Despite its proved riskiness, the film industry is one of the most economically relevant industries in the world, constantly undergoing rapid change and development, since every day millions of dollars, pounds, euros or other currencies are invested in film productions. Although restricted to the theatrical release sector of the market, this thesis aims to explain why this industry attracts so many investors, and in doing this to add to the body of knowledge and understanding of the manner in which the industry works. At its core is the analysis of the trade-off between risk and return that characterises the industry. The work, hence, is based not on models and predictions of the expected returns, profits or losses of film investments, but rather on the assessment of indicators that can depict the scale or degree of dispersion of these expected values - that is, the risk that the companies are willing to entertain. The work makes an in-depth comparative analysis of the investment risk and return trade-off by empirically investigating the different behaviour of the film industry in the United States and in Europe, drawing in detail upon the Italian film industry to represent the European context. In this perspective, the work also aims to analyse why state support is justified in Europe and not in the US, and the financial effectiveness of Italian state support to film industry, by identifying to what extent it contributes to improving cultural identity. The investigation extends significantly current knowledge, showing that the financial effectiveness of the US film industry is incomparably superior to that of the Italian film industry, and that public policy in Italy towards the current system of film subsidisation is inequitable and inefficient. The work also introduces a new dataset into the literature, the Italian dataset constructed by the author.

This study set out to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the adoption levels of market orientation (MO) in Ghana’s mobile telecommunications industry, and to assess its relationship to performance. This was necessitated by the fact that, in-spite of the superfluity of literature on market orientation and its relationship to performance in developed economies and a few on developing nations such as Ghana, there are hardly any studies on Ghana’s mobile telecommunications industry despite its impressive performance. Furthermore, available studies generally assessed market orientation without incorporating any assessment by customers. The study, in addressing these deficiencies, makes significant contribution to academic knowledge on market orientation. Based on literature reviewed, a conceptual model and nine hypotheses are proposed for this study. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods, underpinned by realism philosophy enabled the assessment of the market orientation performance relationship. Qualitative data collection entailed an in-depth interview of ten senior officers of five mobile telecommunications firms operating in Ghana selected by a judgmental sampling method, whose response was analysed by thematic analysis. Quantitative data was obtained by administering questionnaires on 275 staff selected by a simple random sampling method and 302 subscribers selected by a two-stage process of quota and convenience sampling methods. Confirmatory factor analysis, correlation matrix, structural equation modeling and T-test are utilized in the analysis of the quantitative data and the testing of the hypotheses. The findings of the study established that in Ghana’s mobile telecommunications industry, market orientation is determined by one internal antecedent - top management emphasis with no external antecedent influencing it. The significant effect of market orientation on business performance, customer satisfaction, customer retention, employee commitment and employee esprit de corps have also been established by this study. Finally, the study establishes that, when compared, subscribers and staff assessment of the dimensions of market orientation differed with staff rating them higher than subscribers. Based on the findings, the study recommends the need not only for mobile telecommunication operators to continue in the pursuit of market orientated activities, but also undertake measures to close the market orientation gap between them and their subscribers. Top management should also continue with the pivotal role they are playing in the implementation of market orientation, and enhance their information generation, dissemination and responsiveness processes not only to sustain market orientation but also their performance. Notwithstanding the shortfalls identified, which did not adversely affect outcomes of the study, the study has developed an empirical model for market orientation, firm performance relationship for the mobile telecommunications industry incorporating a comparison of the assessment of the dimensions of market orientation by subscribers and staff. It is hoped that this new model will be used for further studies in both developed and developing countries to test the viability of its application.

The thesis is an attempt to establish the water area required by any one ship for safe and efficient navigation. The concept of a ship domain has been considered, which may be defined as the effective area around a ship which a navigator would like to keep free with respect to other ships and stationary objects. This area will not be the same for all ships but will depend on a variety of factors such as speed, size of ship and density of traffic among others. The first part of the project was concerned with the collection of data from two separate sources: one being the performance of ships' officers in collision avoidance exercises on a marine radar simulator and the second being marine traffic surveys conducted in the Sunk area of the North Sea, The collection of data on ship movements and their processing for analysis by computer comprised the early work of the thesis. The next section of work was concerned with the development of a technique for evaluating the size of the domain and in particular the range of the domain boundary from the ship referred to as the domange. Very little work appears to have been done on this topic previously so several possibilities were considered before a decision was made as to the most suitable technique. Once this had been established results were obtained for a variety of conditions such as different sea area, length of ship and experience of the navigator as well as those previously mentioned and others. The final part of the thesis considers possible applications of the results in a variety of situations which are of current and future interest in marine traffic studies.

For the past 50 years, cultural economics has developed as an independent research specialism. At its core are the creative industries and the peculiar economics associated with them, central to which is a tension that arises from the notion that creative goods need to be experienced before an assessment can be made about the utility they deliver to the consumer. In this they differ from the standard private good that forms the basis of demand theory in economic textbooks, in which utility is known ex ante. Furthermore, creative goods are typically complex in composition and subject to heterogeneous and shifting consumer preferences. In response to this, models of linear optimization, rational addiction and Bayesian learning have been applied to better understand consumer decision- making, belief formation and revision. While valuable, these approaches do not lend themselves to forming verifiable hypothesis for the critical reason that they by-pass an essential aspect of creative products: namely, that of novelty. In contrast, computer sciences, and more specifically recommender theory, embrace creative products as a study object. Being items of online transactions, users of creative products share opinions on a massive scale and in doing so generate a flow of data driven research. Not limited by the multiple assumptions made in economic theory, data analysts deal with this type of commodity in a less constrained way, incorporating the variety of item characteristics, as well as their co-use by agents. They apply statistical techniques supporting big data, such as clustering, latent class analysis or singular value decomposition. This thesis is drawn from both disciplines, comparing models, methods and data sets. Based upon movie consumption, the work contrasts bottom-up versus top-down approaches, individual versus collective data, distance measures versus the utility-based comparisons. Rooted in Bayesian latent class models, a synthesis is formed, supported by the random utility theory and recommender algorithm methods. The Bayesian approach makes explicit the experience good nature of creative goods by formulating the prior uncertainty of users towards both movie features and preferences. The latent class method, thus, infers the heterogeneous aspect of preferences, while its dynamic variant- the latent Markov model - gets around one of the main paradoxes in studying creative products: how to analyse taste dynamics when confronted with a good that is novel at each decision point. Generated by mainly movie-user-rating and movie-user-tag triplets, collected from the Movielens recommender system and made available as open data for research by the GroupLens research team, this study of preference patterns formation for creative goods is drawn from individual level data.

No / Key areas of focus at the Conference. Supply and Value Chain Management Global Operations and Supply Chains Operations Strategy and Innovation Logistics and Physical Distribution Inventory and Operations Planning Environment and Sustainability Performance Management Purchasing and Supply Service Operations Collaboration / ORACLE

This research work develops a novel framework for experimental designs of liberalised wholesale power markets, namely the Agent-based Computational Economics of Wholesale Electricity Market (ACEWEM) framework. The ACEWEM allows to further understand the effect of various market designs on market efficiency and to gain insights into market manipulation by electricity generators. The thesis describes a detailed market simulations whereby the strategies of power generators emerge as a result of a stochastic profit optimisation learning algorithm based upon the Generalized Additive Models for Location Scale and Shape statistical framework. The ACEWEM framework, which integrates the agent-based modelling paradigm with formal statistical methods to represent better real-world decision rules, is designed to be the foundation for large custom-purpose experimental studies inspired by computational learning. It makes a methodological contribution in the development of an expert computational laboratory for repeated power auctions with capacity and physical constraints. Furthermore, it contributes by developing a new computational learning algorithm. It integrates the reinforcement learning paradigm to engage past experience in decision making, with flexible statistical models adjust these decisions based on the vision of the future. In regard to policy contribution, this research work conducts a simulation study to identify whether high market prices can be ascribed to problems of market design and/or exercise of market power. Furthermore, the research work presents the detailed study of an abstract wholesale electricity market and real UK power market.

The submission consists of twenty-three outputs, spanning over three decades. These range from books and chapters to reports, journal articles and edited publications. The accompanying commentary aims to set the submitted work in context, demonstrate that it constitutes a coherent whole, and that it makes an independent and original contribution to knowledge and the advancement of the academic field of community media within the discipline of media studies. A number of overlapping contexts are summarised: the socio-historical setting in which the practice of electronic community media first emerged; the ‘personal/professional’ context in which reflection on practical experience led to developments in theory and policy analysis; the academic context of the development of British media studies where at first radio was marginalised and there was no discursive space for the notion of community media, then a later stage where a wider range of theoretical contexts brought community and alternative media into the academic frame. Three main sections discuss, respectively, the candidate’s contribution to the identification and categorisation of community media, the application to it of theoretical perspectives, and the development of policy analysis. All three areas, it is argued, were part of a wider strategy aimed at bringing recognition to the field and which involved activities outside the scope of the submission (advocacy, interventions in mainstream media) but which are part of the context of the submitted work. For that reason an appendix (B) lists all the candidate’s publications on the subject, while others list conference presentations and other relevant activities. In addition, the documentation includes a brief career summary and statements by co-authors.

This study aims to generate insights into the business start-up and maintenance activities of Kurdish and Turkish business owners in catering and retail sectors in North London by utilizing a new theoretical approach influenced by Charles Tilly’s (1978) collective resource mobilisation theory. The research objectives are: - to examine the reasons behind the formation of business start-ups for Kurdish and Turkish business owners in the catering and retail sectors; - to identify and investigate the ways in which the ‘forms of capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986) are acquired and mobilised for starting and maintaining these businesses. Methodologically, the research draws on extensive fieldwork with 65 participants. The thesis draws on qualitative research methods that enable the participants’ business start-up and maintenance experiences to be analysed in the context of the existing literature, and allows for the generation of a new theoretical approach to emerge based on their explanations. The thesis makes theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of study. Empirically, it sheds light onto two ‘invisible communities’ that are largely concentrated in the catering and retail sectors. The field study for this project presents an original contribution by examining business start-up and maintenance activities of the Turkish and Kurdish communities. Theoretically, the business start-up and maintenance activities of Kurdish and Turkish business owners are analysed through the lens of collective resource mobilisation theory. This has three components: interests, mobilisation of networks and opportunity structure. The three components provide an analytical framework for examining the interplay between agency and structural influences on the start-up and maintenance activities of Kurdish and Turkish business owners.

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has received much attention over several decades. This research aimed at investigating the impact of CSR on organisational brand value. This thesis conceptualises CSR using the stakeholder theory approach as a brand building tool to increase organisational brand value emphasising the strategic importance of CSR and its potential to create mutually beneficial outcomes for organisations and their stakeholders. This thesis proposes that firms can gain increased organisational brand value and enjoy superior performance by incorporating CSR as an integral component of their corporate brand building strategy. A new and empirically tested CSR-brand strength-organisational brand value conceptual framework was developed in this thesis. The data was analysed to identify the significant relationships amongst these three main variables using the structural equation model (SEM) PLS.The first round of data collected were qualitative and was subjected to content analysis. It comprised of responses from the general public, customers, academic and industry practitioners. The results pointed out that most respondents understood what CSR is about and were aware of Vodafone‘s CSR activities in Ghana. They also indicated that culture has an effect on organisational CSR practice and CSR practice is more proactive in the Western world. The purpose of the second round of data analysis was twofold: to perform confirmatory factor analysis for each of the 65 variable in the model; and to use the structural equation model to examine the hypothesised relationships between CSR, brand strength and organisational brand value. By using the discriminant validity correlation matrix table, a positive relationship between all the variables of brand strength and organisational brand value was established. However, no evidence was found to support the mediating effect of brand awareness, on organisational brand value when SEM was used. Importantly, of the seven variables of brand strength only brand awareness did not significantly contribute to organisational brand value. Moreover, brand knowledge was found to make the greatest contribution to organisational brand value. In summary, this thesis argues that the results support the proposition that CSR has a direct and positive impact on organisational brand value, therefore management of firms in the telecommunications industry in Ghana can use CSR to increase organisational brand value if they incorporate CSR activities appropriately into their brand building efforts. This thesis concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the study and provides recommendations for future research.

This research explores the interactions of people across cultures. It looks into how cultural distinctiveness and cultural characteristics may serve as a strategic resource for organisations. The research investigates whether the sustained success of South East Asian Airlines in achieving high levels of customer satisfaction is influenced by the application of distinctive cultural traditions and values in the delivery of customer service. Given that this service is delivered by a predominantly female workforce, the research explores cabin crew behaviours and values in relation to assumptions about gender roles that are found within the airline industry generally and South-East Asian cultures specifically. The research is based on a case study of one company, Thai Airways. A triangulated methodology was applied, using a mixture of company documentation, observations and semi-structured interviews. The research aims to inform our understanding of the service interface in a cross-cultural airline environment. Of particular emphasis in this study is the connection between spiritual, cultural values and traditional gender roles within Thai society, which has an impact on the relationship between passengers and cabin crew. The thesis illustrates how the understanding of the relationship between national cultures and individual characteristics can be refined through the use of a conceptual framework. The findings imply that traditional Thai cultural values underpinned by Buddhist spirituality play a part in shaping the way cabin crew think about their work. These influences help them to respond positively to company policy, which in turn can help to achieve Thai Airways’ corporate goals. This synergy between company policy, national culture and spirituality may shape the quality of the service and help to create customer satisfaction. The findings demonstrate that there is a relationship between the satisfaction of basic Thai female needs and work-life balance. Thai cabin crews who work in a female environment tend to balance their career, finances and family so that these needs are met.