New challenges and opportunities have recently arisen for companies’ relationships with customers as a result of the increasing prevalence of social media. By enabling companies to build online communities, social media allow marketers to access information about consumers, identify consumers’ needs, and gain direct consumer feedback. Thus, social media can be a very important and helpful tool for interacting and communicating with customers. In order to sustain such relationships for the long term, however, efforts must be centred around building consumer trust and commitment. This study investigates the role of social media based communities in building relationships with consumers, and the influence of such communities on consumers’ attitudes and behaviours. Specifically, the study investigates whether such influences can lead to trust, commitment, and loyalty towards the organisation. Drawing on Uses and Gratification Theory, Consumption Values Theory, and the Commitment-Trust Theory, the study examines the relationship between consumers using social media channels, trusting these channels, and trusting the organisation that owns these channels. Adopting a positivist deductive approach, quantitative data was collected via a survey strategy. A questionnaire targeting telecommunications company fan pages users in Saudi Arabia was distributed through Twitter and Facebook with help from people who have many followers/likes such as celebrities. More than 700 responses were collected, of which 522 were usable for factor analysis. Based on the results, a cognitive behavioural model was established in relation to social media uses and gratifications, perceived values of social media fan pages, organisational trust, commitment, and loyalty. Users who perceived utilitarian benefits from following a company’s fan pages were likely to trust these pages, whereas perceived hedonic and social benefits did not have an influence on trust towards organization’s fan pages. The findings additionally indicated that consumers who trusted the organization’s fan pages were likely to trust the company. Therefore, telecommunication companies’ fan page users who perceived trust were expected to be committed and loyal to the company, which would consequently, lead to more frequent and larger purchases. The findings contribute to marketing theory and suggest ways in which marketers can tailor companies’ web presence for more effective communication and relationship-building with customers.

This study examined Chinese workers' interpretations of the key psychological contract concepts of 'obligation', 'promise' and 'the other party'. It also explored how Chinese workers described their implicit employment terms. Although the findings of this thesis may be context-constrained, the related discussions and implications provide general and useful insights for the psychological contract and its literature. A qualitative methodology was adopted for the research. The sampling frame comprised 61 Chinese workers in Xiamen and Fushun, recruited by a variety maximisation strategy. Data were collected primarily through semi-structured interviews, whose duration (recording time) was between 22 and 98 minutes (with a mode of 30-45 minutes), and analysed with the general guidance provided by the template analysis (King, 2004). It was found that 'obligation' was an ambiguous term in the Chinese employment context, suggesting a possibility that 'obligation' may not be unambiguous in other contexts either. The findings on the notion of 'promise' in China revealed that it carried strong moral significance and had emotional importance, leading to a reflection that the theoretical specifications of promise (Rousseau, 1995) had not been appropriately reflected in prior empirical research. It was also found that the immediate supervisors were very powerful 'the other party' in the Chinese employment context, implying that empirical psychological contract studies may not appropriately reflect the theory or phenomena, especially in light of the revealed complexities of Chinese employment arrangements. The Chinese workers' employment experiences revealed that their perceived implicit employment terms were below the terms specified in their legal contract, if a contract was existent. This finding was found to relate to perceived significant power gaps between employment parties by participants, which were embedded in the complex relationships between the zone of negotiability, the societal context of employment and the powerful leader positions in China. The discussion, and reflection, of these findings at an integrated level suggests that the existing theory lacks adequate theoretical clarity to appropriately inform deductive studies. It also suggests that the majority of empirical results, consequently, may need to be re-examined. This thesis concludes that the psychological contract is a useful concept to make sense of events, beliefs and experiences at work, but there are urgent needs for further theoretical developments, especially with regard to power and morality, and thus more grounded research in order to make it an adequately testable theory.

This thesis is an attempt to understand the impact of, and factors influencing the outcomes of EPZs in a latecomer context, using Tanzania as a case study. Also, it aims to understand why governments in developing context preserve tax incentives. The analysis in this study works within the context of neoliberal theoretical thinking, and employs multiple research methods, in which, multiple sources of data namely document analysis, questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and direct observation are used. The study first examines the factors which might have hindered Tanzanian EPZ initiative from replicating East Asian success. The results demonstrate that the failure is associated to country’s political and institutional factors relevant in determining strategic planning and implementation of a successful EPZ. The factors include inadequate knowledge about crucial aspects of EPZ development and management, vested interests and conflicting interests between bureaucracies, use of EPZ as a tool for corruption and rent seeking, prevalent anti-FDI sentiment, and adoption of single factory scheme. The second part explores the impact of governance on investors’ decisions to locate in an EPZ. The results demonstrate that a relationship exists between level of governance in host country and the flow of FDI in EPZs. The results support the perception that poor governance deters FDI inflows. The last part of the study examines why the use of tax incentives in the Tanzanian EPZ program has remained politically popular and whether there is a rent seeking motive in its application. It also explores whether investors’ location decisions would change if no tax holidays were offered in EPZs. The findings demonstrate that tax incentives have often been motivated by political rather than economic considerations, resulting into rent seeking behaviour. The findings revealed presence of too much political influence of vested interests in the design and implementation of tax incentives policy. The results also demonstrate that absence of tax holidays in EPZs would not result in to disincentive to invest.

This thesis presents findings from an exploratory study of reverse logistics practices in the Nigerian pharmaceutical private sector. Reverse logistics has received increased attention in recent years due to the sustainability and circular economy implications of value recapture and end-of-life product disposition. A significant amount of reverse logistics research has been done in developed countries but very little has been undertaken in the pharmaceutical industry and developing nations, particularly Africa where recent health crises such as the Ebola virus necessitate safe and proper reverse logistics solutions. This study investigated characteristics, similarities and differences in pharmaceutical reverse logistics practices of 19 private sector pharmaceutical organisations in Nigeria including the regulatory authority to determine facilitating, enabling and inhibiting factors and develop improvement opportunities for the sector. This exploratory research used a multiple case study method involving semi-structured interviews with pharmaceutical supply chain stakeholders and practitioners to explore five research questions within a seven perspectives framework derived for this study. Empirical findings came from within-case, within case-category, and cross case-category analysis of the 19 case organisations. This study contributes a conceptual understanding of pharmaceutical reverse logistics management through operationalising the seven perspectives framework and developing a typology of six important pharmaceutical reverse logistics process flows. This study has identified specific factors that facilitate, drive, or inhibit pharmaceutical reverse logistics practices in Nigeria and differentiated them from those in extant literature. This study impacts research by providing theoretically grounded and empirically informed insights into reverse logistics practices in both the pharmaceutical supply chain and a developing nation, Nigeria. To the researcher’s knowledge, it is the first of its kind to do so. This study augments the reverse logistics content framework by including a seventh perspective, the “when perspective”. The extended reverse logistics framework provides a basic structure upon which researchers can utilise to explore various issues in reverse logistics, thereby providing a starting point for future pharmaceutical reverse logistics researchers, particularly in developing countries. This study contributes to practice by revealing the ‘current state’ of pharmaceutical reverse logistics practices in the Nigerian private sector, identifying improvement opportunities, and suggesting implementable measures to facilitate best practice. Finally, this study contributes to the increasing usage, and applicability of qualitative methods in logistics research.

The thesis studies liquidity related issues in the London Stock Exchange from 2001 to 2013 from different viewpoints. The first chapter introduces and motivates the study. The second chapter fully discusses the liquidity and liquidity measures from multiple dimensions and examines liquidity using five liquidity measures: relative spread, the Amihud ratio, the Rtotr ratio, zero trading volume days and zero return days. The time-series study shows that liquidity changes over time and largely depends on the financial environment. The analysis compares liquidity measures and finds that Rtotr may not be a reliable liquidity measure during a financial crisis due to the turnover anomaly. Moreover, the empirical results support the prior findings in the literature that relative spread is positively related to volatility, and negatively related to price and trading volume. The Amihud ratio, zero trading days and zero return days are better measures of explaining relative spread. All these findings give a better understanding of liquidity measures and enlighten the following deeper research. The third chapter continues to study liquidity and market characteristics from a panel viewpoint and the chapter extends the fixed effects model to solve the problem that some of the variables are not stationary. The panel results give more powerful explanations of liquidity. In particular, less liquid stocks are associated with higher volatility, lower price and lower trading volume. Market value has differing relationships with the various liquidity measures. The fourth chapter expands the liquidity research field and contains both theoretical and empirical work indicating that more liquid stocks have higher kurtosis and first lag autocorrelation due to higher transaction costs. In addition, the empirical results show skewness is also negatively related to liquidity. The final chapter presents the conclusions of the research.

Municipality Solid Waste management services are reverse logistics (RL) operations of significant scale and importance throughout the developed world, and yet the topic has only received limited attention within the logistics and supply-chain management literature, despite an increasing policy focus on sustainability issues. An interdisciplinary approach was chosen for this study to explore the interaction between municipality household recycling waste systems and household recycling behaviour, which is represented by situational and personal factors in this study. A mixed methodology approach was used, based on a Sequential Exploratory Design that uses a mixed method typology (Qual-Quan-Qual) to explore the proposition that there is a symbiosis effect between the recycling behaviour of households and municipality household recycling waste systems. A non-probability sampling was drawn from the population of two adjacent councils in Northern England: the East Riding of Yorkshire and the City of Hull. The three stages of the research design show a consistent and similar outcome for the interaction between households and household recycling waste systems, represented by personal and situational factors respectively. The interaction clearly demonstrates a symbiosic effect between households and household recycling waste systems. The nature of household recycling behaviour was found to be affected by accessibility, availability and convenience, and where these diminish, the personal engagement of households in recycling is likely to diminish. Logistical factors, such as accessibility and availability are therefore considered to be strong predictors in the projection of household recycling behaviour, together with marketing factors, such as engagement and education. In addition, demographical elements are considered as moderating factors in the projection of household recycling behaviour. Moreover personal factors are found to be equally strong predictors when the situational factors are established and formed in accordance with the residential requirement. A robust theoretical framework has been developed during this study, which may be accessible for future studies, incorporating the relationship between situational and personal factors, and focusing primarily on the interaction between the respective factors. However, the conceptualization of the symbiosis effect requires further investigation and replication to clarify and understand the interaction in different scopes and perceptions. With regards to the methodological implication, this study supports earlier logistic literature by diversifying the research approach in its contribution to the literature. Thus, the application of mixed methodology addresses the incongruities between mono-paradigm in relation to recycling and waste literature, and reveals some clarity on the underpinning factors that explain behavioural changes in household recycling performance. As for the practical implications, in order to increase recycling performance, the mediating factors such as engagement and education are important contributions from this study with respect to changing HRB. The study also reveals that accessibility, availability and convenience are important precursors. Therefore, it was useful to design a sustainable reverse logistics system in waste management by considering the precursory factors to appropriate engagement that represents the public needs The outcome of this study indicates that the nexus between HRWS and HRB has to be focused on their symbiotic relationship, and looks at current HRWM from a symbiosis perspective. The caveat may be for policymakers and local authorities to come up with a sustainable backward movement that addresses ‘awareness, acknowledgement and action’ from the households’ perspective.

This study investigates the impact of reputation on the pricing and performance of securitised bonds. On the one hand, we ascertain whether investors incorporate the reputation and experience of issuers and trustees into pricing mortgage-backed securities (MBS). On the other hand, we examine the link between the disciplining mechanisms of price and issuer reputation on the performance of mortgage-backed securities proxied by delinquency rates and rating changes. We address these objectives using pricing and performance data on the MBS issued from 1999-2007 in 14 European countries’ securitisation markets. In perfect capital markets, asset backed securitisation should be irrelevant. However in an environment with asymmetric information, banks prefer to securitise assets rather than fund assets with deposits. The literature concurs that European banks mainly engage in securitisation to augment their liquidity positions and diversify their funding alternatives. Other incentives include risk diversification and regulatory capital arbitrage, however, this was a more common motive in the US, prior to the financial crisis. During that period, the growth of securitisation was fuelled by increased credit supply which in turn was nurtured by relaxed lending standards and a low interest rate environment. Furthermore, banks retained riskier loans and junior tranches to signal the quality of securitised bonds to investors. Hence securitisation, originally designed to transfer credit risk, ultimately involved very limited risk transfer. This trend resulted in the accumulation of risks on banks’ balance sheet which in tend increased the likelihood of a systemic crisis. Contemporary evidence from the equity markets also indicates securitisation announcements typically had negative wealth effects on the market value of issuing banks. As MBS issuance levels increased in the years preceding the financial crisis, investors in securitisation transactions also began to incorporate varying credit factors in excess of credit ratings into the launch spreads of securitised bonds. More importantly, spreads were informative enough to predict bond performance in terms of cumulative losses and rating downgrades. We examine pricing from two dimensions. In the first empirical chapter, we assess the certification value of issuer reputation in securitisation by examining initial yield spreads of MBS. We find that issuer reputation has a certification value for riskier, difficult to evaluate MBS, especially when information asymmetries in credit markets intensify. Furthermore, we show that MBS originated by subsidiaries of foreign banks are perceived to be riskier, regardless of the repuation of the issuer. We also find that investors require higher yields if there is a higher probability of rating shopping and when issuers expand rapidly. In the second empirical chapter, we consider the role of trustees –who are nominated to protect the interests of investors– in securitisation pricing and whether investors rely on them to mitigate risks. We assess the effect of trustee reputation on initial yield spreads and we find that engaging reputable trustees led to lower spreads during the credit boom period prior to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Our findings suggest that trustees’ reputation was considered by investors to be more important when risk assessment became more challenging. Thus, investors began to associate trustee reputation with effective debt monitoring as the concern for defaults grew in the boom period. In hindsight, it is evident that investors took steps to protect their investments, however inadequate, by adjusting the valuations of the structured notes they purchased. Concerning performance, in the third empirical chapter, we find that reputable issuers sold bonds collateralized by low-quality assets during the boom period. However, these bonds were less likely to be downgraded by rating agencies, probably due to the compensating effects of structuring techniques. We attribute this decline in quality to reduced monitoring efforts. We also find that foreign reputable issuers tend to sell lower quality bonds, which are more likely to be downgraded. Furthermore, we confirm that initial yield spreads are informative enough to predict performance. More specifically, this finding is solely driven by non-AAA rated bond yields. Our key finding, however, is that initial yields were generally not informative in the years preceding the boom period (2004-2007). Therefore, at the turn of the millennium, most investors exclusively relied on credit ratings. However, during the growth period, sophisticated investors began to price the increased uncertainty and complexity associated with MBSs. Overall, the analysis provides some insights on the role of reputation in the securitisation markets. Investors demanded lower spreads on securities with reputable sponsors and trustees especially during the growth period preceding the 2007-09 financial crisis. Although the quality of the assets underlying these securities deteriorated rather rapidly, the securitised bonds were less likely to be downgraded, most likely due to countervailing structural features. Furthermore, the findings of this study show that investors, mainly sophisticated investors, grew increasingly sceptical in the years preceding the financial crisis. This is evident in the relative predictive potency of initial yield spreads on non-prime bonds issued during this period.

This study examines the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of oil companies in developing countries, focusing on the conflict surrounding Shell Oil Company in the Niger Delta. Western literature presents CSR as a philanthropic or moral but largely voluntary activity, intended to satisfy various stakeholders, whose needs can be negotiated through dialogue. However, it is often descriptive and theoretical, and neglects local communities as stakeholders. This study explores the applicability of these Western notions in the Nigerian context, with particular reference to the perceptions within the oil company, and those of the local communities as neglected stakeholders. An ethnographic approach was employed to elicit fresh insights from Shell employees and local groups in the Niger Delta, drawing on formal interviews, informal interactions and documentary evidence regarding understandings of CSR perceptions and expectations of Shell’s behaviour, and impacts on life, livelihood and culture in the local area. A complex picture emerges of CSR as an elusive, contested and context-dependent concept that has different meanings for different people. Western notions of philanthropy, voluntarism and stakeholder engagement are shown to be highly problematic in the Niger Delta, where the difficulty of reconciling conflicting expectations is exacerbated by the colonial legacy of mistrust between multinationals and the local people, as well as weak government. As a consequence of exclusion from decision-making, the local community denies the legitimacy of any CSR initiatives by Shell, and indeed, evidence supports that Shell’s behaviour in Niger Delta differs from its actions in other contexts. Whilst joining academic calls to refocus CSR of oil companies to one that is community-oriented and negotiated rather than dictated, it recognises the challenges facing these concepts in communities like the Niger Delta.

This thesis investigates the combinatory relationship between sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and supply chain resilience management (SRES) by developing a new concept of sustainable and resilient supply chain management (SResSCM). Supply chain management has been implemented by organizations for more than three decades and has been developed by integrating different but independent concepts, such as SSCM. Furthermore, organizations also pay attention to business continuity during periods of risk and disruption. Most organizations prepare alternative plans to maintain resilience and SRES was developed to fulfil this strategy. Both SSCM and SRES concepts are important for organizations in order to improve supply chain performance, and are linked in many ways. However, our knowledge is lacking on the combinatory relationship and effects of these two elements as little empirical research has previously been done. This thesis undertakes such empirical research by applying a three-phase, mixed-methods approach: semi-structured interviews to inductively confirm the combination of these two independent concepts, a survey of Thai manufacturers in the electronic/electrical and automotive sectors, and post-survey structured interviews to validate the survey findings. Thailand was chosen as the context for the study as it is a major manufacturing nation for western customers. The research found interconnections between SSCM and SRES from the practitioners’ perspectives which enabled the theoretical development of a ‘House of SResSCM’ framework that organizations around the world can apply. This thesis also contributes theoretically by providing measurement scales of SResSCM practices to assess and define current levels of adoption SSCM and SRES, which supply chain managers can implement in their organization to improve current practices. Finally, the Thai Government could use this study to support Thai manufacturing and provide direction for supply chains to become more sustainable and resilient.

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