Organization studies, including studies of control and identity, has to date been almost exclusively concerned with organizations where work is paid for. By contrast, this thesis considers the dynamics of control and identity when work is unpaid, through the presentation of a qualitative case study of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. This organization relies mainly on volunteers operating in a dangerous working environment to fulfil their mission of saving lives at sea. By considering unpaid voluntary work, the thesis deepens understandings of the relationship between control, autonomy and organizational meaning and identity. There are four main themes of analysis: thick volunteering, perilous volunteering, community and offshore operations. I propose thick volunteering as a form of volunteering from which a significant sense of identity may be derived. Perilous volunteering is theorized to denote volunteering activities whereby the volunteer chooses to engage in dangerous activity which may result in serious harm up to and including loss of life. Thick and perilous volunteering together are shown to have complex effects upon the dynamic of control within the organization. The theme of community shows how volunteering is embedded in a web of social relations, rather than simply being a matter of individual choice, and these relations significantly affect meaning and identity. The 'offshore' theme demonstrates how control, meaning and identity play out differently when the volunteers are on operational duty. Overall, the thesis contributes to the theory of volunteering as well as to more general debates about organizational control, identity and meaning.

One of the main assumptions in the strategy field suggests that a manager's sequence of strategic decisions causes the evolution of resources and competitive positions to differ among firms over time. However, this evidence is not conclusive when Chief Executive Officers (CEO's) manage small firms which are located within markets with underdeveloped production of high-technology products and low technical knowledge required for production. This doctoral thesis concentrates on the investigation of how to support CEOs in their strategy development process related to an internationalisation strategy in small organisations - whose products and resources do not seem particularly unique - in giving them a competitive advantage over competitors in their target markets (e.g., fruit, wine, or fish industries). The present research has been conducted through two empirical investigations: an econometric analysis, and a case study research. The econometric analysis examines the tole played by CEOs in the export intensity of commodity-based small firms. Results from this study revealed that the CEOs' education is particularly relevant for explaining the export intensity. CEOs who developed capabilities from formal training, in companies that do not seem endowed with particular idiosyncratic resources, export intensively. The case study followed a facilitated modelling approach based on System Dynamic (SD) Modelling. This second inquiry focused on structuring, simulating, and evaluating the potential consequences of the internationalisation strategy developed by five CEOs. Findings emerging from this process provide evidence that SD modelling allowed the CEOs to identify more resources and their interrelated relationships (e.g., links, feedback, and delay effects) compared with using a simple description of the internationalisation strategy. Additionally, simulations that have emerged from SD models provided CEOs with scenarios closer to reality for both assessing strategic ideas and learning from simulated performance.

Repeated claims have been made since the early 2000s that UK energy, and its governance, is 'in transition'. In this thesis it is argued, using a conceptual framework informed largely but by no means exclusively by ideational institutionalism, that although UK energy governance, policy and associated institutions have been undergoing a period of continuous crisis, challenge and change, a policy paradigm shift cannot as yet be claimed. This is because UK energy governance processes have not fully rejected some of the ideas upon which the 'pro-market' system was founded in the early 1980s, and due to a lack of credibility in alternative frameworks and solutions. Governance practices do, however, appear to show tendential signs of policy paradigm change. This process of change has been initiated largely in response to public and political concerns about the security of energy supplies, which emerged in the mid 2000s, in addition to growing political support in the UK for measures to mitigate climate change. To the extent that any new 'norms' can be claimed it is suggested here that the emergence of an 'energy-security-climate nexus' in energy governance processes is of particular significance. This nexus reflects the appropriation of the idea that domestic energy production is more 'secure' by climate change protagonists looking to encourage support for increased renewable energy production in the UK. It also reflects a long-standing climate idea that decisions about energy and climate policy should be reached through inter-linked processes. This thesis provides an analysis of change and continuity in UK energy governance from 2000 to 2010 with a particular emphasis on the various ideas, about both energy and its governance, that have informed policymaking as well as the alternative narratives which have called for changes. The thesis is informed empirically by a range of policy documents, including White Papers, Acts, reports and formal reviews, presentations by policy-makers and analysts, and secondary literature. This material has been crosschecked against a limited number of unstructured interviews with policymakers, analysts, consultants and Government advisors. Academic, media, thinktank and other third party literature has also been used to inform and construct those narratives which have, over this period of time, presented critiques of and alternatives to the 'status quo' in energy policymaking.

In this thesis I characterise an optimal procurement contract for a government that purchases a good or service from a firm that has private information about its cost of production (its type) when the government has available the reports of a corruptible internal auditor and an honest but less well informed external auditor. In chapter 2 I assume that the government is constrained to offer the internal auditor a contract that consists of a penalty if the external auditor obtains evidence of misreporting. For the case of two cost types I show that an optimal contract exhibits a separation property: the government gives priority to achieving the first best (no private information) expected profit scheme over demanding the first best quantity scheme. For the case of a continuum of cost types I provide sufficient conditions under which this result is valid. In chapter 3 I allow the government to offer the internal auditor a contract that consists of a transfer, a reimbursement and a penalty. For the situation in which bribery takes place after the firm makes a claim about its type I demonstrate that the government can achieve the outcome of the first best contract if the sum of the expected penalties is positive and for every type of the firm the distribution of the outcome of the audit is not the same as that of the adjacent type. For the situation in which bribery takes place before the firm makes a claim about its type I argue that the contract design problem is the same as in chapter 2 and I prove that if the sum of the expected penalties does not depend on the extent of the misreporting then in an optimal contract bribery does not take place.

Many studies in the minority world have emphasized the potentially positive influences of supported as opposed to sheltered employment on the inclusion of persons with disabilities, including learning difficulties, into the mainstream economy and community. In 2007, Malaysia, as one of the developing countries which possesses a growing population of persons with learning difficulties, started to promote this form of employment hoping for similar outcomes. However, in the majority world where a country is designing policy for the first time and is at the relatively early stages of implementation, there has been little research to explore supported employment practices for persons with learning difficulties and offer empirical findings from real employment experiences. Thus, this thesis aims to fill this gap through providing some substantial evidence and new insights. The social theory of disability and the debates around it have been particularly influential in the past three decades. These have helped to shape the approach of this research into understanding the experiences of persons with learning difficulties in the labour market in Malaysia. The study also covers the general understanding of disability from an Islamic perspective. Theoretical approaches to career and career development are also discussed before specifically focusing on the barriers faced in accessing a working life and developing a career in paid jobs as well as achieving greater social integration. The empirical contribution of the thesis is through a study of supported employment initiated in Malaysia to enable persons with learning difficulties to work in the mainstream retail sector, and sets that experience in the context of relevant policy and practice. It aims to produce key insights into the ‘lived realities’ of employees with learning difficulties taking part in the scheme. It foregrounds their perceptions but also explores the viewpoints of government officials, managers and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) coordinators involved in the development of policy and practice relating to the scheme. The research participants were drawn from the 82 employees with learning difficulties engaged in the supported employment scheme in a retail company, together with seven managers involved with the scheme, eight government officials and three NGOs coordinators. One finding of the study is that, in general, supported employment is likely to help to reduce the stigma associated with having a disability. However, while most persons with learning difficulties believe themselves to have the ability to work in supported employment, others, including those who are providing support for their entry to the workforce, still have doubts. Notwithstanding enjoying many aspects of their working lives in supported employment, some employees face difficulties in developing interpersonal relationships in the workplace and achieving much better control of their own lives than is often assumed to result from having a job. The findings also suggest that stability in the political, economic and social environment facilitate the development of better policy in this complex area. Commitment from the company is vitally important to guarantee the success of the scheme. The existence of international policy frameworks are also helpful and cross-country collaboration has been tremendously beneficial, in particular that between Malaysian institutions and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Further development of policy and practice is required, especially in enriching the understanding of disability issues among most government officials, managers and NGOs coordinators, taking greater account of the research evidence that points to the limited awareness of and specific knowledge about disability issues, particularly for persons with learning difficulties and their employability. The voices and views of persons with learning difficulties should also be better acknowledged in setting priorities for disability-related reform. Finally, in order to sustain and develop supported employment more effectively, there is a fundamental need to upgrade the education and training system for this group as well as to intensify collaboration between government departments.

No description available.

Understanding the opportunity identification process represents a core entrepreneurship domain research focus. Many studies focusing on traditional firm performance outcomes neglect the entrepreneurial human and social capital drivers that are linked to opportunity identification. Research on Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) has explored different dynamics associated with the formation of firms emanating from HEIs (e.g. from the perspective of the individual firm; by exploring support and influence offered by the parent organisation; and through analysis of the spinout process). The contribution from the individual entrepreneur in identifying an opportunity for commercialisation has not been fully explored. This study looks at how academic entrepreneurs from HEIs and non-academic entrepreneurs, from the same industrial sector, identify opportunities and accumulate resources for commercialisation during the formation of life-science firms in a geographical life-science cluster in Scotland. Entrepreneurship, studied from a human and social capital perspective, identifies how lead entrepreneurs and other team members use their individual and accumulated experiences to leverage resources. The Resource-Based View (RBV), traditionally used to examine the link between firms’ internal characteristics and competitive advantage, is extended to explore entrepreneurial behaviour during opportunity identification. Emerging themes from extant literature identify entrepreneurial team formation and the external environment as potential resource pools which aid the formation of firms. Using a process-based, case-study research approach, entrepreneurs and team members were interviewed to gather information about the identification of life-science opportunities. A lead entrepreneur’s general human capital, in the form of educational achievement, was found to be a key factor shaping the opportunity identification process. Further, a specific entrepreneurial and scientific human capital was leveraged to circumvent resource barriers. Social capital also facilitated the identification and leverage of scarce resources. Lead entrepreneurs with narrower resource profiles selected a resource munificent sponsored environment to gain access to additional resources. However, a dynamic, yet unreported in empirical research, was revealed from the data. Over time, lead academic entrepreneurs were encouraged to exit sponsored environments to enhance their independence whilst industry entrepreneurs generally sought sponsored environments for physical resources. Theory building ensued during the process of gathering data and analysing the data through comparison and iterating between existing theories.

Homo economicus has dominated mainstream Economics during the last century. One of the main assumptions of this model is that humans maximise their own utility functions. In other words, homo oeconomicus, before taking action, considers the consequences on their own future interests, which are generally assumed to be monetary. This thesis provides experimental results showing that human behaviour often differs from that of homo oeconomicus, particularly in environments where trust and reciprocity are salient concerns. To be precise, this dissertation analyses the employment relationship, focusing particularly on the importance of trust and the role of direct reciprocity in the relationship between managers and workers. Reciprocity is an important contract enforcement device in the presence of incomplete labour contracts. By reciprocity between employer and employee, what is meant is a predisposition, within the institutional context of defined employment tasks, to cooperate with the other party even at personal cost, and a willingness to punish the other party if they violate cooperative norms, even when punishment is costly to the individual. The original contribution of this thesis goes beyond this result and shows the impact of informal employment rules on reciprocity. In particular, it uses experimental methods to identify two distinct governance patterns for employment relationships: the rigid governance structure and the flexible governance structure. The former is characterised by task-centred rules and defines the boundaries of jobs in a much more specific way than the latter, which is characterised by function-centred rules, and gives rise to a more flexible and discretionary model of employment relationships. The most important original experimental result of this thesis is that rigid governance characterised by taskcentred rules and low reciprocity is better suited to one-shot transactions, whereas flexible governance characterised by function-centred rules and a high level of reciprocity is better suited to repeated transactions.

In my thesis I investigate the causes and the effects of the allocation of workers into occupations, sectors, and locations. My analysis is substantially aided by the availability of new data on workers’ talents (or skills). The first chapter of the thesis exploits the fact that workers choose occupations according to their talents in order to study the effects on wages of the declining demand for manufacturing and clerical occupations. This is done by relating the occupational choices and the wages associated with particular talents over two representative cohorts of young workers in the United States between the late 1980s and the late 2000s. The second chapter, which is conjoint work, analyses the effect of an inflow of talent on productivity and output in the academic sector. We exploit the countercyclical relative attractiveness of academia as an employer over the business cycle to study periods of high (recessions) and low (booms) inflow of talent into that sector. Finally, the third chapter shows that government policy in the form of commuting tax breaks has substantial effects on the allocation of workers into jobs and residences. In particular, I exploit two reductions of tax breaks for commuting in 2003/4 and 2006/7 in Germany to estimate commuting costs’ effects on workers’ decisions to change the location of their job and/or their house.

Many organisations invest a considerable amount of capital and resources, implementing new techniques to improve their operating performance. Many approaches and techniques are available. New fashionable methods tend to displace older approaches, which may still have value. An effective strategy for selecting and implementing improvement initiatives is an important issue to ensure stakeholder satisfaction. This research aims to investigate quality management and continuous improvement practices, study and analyse several approaches leading to continuous improvement (CI), then construct a framework to assist senior management teams, by providing a decision aid for selecting improvement initiatives. Six key improvement approaches including Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, ISO9001, Business Process Reengineer (BPR), Lean production (Lean), Business Excellence framework (BE) were selected as the focus in this study. The research was carried out in three phases. Phase One established a conceptual background for the adoption of CI initiatives based on qualitative and quantitative studies of the literature. It described the two decision criteria of fashion setting and pay-offs. Phase Two provided empirical studies of the Quality Management (QM) approaches adopted in three case companies in Thailand. Different decision criteria for the selection of CI approaches were identified from these case studies, together with suggestions from fourteen quality experts and two additional case companies. In-depth analyses of each case study plus interviews with quality experts provided a context and guidance in development of the decision-aid framework for selecting CI approaches. Then in Phase Three the decision-aid framework was proposed, verified, and refined in testing with a multinational case company of four different plants in the Asia Pacific region and two groups of Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) using action research and assessment questionnaires. The primary outcome of this research is a decision-aid for selecting CI approaches, which demonstrated high utility in practice. The main contributions of this research are a decision-aid for selecting CI initiatives, which was developed and tested, and a number of advancements to the theory of QM and CI, the theory of management fashion, and the application of operations strategy in the QM context.