This exploratory research aimed to understand the barriers to growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Kingdom of Bahrain, the business support provided and required and the effectiveness of such support. The findings showed that the main barriers to growth for Bahraini SMEs were the scarcity of qualified human resources, lack of finance, and fierce competition. To a lesser extent, other barriers were fees applied by many governmental organizations such as Labour Market Regulatory Authority (LMRA), bureaucracy in procedures, and the imposition of the Bahranisation percentage where owner-managers struggling to find relevant Bahrainis to accommodate the percentage required. The political instability of the country since February 2011 has affected the growth of SMEs in terms of sales and employment. The research showed that many supporting organizations exist in Bahrain, such as lending organizations, specialised government organizations, international organizations, societies (for example, professional bodies), universities, training institutions, accountants and consultants. The study found that supporting organizations provided many programmes that benefited SMEs; however, many supporting organizations were not known to SMEs, suggesting that awareness raising and promotion is required. Another finding of the study related to universities and training institutions where a bigger role was needed to close the gap in human resources, knowledge and skills and to provide qualified human resources that are ready for SMEs. Research activity needed to be encouraged, as was export support for SMEs – inevitable to overcome the barrier created by Bahrain‟s small market size. Societies need to enhance their work through specialised programmes that would suit sector-specific requirements and not just general business sessions. Lending organizations need to provide more creative packages to support SMEs growth. The efforts of support were scattered and need to be organised under one official umbrella. Government initiatives need to be promoted such as preferential procurement policies and reducing bureaucracy. Finally, an index has been developed to attempt to measure the effectiveness of supporting organizations.

As business organisations, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constantly strive to achieve success in the form of good financial performance, expansion and growth, and positive corporate reputation. However, growing concerns about climate change and other environmental and social issues require companies to have a socio-environmental response as well. The term ‘Environmental Business’ describes the concept of a commercial organisation that provides environmental goods and/or services in such a way that it addresses intended environmental and social problems whilst avoiding the creation of new ones. The built environment is a major location of energy conservation and carbon emissions reduction efforts, and companies are expanding to take advantage of this market. To expand as environmental businesses, these companies need to develop their business capacity whilst minimising environmental and social problems caused by their operations. This requires a significant adjustment of the traditional capacity development process in order for companies to become more environmentally and socially inclined. In order to study this adjustment, research was conducted on SME business organisations that provide sustainable energy services for the built environment. This involved an investigation of these companies’ approach to capacity development in relation to their realisation of being an environmental business. The research first investigated via participant observation and interviews the values, consequences and barriers associated with the development of capacity in this manner. Using these results, scenario planning cases for major capacity development situations were created, and the extent to which companies were willing and able to function as environmental businesses in these scenarios explored. The research findings show that companies that provide sustainable energy services implement environmental business values and practices mainly due to potential economic benefits, rather than out of particular regard for environmental protection and social accountability. Companies were found to view capacity development as a singular, economic-led process. Nevertheless, these companies were found to have latent socio-environmental potential in a number of capacity development activities. To exploit this potential, the research utilises systems modelling to describe how companies can adjust traditional capacity development to become more inclusive of environmental business values and practices. Activities that aid adjustment include the localisation of supply chains, sharing of capacity development to similar organisations through collaboration, and using partnerships in their supply chain that pay similar attention to socio-environmental responsibility. The research proposes that an adjusted capacity development process can be achieved by companies understanding these actions better (e.g. through the use of the systems model produced in the research), thus presenting social and environmental business practices as a strategy, rather than simply as a symbolic, goodwill or publicity gesture.

Entrepreneurial capital has recently emerged as an important facet of entrepreneurship and new venture creation. Much of the evidence to validate such claims emerged from research that focussed upon large businesses and multinational corporations. Despite this newly acquired status and the rise of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to the top of the socio-economic and political agendas of policy makers in both industrially developed and developing nations, there exists a marked paucity of empirically rigorous research on entrepreneurial capital and convertibility dynamics in SMEs, with a focus on the practical measurement and management of owner-manager experience and knowledge. Fairchild (2002) notes that the practical management objectives of measuring ownermanagers’ knowledge are to find out how well an SME can convert human capital like individual learning/team capabilities to structural capital like organizational knowledge or aspects like documented processes and knowledge bases and thereby moved from tacit to explicit knowledge, and reduced the risk of knowledge lost with the constant changes in such businesses. To bridge this knowledge gap, this research study investigates the dynamics of entrepreneurial capital convertibility in UK SMEs. For the purpose of this thesis, an innovative mixed-method approach was developed, to include 17 face-to-face interviews capturing both quantitative and qualitative data with owner-managers and eight case studies of SMEs located in the West Midlands region of the United Kingdom. The quantitative data generated was analysed using SPSS. This was harmonized with qualitative data obtained from focussed case studies. Developing results presents a rich and in-depth insight into entrepreneurial capital convertibility in SMEs, specifically from the owner-manager’s perspective. The role and centrality of owner-managers in the process ofThe results suggest that a mixed approach provides an informative and powerful method to explore entrepreneurial capital convertibility dynamics in SMEs, reflecting owner-managers’ capital in terms of knowledge management development, strategic thinking, design thinking, leadership styles and entrepreneurial types. Thus, an owner-manager’s personality is mostly shaped by their environment (ba) and past and/or shared experiences which, in turn, influences the way SMEs are disposed to entrepreneurial capital convertibility. An original model of entrepreneurial capital convertibility dynamics is outlined, that reflects perceptions of SME owner-managers’ mental ‘mind maps’. Suggestions are made to extend and validate the entrepreneurial capital convertibility model in future research in a national and international context. Through a process of testing and validating the model, knowledge audits may aid SMEs in adopting knowledge management practices leading to strategic thinking. A process of continuous reflection, experimentation and organising to withstand environmental turbulence is also recommended. Furthermore, if SME owner-managers adopt knowledge management practices and their implications in terms of flexibility and adaptation, they will be better positioned to interact, learn and co-produce with strategic stakeholders, re-design internal and external business processes and survive in a dynamic environment entrepreneurial capital convertibility in SMEs was illustrated and confirmed

Despite culture being a core focus of the study of organisations for over 30 years, the concept is marked by disagreement. The literature on culture tends to present a series of dualisms with each side displaying different meta-theoretical assumptions. Notwithstanding these differences the characterisations of culture are fundamentally the same. For those who view culture as corporate, culture is a shared set of values, beliefs and attitudes devise and disseminated by management. For those who view culture as organisational, culture is a more or less shared set of values, beliefs and attitudes produced through social construction. The production of these discrete sets of values implies that, from either perspective, culture is a normative structure. The only difference being in the derivation of that structure. This normative structure means that, from the perspective of corporate culture, the ways in which people think and act are guided by the meta-theoretical assumptions which found the functional paradigm. In contrast, from the perspective of organisational culture, the ways in which people think and act are guided by the meta-theoretical assumptions which found the interpretive paradigm. This thesis argues that the framing effect of these meta-theoretical assumptions strongly influences research outcomes. This is demonstrated through a bi-paradigmatic analysis of a single organisation's culture. The bi-paradigmatic approach is produced by sets of research methods consistent with the functionalist and the interpretive paradigms. The analysis generates two distinctive contributions. First a deeper understanding of how research outcomes are shaped by paradigmatic assumptions. Second a re-conceptualisation of organisational culture. Here the move away from a mono-method approach reveals contradictory views of culture. Rather than a unitary set of values, attitudes and beliefs culture is seen as consistent of disparate value sets in need of reconciliation. Culture is re-conceptualised as the rubric which guides that reconciliation.

This thesis explores the interaction between Micros (<10 employees) from non-creative sectors and website designers ("Creatives") that occurred when creating a website of a higher order than a basic template site. The research used Straussian Grounded Theory Method with a longitudinal design, in order to identify what knowledge transferred to the Micros during the collaboration, how it transferred, what factors affected the transfer and outcomes of the transfer including behavioural additionality. To identify whether the research could be extended beyond this, five other design areas were also examined, as well as five Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) engaged in website and branding projects. The findings were that, at the start of the design process, many Micros could not articulate their customer knowledge, and had poor marketing and visual language skills, knowledge core to web design, enabling targeted communication to customers through images. Despite these gaps, most Micros still tried to lead the process. To overcome this disjoint, the majority of the designers used a knowledge transfer strategy termed in this thesis as ‘Bi-Modal Knowledge Transfer’, where the Creative was aware of the transfer but the Micro was unaware, both for drawing out customer knowledge from the Micro and for transferring visual language skills to the Micro. Two models were developed to represent this process. Two models were also created to map changes in the knowledge landscapes of customer knowledge and visual language – the Knowledge Placement Model and the Visual Language Scale. The Knowledge Placement model was used to map the placement of customer knowledge within the consciousness, extending the known Automatic-Unconscious -Conscious model, adding two more locations – Peripheral Consciousness and Occasional Consciousness. Peripheral Consciousness is where potential knowledge is held, but not used. Occasional Consciousness is where potential knowledge is held but used only for specific tasks. The Visual Language Scale was created to measure visual language ability from visually responsive, where the participant only responds personally to visual symbols, to visually multi-lingual, where the participant can use visual symbols to communicate with multiple thought-worlds. With successful Bi-Modal Knowledge Transfer, the outcome included not only an effective website but also changes in the knowledge landscape for the Micros and ongoing behavioural changes, especially in marketing. These effects were not seen in the other design projects, and only in two of the SME projects. The key factors for this difference between SMEs and Micros appeared to be an expectation of knowledge by the Creatives and failure by the SMEs to transfer knowledge within the company.

Mobile technology is a next step in the expansion of opportunities made available by information technology (IT). It remains questionable as to whether mobile technology differs from fixed networks and stationary IT, while the role of mobile technology deployment in service innovation practices still needs to be established. In this thesis service innovation practices and mobile technology deployment are studied in a creative industry setting – in-depth interviews with 31 SME managers are analysed using a grounded theory approach. A capability approach, wherein capabilities imply a use-in-practice analysis of a firm’s assets and competences deployment, assists in conceptualising the process of mobile technology deployment and understanding qualitative results. As a result, this study concludes that accessing or acquiring mobile technology resources and developing mobile technology capabilities underpin mobile technology deployment. Primarily, this thesis’s main theoretical contribution is in introducing and defining a new concept named ‘mobile technology capabilities’, namely a firm’s unique practices employed in orchestrating mobile technology resources to create a competitive advantage. Mobile technology capabilities consist of five distinct practices that firms perform to combine and integrate mobile technology resources into organisational processes, namely learning, leading, transforming, leveraging mobile technology resources and solving problems. Moreover, this study concludes that interaction between mobile technology resources and mobile technology capabilities stimulates and facilitates both process and product service innovation practices, where organisational commitment towards mobile technology deployment determine the innovation practices with which a firm is going to engage. Hence, three clusters of creative service SMEs were identified in this study, which reflect on diverse practices of mobile technology deployment. The understanding of mobile technology deployment process that derives from this thesis is particularly significant in showing SMEs’ managers the real value in embracing mobile technology.

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Rising worldwide competition is making it increasingly difficult for SME organisations to compete in the marketplace as traditional means of manufacture, and modes of delivery are being changed through technological advancements. In line with these factors, organisations are ever more capable of producing goods that are more bespoke and personalised than in the past and within the price ranges and affordability levels of demanding markets. Whilst large organisations have the power to enforce supply chain compliance in order to meet these changes, it is not always the case for SMEs. The agile supply chain philosophy moves away from traditional methods under which large organisations enforce supply chain compliance, and embraces the concept of supply chain agility that allows the supply chain as a whole to move forward as one and share the benefits as a developed and cohesive unit. Such a philosophy should be to the advantage of all organisations, but ought to be of particular interest to SMEs as its use could assist in improving their competitiveness. This thesis is primarily concerned with the development of agile supply chains within SME organisations. The research sets out to develop the means through which SMEs can develop their agile supply chains so as to make them more efficient and competitive both now and in the future. The research is set upon existing theories and models, particularly following the works of Sharifi et al. (2006), Ismail and Sharifi (2006), Ismail et al., (2006) and Ismail et al., (2011) so as to contribute further to their concepts theoretically and to also present the practical means by which such frameworks can be utilised in industry. The research provides a link between manager perceptions and underlying factors that affect their organisations and how they relate to the markets served. This has been achieved through the development of a model through which SMEs can analyse their present operating position, consider new product features, potential supply chain partners and the means through which to develop their agile supply chains as a complete unit. Using case study methodology, some extensive fieldwork has been undertaken to examine the ideas and extend our understanding of the approaches to build and sustain agile networks for organisations introducing products into markets. The study has assisted in reforming and developing the initial models into practical tools. Further to this, the research offers a series of developmental roadmaps that can be followed by SMEs to assist in the progress of developing agility into their supply chains. The outcomes from the research provide a contribution to academic theory and practice and build upon previous research, taking it forward with practical tools that organisations can utilise. The findings provide evidence for the benefits that can be derived from the developed models such that their application could be realistically considered within a practical setting.

This research aims to determine whether rationalised life cycle assessment approaches (RLCAAs) are useful and suitable techniques to measure the environmental impacts of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) from service industries. RLCAAs are simplified; less resource intensive techniques; that do not measure exclusively carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) but consider the wider environmental impact details. There is limited research on suitable techniques that measure the wider environmental impacts of service industry SMEs; however, with increasing pressures on accountability, it is important for businesses to recognise these impacts. This study provides an interdisciplinary assessment on such SMEs by using a range of appraisal tools and approaches and using primary data collected from owner-managers and employees. The results suggest SMEs do not adopt a strategic approach to environmental matters and that the respondent companies produce on average 70t CO2e a year. A qualitative assessment undertaken from a roundtable discussion found amongst employees concern, that using CO2e only, as a quantifying metric to gauge impacts, loses wider impact details. Life cycle assessments seek to acknowledge wider environmental impact details, are not promoted to SMEs because they are resource intensive and too complex, to be of practical use. The criticisms are pertinent relative to a ‘cradle to grave’ quantitative assessment. However, in terms of RLCAAs their specific application and benefits to SMEs is unknown Two RLCAAs were configured and tested upon three-service industry case studies; a packing, film and online distance learning establishment. One a magnitude, the other a pragmatic approach differed in the use of qualitative criteria; demonstrated by similar findings, with transport, energy and equipment identified as core emitters, less time consuming approaches can be used effectively by SMEs. In conclusion, both RLCAAs would prove useful at raising environmental awareness, assessing aspects and highlighting impacts thereby, potentially improving the sustainability of SMEs.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) usage in the UK’s construction industry has recorded a significant increase over the last few years. However, available evidence suggests that BIM adoption amongst larger construction firms and innovators seems be dominant, while the uptake of BIM by Small and Medium Sized enterprises (SMEs) remains relatively poor. Consequently, SMEs are currently lagging behind and are losing out in winning publicly funded projects. SMEs have not fully recognised the benefits of using BIM in project delivery. Guidance and frameworks to assist SMEs to make an informed decision about BIM adoption are currently lacking. It appears that SMEs are yet to be convinced that BIM is beneficial to them, and remain concerned about the potential risks to their business. Guidance and frameworks to assist SMEs in making an informed decision about BIM adoption are currently lacking. This study seeks to bridge this gap and provide a decision-support system (DSS) to assist in the analysis of the risks and rewards of adopting BIM by SMEs, in project delivery. As a result, a conceptual framework was developed to give a theoretical foundation to the study of brokering risks and rewards in the adoption of BIM for project delivery. This framework is comprehensive and includes trading off risks and rewards associated with several criteria, such as stage of involvement, project value, funding, and the procurement route chosen. The approach was validated by a representative sample of BIM users. The results of the validation of the framework provided an informed basis for the development of the DSS. The latter was validated by a sample of SMEs, according to several criteria such as ease of use of the Graphical user interface (GUI), quality of information, level of information presented, trading off risks and rewards of adoption of BIM in project delivery. The findings of the framework validation revealed that early design stage, project size between £5m and £50m, private funding, and integrated project delivery procurement are the best opportunities that enable SMEs to maximise the benefits and minimise the risks, when adopting BIM. Regarding the DSS validation, most participants reported that they had found the DSS easy to use, especially the GUI. They were also positive about the level and quality of information and knowledge provided by the DSS. In particular, they found the DSS informative to broker risks and rewards for BIM adoption.