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Why is it that some small companies have profitably embraced an idea of sustainable business, while many others do not give it a passing thought? What are the features that make some businesses open to more sustainable opportunities, but leave others ;losed to the idea? This work identifies a range of important influences on business responsiveness to sustainability and presents a theoretical framework, referred to as business epistemology, to describe their interaction. By analysing the business epistemology, it is possible to identify the barriers to sustainable business within individual companies. The framework also highlights the wide range of supportive influences necessary to enable the development of sustainable business practice. The companies who have embraced sustainable business have benefited from a supportive combination of intemal and external influences. Few companies currently enjoy such wide-ranging support for sustainable business.

Many corporations over the world showed evidence of getting positive benefits from using design and analysis of experiments (DOE), however, some others did not. Companies did not use DOE or failed in using it (for some reasons) might lose their opportunities of getting those benefits which their counterparts received. Despite the advantages of. DOE, the technique is not commonly used by management. The purpose of this research is to investigate why the technique is not applied more often and hence suggestions are made to help rectify the situation. The research covered four main stages: literature review, samples of representative literature, questionnaire survey via the Internet and a case study using action research methodology being carried out in a printed circuit board company in Hong Kong. Triangulation was used in this research in order to uncover knowledge about the topic of study and tradeoff bias caused. A random sampling method and a judgmental sampling method were used in the samples of representative literature. Subsequently, two questionnaire surveys via the Internet were respectively conducted. The snowball sampling method was used to contact targeted companies. Data and information received from the surveyed companies on the use, or not, of DOE were collected and analyzed. The results and findings of the two questionnaire surveys indicated of what, how and why companies use, or not use, of DOE in their operations. A case study using action research methodology was also carried out in a local company. The action research was three-fold: (I) the researcher (i.e. the author) conducted DOE training to a team of staff, (2) trained staff undertook a current industrial problem and resolved it by using DOE, and (3) the company changed from the state of 'non-use of DOE' to the one of 'use of DOE' for better performance practices. Feedbacks from top management and the staff enriched the researcher to answer the posed research questions and achieved the objectives of the whole study.

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This thesis represents a body of work which is about individual and organisational learning from adverse incidents, the context ofthe studies was the National Health Service (NHS). The thesis presents a series of exploratory studies which were undertaken in order to discover whether NHS staffhad a disposition to learn from adverse incidents and whether their employing organisations were indicative of a supportive learning environment. The studies began with the premise that failing to support NHS staff to learn from adverse incidents contributed to their occurrence and re-o ccurrence. This thesis makes a contribution to the scientific community in a number of ways; firstly it relates fmdings from exploring deep approaches to individual and organisational learning from adverse incidents. Secondly the thesis highlights the role of educational leadership as a mechanism for overcoming organisational barriers to learning from adverse incidents. Lastly and most importantly the thesis demonstrates that while progress is being made to educate stafftowards achieving greater patient safety, there is much to be gained from concentrating educational efforts on supporting learning in the workplace. To this end the thesis illuminates how workplace learning from adverse incidents can be viewed as a source of positive learning for both the individual and the organisation and, presents fmdings from a new piloted approach to learning in which the student/participants came to view learning from adverse incidents as a positive experience. The thesis concludes with a range of tools specifically designed to support NHS staff in the workplace to learn from adverse incidents.

Knowledge is now being seen as the most important strategic resource for organisations. The ability to leverage external knowledge to enhance organisational knowledge is a vital constituent as the second-hand experience can be obtained more rapidly and economically than first-hand experience. Transfer of organisational knowledge is of central interest for both academic researchers and practitioners. Moreover, it is significant for organisational learning and it is a powerful mechanism for gaining competitive advantages. However, knowledge transfer is not straightforward as it depends not solely on the nature of knowledge itself, but also on the process of acquisition and assimilation. There are limitations in knowledge transfer since some types of knowledge may not be directly captured, managed, and are not always prepared in a transferable form. Consequently, this research considers 'practice' as a vehicle for knowledge transfer to further our understanding of how knowledge can be reconstructed through the practice. Despite extensive research on knowledge transfer, there is a dearth of research that has explicitly focused on the practice-oriented knowledge transfer. This is different from the objectivist-based knowledge transfer where knowledge is presented as an object. There is little research that considers knowledge as a result of social interaction and knowledge is context-dependent nature. Additionally, organisations require a method of analysis in order to overcome knowledge transfer difficulties relating to the absent congruence of the sourcereCipient context and assist on organisation's decision to choose a suitable source for the transfer process.

The granularity of the information for sharing is one of the essential aspects in project learning. The utilization of information technology has maximised the benefit and extended the scope of sharing at horizontal and vertical aspects, e.g. sharing information between multiple concurrent projects and sharing historic data to new projects. Horizontal information sharing enables the use of common resources in planning and executing projects contained in programmes and portfolio management systems. Vertical information sharing enables a systematic information deposition and dissemination of lessons learned for the knowledge of project management. Information collected throughout a project lifecycle contributes to the project portfolio. Good practises or lessons learnt should be used to guide new projects. Project learning repositories are designed to collect the lesson learnt information and share the information with new projects to better manage them and improve their performance. Current main stream project management methods are process or activity based; making the project portfolio collected and the lesson learnt information granularity process based. Information sharing between projects only happens at the process (activity) level and project level. However, the vast amount of information in between which contains the best practices of producing project's "simple products" (deliverables) are not collected. Portfolios, on the other hand, at each activity level are not easily sharable due to the fact that new technologies, process reengineering and personnel preferences may all affect the chosen activities.

E-learning is still an emerging phenomenon in international hotel companies about which very few previous academic studies have been carried out. This had created a need for this research. This study is an endeavor to bridge the gap in knowledge regarding the use of e-learning in international hotel companies. More specifically it focuses on exploring how international hotel companies can optimize the benefits that they get from using the e-learning tools (e-learning portal). This research is novel in the area of hospitality management and more specifically in the literature focusing on international hotel companies. This is the first study, to the author's knowledge, that has examined e-learning in international hotel companies from the perspectives of organizational learning and knowledge management. This study uncovered the practices in using e-learning of the three studied international hotel companies. This thesis highlights the importance of building a close (integral) relationship between e-learning, organizational learning and knowledge management. E-learning is viewed as a complex adaptive system. This study is organized into eleven chapters. The first six chapters focus on the literature review that supported the achievement of the main aims of this research. Chapter seven is the methodology. In order to attain the aims of this research, data were collected from multiple sources, for example interviews, data published in the public domain (internet sources) and documents collected from the three studied companies. Chapters eight, nine and ten are the case studies of the three studied companies. Each of these chapters in divided into two phases of analysis. Chapter eleven is the conclusion, recommendations and contributions of this research.