Drawing on Bourdieu (1990, 1994, 1998) and Layder (1993, 1998) this study provides a critical realist account of the organisational habitus of managing ethnic diversity in Germany. Using a multilevel, contextual and relational analytical framework, I interpret and operationalise Bourdieu's key concepts, field, habitus and symbolic violence in the organisational context in order to examine macro, meso and micro level influences on the organisational habitus of managing ethnic diversity in Germany. The aim of this study is not only to contribute to an understanding of the organisational habitus of managing ethnic diversity in Germany, but also to understand the resistance of organisations to manage ethnic diversity, since organisations in Germany still do not view managing ethnic diversity as pertinent. Lastly, this study examines the implementation of the diversity management concept in the German context as well as the underlying organisational habitus of managing ethnic diversity in order to understand if the inclusion of ethnic minorities is achievable through the management of ethnic diversity in the German context. In order to do so, this study employs multiple data sources: documentary data, semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, visual data, a focus group, oberservations, a research diary and a single company case study of a German subsidiary of a North American Multinational Corporation (MNC). The thesis demonstrates the importance of considering history and particularly the treatment of history in organisational research, since this study illustrates that the organisational habitus of managing ethnic diversity is trapped in history, to be precise in the treatment of the German Nazi-past. Moreover, the thesis reveals two underlying hidden mechanisms, which guide and constitute the organisational habitus of managing ethnic diversity in Germany. These mechanisms are symbolic violence and integracism, which both undermine the overdue proposal of race equality, equal opportunities and the management of ethnic diversity at work.

An organization trusted by consumers enjoys a number of benefits. Unfortunately, instances of trust-damaging events involving organizations happen often. Damaged consumer trust in an organization has numerous negative consequences for the organization and for consumers. Currently, there is a paucity of theory about consumer trust recovery. So, understanding why and how consumer trust recovery occurs is timely, and theoretically and practically relevant. However, the findings from this study suggest that we need to distinguish between two kinds of consumer trust recovery. The first (I call it unconscious consumer trust recovery) refers to trust recovery that occurs without the consumer being fully conscious of it. In other words, a consumer is aware of their damaged trust during the scandal, but is not aware that their trust in the organization has improved. The consumer does not think about his or her recovered trust, just as they did not think about their level of trust before the scandal. The consumer trust is habitual. The second (I call it conscious consumer trust recovery) refers to an improvement in damaged trust where the consumer is fully conscious of their trust recovery. In other words, in conscious trust recovery the consumer is aware that the scandal damaged their trust in the organization. Also, after the scandal, in contrast to unconscious trust recovery, in conscious trust recovery the consumer is also fully aware that he trusts the organization as much or more than during the scandal. My aim is to inductively develop a theory explaining each type of consumer trust recovery. To do so, I use Charmazian grounded theory methodology, because this methodology is developed for theory-building from data and is aligned with the philosophical underpinnings of this study. The empirical context for this study is the meat adulteration scandal (“the horse meat scandal”) in 2013 in the UK. I collect and analyse empirical data about both types of trust recovery in an organization from 31 consumers that experienced both types. My analysis shows that when consumers perceive the scandal as less important, they experience unconscious trust recovery. This happens because the reduced importance of the scandal leads to a shift in consumers’ attention, which in turn leads to their inattentiveness to the scandal. Consumer inattentiveness is an immediate antecedent of unconscious trust recovery. Conscious consumer trust recovery occurs because consumers see cues indicating to them that the food retailer has improved product control systems, which in turn leads to consumer perceptions of the organization’s renewed ability. Consumer perception of renewed ability is an immediate antecedent of their conscious trust recovery. My findings lead me to make three main theoretical contributions to the theory of trust recovery in general and to consumer trust recovery in particular. The first contribution lies in showing that there are two types of consumer trust recovery in an organization, not one, as previously conceptualised, and that the same consumers can experience both types. The second contribution is a theory of unconscious consumer trust recovery in an organization that involves three concepts: consumers’ perceived importance of the scandal, consumers’ shift of attention, and consumer inattentiveness. The third contribution is the finding that conscious recovery of consumer trust occurs even when existing theory of trust recovery would predict that it would not. This study can help managers aiming to repair consumer trust in an organization by identifying a set of antecedents and underlying mechanisms that can guide such trust repair.

This study investigates the practice of public procurement fraud in Malaysia. The aim of this research is to understand the nature and extent of the persistence of procurement fraud in the Malaysian public sector. Fraud in public procurement results in large losses of public funds which are needed by the government for delivering public services in order to build public infrastructure and facilities for healthcare and education, poverty eradication, security, defense and economic growth. A primarily qualitative methodology is employed in this study using the political economy approach in order to understand this social phenomenon. First, documentary analysis helps identifying some possible factors for the existence of fraud in public procurement in Malaysia. Then, qualitative data from semi-structured interviews are obtained using the Snowball Sampling Method (SSM). The interviews with 40 stakeholders (regulators, professionals, politicians, academics and media actors) reveal their „hidden‟ voices so as to understand public procurement fraud in Malaysia. Nevertheless, this study does not aim to make generalizations and reach concrete conclusions about this issue, but instead seeks to understand why public procurement fraud persists in Malaysia through an analysis of the subjective narratives of the stakeholders. This research identifies several possible factors explaining why fraud in Malaysian public procurement continues to exist: (1) the prevailing power of political and economic forces, (2) complexities in the check and balance system, (3) deficiencies in procurement practices, (4) constraints on the civil servants, and (5) characteristics of the Malaysian society. The findings contribute to the body of knowledge by focusing on an unexplored area of the institutional arrangements between the state and businesses in Malaysia. The institutional arrangements between state and private sector appear to be legitimate, but they have the potential to conceal fraudulent practices, thus making fraud possible. Given the sensitive nature of the subject matter of this research and the fact that fraud by its nature is often concealed, it is possible that the findings have only revealed the „tip of the iceberg‟ of public procurement fraud in Malaysia.

The ageing literature shows robust age-related declines in immediate (e.g. Bopp & Verhaeghen, 2005; Multhaup, Balota & Cowan, 1996; Verhaeghen, 2002; Verhaeghen, Marcoen & Goosens, 1993) and episodic memory (Fleischman, Wilson, Gabrieli, Bienias & Bennett, 2004; Park, 2000; Schaie, 2005; Singer, Lindenberger & Baltes, 2003). However, older adults also consistently show stable or even improving levels of semantic knowledge (Surprenant & Neath, 2007). In younger adults, Hemmer and Steyvers (2009) showed that episodic memory for the properties (i.e. size) of familiar items is influenced by multiple levels of pre-existing knowledge. In this thesis, I developed their paradigm to systematically explore these knowledge effects in healthy ageing for both episodic memory and short-term/ immediate memory. This was done by comparing memory for familiar relative to unfamiliar faces, as well as for the size of familiar everyday objects relative to unfamiliar, random shapes. Across all experiments, both age groups appeared to rely on pre-existing item-based knowledge for the familiar items to the same extent, suggesting no age-related decrement in the use of prior knowledge. Moreover, the result showed that item-specific knowledge for the unfamiliar items develops over the course of the experiment. This became apparent in cases when the distribution of target item sizes was bimodal, as this made session-based learning of the item statistics easier to observe; this experiment-based knowledge/ learning was again equivalent for both age groups. The older adults, however, consistently demonstrated greater reconstruction variability and overall error. I interpreted this as evidence of noisier memory representations of the studied items for the older adults (e.g. Noack, Lovden & Lindenberger, 2014); the findings suggest that this increase in error does not lead to more knowledge-based bias in older adults.

The thesis is composed of three chapters which analyze the monetary and macro-prudential policy using a New Keynesian DSGE model with the banking sector. The first chapter evaluates the effectiveness of time-varying macro-prudential tools and their interaction with monetary policy using the model framework of Gertler and Karadi (2011) which emphasizes the role of bank capital and endogenous leverage constraint due to the moral hazard problem. We consider the following three types of countercyclical macro-prudential tools: (i) capital requirements (CAR), (ii) deposit-based reserve requirements (DBRR), and (iii) asset-based reserve requirements (ABRR). The main findings are as follows. First, all three types of macro-prudential policy tools reacting to the financial condition (credit to output gap) are effective to mitigate the fluctuation of credit and business cycle by weakening the pro-cyclicality of banks' net worth and the counter-cyclicality of the endogenous leverage and external finance premium. Second, the effectiveness of each instrument differs by the source of shocks to the economy. In response to a TFP shock, the counter-cyclical CAR is the most effective to mitigate the fluctuation of credit and output and the ABRR is relatively more effective in response to capital quality shocks (credit supply shock). Third, all types of macro-prudential tools are welfare improving in combination with monetary policy, but the use of macro-prudential policy is relevant in response to the credit supply shock (financial shock). Finally, when the economy is hit by a financial shock, a relatively direct tool like asset-based reserve requirement (ABRR) can be the most welfare-improving and the relationship between monetary and macro-prudential policy can be complementary each other. The second chapter examines the role of banks' endogenous reserves and capital and the usefulness of financial condition (credit aggregates and external finance premium) as an indicator for setting up a relevant monetary policy rule. For the task, I construct an extended version of Goodfriend and McCallum (2007) model which is characterized by banks' loan production function with inputs (collaterals, monitoring works and bank capital buffer) under the households' deposit in advance (DIA) constraint. Main findings are as follows. First, banks' endogenous reserves can mitigate the variation of external finance premium by substituting costly monitoring works for lending. However, the effect of endogenous reserves on output and credits depends on types of shocks (credit-demand vs credit-supply shock), which reflects the role of external finance premium (EFP) as a banking attenuator (pro-cyclical EFP) or financial accelerator (counter-cyclical EFP) respectively. Second, the effect of banks' endogenous reserves can be limited when banks can adjust their capital flexibly compared to when banks' keep their capital to asset ratio (leverage) stable. Third, considering the role of money and the frictions on the credit-supply side, monetary policy reacting actively to the financial condition is welfare improving. These results imply that quantitative easing (QE) policy during the crisis was effective but the effectiveness of QE can be limited when banks can lower their leverage in a pro-cyclical manner. And monetary policy should pay more attention to the financial condition and prevailing interest rates as well as inflation and output gap in the presence of substantive financial frictions on the credit supply side in particular when the banking shocks dominate the economy. In the last chapter (co-authored with Professor Jagjit S. Chadha), we investigate the question facing many emerging economies: the extent to which a workhorse advanced economy model can yield important insights for monetary policy-making. We note that the standard sticky-price, monopolistically competitive model does not allow analysis of money and credit dynamics and led to a concentration of research on simple interest rate reaction functions. However, time-varying financial frictions tend to act as a tax on intermediation activities and so can vary output in a significant manner. In this chapter, we consider the implications of financial frictions for baseline monetary policy using a model calibrated on Indian data and find that a simple interest rate reaction function may not be welfare maximizing when banking shocks are dominant in the economy.

This research starts from the comparison between warranty and insurance in their coverages, policies, data and, particularly, policy optimisation techniques. Based on abundant literature in related areas, the result of this comparison indicates that warranty policy optimisation can be improved by considering the application of the portfolio theory, dependence modelling and risk measures that are widely used in the actuarial science and the financial discipline. In the following chapters, Chapter 1 introduces the Importance of this research and lists its aim and objectives. Chapter 2 mainly conducts a critical and comprehensive literature review relating to warranty management and actuarial science and summarised the knowledge gaps identified. Chapter 3 establishes a collective warranty policy optimisation framework, with the benefits of the modern portfolio theory borrowed from the actuarial and financial disciplines and copulas from the probability and statistics. With progressing of this research, the disadvantage of the symmetric risk measure, variance, is uncovered in dealing with the extreme events. Chapter 4 proposes using two of the downside risk measures used in the financial discipline, Value-at-Risk and Conditional Value-at-Risk, into the optimisation of warranty policy and a new portfolio optimisation framework of warranty optimisation based on copulas. Chapter 5 investigates the interplay among the hardware, software and users of individual products under different scenarios relating to the warranty claims. Considering such an interplay, it then develops a more comprehensive framework for warranty policy optimisation. This fits the trend that that more and more products can be considered as a system composed of three subsystems: hardware, software and user subsystems and considers that the existing warranty policy optimisation methods in the literature merely focus on products composed of hardware systems. Even though the above chapters have developed warranty policy optimisation frameworks collectively and comprehensively, this research can also be improved in many aspects. As such, in Chapter 6, the sale volume modelling, renewing warranty policy optimisation and copula selection are discussed. Chapter 7 wraps up the research and discusses future research.

This thesis aims to analyse the process of branding young and emerging artists in the contemporary art market, focusing on the valuation of works of art. The ambiguous borderline of being a work of art in terms of appearance poses a challenge for the market, which requires an explanation of its symbolic value and meaning. A thick, multifarious group of intermediaries in the art world contributes to the construction of legitimacy for artists and their artworks, engendering the understanding of such value. Through the legitimation process, artworks by young and emerging artists are rendered accepted and validated, thereby branding them. Some researchers on arts marketing have explored the valuation process by applying socio-cultural perspective on branding. However, such application has empirically overlooked two important mediums: art fairs and online platforms. Theoretically, the complex and fluid valuation structure in the art market, driven by the uncertain value of contemporary art and the repositioning of inner members of the art world, is a compelling research issue to be explored at the societal level. To do so, this thesis begins with investigating Andy Warhol's Brillo Box. This research also explores Frieze London and the Other Art Fair by collecting data from direct observation and secondary sources. The research additionally conducts an instrumental case study of Saatchi Art, using data from interviews, observation, and document reviews. The key finding of the historical case is that the legitimacy of Warhol and his artworks was shaped by various elements such as the intermediaries, a myth in society, an artistic movement, the artists' persona and social networks. Moreover, the empirical cases of art fairs and an online platform enact the functions of discovering, introducing, instructing, and including young and emerging artists. This indicates that these institutions play the role of intermediaries and contribute to framing the legitimacy of the artists and artworks, thereby branding new artists. Although art fairs and an online platform hold varying positions in the hierarchical order of valuing artworks in the art world (depending on the extent of their accumulated symbolic value), it is noteworthy that such mediums, which did not exist in the hierarchical structure before the twentieth century, have become important insiders in the structure. However, this research concludes that this change does not substantially reconstitute the stratified structure of the art world that has existed prior to their emergence. The theoretical contribution of this thesis lies in extending the application of Holt's (2004) theory of cultural branding to the context of arts. Building on the recent literature on cultural branding of artists (Kerrigan et al. 2011; Hewer, Brownlie and Kerrigan 2013; Muñiz, Norris and Fine 2014; Preece and Kerrigan 2015; Rodner and Preece 2015), this thesis conceptualises the process of legitimising young and emerging artists and their artworks as normative and cultural-cognitive legitimacy shaped by intermediaries through the stages of discovery, introduction, instruction, and selection. Moreover, by drawing on sociological arguments by Becker (1984) and Bourdieu (1996), the conceptual framework of the present study acknowledges the hierarchical structure of the art market and intricate interactions among intermediaries in the art world.

This qualitative research study into professional youth work identities and practices offers an insider perspective on the youth work community of practice. The research inquiry adopts a socially constructivist theoretical framework and was contextualised by the political and socio-economic climate in the north-west of England in 2013. Seventeen professionally-qualified youth workers took part in focus groups and interviews that were audio-recorded and transcribed, producing data for both thematic and discursive analyses. The data seeks to shed light on personal, professional and political dimensions of youth work identities; the professional knowledge used by youth workers, evidence of the value of youth work and the discursive construction of youth work accounts. Noticeably, the youth workers’ descriptions and explanations of their practice portrayed the formative influence of biography and learning in shaping their journey into youth work. They expressed commitment to reflective practice and had passion for youth work, espousing roles as listeners, advocates and informal educators in evolving practice situations. Moreover, some innovative youth work responses to young people’s needs were being recognised in some formal inter-agency contexts. Nevertheless, the data depicted youth workers conjuring up ‘the blitz spirit’ to deal with funding shortfalls that created feelings of being ‘the poor relation’ at times and finding themselves ‘fighting the corner’ against the onset of managerial preoccupations with targeting and outcome measures that side-lined the professional value base. The discursive lens illuminated the dialogical interaction that was positioning speakers in the discourse and constructing social and professional identities. It was evident that these were animated accounts of practice, infused with evocative imagery and capturing vibrant youth work voices that articulated the youth work point of view, an under-represented perspective in wider discourses on work with young people.

This thesis seeks to understand how and why police use 'Offences Taken Into Consideration' (TIC) processes as part of their crime management work. Informed by empirical data collected in the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), the study utilises a multi-method research design, to understand the organisation of TIC process and the variety of factors influencing the ways they are implemented and the outcomes they deliver in different areas of London. A key feature of the research is its use of focused comparative case studies of TIC work based upon in-depth qualitative fieldwork and interviews. The evidence and insight gleaned from these case studies are augmented and corroborated by the examination of material derived from the examination of official police case files. A key theme explored through exploration of the empirical data concerns the role and meaning of 'performance indicators'. Specifically, the analysis highlights how a range of organisational, subcultural and individual level factors interact to produce very different approaches to the use of TICs across different geographical areas. There are various interpretations applied to the TIC policy and procedures, which highlight the implications of such variant approaches. Theoretically, the evidence helps to shine a light on a neglected aspect of police practice and how crime detections are produced. The findings also have policy and practice implications, as the TIC policy wordings and processes may have been misinterpreted. As discussed in the thesis, potentially this could have led to miscarriages of justice or even breaches of the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998.

This thesis seeks to show through both historical and contemporary examples what makes Russia an ‘outlier’ among key sports mega-events hosts. More specifically, this thesis sets out to establish how external and internal objectives Russia pursued in the context of the 1980 Olympics and the 2014 Sochi Olympics differed from those of other sports mega-event hosts, including non-liberal states. The originality of this thesis lies not only in the fact that it sheds light on Russia’s strategy of sports mega-event hosting, but that it does so from the vantage point of the combination of the three most popular approaches in the extant sports mega-event research: public diplomacy, place branding and soft power. Moreover, this study places Russia’s hosting of sports mega-events within constructivist international relations theory, which prioritises identity and interests. In this respect, this research, by uncovering Russia’s motives behind sports mega-events hosting, seeks to add predictability to Russia’s behaviour in the international arena. Further, this thesis shows that the pursuit of domestic soft power goals appear to be much more important to Russia than the attainment of external reputational benefits. In this respect, this thesis explores at length what role elite sport and sports mega-events play in a nation-building project in Russia and how they are used to legitimise the incumbent elites. Finally, this thesis is an attempt to overcome a Western-centric paradigmatic hegemony in sports mega-event research.