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Developing countries often use government-funded overseas scholarships to build some of their human capital abroad in order to fill skills gaps at home. Most of these developed skills however do not return home thereby ostensibly defeating the purpose of the programmes. There is also a dearth of quantifiable outcome targets to objectively assess the achievements of these schemes. The Rivers State government of Nigeria set up one such government-funded overseas scholarships programme in 2008. This study is an empirical assessment of the relative success of the Rivers State overseas scholarships programme. The study examines the extent to which the outcomes were aligned with its policy goals. Five research objectives and seven hypotheses were postulated for the study. The population was the 1,298 students who had travelled abroad to study and should have graduated and returned by 2015. It adopted a quantitative research approach using descriptive statistics and binary outcome regression techniques on secondary data. The study found that 89% (1,152) of the 1,298 had successfully graduated and 37% (485) had graduated and returned home. Age, successful graduation, immigration policy and level of award were statistically significant predictors of their likelihood to return home. The study concludes that the programme was relatively successful in developing the human capital of the individual students of Rivers State but not too successful in developing human capital for the State because majority of the students did not return home to add to the manpower pool. It recommends the continuation of the programme but that policy goals should be quantified as key success factors and the successfully graduated students should be incentivised to return home through creation of job opportunities at home and signing return home agreements with study destination countries. These measures should engender the chances of developing human capital for Rivers State.

The conceptual foundations of this paper emerge from the prior research by Hassard et al (2009) in the publication, Managing in a Modern Corporation, which considers work practices. Hassard et al (2009) proposes that work can play an important role in addressing the contextual issues given the scarcity of longitudinal research on post-millennium work practices. They observed increasing work intensification and change within multinationals in differing countries (United Kingdom, United States of America and Japan). Middle Managers’ work hours, stress and responsibility were all found to have increased. Therefore it becomes critical to examine whether this has continued to worsen since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and whether it has had an impact on the employee experience. The initial focus was upon the non-supervisory employees, with middle managers and senior management perceptions being explored as they are also considered employees. Whilst the focus of the study intended to consider the experiences of non-supervisory employees in the first instance, the reality that all levels of employees remain employees, meant that the determination of 'non-supervisory' would not limit the study by not including differing perspectives occupied at each level of employee, in terms of their subsequent responses to the changing nature of their work. Qualitative interview data was gathered from three companies within the EADT (2014) top one hundred companies in the UK’s East Anglian region. Since the benefit of template analysis lies with its potential plasticity, the study used a priori themes to develop an initial template to collect the data. Findings report that the data concurs with the observations of Hassard et al (2009). However further problems emerged stemming from control, time frames, quality and financialisation. The project looks to also extend Hassard et al’s (2009) previous work by incorporating employees as a focus, but including and middle managers and senior managers.

Trust is a topic that has long been of interest to organisational scholars. Over the past two decades, numerous studies have scrutinized the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of trust within organisations (i.e. intra-organisational trust) sharpening our understanding of its complexity and describing all the benefits that trust can confer. However, most intra-organisational trust researchers have arguably developed an over-optimistic vision on the possibilities of building trust relationships. This seems in fact to clash with the outcomes of recent surveys and employee engagement measures, which have recorded a significant trust deficit with levels of trust at historic low within Western organisations. Within the literature, such declining levels of trust are often considered as the consequence of deficits in people management skills and practices, while failing to acknowledge the existence of wider structural issues within the employment relationship. This thesis argues that, in order to better understand the current declining levels of trust, trust researchers need to take a sociological and critical turn and move beyond the micro-foundations and the psychological reductionism characterizing most of the intra-organisational trust literature. It proposes a multi-level study, which captures the essence of how micro- and macro-levels forces simultaneously influence the development of trust at both the interpersonal and the organisational level. To bridge the micro-macro gap, specific attention has been given to the role of the Human Resource function, which sits at the heart of the employment relationship. The findings demonstrate that the development of intra-organizational trust is influenced by the specificities of the job role, by interpersonal dynamics, as well as by numerous other organizational factors. They also reveal a fractured and dysfunctional situation for Human Resource professionals. Paradoxically, despite being normatively committed to trust-building models of employment relations, HR staff are instead largely not trusted as they find themselves squeezed between their conflicting roles of ‘strategic partner’ and ‘employee champion’. The thesis provides new evidence to the recent crisis of trust faced by the Human Resource profession, as well as it demonstrates that trust is inherently context-dependent and that trust relationships are inevitably embedded in the structural context of the employment relationship.

The study explores training transfer by utilising a socio-cognitive psychological theory, the theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1991), to provide an understanding of the antecedents of participants’ training transfer intention and behaviour. This theory claims that predictors of transfer can impact employees’ transfer intention and behaviour through directly influencing their attitudes towards transfer, perceptions of subjective norms and their perceived behavioural control. The empirical study gathers data from the perspective of faculty members and their supervisors within health education institutions in Oman. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a total of 95 faculty members and their supervisors in two Health Institutes. The analysis explored participants’ perceptions of training transfer within their Institutions and the factors that shaped their perceptions of subjective norms, perceived behaviour control and their attitudes towards training transfer. The findings show that participants perceived opportunity to use trained skills in the workplace as an important factor to influence their transfer. Supervisors are the main referent group perceived to influence participants’ transfer behaviour. Findings also show that recognition and resistance contributed towards participants’ attitudes towards training transfer. The theoretical contribution of the study is bridging the gap of understanding the training transfer process at the individual level by offering a holistic insight on training transfer behaviour within a specific context utilising the theory of planned behaviour. The study also has practical implications for organisations to plan and manage their training and transfer interventions to positively influence trainees’ intention to transfer.

This thesis examines the impact of supply chain pressures and workers’ agency on job quality in the Scottish Spirits Industry. The examination of these issues is achieved through exploring how supply chain dynamics influence employers’ behaviours, and how these in turn shape job quality at the workplace level. Moreover, this thesis looks at the active role of workers, through collective and individual means, in shaping job quality. The empirical evidence draws on qualitative research from three organisational case studies,in Scottish Spirits Industry, that operate in the same production network. This study reports on 67 semi-structured interviews and three focus groups with senior managers, supply chain managers, site managers, line managers, HR staff or managers,shop-floor workers, and union representatives. Moreover, document analysis and long hours of workplace observation were key methods applied during fieldwork. The research evidence highlighted that supply chain pressures deeply impacted job quality in all three case-studies. The power and control dynamics stemming from product and capital markets were decisive actors which impacted the ways in which employers used specific work and employment patterns in order to cope with these pressures. As a result, there was a clear and marked deterioration of job quality. At the same time, the data demonstrated a latent determination from workers, across all three case-studies, to recast this condition. This was examined, firstly, by examining the ways in which supply chain pressures influence workers’ capacity to mobilise; and, secondly, by exploring the ways in which worker agency, through collective and individual forms, was able to regulate and shape job quality. This research study contributes to our understanding of the factors that shape job quality by examining the dynamics happening at the sectoral and supply chain level, by considering the power and control dynamics stemming from product and capital markets,and the dynamics played within the employment relationship between managers and workers. This thesis, then, develops the argument that job quality analysis is strengthened by the examination of factors happening within the national institutional, sectoral, and organisational settings.

This thesis examines the impact of personalisation, marketization and austerity on voluntary sector social care employment relations in post-recession Scotland. The prevalence of short-term funding contracts characterised by strict and often confining performance criteria has resulted in the emergence of a 'contract culture' whereby funders effectively determine service provision. This quasi-market approach to procurement often manifests itself in a pronounced deterioration in terms and conditions of employment, and an intensification of work. Personalisation is premised on the notion of empowering service users, which many studies have found increases their satisfaction and wellbeing. However, due to its dual imperative of increasing quality and reducing cost, personalisation can serve to significantly intensify work. In this sense, the demands of austerity and personalisation converge, and create a compound pressure on the voluntary sector employment relationship. In consequence, this research examines firstly, the implications of austerity and personalisation on voluntary sector employment policies; secondly, the impact of subsequent changes to employment policies within voluntary sector organisations on the attitudes of employees; and finally, whether or not these changes in attitudes create tensions between employees and management. At an empirical level, this research provides analysis of four comprehensive case studies, comprised of fifty-five interviews overall and a benchmarking survey of each, situated in the under-researched context of voluntary sector social care in Scotland. This is of pressing importance, given that the UK voluntary sector has grown considerably in recent years (NCVO, 2017), and in light of a growing and aging UK population (ONS, 2017), looks set to continue to do so. This research makes a conceptual contribution to knowledge via a unique conceptual framework, based on the sociology of service work and the psychological contract, as an instrument through which to better understand how personalisation and austerity affect the employment relationship. In doing so, it provides the scope to identify specific issues affecting the workforce, how they respond to them, and what this means for employers, and the sector at large.

As the number of global expatriates continues to rise, the need to understand factors that influence their decisions to remain in their host countries or to return home increases. Self-Initiated Expatriates (SIEs) are defined as individuals who relocate across a national border, for an extended period of time, of their own volition, for work purposes. SIEs are the most prevalent expatriates globally (Finaccord, 2014) but are also some of the least understood. Expatriate academics (EAs) form a subgroup of this wider SIE group, and whilst being fairly representative, face their own unique challenges. Interpersonal links and social networks are influential in EA decisions to stay in or leave their host country, yet little is known about the exact function of networks, and how access to resources through networks influences SIE or EA decisions to remain in their host country or return to their home country. Drawing on social capital theory, this thesis develops a theoretical model that links various characteristics of EAs' ego-networks to EAs' intention to repatriate. Specifically, the model suggests that homophily, density, and hierarchy affect EAs' intention to repatriate and that EAs' national identity and career embeddedness moderate these effects. The developed hypotheses are tested using data collected from surveys among German academic expatriates in the UK Higher Education sector. In total, 213 responses were analysed using multiple regression analyses. The empirical results underline the importance of similarity of nationality between an EA and their network partners as an influencing factor on their intention to repatriate. The similarity in location of the EA and their network connections did not have any significant impact. The network density, and the EAs hierarchical position within their network also had a direct influence on intention to repatriate. The thesis contributes to current research on EAs and SIEs by providing a theory-based explanation of the effect of ego-network characteristics on EAs' intention to repatriate. It also contributes to the development of social capital theory by applying social capital logic in a novel context, clarifying the mechanisms underlying this logic and identifying boundary conditions of this logic in the context of SIE academics. The findings of this research are also relevant for HR practitioners in the UK Higher Education sector, by highlighting factors that may help or hinder the retention of key foreign academics.

It is estimated, that most employees eat one or more meals per day whilst they are at work, which is forming an important element of their overall diet. However, consumers struggle to make an informed dish decision due to a lack of information provided. Additionally, past food scares in Germany and the UK have created distrust and interest in food information. This study is identifying what is important to consumers, indicating their information needs and establishes the format that is most appropriate for the delivery of food information in workplace canteens in Germany and the UK. Providing consumers with enhanced food information can strengthen the relationship between consumer and canteen operator as well as establish trust in the food served. A mixed methodological, sequential approach was employed. Four focus groups were used to inform the design of a questionnaire (n=317), which tested criteria of importance and types of information provision that are relevant when making food choice in a workplace setting using Best-worst scaling. Through semi-structured interviews (n=10) canteen operators’ views on meeting customer needs and establishing trust in the food served were identified. Informational criteria of importance have been identified whereby, Nutrition, Value for Money and Naturalness are key elements that consumers require to make a decision about dish selection. Consumers fall into different segments; Health Conscious, Socially Responsible and Value Driven and hence rate the importance of certain informational criteria differently impacting on dish selection. Traffic Light Labelling, Information Boxes and Quality Assurance have been shown to be the most favourable way of receiving food information. Consumers align to different segments; Tech-savvy, Heuristic Processors, Brand Orientated and Systematic Processors, hence various communication channels can be explored to most effectively target consumers. This study has provided an understanding of consumers’ information requirements thus enabling canteen operators to be more competitive. The provision of food information that targets different consumer segments can demonstrate shared customers’ values and consequently, evidence operators’ commitment towards a relationship that is based on transparency and trust.

In recent years, employee silence has emerged as an important construct and field of study. This thesis contributes to knowledge about the ontological foundations of silence, focusing on who is remaining silent and what they are remaining silent about; in this thesis the silence of mental health conditions is explored. It does this through conducting 65 semi-structured, qualitative interviews within TransportCo, a large transport organisation. An alternate reading of silence is presented from the perspective of the employee, whilst interviews with those with managerial authority provide a platform to understand the significance of management and the role of other factors in structuring silence. Consideration is given to how employees perceptions on the procedural opportunities for voice can be influenced. A disparity between TransportCo’s commitments to the voice of those with mental health conditions and practice is` found, demonstrating a lack of genuine commitment from management to develop their organisational strategies on mental health. The role of management in structuring silence through agenda setting, the absence of voice channels and through not building line managers’ soft-skill and mental health knowledge, organises the issues employees’ want to voice out of the voice process. Silence is shown not to be a communicative choice; rather the employees’ agency to make purposeful decisions regarding the voice process is constrained. This thesis contributes to the silence literature by offering an insight into how employees define their own silence by introducing an employee-oriented framework of silence. The thesis demonstrates how employees can regain their agency over the silence process through various silence practices, and the significance social voice plays for challenging aspects of employee-oriented framework of silence. A spiral of voice theory is presented, advancing knowledge on the positive repercussions of social voice on employee perceptions of silence and organisational voice as a whole.