This research aims to further our understanding on online information seeking and the customer's experience during search. The primary focus of this research is to explore the online customer experience during a utilitarian search for business advisory information and services. Previous research has provided an understanding on the process of information seeking, however this research advances our limited theoretical knowledge on the online customer experience moving beyond service quality and the outcomes of the customer experience, thus understanding variables capable of influencing the customer experience while searching for information during a customer's online journey on a business advisory website. In line with this, the research has answered five research objectives: (1) Establish which variables influence the online customer experience during a utilitarian search for online business advisory information and services. (2) Investigate the role of customer emotions while searching for online business advisory information and services. (3) Establish the role of online customer support through social interaction in relation to a customer's experience. (4) Examine the effect of a customer's search success on the online customer experience (5) Develop a comprehensive online customer experience model incorporating variables influencing the customer experience during the initial customer journey to find business information and services. A mixed methods approach was adopted in the research within a pragmatic philosophical underpinning. Due to the limited research within the area of the online customer experience an initial qualitative element was used in order to refine the proposed theoretical framework in the study. The qualitative research was developed based on the literature reviewed with the aim of providing an initial insight into the variables to be tested in the quantitative phase of the study, thus providing comprehensiveness and parsimony. 16 semi structured in-depth interviews were conducted with SMEs from an array of industries. The interviews provided in-depth insight into the variables capable of influencing the online experience and identified those variables to be examined in the quantitative phase of the research. The main quantitative phase of the research consisted of an online experiment aligned with an online questionnaire. The online experiment was conducted on three selected business advisory websites offering business advisory information and services with a sample of 160 participants. Tasks were set up on each website for participants to complete. After the completion of the set of tasks on each website, participants completed the online questionnaire. All 160 responses were completed and usable to test the proposed theoretical model and thus made it suitable for structural equation modelling. The findings of the research outline a number of variables that have been previously overlooked in relation to influencing the online customer experience. The new context of exploring the online customer experience during a utilitarian search for information has furthered our limited theoretical understanding of the online customer experience and online information seeking. This research found that the quality of the information, the credibility of the website, the perceived length of time spent on the website, the success of the search as well as the requirement of online customer support all have an influence on the online customer experience during a utilitarian search for business advisory information and services. In addition, the findings also illustrate an underlying latent variable comprised of website aesthetics, level of control, information quality, website credibility and flow combining together to influence the online customer experience. The findings illustrate a role for the previously unexplored online customer support through synchronised social interaction via functions such as live chat and online help desks. The findings illustrated, should customers require to spend longer searching on the website than perceived necessary or have an unsuccessful search they will require online customer support. Previous research exploring the online customer experience has predominantly explored the outcomes of a positive customer experience, this research has responded to calls for research (Verhoef et al, 2009) and established the variables influencing the customer at specific points during the customer's journey to finding the required information and services on business advisory websites. Key managerial implications for online business advisory providers are discussed in relation to improving the online customer experience. Managers need to be conscious of the variables capable of influencing the customer experience, particularly the length of time customers are required to spend on the website which plays a key mediating role on other influential variables. The focus for managers has been on the importance of customers spending a prolonged period of time on the website as a benchmark of a successful website. This study however highlights to managers of business advisory websites to use such a benchmark with caution as this research finds that the longer customers spend searching on a website for business advisory information and services, the less likely they are to have a positive experience as well as being less likely in having a successful search and requiring online customer support. The key contributions of this research include: The development of a new online customer experience model incorporating the variables capable of influencning the online customer experience including website aesthetics, level of control on the website (ease of use and customisation), the credibility of the website, the quality of the information and flow, while involving the mediating effect of the perceived length of time spent on the website, the need to seek online customer support and the success of the search. The research has introduced and developed a new scale to measure the perceived length of time customers are willing to spend on the website. The reseach has introduced the need for online customer support, with the perceived length of time spent on the website driving the need to seek online customer support. The research has established the sequence of variables influencing the online customer experience during a utilitarian search for business advisory information and services. The research has confirmed a measure for the online customer experience involving cognitive satisfaction with the experience and customer emotions. The research has extended our theoretical understanding of the online customer experience in a new context.

The advents of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet applications, have become indispensable tool to the tourism industry. ICTs have had a major influence in changing the structure of this industry, to be information intensive industry. Travel agencies category of SMEs , have a vital role in tourism; managing, coordinating and supplying all aspects thereof, such as transport sector, hospitality sector and leisure attractions. The factors affecting e-commerce adoption by SMEs have been well-documented in developed countries, but inadequate studies have been conducted regarding e-commerce adoption in the developing countries; particularly in Arab countries. Moreover, it has been found that in spite of potential benefits for travel agencies of adoption of ecommerce, travel agencies are commonly regarded as slow adopters of e-commerce, lagging far behind the developed countries. Therefore, the focus of this study is on investigating the factors affecting e-commerce adoption by focusing on Jordanian travel agencies. To achieve this objective; an integrated conceptual framework was developed on the basis of previous models and theories relevant to ICTs and e-commerce adoption, namely Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation model, the Technology-Organisation-Environment model and Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions theory. The conceptual framework was developed for the explanation of the factors affecting e-commerce adoption by travel agencies. These factors were used to identify different levels of e-commerce adoption. These levels include: non-adoption, e-connectivity, e-window, e-interactivity, e-transaction and e-enterprise. The quantitative method was applied in this study for data collection using self-administrated questionnaire distributed to 300 Jordanian travel agents. The total number of valid questionnaires was 206, constituting a response rate of 68.6%. The descriptive analysis was used to explain demographic profiles of participants and current state of ecommerce adoption level. Multinomial Logistic Regression was used to test the research hypotheses. The research findings revealed that there are three different adoption levels of e-commerce by Jordanian travel agencies: e-connectivity, e-window and e-interactivity. The results showed that relative advantage, observability, business/partner pressure, uncertainty avoidance and government support were the significant predictors differentiating e-window from e-connectivity. Moreover, relative advantage, observability, financial barriers, power distance, business/partner pressure and government support proved to be significant predictors differentiating between e-interactivity and e-connectivity. It was also found that observability, competitive pressure, firm size and complexity were significant predictors differentiating between e-interactivity and e-window. On the other hand, the results showed that compatibility,trialability, employees’ IT knowledge, top management support, manager’s attitude, and customer pressure were insignificant predictors of any of the e-commerce adoption levels. Upon that, it can be argued with confidence that different levels of e-commerce adoption are affected by different factors. This entails the necessity of addressing the above ten significant predictors as they can be useful for managers, IT/web vendors and policy makers in drawing a roadmap and strategies for expanding the use and benefits of ecommerce adoption. Moreover, the conceptual framework of the study provide a best explanation of factors affecting e-commerce adoption levels in travel agencies as an example of SMEs, which contribute to the knowledge in the area of information systems particularly in the context of e-commerce adoption in developing countries.

This research is informed by the implications of Disruptive Innovation Theory, which posits that incumbent firms tend to fail in the face of disruptive threats. A framework is developed based on the aim to identify controllable parameters of firm's innovation capability to ultimately contribute to the longevity of incumbent organizations. It integrates the conceptualization of Innovation Orientation with a processual perspective on innovation and the Dynamic Capabilities View to gain a holistic perspective on a firm's innovation. Furthermore, it emphasizes the role of managers and strategy makers to determine the level and composition of an organization's overall Capability to Innovate. Research constructs for Business Strategy, Market Orientation (with separate measures to assess the firm's distinct focus on Current Customers and/or Future Markets), as well as Learning Orientation were supplemented with a measure to assess the favourability of the Innovation Implementation Context of the firm. In their combination, these constructs are posited to provide a holistic account of the firm's overall Capability to Innovate. The research setting provides a framework to determine the influence of Business Strategy on the configuration of these constructs and to illustrate the interplay among them. A survey of 182 respondents based in a single organization in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods Industry was taken to validate the framework. Its objective was to investigate into the individual linkages between Business Strategy and Market Orientation, Learning Orientation and the favourability of the Innovation Implementation Context. Moreover, the perceptions of employees on 4 different hierarchical levels are assessed. Ultimately this setting allows to determine the degree of strategic alignment throughout the organization, which was shown to result in higher performance in prior research. The findings of this research contribute to extend existing knowledge in an evolutionary manner. It contributes to the integration of prior research in the field of Innovation Orientation, innovation and the Dynamic Capabilities View towards a holistic understanding of a firm's Capability to Innovate. Moreover, the findings provide insights into the interrelationship between Business Strategy and the organization's propensity for Market Orientation in the Current Customer domain and into the Future Market domain, its Learning Orientation and the arrangement of its Innovation Implementation Context. It revealed a synergistic interplay between these constructs. The research provides directions for practitioners in outlining the importance of a holistic appreciation of innovation and by illustrating specific mechanisms how Business Strategy may influence a firm's overall Capability to Innovate.

Through the application of the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) model, this study investigates the key factors affecting the adoption of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce in Egypt. This study has adopted a quantitative methodology to answer the research questions and test the proposed sixteen hypotheses. The research sample of this study included 600 Egyptian respondents. Regression Analysis has been conducted as a major evaluation of the research model and associated hypotheses. The constructs that have been empirically tested in the extended UTAUT2 model are: Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Social Influence (SI), Hedonic Motivation (HM), Habit (HI) and Facilitating Conditions (FC). Age, gender and experience moderate the relationship for the six independent variables and the dependent variable except for Performance Expectancy (PE) construct that was only moderated by age and gender. The proposed additional constructs for this model are on-line satisfaction (OS), on-line interactivity (OI), on-line trust (OT) and on-line security (OSY). The major findings of this study show that there is an effect of the established factors: Effort Expectancy, Hedonic Motivation and Facilitating Conditions, Social Influence, on-line Trust, on-line Satisfaction and on-line Interactivity on Egyptian consumers’ intention to adopt B2C e-commerce. In addition, the effect of moderator’s factors: age, gender, and experience have been absent in this study. Accordingly, seven hypotheses have been proven, while nine have been rejected. The study further discusses significant implications for marketers, on-line vendors and the Egyptian Government. In addition to presenting the important theoretical and practical contributions, this study also recommends directions for future related research. By specifically examining the Egyptian consumer, this study is the first of its kind to empirically examine B2C adoption in Egypt. Thus, it expands the body of knowledge in the field of B2C adoption and usage, which the existing literature has failed to provide an extensive understanding of B2C in the Arab World’s most populous country. This study is also the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive understanding of the factors affecting B2C by Egyptian consumers and to develop the (UTAUT3) model.

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This study addresses the interconnections between brand names, scripts, and languages in the Jordanian context through an investigation of the brand names in the linguistic landscape (LL henceforth) of Aqaba and of Jordanians’ attitudes and beliefs towards the occurrence of these brand names in the city. For the purpose of conducting the study, six streets were selected in Aqaba city on the basis of their commercial and tourism significance. The data collected within these survey areas generated a corpus of 1,810 signs. In the Thesis brand names, which constitute 25% of the entire corpus, are divided according to two typologies: the languages of scripts, and scripts in association with the language of slogans and business names. For the former typology, the mono-script brands contain Roman, Romanised Arabic, and Arabic, and the multi-script brands contain the pairings of Arabic and Romanised Arabic, and Roman and Arabicised Roman. The second typology identifies the brand names according to four patterns: brand advertising, hybrid brand, clone brand, and brand imitation. Brand names in both typologies have been examined from the perspective of semiotics, particularly the use of ‘composition’ and ‘multimodality’ as pertinent premises of Kress and Van Leewen’s (1996) grammar of visual design. The visual semiotic analysis has uncovered that the elements of the brand names perform as toolkits to disclose different socio-cultural and symbolic meanings in connection with both global and Jordanian brand names. Whilst the Arabic-script brands reflect local cultural practices in connection with the Jordanian community, such as the significance of religion, social habits, the customs exemplified in Bedouin life, and the display of Jordanian Arabic, the global brands, generally expressed in Roman scripts, display symbolic meanings associated with prestige, youth, decoration, success, and progress in the LL. In order to test the model proposed by Tufi and Blackwood (2010) regarding the impact of the socio-economic composition of individuals on their responses to the language(s) and countries of representation of brand names’ scripts, 42 Jordanian residents of the city with different demographic backgrounds were interviewed on their understanding of 20 recurrent brand names in the LL. The analysis of the data pinpoints five broad themes and perspectives: the prestige of English, the prestige of the US, Islamic associations, linguistic nationalism, and sound suggestions. The first two of these themes highlight the positive beliefs of younger people with respect to ‘English’ and the US as prestigious labels and marks. Cosmopolitan traits enhance this perception so that LL actors and viewers participate in new social identities which, in many situations, do not belong to the local setting. As for Islamic associations and linguistic nationalism, these are mostly mentioned by middle-aged and older respondents, who associate certain brand names with the teachings of Islam and the preference of the Arabic language over foreign languages. Islamic associations in turn relate to negative political and social concepts with regard to the brands’ perceived country of representation. This extends to negative evaluations of the inhabitants’ norms and customs in the given countries, which are then transferred to the languages themselves. Responses incorporating elements of linguistic nationalism exhibit views about the decreased appearance of the Arabic language and its replacement with foreign languages, as well as the respondents’ devotion to Arabic as the language of Islam. Finally, sound associations, that is the relations between the phonological shape of the brand name and the particularities of a local language, were identified and articulated by some educated inhabitants of different age groups. The Thesis concludes by highlighting the key role of age in the identification of the diverse viewpoints regarding the perceived language(s) and countries of brand names. Jordanian linguistic preferences towards the languages of these signs are also dependent on their viewpoints on the political meanings surrounding the perceived country of the brand names. The Thesis contributes to the field of LL in so far as it provides a wealth of original data from an unexplored setting, it devises a new method of coding brand names, and it contributes to establishing a solid linguistic framework in which to place the language policy of brand names in other LLs.

Since the late 1990s, organisations have been increasingly investing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to support their sales, marketing and customer service operations. Despite the significant growth in the acquisition of CRM systems and the widely accepted concepts of a CRM strategy, academics and practitioners repeatedly point to the high failure rates of CRM initiatives. Improving CRM systems’ use can provide organisations with considerable benefits. However, limited research has been directed towards understanding post-adoption CRM systems usage behaviour. This is an important and topical subject at a time when CRM has edged past Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) as the top application software investment priority and is expected to drive Enterprise System (ES) spending in 2013 and 2014. Using a multiple case study design methodology and Grounded Theory (GT) as the data collection and analysis technique, this process study strives to accomplish four primary research objectives. Firstly, it proposes a post-adoption CRM system usage process consisting of three phases (adaptation, exploitation, and benefits realization) and seven sub-phases (training assimilation, basic functionality discovery, basic functionality appropriation, advanced functionality discovery and appropriation, individual productivity enhancement, individual job objectives achievement, and company business objectives achievement) along which individual CRM system users can be placed. Secondly, it identifies ten misfit types (communication, supervision, user support, skill sets, commitment, functionality, data, strategy, organisation, and IT/business alignment) explaining for usage discrepancy among the user population. Thirdly, it looks at the evolution of those ten misfit types, and finds that their influence varies across the three post-adoption usage phases. For example, tool related misfits (e.g. functionality) appear early but tend to disappear by the end of the adaptation phase or the beginning of the exploitation phase, while company related misfits (e.g. communication of benefits, silo organisation) appear later in the exploitation phase, but seem to widen over time and significantly impact usage when not appropriately addressed. Finally, it identifies the organisation’s leadership style as a potential root cause explaining for CRM system usage behaviour.

Children as influencer in family decision making have widely been acknowledged in consumer research. In today's world environmental concerns are taking centre stage in different discourses including consumer behaviour, in which children have been recognised by policy makers as potential influencers and catalysts of environmental attitude and behaviour change for their families and communities. Globally, different environmental education programs are implemented to empower them, including in India. To study the role of children in environmental discourse in India, this thesis uses consumer socialisation theory to explore the process of environmental socialisation of Indian adolescents (age 13-18 years) and whether they influence the environmental attitudes and behaviour of their parents. The thesis focuses on one activity-based environmental education program, the Green School Program in India as the basis to study the effect of environmental education on the environmental socialisation and reverse socialisation processes and also to target the required sample population. The thesis uses a sequential exploratory mixed methods approach, utilising multiple qualitative methods (including essay writing, group interviews and mother-adolescent dyad interviews) in the first phase followed by a questionnaire survey in the quantitative phase. As a contribution in the environmental reverse socialisation research stream, this thesis indicates that Indian adolescents influence their parents' environmental attitudes and behaviour however the degree of their influence is moderated by parents' perception of their adolescents' environmental ability and knowledge. This adds a new insight into the role of learner in agent-learner relationship in existing socialisation research by indicating that parents as learners are not passive in the environmental reverse socialisation process. Indian parents act more actively as learners and scrutinise and control the knowledge and behaviour influence of their adolescents according to their own perception. Further, as key environmental socialisation agents, school, media, parents and peers were all investigated, and for adolescents' school are considered the most important agent. As an important contribution, this thesis concludes that socialisation agents exert different degrees of influence on adolescents' environmental learning and play a relative role. Another key finding suggest that schools also play an important role in creating a positive perception of adolescents' environmental knowledge and abilities among parents and therefore facilitating their receptivity towards their adolescents' environmental influence. This further contributes to the socialisation theory by indicating schools as antecedent variable for the environmental reverse socialisation process in India. The thesis further contributes to socialisation theory and environmental socialisation research by extending the application of socialisation theory to the environmental socialisation process in India and studying both the environmental socialisation process of adolescents and environmental reverse socialisation process of parents in India and connecting them in one study. Further it also highlights the role of family as a unit in India instead of individual members to be targeted by both environmental education, and communication policies and strategies for holistic impact. The key methodological contribution lies in the development of new scales and this further add in the current methodological discourse of environmental socialisation research by using mixed methods and triangulating both qualitative and quantitative results.

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1. The rapidly changing economic and social environment, in our ever shrinking global Community, calls for a drastic review and reappraisal of the 'way we do business'. A projected doubling of the world population in the next 50 - 70 years, all of it within the already struggling developing nations, must be taken as a 'wake up call' for the world's 'Community of Professionals'. 2. The National Centrę for Work Based Learning Partnerships has embarked upon a mission designed to assist Professionals to update their own knowledge and skills portfolios whilst at the same time providing a 'product' containing a distilled, reflected and thought out treasure trove of experience. Such practical experience will help build up the 'body of knowledge' of the greater Community in which they operate i.e. other Professionals. 3. The candidate himself has embarked on a personal journey which, when started, was structured to achieve the following: • To capitalise upon previous professional learning, taking advantage of a unique opportunity to reflect upon the merging of formal and informal study, practical experience and new insights gained over the years to produce a brand new composition of far greater quality and scope than previously achieved. • To capture the essence of own Franchising experience, knowledge and feel for the benefit of Franchisees, Franchisors, Government and Academia, i.e. to the benefit of the greater Community. • To think 'outside of the box' and offer new ideas and suggestions for consideration i.e. how a revitalised and courageous Franchising can contribute to the well being of the global and local communities. • To gain the pleasure of achieving the Doctorate in Professional Studies degree. • To be recognised 'in the public domain' by other Professionals in the economic, social and Franchising communities. 4. As far back as 1943 Sir Winston Churchill recognised and acknowledged that skills and expertise, as well as, the wide distribution of same throughout society are the key to success, when he said: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind". (From a speech given at Harvard University 06.09.1943).