This study critically investigated how organisational members made sense of change within a local government authority in Northern Ireland. The large-scale Review of Public Administration (RPA) that unfolded over a ten-year period presented a unique case study opportunity to assess how change and sensemaking are linked within a public sector setting. Adopting a longitudinal approach, the change communication process was investigated using two sensemaking frameworks used in parallel: Dervin's (1984) Sense-Making Metaphor and Weick's (1995) sensemaking framework. Qualitative data were obtained using the MicroMoment Time-Line Interview technique across two key phases; thus enabling a longitudinal comparison of how sensemaking changed over time. Although previous research acknowledged the importance of communication during organisational change, to date there is dearth of literature on communication processes that emerge in this context. Additionally, there has been little examination of the links between large-scale organisational change and sensemaking over time. As such, this thesis sets out to redress these research gaps by investigating the nature, form and effects of organisational members' sensemaking during major organisational restructuring. Key findings indicated that sensemaking is central to the success of any transformation programme. Heightened uncertainty and fear for organisational members results in the necessity to engage in cycles of perpetual sensemaking for prolonged periods of time. Due to the politically driven nature of the change process, and the unavailability of formal (factual) information, the psychological impact on employees was significant - a point worthy of note for future change programmes. Accordingly, the implications of these results aims to benefit academics and change leaders alike by adding to the body of sensemaking and communication literature in this field.

The problem of resistance to organisational change has been highlighted through the contemporary literature on change management. Endemic with change programs are the reported failure rates, which suggest an unusually high percentage of all change initiatives fail. The cited reasons for the failures abound, from systemic management failure through to direct causes such as workforce absenteeism. However, throughout the literature the catch all term of 'resistance' to change is cited as the most dominant feature of change failure. The literature however does not deal in any in-depth way with the nature of why people resist change. The position of this thesis is that the literature on change is ill equipped to conceptualise and deal with the resistance issue due to the historical development of change management as a body of knowledge. This thesis argues that viewing identity as a process (incomplete and unfinished) offers clear insights as to why people resist change. Further, viewing identity as a process allows change to be understood as interference in the identity process.

Workplace writing is a high stakes activity. It constitutes a permanent record of a company’s transactions and this has implications for both the employees involved in the production of documents and also for the company as a whole. Workplace writing is dynamic, and processes and practices vary between teams, departments, companies and industries. In this context, the study is concerned with workplace writing practices in eight multinational companies situated in Greece. The thesis is structured in two parts: the first part aims to explore the writing practices in the participant organisations focusing on factors behind inter- and intra- company variation. The discussion draws on the analysis of questionnaire and interview data. The second part takes a micro perspective and focuses on one genre, that of the business email. The analysis reports on a sample of naturally occurring emails from three participant companies. As the business email tends to be perceived as an informal genre, special attention is paid to the notion of formality, which has not been systematically discussed and defined in this context. The findings show that writing practices vary according to company size, employees’ hierarchical level and years of experience. Business email emerges as the most frequent genre, which serves a range of functions in different contexts. Dynamic continua of writing practices ranging from ‘formal to informal’ and ‘transactional to relational’ are mobilised as employees reflect on their use of email at work and this is aligned with the findings of the linguistic analysis. The data also indicate the impact of the globalised socioeconomic activity on employees’ practices in modern organisations. The participants in this study operate at the interface of different languages and practices, which cut across national and professional boundaries. The complex choices they make in different contexts have implications for language training and specifically the teaching of writing in academic contexts.

This research explores the relationship between a strategic approach to quality management in Canadian organizations and employee measures of happiness. In particular, it investigates how a strategic approach to quality management impacts on employee satisfaction, engagement, and morale. Understanding the relationships between a strategic approach to quality management and employee measures of happiness helps companies, policy-makers, and academia. Companies can use the conclusions to decide on the value of a quality management system as it relates to employees. The findings provide answers to employees, management, and labour unions that need to understand the impact a strategic approach to quality will have on them. Policy-makers can use the findings to set the agenda for closing Canada’s productivity gap. Knowledge of this research can support policy-maker decisions to simplify the process for implementing a strategic approach to quality, realizing the benefits for participating organizations and employees at those organizations. This research helps academia fill two major gaps in the literature: First, the impact that the implementation of a strategic quality approach has on employee happiness (namely satisfaction, engagement, and morale). The second is the focus on Canadian organizations. There are relatively few studies that investigate a strategic approach to quality that focus on Canadian companies. Much of the research related to strategic quality employs data from American, Asian, Australian, and European organizations whereas this research uses data from exclusively Canadian organizations. This is the only academic research (to the knowledge of the researcher) that uses original Canada Awards for Excellence recipient results to draw conclusions. In this research, organizations with a strategic approach to quality (Canada Awards for Excellence recipients) are compared with similar size organizations with no defined approach to quality (non-winners). A 66-question survey was used with 591 respondents representing 58.68% response rate from 12 Canadian organizations. The participating organizations were a mix of small and medium size organizations ranging in size from 5 employees to 400 employees in both the service and manufacturing sectors. The survey respondents included 315 from Canada Award for Excellence winners and 276 from non-winners. Of the 12 organizations studied, five are Canada Award for Excellence winners and seven of them are non-winners. The research provides evidence that organizations taking a strategic approach to quality have a positive impact on the employees of that organization. The research has found significant connections between an organization’s level of strategic quality and the effect on employees in terms of morale, engagement, and satisfaction. The survey alongside focus group analysis shows that there is a clear relationship between strategic quality and employee measures of happiness. The findings indicate that the impact of implementing quality is positive and results in benefits for both the organization as a whole and the individual employee. Significant differences are noted between Canada Award for Excellence winners and non-winners.

Approaches to assessing the effectiveness of decision analyses in strategy development contexts have yet to be widely covered in the academic literature. In particular, there are two major gaps: first, a lack of conceptual links between socio-technical decision analysis and strategy development processes, and, second, a limited number of approaches that assess empirically the process effectiveness of decision analyses. This PhD research contributes to filling these gaps. The first part of this study analyses the contribution of socio-technical decision analysis to the effective development of strategies. I introduce a simplified taxonomy of strategy development that classifies socio-technical decision analysis as contributing both to enhanced information exchange ('socio' side) and improved information processing (technical side). The second part of the study assesses the effect of socio-technical decision analysis. I develop two measures to test the process effectiveness as well as the group alignment effects of the approach. An application to six case studies shows that socio-technical decision analysis is perceived as consistently more effective than existing decision processes on eight 'socio', technical and result-oriented dimensions. In addition, it has helped to create group alignment. The study also indicates that a group of relatively inexperienced decision analysts can apply socio-technical decision analysis successfully. The empirical studies, however, revealed several weaknesses in the approach, in particular on the information exchange side. The third part of the study addresses these weaknesses by introducing 'Strategy Conferencing'. The approach aims to enhance the effectiveness of socio-technical decision analysis in strategy development contexts by adding outside expertise to the process-based socio-technical decision analysis.

This thesis examines the role and significance of the idea and practice of 'social entrepreneurship' within UK social policy between 1980 and 2006. Social entrepreneurship came to policy prominence in 1997 with the election of New Labour. It promoted the role of individual social entrepreneurs as bringing about social innovation, and it held out the promise of contributing to social policy by revitalising poor communities, professionalising the voluntary sector, and reforming welfare. This study problematises the concept of 'social entrepreneurship', challenges its claim- bearing nature, and presents a more critical and in-depth analysis than is found in the existing research and practitioner literatures. It does this by adopting a social constructionist perspective to analyse the development, representation and enactment of social entrepreneurship as discourse and practice, drawing on a wide range of data from interviews, policy and organisational documents, academic texts, websites, and the media. The findings show that social entrepreneurship has neither given rise to the wide ranging innovations claimed nor resulted in coherent or systematic policy interventions. Rather, the idea of social entrepreneurship framed a convenient discourse within which to emphasise policy priorities centred on further incorporating a market orientation to addressing social needs, thereby extending the 'enterprise culture'. In contrast, the practice of social entrepreneurship took place primarily at the community level, involving the labelling and support of several thousand 'social entrepreneurs' who carried out small-scale social initiatives. The study identified four roles that social entrepreneurship plays in UK social policy, arising from the tensions between the market orientation of social entrepreneurship as an idea and its community oriented practice: celebrating the achievements of individuals; renegotiating welfare responsibilities through the 'active welfare subject'; creating a channel through which business can engage with community; and enabling government policy to respond to the particularism of the local.

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of information infrastructure (II) within the IS field. Nevertheless, issues of risk in the development of II have seldom been addressed. This dissertation addresses this important gap by drawing on recent contributions to sociological theories of risk to study the relationship between risk, culture and the occurrence of danger in the development of IT as corporate information infrastructure (CII). The thesis is established on findings from an ethnographic study of risk in the development of II with a multinational banking corporation. This thesis makes several key contributions to the field of IS, firstly to the understanding of risk in the development of II. Secondly, to theory development in IS risk research through the novel integration of sociological theories of risk into a theoretical model for the analysis of risk, culture, and danger in the development of ICT. A further contribution to IS research is achieved through the adoption of the impressionist autoethnographic approach, as a novel means of narrative construction within IS research.

The development of European Union political institutions and scope of policy-making has resulted in fundamental changes in the political and economic environment within which UK firms operate. Since 1986 in particular, the response to these developments has been a noted increase in business lobbying activity directed towards 'Brussels'. A dense network of interests has formed around key EU institutions. This includes some companies which have chosen to locate a permanent company representative in Brussels. Firms have a variety of strategies they can adopt for representation, both individual and collective, in addition to existing, established, national routes for exerting influence on EU institutions and policies. The thesis is about why companies choose particular strategies, and the political and economic factors which may help determine that choice. It maintains that information plays a key role in the creation of opportunities for influence, and in the choice of influence strategies. Chapter 2 explores theoretical contributions on influence behaviour and lobbying activity. Chapters 3 & 4 review the development of the EU. It shows that the complexity and uncertainty of its institutions and decision-making processes generate substantial information needs on the part of policy-makers. This in turn creates a high level of opportunity for business interests to exert influence. Following a brief outline of the approach to the empirical work contained in chapter 5, chapters 6 & 7 examine business response to these opportunities across two industries. Two contrasting sectors are analysed, Road Freight and Pharmaceuticals. These show that business response to such opportunities can vary significantly both at firm and at sectoral level. It links responses to the costs and benefits associated with various strategies, which in turn relate to key firm and sector characteristics. The most important of these are; firm size, transnational operations and sector concentration. Chapter 8 brings together the findings from both empirical work and earlier theoretical contributions and assesses the similarities and differences between the Road Freight and Pharmaceutical sectors in terms of both firm and sector characteristics, and influence strategies focused on EU institutions and policy-making.

Increasing emphasis on strategic and operational IT-business alignment and best-practice frameworks (e.g. ITIL) has promoted the deployment of cross-functional process-based IT Service Management (ITSM) technologies within a wide range of organisations. Such technologies underpin core IT support processes such as Incident, Problem, and Change Management within a Service Management framework, promoting greater visibility and evaluation of IT contribution to the business. However, strategic and operational improvement of cross-functional ITSM processes requires effective embedding of process-supporting software in the organisation's ITSM process infrastructure. This research is based on an in-depth interpretive case-study of the use made of an ITSM software package in an IT Services department of a major UK university. In particular, this thesis examines the roles of organisational context, specific software functionality and design features, and organisational process infrastructure to develop an understanding of how particular ways of working with the software are embedded in various organisational routines. This research identifies a number of prevalent IT support working practices as organisational routines, and analyses the interrelationship between the working practices, organisational processes, the ITSM software artefact, and the immediate and wider organisational context. This thesis makes a number of contributions, including developing a theoretical framework for studying the role of technological artefact and organisational context and processes from the perspective of organisational routines and structuration theory.

This thesis investigates Innovation Creativity Environments (ICEs) located within the London School of Economics by looking at events taking place within these specific spaces. ICEs are gaining popularity within organisations and academic institutions as places to foster creativity for decision-making. Much has been written about these types of spaces in organisational and business contexts, but academic research is virtually non-existent. This research sets out to document two main objectives. The first objective is to describe and narrate what actually happens in Innovation Creativity Environments before, during and after the event taking into account crew facilitation and participant perspectives. The empirical focus of the thesis is on a series events mounted annually in these environments on "Project Dreams and Reality," with the aim to support MSc students in the Institute of Social Psychology, LSE to prepare for their dissertations and future careers. The thesis provides, as its first objective, an in-depth narration of in the documents what actually happened within ICEs. The second objective is to understand how these environments function and provide Group Decision Authoring and Communication Support (GDACS) that facilitate creative decision-making. Through interviews, observations and participation the research identifies two main pathways in which play supports the decision-making processes with ICE. First, play enables participants establish a background-of-safety, a concept coined by Sandler and Sandler (1978), is a psychoanalytical cognitive model that identifies safety as a feeling quality within the ego and motored by the ego, which is usually taken for granted. The ego tries to maximize safety experience, rather than avoid anxiety, allowing students to risk being creative. Secondly, play nurtures the decision-hedgehog (Humphreys and Jones 2006) which positions decision-making through the construction of narratives making the rhizome that constitutes the body of the hedgehog with the fundamental aim of enriching contextual knowledge and creativity for decision-making within Innovative Creativity Environments.