‘Effects of bank debt relationships on corporate performance’ is an empirical survey based on a unique recent dataset regarding German manufacturing firms for the years 2003–2010. It seeks to understand the opportunities for German banks to offer services solely linked to information generated within loan-monitoring processes, relaxing the common assumption that banks are informationally disadvantaged because credit mar-kets do not perfectly equalize in prices but in the bank-optimal rate; the existence of red-lining and rationing demonstrates credit markets’ informational imperfection. The flow of information in credit markets is basically one way, and banks improve their abilities to distinguish borrowers to prevent related losses. Therefore, they are able to generate new information that is then used for further borrower evaluation. This newly generated information is assumed to be superior to borrowers’ knowledge, and borrowers might recognize and anticipate this information. Therefore, the informa-tional chain evolves into the proposed theory of the customer-improving loan-monitoring cycle. It is assumed to be true if borrowers with bank debt show better results than borrowers without. Related hypotheses regarding corporate performance preferably are tested by using return on equity. Additionally, net operating margin, net interest, and return on investment are checked for their patterns. They are supplemented by sus-tainability tests regarding the equity-to-debt ratio and the distance-to-default point to evaluate whether positive effects are based on chance or opportunistic behaviour. All performance hypotheses are rejected. Therefore, the proposed theory does not find support from the evidence, and banks’ informational disadvantage remains – even if their borrower evaluation is actually more detailed than before. Accordingly, the survey shows that loan monitoring does not offer informational links to generate new products or services, and banks remain limited to their already applied approaches. German cor-porate performance is basically convexly associated with firm size, and firm perform-ance clearly differs depending on firms’ riskiness. However, risky firms’ results are superior if they report bank debt because banks’ related monitoring generates moderat-ing effects. Thus, particularly risky firms are suggested to use bank debt.

This thesis is concerned with the understanding the contextual nature of consumer value creation within service encounters in high customer participation services. The study of service encounters is shown to have traditionally adopted individualistic or highly rational perspectives that ignore or overlook the significance of social context in shaping the material and cognitive resources that participants bring to the encounter and that they use to shape its outcomes and effectiveness. It is shown that by focusing on encounters as forms of social practice, involving a complex set of activities and skills, all of which need to be located within a context that reflects a wide range of factors (from individual biography to macrostructures) it is possible to develop a more complete understanding of how encounters are structured and how value is defined within them. This perspective provides a framework of concepts within which a detailed qualitative study of service encounters is conducted, remaining open to new possibilities that may be identified inductively. The study uses observation and interviews with participants in two case sites in Colombia, a higher education institution and a fitness club, to develop a framework that identifies issues that carry contextual relevance, summarizing these in a model of factors that need to be taken into account when investigating service encounters. Although the model is provisional, being derived from only two cases in a single country, it offers a depth of analysis that helps to identify the complex processes involved. It is suggested that further research will be needed to test this model for applicability in a broader context. In summary, the research contributes to a better understanding of service encounters by showing the importance of social context in shaping value-creation issues: participants of service encounters are not only decision makers but active human beings embedded in a cultural, socio-historical context, who construct value through service consumption practices that are dynamic, contextual and practical.

This thesis investigates governance in practice as evidenced by directly observed board room dynamics and first hand recollections of when continuity of governance is disrupted by the rotation of board members. There is parsimonious research into corporate governance as an act due to the difficulty of gaining access to the board room. My research is conducted on pension scheme boards as this is where I had personal experience of being a novice board member who found herself getting to grips with the board tasks in situ. As being a pension fund trustee is an important high-stakes role this research seeks to investigate how such governance boards ensure the reproduction of governance as newcomers and novices relinquish and take up a seat at the board. I investigate novices taking on a trustee role on a workplace pension scheme board, a role which is important as trustees oversee £1.6trillion of 12million peoples’ retirement money. Yet throughout the UK, workplace pension funds are beset with problems such as growing deficits, regulatory intervention and a £100billion funding gap. The findings of research is important to both corporate governance and roles such as community led governance of hospitals and charities and schools were board members can be sought from the community at large. To investigate the problem of reproduction of governance on the board during periods of disruption, I needed to understand what was going on within the boardroom during these periods which meant researching the dynamics of meeting that involved the board cohort and the novice and then to extend the research longitudinally to investigate their experience as they strove to become an integrated board member. There are several theoretical options to explore that span learning theory to expert theory, and extend out to understand how one becomes a board member as the governance process aims to remain stable where the theory development has focused on socialisation. To get the of input that I required to prevent this study from relying solely on participants’ claims of what they did I deployed a mixed method approach which incorporated original longitudinal journals and interviews from 5 novice trustees, 26 Elite interviews, and observations of novices in action on 2 pensions boards; as the analysis developed I sought additional data from publicly available board minutes to further explore and augment the findings of the discourse analysis. The goal of this research was to find out how the rhythm of governance as practice is executed by a board as it withstands the disturbance of board members leaving and joining by investigating the first hand and observed experiences of those involved in governance as an activity. My findings are that the results do not align with the linear nature of the theory of socialisation, the setting of the boardroom providing a more complex, changing and unstable influence on a novice’s journey into trusteeship and knowing whether they have mastered the board tasks, processes and performance requirements to the maximal level. The thesis contributes to knowledge of good governance practices in a number of ways namely: 1. By suggesting enhancements to boardroom processes to improve socialisation practices, 2. Augmenting the theoretical framework of socialisation for a non-job-like role, and 3. Developing research knowledge on how to undertake board observations in a confidential business environment.

A substantial portion of the workforce performs the jobs that other people avoid because the work is dirty, dangerous, servile or morally reprehensible. Over time, researchers have reflected on how tainted jobs are critical to the effective functioning of society (Hughes, 1951). The current study sought to understand the factors and experiences connected with a worker’s intention to stay in a dirty job. A single multinational company with 800 employees operating in the United Kingdom, France and the United States was the focus of the study. The company secures and cleans vacant properties. Most of the job sites are public housing buildings situated in high crime areas. The workers first must clear out discarded personal items and garbage scattered throughout the units by the previous occupants and squatters. The properties must be thoroughly cleaned and then steel panels are installed on the doors and windows to secure the property. Although a significant amount of literature exists on the subject of dirty work, the studies have typically employed qualitative data collection methods. In contrast, the current study diverged from this previous approach by adopting a mixed-methods style of data collection. A quantitative survey data (N=266) tested a hypothesized model of factors relating to workers’ intention to stay with the company. The researcher also performed qualitative semi-structured interviews (N=53) and job site passive participation observation to reveal distinctive traits in worker attitudes and experiences relating to their dirty job. The study identified 13 factors associated with this population of workers’ intention to stay in their job. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, data was collected to assess workers’ attitudes and experiences regarding: the characteristics of their work, attitudes toward dirty work, perceived stigma, job satisfaction and job embeddedness. Analysis of the data revealed support for the majority of the predicted hypotheses. Intention to stay was positively associated with job variety, individual and group autonomy, satisfaction with work duties, person-job fit, distributive justice, satisfaction with pay, promotion, supervision and job embeddedness. Conversely, perceived stigma and alternative job opportunities showed a negative association with the workers’ intention to stay. The qualitative results revealed worker reactions to job site conditions and experiences. The main contribution of the study lies in the identification, and analysis of, several distinct factors and related issues associated with a dirty worker’s decision to stay in a dirty job. The implications and limitations of the study are also discussed.

This thesis explores how changes in health service delivery are conceived of and pursued by different stakeholders. The thesis focuses on the importance of evidence to inform change. The London stroke service reconfiguration (2008-2011) is used as a case study to explore the interplay between evidence and the management of large-scale strategic change in health care. 45 semi-structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholders involved in the reconfiguration at both macro- and micro-levels through a pan-London case study with an embedded study at one London hospital affected by the reconfiguration. Observations of clinical meetings and analysis of official documentation was also performed. The study uses an ‘analytics of government’ (Dean, 2010) approach which is derived from Foucault’s (2007) work on ‘governmentality’ to interpretively explore the role of evidence in the reconfiguration process. This approach highlights the specific ways in which London’s stroke services were ‘problematised’ and explores the application of knowledge and techniques of power to address these issues. The discourse of evidence based health care is shown to be important in depoliticising potentially controversial strategic decisions. The advantages of conceptualising health service reconfigurations in ‘biopolitical’ terms are discussed. The impacts the reconfiguration had upon the relations between managers and professionals are analysed alongside a discussion around the interplay of disciplinary power and governmentality in the implementation of evidence based health care.

It is widely accepted that R&D is a key factor explaining performance at both macro and micro-levels. At the micro level, it is thought that firm‘s R&D activities contribute to productivity and profitability by improving efficiency and delivering new products. What is unclear is the role that technology spillovers play in firm performance and the importance that absorptive capacity plays in helping firms benefit from these spillovers. This thesis fills this gap by addressing three issues: the impact of firm R&D on performance as measured by labour productivity and profitability; the impact of technological spillovers on this performance; and the formalisation of absorptive capacity in order to examine the indirect effect of the firm‘s technological effort. Of secondary importance is the bi-directional relationship between R&D and profitability. The empirical context for this study is the Japanese automotive and electronics industries. Japan is an appropriate context because both the automotive and electronics manufacturing industries are considering some of the world leading innovators. Three empirical chapters address these issues in turn. The first explores the productivity effects of internal R&D activities, intra-industry spillovers, inter-industry spillovers and absorptive capacity. It adopts production function framework, and random and fixed effects panel data estimators. The second empirical chapter considers the effect of these factors on profitability. It applies dynamic regression models and autoregressive distributed lag empirical methodologies. Results in both empirical chapters indicate that internal R&D activities undertaken by the firm directly enhance performance and indirectly foster the capability to internalise outside knowledge. The third chapter assesses the reverse impact of profitability on the firm‘s R&D investments. Little evidence of profitability effect on R&D is found in the automobile industry whereas a fall in profit motivates electronics firms to engage more innovative activities. This thesis contributes to the literature on the impact of technology on performance at the micro-level. It sheds the light on the significance of technological externalities and the importance of absorptive capacity. The empirical analysis presented in this thesis provides insights into the direct and indirect role of firm R&D on performance, which will be of interest to managers. It also raises policy implications in bolstering the private sector‘s incentive to undertake R&D in order to cultivate the pool of technological spillovers.

Public Sector Reform has been on the agenda of governments in United Kingdom for many decades. New Public Management is the most recent thinking that is driving the changes in Public Administration since the 1980s. This thesis explores the social psychology of an encounter of Civil Servants and the Consultants, engaged by the government in the late 1990s. This encounter between two fundamentally different groups, that is, the institution of the British Civil Service and the community of practice of the management consultants, resulted in a culture clash of ethos, languages, rites and rituals, perceptions of change, and actions. This is a crucial moment to capture the experience of change and the consequences of these representations in the process. This thesis tracks the social representations of change and the acts of representing the change over a nine-month period. Over 800 staff members from both groups worked intensively together, impacting over 10,000 employees, and documenting this change period. Drawing on a social psychological theory of representations, this thesis looks at these processes both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Representations are analysed using co-occurrence analysis on the languages used in the documentation about the change (using ALCESTE software). The results of this study looks at the implications of this 'arranged marriage' between two different cultures being put together by a third party, in this case, the government. The study presents evidence of convergence and conversion of representations over time, and offers putative conditions for one or the other to occur. The recommendations made for Private Sector change models to work towards convergence rather than conversion.

The aims and objectives of my thesis are to research the foreign direct investment (hereinafter, FDI) in Taiwan post-1980s when it started to experience an economic transformation from traditional manufacturing into high-technology manufacturing and service industries. For instance, the Taiwanese government introduced the Six-year National Development Plan, Asia- Pacific Regional Operations Centre (APROC), and relevant incentive polices since 1990s in order to attract export-oriented FDI, and develop further economic and industrial development. Since then there was a drastic change in Taiwan’s economic structure and industrial activity along with an increasing amount of investment from foreign investors. Hence, this thesis empirically investigates the determinants of FDI (Chapter 5), evaluates the impact of FDI on economic growth (Chapter 6), and assesses the dynamic interaction between FDI and macroeconomic variables (Chapter 7). The dataset used for thesis covers the period from 1990 to 2010, and involves industry-level data in Taiwan. The key findings of this thesis could be summarised into three points. First, by employing both the static and dynamic panel data approaches, Chapter 5 suggests that the market size, the employment level, and the exchange rate remain to be significant factors to explain FDI inflows to Taiwan, while the wage cost and the political stability are not significant factors of investment decision-making process for foreign investors. The results imply that foreign investors no longer regard Taiwan as a country with the supply of cheap labour for mass production, but one with the supply of highly skilled and sophisticated talents for high-end manufacturing and service industries. Further, foreign investors no longer regard political instability as a major concern for Taiwan since it has had a stable political environment democratically and diplomatically. Second, by applying the Granger causality test, Chapter 6 suggests that the two-way feedback between FDI and GDP is significant both at overall- and industry-levels, while the one-way feedback (from FDI to GDP) is significant at the cross-industry level. In the first case, it is therefore believed that FDI and GDP are mutually enhancing in the long term in the overall economy, manufacturing and service industries. In the second case, it reflects that GDP growth in manufacturing and service industries has been induced not only by the inward FDI in its own industry but also by inward FDI in the other one. Third, by utilising the vector autoregression (VAR) methodology, Chapter 7 confirms the existence of the two-way causal and dynamic interactions among FDI, GDP and Exports. This two-way feedback result is not only in line with the key findings mentioned above, but also implies that FDI could be a fundamental driver of economic growth in Taiwan, and be considered a close proxy for the degree of openness of the macro-economic policy and position of the Taiwanese government. In addition, while FDI, GDP and Exports are all found to positively affect employment; the reverse relationship is relatively insignificant.

This thesis examines the subjective perceptions of the job activities of the university teachers with an aim to understand and differentiate between what is regarded as in-role tasks (i.e. prescribed or mandatory job behaviours) and what is regarded as extra-role tasks or Organizational citizenship behaviours OCB (Organ, 1988). In the recent past, OCB has gained a wide academic and organizational interest. With an emerging role of OCB in helping organizations to achieve various objectives, many researchers have focused on understanding the relationship of OCB with different determinants and consequences. However, most of the OCB-research has been confined to the causal studies aiming to relate OCB with various other factors following the positivist approach and quantitative methodologies. Moreover, being originated in commercial work settings, OCB remains under-researched in the academics. Furthermore, OCB has been problematized by the researchers for ignoring the gender-perspective in the formulation of OCB concept (e.g. Kidder, 2002; Kark & Waismel-Manor, 2005). The current study uses a qualitative lens to explore the meaning attached to extra-role job behaviours and their implications for male and female university teachers. The study includes the unheard voices of university teachers of Pakistan to understand the contextual and structural conditions under which these perceptions of in-role and extra-role job behaviours are developed. Thematic analysis was performed on the data obtained from 40 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with university teachers from the public and private sector universities of Pakistan. Drawing on the positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) and professional identity paradigm (Lasky, 2005), the findings suggest that the personal choices, social expectations and cultural values underpin the way in which university teachers develop their perceptions of OCB and other job behaviours. Moreover, there is a large difference in the perceptions of these participants on regarding their job behaviours as in-role or as extra-role job behaviours. Based on their perceptions, the study proposes three general domains for which university teachers perform OCBs. These domains include OCB towards students, colleagues, and department or university. Findings also indicate that there is a remarkable difference in the perceptions and performance of extra-role job behaviours by male and female university teachers, where the types of OCBs performed by female university teachers are helping in nature and mostly aimed at students, whereas the male university teachers perform OCB which are targeted at the department or the universities. Finally, the thesis offers theoretical and applied contributions in the field of OCB-research suggesting a few avenues for future research. Theoretically the current study has contributed by introducing the voices of a completely unheard segment i.e. academics from Pakistan. It highlights the need for examining OCB through a qualitative study to appreciate the unique context in which the accounts of participants are developed. The study also suggests the use of professional identity paradigm and positioning theory to examine the context in which university teachers develop their perceptions of in-role and extra-role job behaviours. Moreover, the study problematizes the concept of OCB being gender-neutral, offering the gender-based analysis of accounts obtained from the male and female university teachers.

The focus of this action research study is the analysis of invisible assumptions that sustain gendered work processes based on the ideal worker values. The case study, which is set within a Maltese ICT company, also explores the potential for action research (CIAR) to challenge the gendered processes in ways that enable better work-life integration through the Dual Agenda logic. Data for this research, which adopts a constructionist and interpretivist approach, were obtained through various cycles of qualitative interviews and focus group meetings with participants, the majority of whom were males. These were analysed through NVivo on the principles of Thematic Analysis. This research showed how the hegemonic masculine values of the leaders which led to the conceptualisation of the ideal worker, allowed them the opportunity to perform their masculinity in a culturally approved manner, and because this brought them power and benefits, such values prevailed. It also confirmed that the default expectations by which ideal worker values were measured, stemmed from culturally normative behaviour typically linked to unencumbered men. This rendered anomalous, suspicious and undesirable attempts to integrate work and life for family-related reasons. This happened in an organisational context where the means to assess productivity were low, where organisational learning was weak, and within a national context where the work-life challenge is typically linked to mothers. This illustrates how interlinking factors within the multi-layers of context underpin the current notions of ideal worker thus rendering CIAR insufficient to tackle the multi-forces at play which perpetuate the Single Agenda logic. This research highlights the importance of studying situated hegemonic masculinity in the micro context of organisations without neglecting the interlinking factors at play within the broader context that sustain it. This multi-dimensional approach is useful in allowing a better understanding of the complexities surrounding the concept of gendered organisations within a dominant hegemonic masculine culture. Overall, this research strives to make a contribution to the debate about gendered organisations and work-life issues through a better understanding of hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, it adds knowledge about the potential and barriers to Dual Agenda change through the use of the CIAR approach.