Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1983. / Also available in print.

This study was an examination of businesses that became big businesses in the United States during the time period between the years of 1861 and 1890, a period of time frequently referred to as the “big business era.” The purpose of the study was to identify actions taken by businesses that enabled them to become and remain big businesses. A secondary purpose of the study was to show that these actions were explained by theories of Karl Marx and Max Weber. The results of the study showed that businesses which took specific actions were able to become and remain big businesses and these actions were explained by the theories of Marx and Weber. The results of the study demonstrate the ability of classical sociological theory to explain macro-level social change.

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

This paper argues against the common historical belief that the British East India Company’s actions benefited the British Public. While many recent historical works argue that the Company had detrimental effects on India, the common consensus believes that the Company’s actions while pillaging India benefited Britain through economic treasures and access to luxuries. In the first section of the text, the author describes the British East India Company’s corruption, propaganda, and lobbying efforts to enrich individual members of the Company and protect personal and corporate profits. The next section describes the Company’s impact on Britain and argues that the Company was an overwhelmingly negative investment for the British taxpayer. The author compares the East India Company’s historic actions and impacts on Britain to the impact of modern big corporations on their own nations. The text concludes with an argument that the popular narrative, which holds that large corporations’ interests coincide with that of the nation’s public interest, is both inherently mistaken and fraught with danger. The author argues against a zero-sum worldview and for a corporate sector with checks and balances.

The evolution of big business in manufacturing and some service industries, together with the role played in this by merger and acquisition (M&A) activity has been thoroughly researched and is well documented. However, despite' the increasing economic and social importance of the UK hotel industry, its development has been largely neglected. Therefore, this thesis set out to explore the development of big business in the hotel industry through the study of M&A activities. This study employs the multiple case study approach (four UK hotel companies), using M&A theory as the theoretical framework; extensive historical secondary data and semi-structured interviews were carried out for the study, covering a period of 26 years. The analysis was conducted by synthesising data with the M&A theory, in terms of two levels, organisational motives and macro environmental factors. The findings confirm those in the existing literature on what is encompassed by the term big business and the part played by M&A activity in the creation of big business. They also suggest that in the hotel industry the acquisition of brand name and brand rights is an important motive, one which has been neglected in the general M&A literature discussion. These findings added several new dimensions to big business concepts, through illuminating the role of brand and brand right acquisition in the context of the UK hotel industry. This thesis confirms the utility of deploying the wide range and large quantity of publicly available historical secondary information, which is rarely used. In addition, the application of a qualitative and longitudinal approach, applied to management theory, has broadened the research agenda in the study of hotel business, business history and business management theory.

As a large number of MNEs have entered China and many domestic companies become increasingly competitive, Sino-foreign joint ventures are facing intensified competition in many industries in China. The review of the literature shows that few studies on Sino-foreign joint ventures focus on competitive issues, and most studies tend to examine the issues associated with partnerships. This thesis examines competitive advantage of Sino-British joint ventures in China and explains why some joint ventures have (or have not) achieved competitive advantage. The research developed a multi-perspective framework for analysing competitive advantage of the joint venture. The framework embraces strategic positioning, the resource-based view, partnerships, and location specific factors. The empirical study investigated five cases: AstraZeneca China, ERM China, Shanghai Marconi, GSK Chongqing, and YARACO. The case studies have revealed some salient characteristics of the joint ventures from the differing perspectives. The positioning perspective examines the alignment of activities with the positioning and fit among activities. Partnerships and locational factors are incorporated into the analysis. The analysis from the resource-based is focused on the potential of some critical resources for competitive advantage. The resources embedded in the partnership structure and the local context are likely to be sources of sustainable competitive advantage. The synthesized analysis investigates the relationship between activities and resources of the firm and leads to some theoretical propositions about creating sustainable competitive advantage. The research aims to make contributions to knowledge in the following respects. First, the research draws attention to competitive advantage of the joint venture as a relatively new area for the study. Second, by developing multi-perspective framework, the research can help broaden theoretical perspectives for studying the joint venture and may effect discoveries of new issues. Moreover, the research seeks to contribute to the debate about competitive advantage and strategy through synthesizing positioning and the resource-based view.

During the past two decades the manufacturing industry has consistently tried to transition from a position as traditional goods supplier to a provider of solutions by means of the integration of goods and services. This integration phenomenon is called servitization. Transition triggers are forces such as economic pressure, gaining competitive advantage and increasing customer demands. In spite of the evident gains identified in the literature, the major part of the industry either advanced hesitantly, or stalled after the first steps. Only a few “hidden champions” succeeded. The status of servitization as an academic field has reached maturity. During the past years, published servitization research papers grew exponentially compared with the early years of this century. The extant literature offers an extraordinarily broad range of researched themes such as servitization avenues, benefits and barriers, bundling, product design, contract models and sales process. What is missing, however, is a conceptualization that focuses on the practical implementation aspects of servitization to guide practitioners to apply servitization sustainably. The findings of my servitization research contribute to knowledge in several ways. They provide a novel understanding about the crucial first step in a traditional product manufacturer’s customer re-orientation. The unique principle of functional arrays facilitates the understanding of the terms “the customer” and “solution”. It permits the identification and collection of specific customer solution requirements by unusual functional disaggregation of entire companies. The creation of customer service demand categories enables a correlation with customers’ functional arrays that consequently leads into the formation of particular service competencies and specific service delivery platforms. For the first time, manufacturers, through these platforms, may proactively address individually and specifically customers’ service demands across the entire customer`s company structure. A final contribution constitutes the conceptualization based on the progression principle of service delivery platforms. The study tackled a business problem through a constructivist research philosophy, employing an inductive approach and adopting a case study strategy. In-depth interviews in real life settings revealed how a traditional product manufacturer should re-orientate its capabilities and progress on a servitization transition.

This thesis contributes to closing a gap in the field of science, technology and innovation (STI) policy research: despite many theoretical advances in the field, we still do not know why some urgent societal issues (or ‘challenges') remain unaddressed, notwithstanding the technological advances that could potentially address them. In particular, radical technological innovations – innovations that depart from the established technological trajectory – would offer greatest potential to address societal challenges. While the source of radical innovations is often new entrepreneurial firms, established firms (‘incumbents') are likely to play an important role in developing them because of the vast resources and complementary assets they possess. Incumbents however, face few immediate incentives to develop radical innovations in response to societal challenges. The analytical puzzle of this thesis is thus to explain how, when, and why industries change (or not) their strategies (in particular, their technological strategy) in order to address a societal problem. This puzzle is disentangled into interrelated research questions: A) How do societal issue­‐related pressures (on the incumbent industry) from different domains (namely, civil society, science, political arena, economy) evolve? B) How does the incumbent industry respond to changing pressures around societal issues, in terms of technological, political, cultural and economic strategies? C) In particular, when and why do industry actors decide to develop substantive technological responses? To answer these questions, the thesis develops a new analytical perspective that combines insights from (a) issue life­‐cycle and issue attention cycle theories (from the Business & Society field) with (b) the so­‐called ‘Triple Embeddedness Framework' and (c) concepts from business strategies, innovation management, corporate political strategies, and technology policy. This novel perspective represents an ideal­‐typical model of issue evolution (‘issue life ­‐cycle'). The model, which I call the Dialectic Issue Life­‐Cycle (DILC) model, is applied to three case studies of the American automobile industry's responses to various societal problems (local air pollution, auto and highway safety, and climate change). Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods in an original way, the case studies aim not only to investigate the validity of the framework, which also provides conceptual answers to the research questions, but also to further refine it and nuance the conceptual answers. By explaining how incumbent industry actors respond to societal challenges, this thesis ultimately contributes to the practical policy debate of how incumbents can be stimulated to develop radical innovations that help address societal challenges.

This thesis is concerned with the study of technology upgrading in late industrialising countries. This research aims to understand the process of technology upgrading of SMEs in the automotive industry by looking at the internal and external sources of technology for these firms. To do so, the main bodies of literature of this research are i) technological capabilities and absorptive capacity, ii) global value chains, and iii) NLSs. Technology upgrading has not been a well-developed notion in the literature. The literature has focused on technical change in industrialised economies and it has omitted the process of incremental changes and the shortcomings existing in the system of innovation for late industrialising countries. To observe technology upgrading in developing countries, I look at the transfer of technology from up-to-date firms (assemblers) to the less knowledgeable firms (SMEs) and the assimilation of this technology by the latter. To look at other sources of technology, I observed the country' context and the role of other actors in the industry. In this regard, National Learning Systems (NLSs) permit to understand and explain the differences of the process of technical change in late industrialising countries where they learnt through the diffusion of technology created somewhere else rather than the creation of it within the system. In this research, I offer new findings for the literature which has paid little attention to the process of technology upgrading and SMEs. I also confirm that the use of NLSs instead of NIS is more accurate for late industrialising countries and I offer new paths for future research in these issues.