New information and communication technologies bring the enticing potential to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency of government administration and services. One theorised outcome of egovernment that has received little empirical attention is its ability to build citizens’ trust in government. This thesis contributes to this knowledge through a comparative study of the impacts of two Chilean e-services on citizens’ trust in the institutions of democratic government. This research traces the causal processes from the influence of the e-services on the trustworthiness of public sector institutions to how, for whom, and in what circumstances the e-services directly affect citizens’ trust in those institutions. The research approach draws from social realist assumptions and, in particular, the ontology offered by critical realism. This approach allows for the development of a novel e-government and institutional trust framework that integrates a wide range of trust theories from political science, sociology, psychology, and information systems. Extending the framework, the thesis proposes fifteen middle-range causal hypotheses that link e-services to institutional trustworthiness and citizens’ trust in those institutions. These hypotheses are then empirically grounded in casespecific hypotheses which are subsequently tested and refined through both a within-case analysis and cross-case comparison. Within limits, this study provides insight into the potentials and limits of e-government to improve the trustworthiness of the public sector. Furthermore, by adopting a street-level epistemological perspective of citizens’ interpretations and explanations of e-service interactions, the thesis contributes to the micro-level understanding of the interactions of eservices and citizens’ trust in public sector institutions. A central finding is the importance of self-interested concerns and direct user benefits in shaping perceptions and interpretations of the citizen-e-service interaction. The findings also provide empirical insight into the theoretical and practical importance of discerning between theories of how to build trustworthy institutions and trust in those institutions.

Towards the end of the 1990s, and in response to increasing global condemnation, the mining industry adopted sustainable development (SD) principles and standards through corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. This approach not only proposed a dramatic change in the operating practices of large mining houses, but also suggested a grand vision for the industry as a long term catalyser of local economic growth. This research now investigates the effect that mining enterprises which operate under these principles have on sub-national economic development. In doing so, it undertakes multiple case-study analysis, focussing on a single firm, Rio Tinto, and covers three of its subsidiary companies at various stages of development. Consistent with claims by mining advocates, this work confirms the frequently striking importance that large mines have for sub-national economies. However, this investigation disagrees with the emphasis typically attributed to each stream of benefits and brings attention back to the use that mining cash flows are put to. More generally, the study argues that the potential for large mining firms to trigger endogenous growth has been underestimated. On the one hand, these enterprises can contribute distinctly to local capital accumulation; on the other, under certain circumstances, they can also help sustain increases in local productivity endogenously. Indeed; while local preconditions will determine socioeconomic outcomes to a significant degree, mining companies can play a critical part in economic planning and the building of innovative institutions, which could, in turn, help increase the underlying local rate of technological absorption, human capital and overall capacity for economic governance. This entails a drastic (and controversial) change from the role previously assumed by companies. Yet, this study also concludes that, in some other cases, SD has promoted unattainable economic expectations. In these cases, minimising the local impact of mining would be a more advisable economic strategy.

Since the end of the 1990s, Berlin’s housing has been described by a transformation from state- to market-led provision, creating more socially and spatially segregated neighbourhoods. The underlying processes exacerbating and reproducing these inequalities have however rarely been addressed. This thesis investigates the question how the transformation of Berlin’s mode of housing provision generated particular forms of social and spatial inequalities. It begins from a state-focused approach to regulation theory and the related debate on the contemporary form of urban governance of the entrepreneurial city. The thesis identifies three transformation processes of Berlin’s mode of housing provision, which are informed by critical realist housing research. First, the privatisation of state-owned housing and the entrance of institutional investors; second, the reformation of the remaining state-owned housing companies and their adaptation to the government’s social and economic demands; and third, the abandonment of supplyside subsidies for the construction and renovation of housing. The analysis of these three processes exposes how regulation, production, and consumption mechanisms play out under particular spatial and temporal circumstances, creating social and spatial inequalities. A particular emphasis lies on the production mechanisms defined through the diverging strategies of different institutional investors and state-owned housing companies. The thesis concludes with a reflection upon the benefits of a critical realist methodology for analysing state restructuring. It is argued that only through the application of a critical realist methodology, the strengths of the regulation theory’s conceptualisation of state transformation can fully be deployed. The thesis therefore goes beyond an affirmation of a more entrepreneurial mode of housing provision in Berlin, deploying a critical realist approach to reveal the underlying mechanisms of the particular mode of housing provision and its uneven consequences.

The academic debate about European cooperation on immigration has focused on big treaty negotiations, presented an undifferentiated picture of the subfields of immigration, and has only recently begun to make use of the abundant literature on national immigration policies. As a macrostructure, this study uses a bureaucratic politics framework to understand the preference formation of national governments on liberalising economic migration policies. This allows unpacking the process of preference formation and linking it to a number of causal factors, which, by influencing the cost and benefits distribution of the relevant actors – intra-ministerial actors, employer associations, trade unions, and other sub-state actors – shape the position of the government. The influence of the causal factors is underpinned by different theories derived from the literatures on Europeanisation, immigration policy-making, and foreign policy. Germany is used as a longitudinal case study with four cases within it, as it has undergone a U-turn in a way no other relevant Member State has, from a keen supporter of EU involvement to being highly sceptical with regard to economic migration policies at the EU level. The empirical data is based on 43 open-ended interviews, archival research and newspaper analysis. The bureaucratic politics framework supplanted with the theoretical strands of domestic politics and foreign policy concerns provides a number of themes that can explain why and under what conditions a Member State supports liberalising economic migration policies at the EU level from 1957 until the Treaty of Lisbon. The thesis argues that if the European policy measure applies to a particular group of sending countries and the domestic salience of immigration is low, sending countries can lobby Member State governments to support EU-level liberalisation of immigration policies. The misfit between the existing national regulations for economic migration and European-level policies cannot be significant as otherwise the economic and political adaptation costs for actors involved are too high. A heated national debate on immigration is negatively related to governmental support for such measures as the political costs of support skyrocket. Conversely, if the decision-making process happens bureaucratically, this helps to attain governmental support as the political costs of doing so are kept minimal.

This thesis examines some characteristics of the interaction between innovation activity of firms, in particular R&D, and economic system. The first main chapter analyses a mechanism of interaction between R&D and market structure, in a horizontally differentiated market where firms invest to increase differentiation among varieties. R&D activity declines over time; prices, output and short-run profits of firms producing the differentiated product move towards the higher steadystate values, production of the non-differentiated good falls. The increasing specialization improves the overall utility of consumers. The comparison with the socially optimal solution shows that firms underinvest in R&D. The second main chapter evaluates the effectiveness of the incentives to development of innovations provided by the Italian Ministry for Economic Development through the Fund for Technological Innovation. We analyse the subsidies to firms supplied by the general and the special sections of this Fund, using a difference-in-differences framework and a regression discontinuity one. We find no hints of effect on investments, dimension, labour productivity, labour costs, financial structure and profitability. For the general section, the effect on assets is positive, suggesting that firms used the subsidy to finance current expenditures. The third main chapter examines the relationship between R&D and market value of firms. We find high heterogeneity in the coefficients of different US manufacturing sectors between 1975 and 1995; sometimes the effects of current R&D on market value are very small or negative. We develop a model with uncertain R&D, where we decompose market value in two components, due to the already concretized assets and to work-in-progress R&D. Risk aversion may cause different evaluations of these components: when investors are risk-averse and managers maximize the long-run firm value, the risk associated with work-in-progress R&D reduces the short-run firm value even if its expected long-run value grows.

Emanating from the mainstream accounting and managerial thinking, which hinges upon the “command and control” assumption, a firm’s Intellectual Capital (IC) is understood as an objective reality. Influenced by this understanding, advocates of the measuring paradigm attempt to posit IC under parsimonious conditions within a reporting system. This thesis contributes to an emerging critical trend that seeks to counterbalance the limitations of the measuring paradigm and explores the possibilities of constructing a learning paradigm. A series of high-level questions that confront both paradigms, including their ontological assumptions, methodological considerations, foci of practice, and criteria for ICinformation disclosure, are considered. Whilst the measuring paradigm prioritises the activities of assessing and reporting individual IC elements, a learning paradigm is concerned with nurturing a learning motive in IC practice for organisational change and innovation. The analysis of a learning paradigm draws on the works of three processphilosophers: Habermas, Vygotsky and Deleuze. This thesis engages with the case study of “InCaS”: a project combined IC research and practice, involving researchers and 25 SMEs from 5 European countries. Data were collected through qualitative survey and administrative documents, interviews, and group discussions over a 30-month-period. Thematic analysis and reconstructed stories analysis were applied where suitable. The findings reveal that a learning paradigm does not stand against the measuring paradigm, but transforms it by enabling a flowing process of IC in SMEs. This flowing process contributes to the generation and development of new knowledge, new practice, and a new sense of positive energy. Based on this, the thesis suggests that the future of IC practice should focus on “IC flow management”, i.e. activate a non-linear process of learning-by-reflection, learning-by-participation, and learning-by-affection. In doing so, IC would not be perceived as a lifeless commodity, but as a metaphor of life that accommodates different pathways to value.

Our concern is with control problems which arise in connection wi th a discrete time Markov chain model for a graded manpower system. In this model, the members of an organisation are classified into distinct classes. As time passes, they move from one class to another, or to the outside world, in a random way governed by fixed transition probabilities. The emphasis is, then, placed on examining means of reaching and then retaining the structure best adapted to the aims of the organisation, with the assumption that only the recruitment flows are subject to control. Attainability and maintainability have received a great deal of attention in recent years. However, much of the work has been concerned with deterministic analysis, in the sense that average values are used in place of random variables. We adopt, instead, a stochastic approach to the study of these forms of control. We present some of the problems encountered when evaluating probabilities related to the distribution of stock numbers at different steps and we give a detailed numerical comparison of different recruitment strategies. An iterative method is developed to compute exact values of the probabilities of attaining and maintaining a structure in one step. It is designed for the special but very important case of systems in which promotion is only possible to the next highest grade. Its efficiency makes possible the use of exact results in the comparison of the recruitment strategies, which was formerly accomplished by means of simulation techniques only. As to the comparison itself, it emerges that the strategy which, at each step, steers the system as far as possible towards the goal is superior to all deterministic strategies. Also, this strategy is shown to come close to providing the highest level of control that is possible.

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This research explores the reformed UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) as an institution addressing a changed world, and as an illustration of evolving global food security governance. The research sets out to answer the extent to which the CFS is realising its reform objectives and how it is positioning itself within a changing architecture of global food security governance. Informed by literature on global governance and embedded neoliberalism, the inquiry centres around three case studies – Civil Society Mechanism, Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests, and the Global Strategic Framework – which serve to highlight the operationalization of key reform objectives while simultaneously providing insight into broader policy processes and dynamics. Data was collected through document analysis, participant observation, and interviews. The resulting analysis provides clear evidence of the impact of enhanced participation on policy outcomes and concludes that the policy recommendations emerging from the CFS are amongst the most comprehensive and useful in terms of applicability and uptake at the national and regional level. The analysis also reveals that despite its methods, outcomes and mandate, the CFS is being systematically undermined by other actors seeking to maintain influence and sustain neoliberal hegemony across food security policies at the global level. The research contributes to global governance theory by describing the functioning of a mechanisms that can address democratic deficits in global governance while elucidating related opportunities and challenges. The research also contributes to scholarship on global food security policy by challenging the application of previous analyses to the contemporary reality. The research addresses limitations in global governance literature by mapping the complexity of social and political relations across sites of negotiation, contestation and compromise between actors. The policy implications derived from this thesis focus on the need to further problematize food security and for policies to target structural causes of food insecurity. Building on the experiences of the CFS, this thesis concludes that transparent, participatory mechanisms need to be created which acknowledge, and seek to rectify, existing imbalances in power relations in policy-making processes.

Broader transformations in the economy are linked to a changing spatial organisation for economic activity, particularly in industries imbued with a high creative content, although there are competing explanations regarding the nature of this logic. This thesis explores the ways in which space and place matter to the creative industries sector. In particular, it examines the logic guiding concentration in the centre as opposed to decentralisation to more peripheral sites within a transforming regional city negotiating its place in the knowledge economy. There has been a significant policy thrust from formerly industrial cities to build a share in this sector, often touted as a panacea for urban decline, but critical evidence regarding the possibilities for this is hard to find. The research employs a mixed methods approach, which is applied to the case study of Greater Manchester. The study firstly probes the spatial pattern of creative industry activity there and selected two sectors with a somewhat different distribution: advertising, and film and television. Contextual information is gathered from a range of documentary evidence. Semi-structured interviews with 28 firms and 18 policymakers and other stakeholders are used to probe the determinants affecting the decisions regarding firm location. Three dominant determinants of location were identified by the research: the availability and cost of space, place reputation and transport connectivity. The empirical findings further suggested that there were a set of firm characteristics guiding location choices relating to the size, profile, age and activities of the firms. It was found that the city centre still provided a considerable pull related to traditional agglomeration advantages, including access to skilled labour and strong transport connectivity, as well as a sense of place brand. Location outside the city centre was chiefly prompted by the cost and size of business premises or was made possible by the place reputation advantages not holding for more routine, less growth-orientated or locally-focused firms. The study also identified evidence of displacement and industrial gentrification and the recent regeneration of the city centre had exacerbated these processes. There was some divergence from the existing literature regarding the importance of proximity for knowledge sharing and spillovers, for which little evidence was found by the interviews.