This thesis uses an abductive research strategy to discover how individuals in a UK contact centre became first-line managers. Managers play a significant role in organisations as supervisors of staff, yet there is no general agreement as to what they do or how. Adopting an idealist ontology and a constructionist epistemology, this ethnographic project uncovered stories of becoming by using questionnaires, observations and interviews with twelve participants. The context was a private / public sector partnership to provide advice and guidance to a local community. The use by organisations of contact centres is maturing in the private sector and growing in the public sector. It is an especially important arena to explore in the UK economy as currently many contact centres that were outsourced to cheaper, high quality labour markets are returning to the UK. Analysis of data showed clearly that learning to become a first-line manager occurred throughout the life course in three distinct stages; formative development, and reflecting the values and behaviours of parents and teachers; pre-management occupational development, and the experience of being managed; and development actually in the role of a first-line manager. The thesis makes four contributions to the extant literature. Firstly, these three stages were shown to be the route in the transition from legitimate peripheral participation to mastery. Situated learning theory provides no such clarification. Secondly, learning to become a first-line manager did not necessarily change identity as many writers claim. Identities of first-line manager evolved by building on personal and occupational identities that had been developed earlier. Thirdly, teachers made a vital contribution to developing future first-line managers by affirming and strengthening family values. They also encouraged their pupils to recognise the connection between effort and gaining reward for achievement. Finally, the messy terrain of learning theory has been clarified, not as grand theory, but as mid-range theorising through a new conceptual framework. This schema synthesizes learning orientations with learning metaphors and learning viewed as a noun or a verb, and the various influences on learning from structure and agency. The four learning modes are adapt, assimilation, accommodation and aspire.

The complex and unpredictable nature of cultural behavioral changes has posed multiple challenges for marketing practitioners during recent years. These challenges include, but are not limited to, inaccurate market forecasts, market failures, wasted resources etc.This study attempts to tackle that problem by exploring cultural dimensional interactions and their potential role in consumers’ cultural behavioral change process. Due to both fields of cultural behavioral change and cultural dimensional interactions being under researched, having insufficient theoretical basis, this study adapted an abductive research approach. Additionally, this study conducted its data gathering process abroad and within the restaurant industry, so as to capture the necessary aspects of the studied phenomenon.The research was conducted by identifying two separate research subgroups: “culturally unaffected” Swedes, living in Sweden, and “culturally affected” Swedes, living in Spain. The two subgroups were interviewed on their preferred consumer behaviors in a restaurant setting. Consequently, their answers were matched against each other, in order to locate any differences in consumer behavioral preferences, indicating potential cultural behavioral changes. When provided with the participants’ rationale for the potential cultural behavioral changes, the study analyzed it through the lens of Hofstede model, looking for possible interactions between its cultural dimensions.The findings of this study suggest that cultural dimensional interactions are, in fact, existent and have a role in consumers’ cultural behavioral change process. The assumption is that the cultural dimensional interactions are regulatory in their nature and are used by the consumers to create desirable consumer situations, in order to maintain their preferred consumer behaviors in a culturally unfamiliar environment. Additionally, the findings suggest a much bigger role of consumer´s core values in the process of cultural behavioral change, than previously thought. Core values are speculated to serve as a trigger that starts the cultural dimensional interactions, due to the consumers’ adamant unwillingness to alter their core values and consumer behaviors linked to them. Due to this study´s abductive research approach, as well as insufficient theoretical basis in the fields of cultural dimensional interactions and cultural behavioral changes, these findings don´t provide any definitive conclusions. As of that, numerous prospects for future research are discussed and recommended.

In this study, Interpretivist epistemology and abductive research strategy were used to examine transcripts of sixteen two-hour focused interviews. The research sample was a group of technical experts who assumed managerial responsibilities within their organisations (transitional managers). The subjectively perceived experiences of the transition were examined as well as the respondents' intersubjective interpretations of the transition from the organisational perspective. The aim was to explore the perceived characteristics of the transitional experience. The main findings of this study could be summarised as follows: firstly, it was found that there were three main types of transitional managers: the unwilling, the pragmatic and the eager managers. Secondly, the key motivations to take the manager role for all three categories were higher remuneration, technical peer respect and the respondent's new role as an organisational decision-maker. The third finding of this study was that there were two types of transitions, the complete transition which the majority of the eager managers went through and the technical transition which was experienced by the unwilling and the pragmatic managers. Related to that finding was the link between the type of organisation, its culture and the leadership skills required in that organisation. The fourth finding was that, irrespective of the amount of time in the manager role (six months to eleven years) or the type of transition (complete or technical), all respondents in this study continued to identify themselves as technical experts with the respondents who underwent a complete transition also seeing themselves as managers. Related to this finding was the respondents' continued identification as technical experts being largely due to their need to identify with their peers (other technical experts). The fifth major finding of this study related to a lack of career planning by the respondents and little or no succession and management development planning by the respondents' organisations. In a contribution to the theory of leadership studies, this study examined leadership as a social process, building on the existing leadership concepts and theories and putting them in a social context of subjective efforts by the researcher to interpret the respondents' transitional experiences through typification of the leadership characteristics into seven themes. The need to apply an individual contextualisation was seen as essential to understanding the transitional managers' response to their own transition. In doing so, the study has contributed towards narrowing the existing empirical literature gap on the transition processes. The contributions of this study need to be seen in the context that explorative research such as the one carried out here is not considered generalisable, as its aim was to explore and describe particular phenomena. Nevertheless, insights from this study were eight

The purpose of this study is to explore the engagement in an innovation ecosystem for knowledge co-creation. It aims at exploring the various aspects of ecosystems, innovation, and knowledge which can drive or hinder actors to engage in collaboration in an innovation ecosystem. A single case study was selected as a research strategy (The OSMaaS project), as it provided us the opportunity to analyze an innovation ecosystem with specific characteristics that few has considered before. Semi-structured interview was used as data collectiontechnique since this interview method offered us the required flexibility to explore in depth theindividual experiences lived during the process of evaluating whether to engage or not to the OSMaaS project. Consequently, a hybrid approach of thematic analysis was selected as methodfor data analysis as it allowed us to interact with the interviewees or the empirical world, theconcepts regarding innovation and ecosystems or theory, and the OSMaaS project or the case study. The findings show that aspects of ecosystems, innovation and Knowledge co-creation aspects such as co-opetition, ecosystem governance and structure, proximity, relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability, competitive advantage, and product development contain factors driving and hindering actors’ engagement in aninnovation ecosystem. These factors are explained within this study and show what have droveand hindered actors to engage in the OSMaaS project.