driver of academic engagement. Moreover, this thesis highlights the crucial role of scientists‘ personality in determining academic engagement and entrepreneurship, while putting back into perspective the role of organizational support mechanisms. The role of the academics‘ immediate social context is also assessed, showing that individuals look to their immediate peers for their orientation, both collaboratively via learning as well as competitively via social comparison. Finally, this research informs policy on how to devise more effective strategies to promote university-industry interactions.

This thesis brings together three papers to address one of the central problems in the management of innovation: how organisations manage innovations to enter, grow and succeed in emerging markets. It explores the paradoxical attributes of the firm and shows how stable and dynamic processes are mutually constitutive and occur at multiple levels. The first paper (Chapter 3) contributes to the literature of dynamic capabilities which has recently been questioned for subsuming “rigidity” and “flexibility” within one concept. The paper employs an inductive case study approach to examine the processes by which an organisation develops capabilities to enter, grow and shape an emerging sustainable urban market. Addressing a process problem of developing novel practices into good currency, the paper develops a conceptual model within which the three sets of activities dynamically combine and interact at different phases over time. The paper argues the conceptual model individually disaggregates the paradoxical problem, and holistically underlines the two countervailing processes of capability enhancement and consolidation. In particular, the findings illustrate the institutional origins of dynamic capabilities by introducing and analysing one set of activities: capability reinforcement. The second paper (Chapter 4) deepens the understanding of “capability reinforcement”. Existing studies in institutional entrepreneurship suggest central organisations confront the paradox of “structure and agency” when they move away from embedded fields and institutionalize their innovative practices or product. The study contributes to resolving the paradoxical problem by unfolding the process of an incumbent conducting entrepreneurial actions to dominate a nascent field. Based on a longitudinal analysis of interview and media dataset, the results show central organisations implement a combination of deliberate and emergent strategies to achieve dominance in nascent fields associated with contingent nature. Addressing a strategic problem of institutional leadership, the paper argues organisations adopt market-focused and socio-political approaches to implement such mixed strategies. The findings identify the resource-based origins of institutional entrepreneurship by introducing and examining a strategic mechanism: boundary infrastructure. While the empirical studies are carried out independently, their combined value exceeds the sum of the individual papers. Bridging the two theoretical streams, Chapter 5 extends my contribution by developing an integrative framework which benefits from appreciating the full spectrum of multi-level consolidation in the field of innovation management.

The employee as an advocate for his/her own brand has achieved heightened attention of late. However, despite a wealth of research into consumer-brand relationships, how employees relate to their own brands and subsequently exhibit specific brand-behaviours is poorly understood. Particularly, little attention has been directed towards the concept of the employee as forming brand relationships as compared with consumers. This thesis examines the nature of the employee-brand relationship; more specifically we discuss functional, symbolic and experiential brand value as drivers of employee-brand self-connection and employee-brand identification and subsequently the effect on brand-specific behaviours. Given the relative paucity of literature on employees and brands we adopt a grounded theory approach and conduct a series of in-depth interviews to access employees’ insights and experiences with the brand. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded. The themes that emerge are used to construct a conceptual framework that is subsequently tested using a survey instrument and Structural Equation Modeling. Our findings suggest a number of similarities and differences between the way in which employees relate to the brand and the way in which consumers relate to the brand. Our findings have far reaching implications for academics and practitioners alike.

This research investigates learners’ requirements for the format of feedback when using technology based instruction (TBI). A novel approach is taken by focusing on learners’ preferences for such feedback. The primary method of data collection is to provide subjects with a range of options for TBI feedback and observe those options they choose to view. Feedback has a powerful effect on learning. It is considered one of the ten most significant influences on learner achievement (Hattie and Timperley 2007: 83). Prior research into TBI feedback has focused on the relationship between the format of such feedback and scores achieved in subsequent performance tests. Results have been inconclusive and the format of TBI feedback that should be provided to learners is unclear. This has led to calls for an increased focus on the learners’ perspective of TBI feedback (Mory 2003: 770; Handley, Price, et al. 2011: 548). This research furthers understanding of the learners’ perspective by identifying the format of TBI feedback learners choose to view and factors that affect this choice, hitherto an area not subject to empirical research. The specific focus is learners’ preferences for TBI feedback provided following responses to multiple choice questions. A mixed-method approach is taken comprising technology based observations and semi-structured interviews. In the former, a software tool developed as part of this research delivers items of TBI to students and records their preferences for feedback. Between 2008 and 2010 data were collected on 24 cohorts of students studying one or more of three items of TBI. In total, students responded to 61,929 questions. Results are interpreted through the constructivist perspective and the results are organised into eight themes which are then synthesised with reference to theoretical frameworks to produce a model of learner interaction with TBI feedback. In addition to furthering our understanding of how learners engage with TBI feedback, the results have implications for existing theoretical models and for research aiming to establish the effectiveness of different formats of TBI feedback. For the latter, this research also reveals avenues of future research that potentially address the inconsistent pattern of results found in prior research. No claims are made as to the effectiveness of different feedback formats however a number of recommendations to educators regarding the content, timing and delivery of TBI feedback are suggested.

Defence procurement easily matches and exceeds virtually any other form of technology-intensive procurements by the government. Additionally, defence procurement often focuses on technologically advanced, engineering-intensive equipment. This represents a significant potential for technological innovation and subsequent diffusion of this innovation throughout the economy. The defence industry has often been considered insular and idiosyncratic, meeting the demands of a bureaucratic, central buyer, creating firms unable to compete in dynamic commercial markets, and posing a barrier for innovative firms to enter. This study poses the question: When is technology likely to transfer into or out of the defence sector? Which organisational-level factors facilitate or hinder the likelihood and success of such technology transfer? By combining organisational identity, capabilities and institutional theories, this thesis pursues a novel approach to the problem, and we find that organisational identity moderates the capability-performance relationship – in essence, a strong organisational identity is negatively associated with the likelihood that a firm will deploy its resources in unfamiliar markets, or to exploit technologies present in them. The defence industry provides a salient context for the study of this phenomenon. This thesis presents a current overview of the UK defence sector, by reviewing the existing literature in the field and updating it with consideration to the significant changes which the industry has faced. This includes a review of the previous research on firm-level factors which influence the transfer of technology into and out of the sector. An organisational identity theory of capability deployment is then developed, and tested with a combination of expert interviews and quantitative analysis of the results of a survey of firms in the UK defence sector. The resulting analysis and discussion contribute to the understanding of the UK defence sector in the modern world, and the potential barriers to fully exploit technology developed in the defence context, and to the factors which may influence the UK armed forces’ access to technologies from non-traditional sources. Further, the recognition that institutional forces can influence organisational identity and subsequently affect the deployment of capabilities, I contribute to the management literature by suggesting a link between the rarely connected literatures on organisational identity and capabilities.