The primary purpose of this thesis is to investigate, describe, and thus understand, the phenomenon of the strategy-creation process, the process, content, and context in senior Welsh rugby clubs, 1990 - 2000. The inspiration for the research arose during a monumental decade of transformation to the Game of Rugby Union Football. The research questions concern evaluating the clubs’ strategy-creation process, and the reactions to the introduction of National Leagues and Professionalism. The process pursued was centred on a purposive sample of three nonprofit rugby clubs. In addition to an in-depth analysis of the general strategy management literature, reviews were conducted within the themes of small business, nonprofits and sporting organizations. A lack of prior research in the strategy action-outcomes in the nonprofits, sporting sector, particularly the rugby union environment, was a cause for concern. The general literature revealed clear differences of opinion between researchers about the relationship between organizational strategy, strategy-creation and outcomes. An interpretive approach was adopted, employing the validated theoretical framework by Bailey et al (2000), to collect, and analyse, ‘insider’ data from different levels of club respondents, and also from various club stakeholders. The content (outcomes) found that rugby clubs employed operational planning regularly during the playing season. Strategic planning had been used, but only on a few necessary occasions. The decision-making processes were found to have strong political and enforced choice dimensions, both pre- and post- 1995. The Introduction of Professionalism had caused the need for clubs to manage conflicting rugby and business objectives, and to re-appraise the influence of culture on decisions. However, it did not change the clubs’ long established priority of placing playing performance before financial performance. The context of the clubs’ turbulent external environment, coupled with the uncertainty and unpredictability of the Game, ensured an annual, seasonal struggle for survival for clubs operating in a niche market. These distinctive operating conditions strongly influence a rugby club’s strategy-creation. This thesis concludes by considering the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings arising from the study of non-profit rugby clubs.

This thesis analyses poor law administration in Wigan Union from 1880-1900. The late-nineteenth century is fertile territory for poor law historians, and this study intends to further enhance our understanding of the period. Local studies are vital given that the weakness of central authority ensured a wide variety of practice amongst unions, and are essential to the development of a better informed national picture. With that purpose, the thesis focuses on the important Lancashire industrial town of Wigan. Analysis addresses selected themes that require greater attention from historians in order to facilitate a more developed understanding of the poor law. Chapter one analyses politics in relation to guardians’ elections before and after the democratisation of the boards in 1894. Chapter two explores the role of boards of guardians, both individually and collaboratively, as active political agencies and defenders of the public interest in relation to removal of Irish paupers and in battles over rating with canal and railway companies. Chapters three and four focus on what was arguably the greatest poor law controversy of the period – the ‘Crusade’ against outdoor relief, initiated nationally in 1870. Wigan Union was an apparent supporter of this ‘reform’ movement, but appearances were deceptive. Chapter five addresses the problem of the ‘casual poor’, another major national concern of the period. Analysis illustrates the detail of local practice and the nature of central-local relations between the guardians and the LGB. Chapter six examines the themes of dismissal of union officers and superannuation for those deemed to have given good public service, further illustrating conceptions of professionalism and central-local relations. From this analysis, the Wigan board emerges as a politically engaged institution; financially cautious but with a paternalistic sense of obligation to the poor and pragmatic rather than ideologically driven in its policy and practice. Strong local conceptions of identity, professionalism and public service are evident within a nuanced context of central-local relations.

There has been a considerable growth in research in recent years into the history of both journalism and sport, two hugely influential areas of popular culture. The two fields cover a wide spectrum of interests and there is much ground that is common to both. However, studies of journalism and the growth of the newspaper industry have largely ignored the role of the sports journalist and the place of sport within a developing press. Moreover, studies of the expansion of commercial sport and the games-playing habit, whilst touching on the place of the press in their development, and utilising newspapers as primary source material, have paid little or no attention to the place of the sports reporter in the promotion and recording of the sporting sub-culture. This thesis aims to address the shortcoming in current research with a study centring on the growth of the occupation of sports reporting from the mid-Victorian era to the inter-war years. The thesis notes the adoption of sport as a circulation aid by the popular press, considers the type of recruit attracted to sports reporting, the job's practical aspects, the position of the sports journalist within the editorial hierarchy, and the acceptance of sports reporting as a legitimate specialism within a widening editorial agenda. The career of journalist James Catton is introduced to the study to examine in detail the manner in which occupational trends impacted upon the individual reporter, and in order to trace the manner in which sports reporting could be said to have adopted a 'professional' outlook during the period of this study. The thesis reveals the uncertain standing of the sports journalist within the newspaper industry, the part-time nature of much sports reporting, with sport regarded as an occupational rite of passage for the young and the trainee, and the struggle to rid the occupation of a reputation sullied by a perception of hackneyed journalism. The biographical section of the thesis introduces a contemporary voice, that of James Catton, to let it speak to an experience that might otherwise prove difficult to capture. Catton's working life highlights the possibilities and the demands of a career in sports journalism, and the success that the adoption of a 'professional' approach to the work could secure.

Purpose The purpose of this research is to examine the role of servicescape theory in the counterfeit context and explore the extent to which servicescape cues influence perceptions of counterfeit products. Literature Following extensive examination of the current literature surrounding counterfeit activity it was discovered that counterfeits can be sold in a variety of environments; market stalls and car boots sales through to the legitimate retail environments. In the instances where the counterfeit has been integrated into the legitimate retail environment, weaknesses in the supply chain are usually to blame. These occurrences can be a major concern for both brands and consumers as they pose not only a risk to brand image but also a threat to consumer safety. Much of the current literature which explores consumer perceptions of counterfeit products concentrates on tangible product attributes and their influence. This research expands the current knowledge by examining further influential factors in the form of environmental cues. As a means of discussing the various elements which constitute a retail environment, the concept of servicescape is incorporated and analysed into the literature discussion. Following a comprehensive exploration of the various cues that may be present within a retail environment, the extent to which these cues influence consumer behaviour is explored. Further to this, as a means of understanding the ways consumers generate perceptions of counterfeit products, the processes of sensation and perception are analysed. Methodology The methodology chapter contained within this thesis considers both the philosophical positioning and the data collection methods used by this research. The philosophical positioning of the researcher is one of a constructivist-interpretive nature. Focus groups in conjunction with photo elicitation were the core data collection methods used. This combination of methods allowed an excellent opportunity for discussion and insights to be gathered and emotions to be recorded surrounding the issues of counterfeiting, servicescape and perception formation. Findings The findings which were identified by this research contribute extensively to the existing knowledge regarding counterfeiting and servicescape. The key themes highlighted the influence of human variables on perceptions of counterfeit products. Within this theme were a number of subsidiary themes including the influence of image, socio-demographics, other individuals within the counterfeit purchase environment, customer characteristics, human/social crowding and the influence of staff in the counterfeit purchase environment. In addition to this, levels of privacy also appeared to be an influential cue amongst participants in relation to their perceptions of product authenticity. Levels of spatial crowding were also an influential factor used by the research participants as a means of forming perceptions regarding product authenticity. From examination of the data, it was also made apparent that branding categorisation within a counterfeit purchase environment was particularly influential. Finally, servicescape permanency was noted to be a key theme throughout the focus group discussions. It appeared that a purchase environment‟s level of permanency was a key influencer when determining whether or not it sold counterfeit products.

Various models explaining micro knowledge-generating behaviour (in particular exporting and innovating) in the economics literature are underpinned by the overlapping assumption that these activities are largely determined by the resources/capabilities possessed by firms. Despite their perceived importance, there is a dearth of evidence on how these heterogeneous resources and firm-specific capabilities can be incorporated into economics models to quantify their roles in determining microeconomic behaviour. Therefore this thesis attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by integrating the resource-based view (RBV) as a new IO theory into the microeconomics literature and empirically utilising micro level data to investigate the significance of such resources/capacities in determining exporting and innovation activities, moderating their inter-relationships as well as conditioning their impacts on the firm’s performance. These heterogeneous resources have been proxied using firm size, productivity, capital intensity, intangible assets, various dimensions to absorptive capacity, the deployment of R&D sourcing strategies and so on. Using establishment-level data covering all UK market-based sectors in 2000, the findings show that all these factors have a large impact upon the propensity and/or intensity of establishments’ exporting and/or R&D activities, with an especially noticeable role in breaking down entry barriers to undertaking such activities. Given the significant impact of exports on knowledge-creating R&D activity, the thesis subsequently investigates and confirms additional learning effect of exporting as embodied in the firm-level exports-productivity relationship using a nationally representative panel dataset covering both manufacturing and services sectors in the UK, for the 1996-2004 period. Lastly, this thesis also attempts to provide an initial inspection of the contribution of innovation (proxied by R&D stock) to productivity using plant-level panel data for Northern Ireland. Based on the estimation of a ‘knowledge production function’ separately for various manufacturing industries, the overall long-run results show that R&D stock does have a positive impact upon productivity.

The challenge of abstract trademark image retrieval as a test of machine vision algorithms has attracted considerable research interest in the past decade. Current operational trademark retrieval systems involve manual annotation of the images (the current ‘gold standard’). Accordingly, current systems require a substantial amount of time and labour to access, and are therefore expensive to operate. This thesis focuses on the development of algorithms that mimic aspects of human visual perception in order to retrieve similar abstract trademark images automatically. A significant category of trademark images are typically highly stylised, comprising a collection of distinctive graphical elements that often include geometric shapes. Therefore, in order to compare the similarity of such images the principal aim of this research has been to develop a method for solving the partial matching and shape perception problem. There are few useful techniques for partial shape matching in the context of trademark retrieval, because those existing techniques tend not to support multicomponent retrieval. When this work was initiated most trademark image retrieval systems represented images by means of global features, which are not suited to solving the partial matching problem. Instead, the author has investigated the use of local image features as a means to finding similarities between trademark images that only partially match in terms of their subcomponents. During the course of this work, it has been established that the Harris and Chabat detectors could potentially perform sufficiently well to serve as the basis for local feature extraction in trademark image retrieval. Early findings in this investigation indicated that the well established SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) local features, based on the Harris detector, could potentially serve as an adequate underlying local representation for matching trademark images. There are few researchers who have used mechanisms based on human perception for trademark image retrieval, implying that the shape representations utilised in the past to solve this problem do not necessarily reflect the shapes contained in these image, as characterised by human perception. In response, a ii practical approach to trademark image retrieval by perceptual grouping has been developed based on defining meta-features that are calculated from the spatial configurations of SIFT local image features. This new technique measures certain visual properties of the appearance of images containing multiple graphical elements and supports perceptual grouping by exploiting the non-accidental properties of their configuration. Our validation experiments indicated that we were indeed able to capture and quantify the differences in the global arrangement of sub-components evident when comparing stylised images in terms of their visual appearance properties. Such visual appearance properties, measured using 17 of the proposed metafeatures, include relative sub-component proximity, similarity, rotation and symmetry. Similar work on meta-features, based on the above Gestalt proximity, similarity, and simplicity groupings of local features, had not been reported in the current computer vision literature at the time of undertaking this work. We decided to adopted relevance feedback to allow the visual appearance properties of relevant and non-relevant images returned in response to a query to be determined by example. Since limited training data is available when constructing a relevance classifier by means of user supplied relevance feedback, the intrinsically non-parametric machine learning algorithm ID3 (Iterative Dichotomiser 3) was selected to construct decision trees by means of dynamic rule induction. We believe that the above approach to capturing high-level visual concepts, encoded by means of meta-features specified by example through relevance feedback and decision tree classification, to support flexible trademark image retrieval and to be wholly novel. The retrieval performance the above system was compared with two other state-of-the-art image trademark retrieval systems: Artisan developed by Eakins (Eakins et al., 1998) and a system developed by Jiang (Jiang et al., 2006). Using relevance feedback, our system achieves higher average normalised precision than either of the systems developed by Eakins’ or Jiang. However, while our trademark image query and database set is based on an image dataset used by Eakins, we employed different numbers of images. It was not possible to access to the same query set and image database used in the evaluation of Jiang’s trademark iii image retrieval system evaluation. Despite these differences in evaluation methodology, our approach would appear to have the potential to improve retrieval effectiveness.

Previous research in the UK and elsewhere has found that housing tenure (i.e. whether the dwelling is owned or rented) predicts mortality and morbidity. This thesis aims to explain whether ontological security (a long term tendency to believe things are reliable and secure as opposed to threatening) is more likely to be associated with owner occupation, and therefore whether it helps to explain the observed association with tenure and health. For the purposes of this study ontological security was operationalised as being formed of three components: protection, autonomy and prestige. A scale was devised to measure ontological security arising from the home through these three components. This scale was included in a postal survey that also included questions on health, housing area, psychological and sociodemographic characteristics. The postal survey was sent to a random sample of adults in the West of Scotland and nearly 300 completed questionnaires were returned. I found that ontological security was associated with owner occupation but not independently of features of housing. Ontological security was not independently related to housing tenure itself. Owner occupiers reported more ontological security from their homes because their homes were in better condition, situated in better areas and of higher value than social renters. Ontological security appeared to be related to health particularly through psychological characteristics. Other reasons for the associations between tenure and health were that owners were on average younger and richer than social renters. This study suggests that social meaning per se may not be health damaging, but that social rented homes might put their occupants at greater health risk because they are in poorer condition, located in more poorly resourced and problem ridden areas and of lower status. These features of social renting may also be observed in other countries (e.g. USA).

Life science firms compete in rapidly changing environments that demand substantial resources and capabilities. Nevertheless, there are a growing number of small life science firms, and these firms are having a profound impact on innovation in the industry. However, little is known on how these firms overcome resource constraints to finance and develop R&D resources and capabilities. Consequently, the purpose of this thesis is to empirically explore how small life science firms develop R&D and financial resources and capabilities. A closely related area that this research is also fundamentally concerned with is how R&D and financial resources and capabilities affect firms‟ early growth. The central aim of this research is to unearth insights on the motivations, assets and processes that lead to the development of R&D and financial resources and capabilities. To accomplish this, the research draws on the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities. The resources-based view is interested in the resources from which firms derive competitive advantages. Whilst dynamic capabilities focus on how firms in rapidly changing environments – especially high technology environments – configure and reconfigure their assets and capabilities to develop competitive advantages. Because this research is concerned with the development of key resources and capabilities of firms in rapidly changing environments, a resource-based view influenced dynamic capabilities framework is used to isolate the development of R&D and financial resources and capabilities of life science firms. An in depth case study approach is used to examine the research questions. It draws on longitudinal data collected from six life science firms. Data has been collected from twenty interviews and over 3000 pages of secondary data. The interview data is abstracted using four techniques: 1) identifying repetitions, 2) looking for transitions, 3) identifying similarities and differences and 4) cutting and sorting notable quotes. Following Miles and Huberman (1994), the data is then analysed using a multiple step abstraction and condensing process. A unique triangulation technique is used at the end of the study where the key informants are surveyed on the results of the qualitative analysis. Results from the study indicate that a unique set of past decisions, future opportunities, assets, capabilities and routines leads to the development of R&D and financial resources and capabilities. It is evident in all of the case firms in this study that scientific breakthroughs, partnership opportunities, the founders‟ experience and the firm‟s ability to integrate resources and learn from earlier paths are vital to the development of R&D and financial resources and capabilities. The study makes several contributions to the practice and scholarship of management. It provides insights on how small life science firms develop the R&D and financial resources to compete in a highly dynamic industry. From a scholarly perspective, it extends the dynamic capabilities framework and offers empirical support to several categories of dynamic capabilities. It also offers support to R&D and financial capabilities as categories of complementary assets. This thesis identifies details of the aforementioned aspects, discusses the importance of the findings in relation to the literature, and offers future research directions.

In Canada, national ethnocultural advocacy groups are highly visible and are consulted by government officials in areas of multiculturalism policy as well as other areas of social policy and constitutional reform. Unlike local ‘ethnic’ associations that arise for a myriad of community specific purposes, national level ‘ethnic’ umbrella associations occupy a wholly different political space. One implication of this national level of representation is that who and what the group is becomes re-configured from a form of social organisation to a form of broad representation. At the national level, the organisation not only comes to represent the concrete aspirations of group members, but also becomes a guardian and advocate of a vision of ‘the group’. The process through which the ‘group’ boundaries are socially and politically constructed is the subject of this thesis. Writers tend to explain the proliferation of national ‘ethnic’ umbrella organisations through one of four therapies: interest group theory, social movement theory, theories of ethnic mobilisation, and state intervention. There is relative agreement that demographic changes resulting from the liberalisation of Canada’s immigration policy in 1967 led to larger and more politically active ethnocultural communities. Also, writers argue that the policy of Multiculturalism established in 1971 created opportunity for ethnocultural political participation as never before. There are strengths and weaknesses to each of these approaches, and they are analysed in the thesis. However, none of the existing theories explain how and why organisations formed at the national level at given periods of time, and how the substantive delineations of representation (i.e. in terms of ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ identities) were determined.

The thesis investigates two fundamental dynamics of participation and collaboration in mature, community-led Free/Open Source (F/OS) software projects - commercialization and peripheral participation. The aim of the thesis is to examine whether the power relations that underlie the F/OS model of development are indicative of a new form of power relations supported by ICTs. Theoretically, the thesis is located within the Communities of Practice (CoP) literature and it draws upon Michel Foucault's ideas about the historical and relational character of power. It also mobilizes, to a lesser extent, Erving Goffman's notion of `face-work'. This framework supports a methodology that questions the rationality of how F/OS is organized and examines the relations between employed coders and volunteers, experienced and inexperienced coders, and programmers and nonprogrammers. The thesis examines discursive and structural dimensions of collaboration and employs quantitative and qualitative methods. Structural characteristics are considered in the light of arguments about embeddedness. The thesis contributes insights into how the gift economy is embedded in the exchange economy and the role of peripheral contributors. The analysis indicates that community-integrated paid developers have a key role in project development, maintaining the infrastructure aspects of the code base. The analysis suggests that programming and non-programming contributors are distinct in their make-up, priorities and rhythms of participation, and that learning plays an important role in controlling access. The results show that volunteers are important drivers of peripheral activities, such as translation and documentation. The term `autonomous peripherality' is used to capture the unique characteristics of these activities. These findings support the argument that centrality and peripherality are associated with the division of labour, which, in turn, is associated with employment relations and frameworks of institutional support. The thesis shows how the tensions produced by commercialization and peripheral participation are interwoven with values of meritocracy, ritual and strategic enactment of the idea of community as well as with tools and techniques developed to address the emergence of a set of problems specific to management and governance. These are characterized as `technologies of communities'. It is argued that the emerging topology of F/OS participation, seen as a `relational meshwork', is indicative of a redefinition of the relationship between sociality and economic production within mature, community-led F/OS projects.