The theme of this research is the conservation of open dry-deciduous forest areas of West Bengal, India, through the socio-economic progress of forest dwellers. The use of Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) is manifold in the livelihood of this area. Systematic and sustainable harvesting of NTFPs could improve the standard of living of forest dwellers and play an important role in the conservation of forest ecosystems. The research was conducted in Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapur districts, in the south-western part of West Bengal, India. Firewood is the main source of fuel for the forest fringe dwellers of these three districts. Due to the high demand firewood harvesting is an important occupation for a large number of forest communities. The incessant collection of firewood is adversely affecting forest cover and the type and quality of plant species. In this circumstance, sustainable and systematic harvesting of NTFPs can play a potential role in creating job opportunities for forest dwellers. The enhancement of organised NTFP marketing channels could improve the economy and thus reduce the major dependence on firewood. Therefore, the aim of the thesis is to examine NTFPs-based economic development of forest fringe dwellers and to protect the forest cover. The thesis starts with a brief introduction to NTFPs and its present importance in forest livelihoods in India (with reference to West Bengal) and in international context, highlighting work by geographers, forest researchers, economists and sociologists who are becoming more interested on NTFPs and forest livelihoods from their respective disciplinary perspectives. To have an idea about NTFPs based forest livelihood of West Bengal, it is necessary to study the geo-physical features of the State and the study area. This will reveal the reasons why this area has been selected for this research. A variety of complementary sources and methodologies were used for the collection and analysis of data and information. Detailed archival research at the British Library, London provides insight into the pre-colonial and colonial NTFP-based forest livelihoods of the Presidency of Bengal. An exploration of the socio-cultural characteristics of forest communities through interviews and surveys helped to reveal the use and importance of NTFPs. After collection of NTFPs, it is necessary to store those products for gradation and value-addition. The research reveals that the organised markets are quite away from forest villages. Therefore, the knowledge of systematic and sustainable collection and storage of NTFPs needs to be enhanced at the grassroots level. After the collection and processing of NTFPs, the most important thing is marketing. Through the organised marketing system, forest dwellers can earn more money selling the same amount of products. It was discovered that a large number of intermediaries are involved in the NTFPs business and these intermediaries often try to purchase NTFPs from actual collectors at a very low price and then sell them at a high price. The reasons for the presence of middlemen and how the formal marketing channels can be stronger than the present informal channels were all revealed to be important issues which bolster the formal marketing channels, in which actual collectors might earn reasonable price for their collected NTFPs. It is argued that the efficient and sustainable harvesting of NTFPs can promote opportunities for marginal forest dwellers of these three districts. The increasing production of value-added products from different NTFPs can improve the economic status of these forest dwellers and will reduce rampant demolition of forest resources. The socio-economic improvement can also shift forest dwellers to other professions, which will reduce the dependency on forestry and subsequently it will help to promote the dry-deciduous forest ecology. Therefore, the research begins with an investigation of historical perspective of human-forest interactions in the Presidency of Bengal and subsequently explores the contemporary forest-based livelihoods of the socio-economically deprived forest fringe dwellers in the dry-deciduous forest areas of West Bengal. The research draws on interdisciplinary areas including historical geography with reference of indigenous knowledge regarding forest products, development geography of the forest-based livelihoods and economic geography of the systematic and sustainable harvesting of NTFPs for the enhancement of formal marketing channels. The study demonstrates that there is a need for intensive research at the grassroots level that will address all the aspects of NTFPs and forest livelihoods, before devising any precise NTFP policy to improve the status of forest livelihoods through the sustainable harvesting of forest products.

This thesis presents an analysis of how one UK Regional Development Agency (RDA) used scenario planning in its construction of the region’s Regional Economic Strategy (RES). Strategists are broadly defined to include those within the RDA charged with developing and enacting a consultative strategy making process, the consultants engaged to provide advice and expertise to ensure workshops were conducted effectively, and, individuals representing stakeholder organizations that attended these workshops and responded to written consultations. Four scenarios depicting the region in the year 2020 were produced, which were subsequently presented as an evidence-base for the strategy process. A draft RES was created and issued for consultation. Previous RES development processes had been criticized for their lack of consultation, in this iteration strategists skilfully utilized a recognized strategy making practice as a means of responding to this. The scenario planning approach they adopted bore little resemblance to to the sanitised and context-free recipes commonly presented in the strategy textbooks. The research is a reflective, longitudinal study with data drawn from forty-six semi-structured interviews producing an authentic rich description that illustrates how actors enacted a strategizing process in the complex environment of the UK public sector. The analysis highlights how the strategists were influenced by sometimes conflicting desires and aspirations, and that to reconcile these and ensure deadlines were met inductive, interpretive and subjective acts were required. This analysis presents strategists as bricoleurs, with the documents and draft strategies produced being socially situated co-constructions emerging from negotiated, temporally-bound, power-laden and politically-infused interactions.

The objective of this thesis is to identify various determinants of human capital development among Canadian youth. Three mediating agents are examined: parents, schools, and government. Considerable attention is paid throughout to identifying causal relationships with empirical data. The first chapter introduces the thesis by discussing its main goals, as well as the importance of the topic. This chapter also summarizes each of the following substantive chapters. I explore the relationship between family size and various components of the child quality production function in the second chapter. The findings suggest that larger families lead to reduced parental investments in children. Despite this, standardized test scores do not decline with family size. Three possible reasons for this puzzle are explored. In the third chapter, I estimate the relationship between fertility and the allocation of paid and unpaid labour among couples. Results indicate that additional children lead to a reduction in paid hours and to an even larger increase in unpaid hours among mothers. Additional children are not related to paternal paid hours, although fathers spend slightly more time performing unpaid childcare. In the fourth chapter, I estimate the impact of schooling on academic performance in high school. Additional schooling is associated with significant improvements in reading, mathematics, and science performance, but it confers the same benefits in each area to students across the conditional distribution of academic performance, as well as to both sexes and to students from high and low income families. I examine the relationship between prospective student debt load and postsecondary attendance in the fifth chapter. The results indicate that reduced prospective debt load raise university enrolment only among students facing lower net returns to attending. The final chapter summarizes the findings, highlights the contributions to the literature, discusses policy implications, and sets forth directions for future research.

The goal of this dissertation is to understand what supply chain quality risk management (SCQRM) is and how SCQRM can help firms improve product quality and firm performance. This dissertation attempts to reveal and understand the SCQRM practices in order to provide new insights in dealing with supply chain quality risk. Thus, this dissertation aims to address three research questions: RQI) What should SCQRM entail in order to reduce the risk to the quality of products being handled along the supply chain? RQ2) What would a valid measurement scale of SCQRM entail? RQ3) What is the impact of SCQRM on product quality and firm's performance? In this research, a comprehensive SCQRM framework is proposed. SCQRM is conceptualised as a multidimensional, second-order construct that is represented by a system of four interrelated and complementary dimensions: risk shifting, risk sharing, risk avoidance, and risk remedy. These four SCQRM dimensions are subsequently examined in the conceptual model in relation to performance, and three key approaches are adopted: (a) statistical analysis to validate the measurement instrument of SCQRM; (b) measurement model analysis technique to investigate multi-dimensionality of SCQRM; (c) structural model building technique to examine the relationships between SCQRM dimensions and performance. In such, quantitative analysis techniques, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM), are adopted to analyse survey data from 289 companies. Three contributions to knowledge are made in advancing the literature of SCQRM. Firstly, this study reports a 7-stage procedure for developing a reliable and valid measure of SCQRM. Secondly, the measure of SCQRM is found to be a multidimensional construct consisting of four unique dimensions. Thirdly, this study examines the significant positive effect of the complementarity system of SCQRM on product quality and on firm performances. Moreover, the findings imply that a successful SCQRM results from building a complementarity power in risk management resources and routines. The multiple manifestations of the four SCQRM dimensions are all driven by a cohesive, yet unobserved synergy, which also forms one of the competences of the firm. Moreover, the managerial implication suggests that complementary benefits arise from the adoption of a more holistic approach to the management of supply chain quality risk at the firm-level.

During the last two decades, ISO 9000 standards have become one of the most important management approaches in the world. Currently, the standards are used by more than one million companies in more than 170 countries. ISO 9001 audits are the most widely used performance measurement (PM) method to assess ISO 9001 quality management systems (QMS). However, in recent years the effectiveness of ISO 9001 quality auditing has been questioned for: (1) only focusing on compliance; (2) failing to detect problems in products and processes; (3) failing to predict QMS failures; and (4) failing to provide added value to organisations. To overcome these problems, two main conversations have taken place in the literature. The first advocates changing the current compliance focus of auditing for a performance oriented one, to promote improvements in business processes and the QMS. The second theme seeks to develop different methods, guidelines, tools and techniques to improve auditing practice. In order to generate a change of focus from compliance towards improvement, some recent research has also advocated incorporating concepts and techniques from the PM field into the ISO 9000 world. However, there have been no substantial previous attempts to provide internal quality auditing with a performance focus, which was the aim of this research. Hence, this thesis intends to establish how ISO 9001:2008 certified organisations can better measure their QMS performance using internal audits. In order to provide answers to this question, an empirical study using mixed methods research was conducted. Firstly, the current state of the art of the ISO 9001:2008 internal auditing process was determined using a mixed methods study, including two surveys of 272 ISO 9001 experts and 25 interviews. This allowed the identification of the current problems that ISO 9001 certified organisations face when conducting audits, as well as the impacts on the performance of the QMS due to deficient internal auditing. Secondly, using the statistical technique of path analysis, a model identifying the relationships between internal audit problems and their impacts on QMS performance was developed. The model indicated that an intricate network of individual and organisational deficits link auditing and QMS performance. Finally, ‘Audit+’ a detailed and comprehensive procedure for conducting ISO 9001:2008 internal audits with a focus on the performance of the QMS was developed. The procedure was thoroughly tested and validated by a further mixed methods study, including three in-depth case studies and a survey of 174 ISO 9001 auditors. Although some minor changes were recommended, the results of the Audit+ validation were encouraging, showing that PM approaches can be successfully incorporated into the ISO 9001 world, to help organisations to better measure their QMS performance.

Past research on organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs) has often prescribed to a number of preconceived assumptions predominately focused on the positive aspects of OCB performance. Using a sequential mixed-method approach, this thesis tests some of these assumptions considering whether researchers, organisations and other stakeholder should subscribe to the notion that OCBs are always positive. Specifically the thesis examines how OCBs are conceptualised by the employees who experience them in their organisational lives and the extent that culture plays in performance and outcomes of OCB. Study one interviewed five British and five Asian participants on their experiences and conceptualisation of OCBs. The interviews were analysed using the Grounded Theory approach which allowed two main theories to emerge from the data. Firstly, congruence or incongruence of employee and supervisor perceptions of OCB as in or extra role effects the motivation, performance and outcomes. Secondly, employees perform impression management motivated OCBs to facilitate the obtainment of their goals. In addition, cultural differences between the responses of the British and Asian participants were found, suggesting a more complex cultural relationship. Based on these findings, the second study presented OCB and impression management scenarios to 64 British participants and 70 Indonesian participants. The results of this study found that participants were able to distinguish between OCB and impression management behaviours. In addition, the perception of these behaviours as OCB or impression management affected the outcome of the behaviours. British participants' ratings of the effect of OCB and impression management behaviours were found to be more distinct than their Indonesian counterparts, suggesting that Indonesian employees may be more accepting of their co-workers performance of impression management behaviours. The final study examined the relationship between OCB motives, performance and outcomes of OCB performance by 141 Indonesian employees. Results showed that prosocial motives predicted the performance of affiliative and challenging behaviours; however other OCB motives did not predict OCB performance. In addition, affiliative and challenging behaviours predicted positive outcomes for employees, while compulsory citizenship behaviours were associated with negative outcomes. Collectivists and individualists were found to react in converse manners to the performance of affiliative and challenging behaviours. The findings of this thesis found some support for the basic assumptions of OCBs; however, the findings also found contradictions to the assumptions, as well as identifying cultural differences in the conceptualisation, performance and outcomes to OCB performance.

This thesis tries to establish a functional relationship between the supply and supply price of labour, product-mix and choice of technology in British agriculture during the period 1700-1870. The desiderata, increased production and lower unit production costs were in many respects incompatible with those of full-employment and greater social welfare. Historians have been primarily concerned with just one aspect of this problem, namely structural unemployment during the winter months. This is to ignore that the chief limiting factor on increased production may often have been the capacity of the labour force during the summer work-bottlenecks. This thesis argues that over a large part of the proto-industrial period (1790-1870), British agriculture was afflicted by sometimes very serious labour shortages in the summer work peaks. It goes on to a detailed case-study of labour supply and technological change in the corn harvest, the farm operation which historically has always created the exceptional demand for labour, and in which labour shortages were soonest likely to develop. It demonstrates that initially, at least, and for some time after 1851, when reaping machinery became available, the majority of farmers obtained their labour and labour cost-savings not through mechanization but by a more intensive use of labour (the more thorough exploitation of child and female labour, greater dependence on migrant harvesters and the introduction of piecework), and, when the supply of labour became inelastic, by the 'intermediate technology’ of improved hand tools, in particular the substitution of the faster-working scythe and heavy hook for the traditional sickle and reap hook. The advantages of this strategy were that it conserved capital, that it did not disrupt other work schedules, and perhaps most important, that it averted unemployment over what for the majority of farm labourers and their families was the key earnings period of the year. It met the requirements for a technology which was discontinuous enough to guarantee production and flexible enough to guarantee employment. The conclusion is that there is a phase of economic development in which factor proportions render a scythe economically and socially more useful than a reaping machine.

This thesis examines the development and implementation of Housing Action Trust (HAT) policy, with a particular emphasis on the theme of choice. When first announced, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Nick Ridley, argued that HATs would form the ‘cutting edge’ of the Government's urban regenerationin itiatives. In practice, as only six HATs were ever established, they became something much more marginal and experimental. HAT policy therefore represents a curious episode in the development of housing policy in England. The 1980s Conservative Government's political ideology had been particularly influenced by the New Right and their critique of the welfare state, which inter alia called for the removal of the local authority monopoly in the rented housing sector through the demunicipalisation of local authority housing. The first policy instrument to demunicipalise council housing was a statutory right-to-buy (RTB) for council tenants introduced in 1980. During the late 1980s, three further exit mechanisms were introduced: Tenants' Choice, HATs and voluntary transfers. Proposals for HATs were met with fierce opposition from the Labour party, local authorities and tenants. None of the first six areas intended to be designated as HATs were implemented. In March 1991, however, the first successful HAT ballot occurred in Hull, followed by a second in the London Borough of Waltham Forest in July 1991 and a third in Liverpool in August, 1992. In total six HATs were established. Chapter Two outlines the research agenda. Chapter Three discusses the major developments in housing policy during the 1980s. Building on Chapters One and Three, Chapter Four focuses specifically on HAT policy. Chapters Five to Seven examine HAT practice, with each Chapter focusing on one of the first three HATs. Chapter Eight draws conclusions.

The 1990s witnessed an increased interest in issues of governance and accountability in U.K. companies. In the wake of a series of governance reports (e.g. Cadbury, 1992; Greenbury, 1995; Hampel, 1998), U.K. companies have significantly altered their governance characteristics. The objective of this thesis is to examine the utilisation of governance mechanisms by U.K. companies immediately prior to the beginning of this governance revolution. My first objective is to ascertain the extent to which board composition and leadership, managerial ownership and external shareholder control were substitutes or complements in the overall governance strategies employed by large quoted companies at the beginning of the 1990s. My second objective is to examine the relationship between internal and external governance mechanisms. This is accomplished in two ways. First, I investigate the internal governance characteristics of takeover targets and a matched sample of non-targets to ascertain the influence of internal governance characteristics at various stages of the takeover process. The motivation for this investigation is a perception in the governance literature that takeovers represent a governance mechanism of last resort exercised only when internal governance structures are ineffective in aligning the interests of managers and shareholders. Second, I examine the governance characteristics of mutual and proprietary insurance companies. In mutual insurance companies, the functions of owner and policyholder are merged which eliminates the prospect of governance either through takeovers or through the ownership of substantial proportion of equity. The absence of these two governance mechanisms suggests that mutual insurers may place greater reliance on internal governance such as more intensive monitoring by the board of directors. In the case of large quoted companies, I find a significant substitution between the monitoring potential of both external and internal ownership and the utilisation of non-executive directors. I also find that companies with greater nonexecutive representation on their boards are more likely to acquire the complementary monitoring of directors' and officers' insurance and demand more extensive auditing. Managerial ownership is the dominant influence on the takeover process. Hostile and unsuccessful bids are associated with lower levels of managerial ownership while friendly and successful bids are associated with high ownership levels. I also find some evidence that hostile targets possess less independent boards compared to a matched sample of non-targets. In the case of insurance companies, I find that mutuals place greater emphasis on non-executive directors than their proprietary counterparts. Overall, my empirical analysis suggests that, at the beginning of the 1990s, U.K. companies emphasised different governance mechanisms depending on the specific monitoring problems they faced.

In this thesis, we endeavour to explore the characteristics and the role of exceptionally innovative small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) within the UK system of innovation. The focus is placed on 'serial' and 'persistent' innovators, defined as independent companies with an unusually high frequency of innovation over time. The aim of the thesis is to identify such companies and analyse those factors, both internal and external to the enterprise, which influence such a sustained stream of innovation within SMEs. Persistence in innovation is an important element within the discussion on the properties of the patterns of innovative activities and industry dynamics. In this thesis, we propose three main empirical studies which look at rather unexplored areas in the literature on persistent innovation, focusing on the presence and the specific characteristics of small persistent and serial innovators and the role of cumulated knowledge capabilities in explaining the presence and the extent of such phenomenon. In particular, we follow a multidimensional approach, investigating the related and yet different phenomena of persistent and serial innovation through different perspectives built upon empirical evidence from patent data as well as innovation surveys. Our intended contribution to the literature is centred around the presence of persistent and serial innovation across small companies, the role played by elements internal and external to the enterprise in sustaining their innovation activity and, finally, the extent and the determinants of technological diversification across small serial innovators. Additionally, we explore differences and similarities across firm size. The first study explores the effect that specific patterns of innovative activity and firm-specific technology characteristics exert on the rate of innovation of serial innovators. Then, it offers a comparative perspective observing the differences between small and large serial innovators. In particular, we test the hypothesis that the specific qualities of cumulativeness, described in terms of dynamic economies of scale and dynamic increasing returns, play a central role in defining the differences across firm size. Analysing patent counts and citation-weighted patent counts with a negative binomial GEE model, this study provides evidence that serial small innovators benefit from technological regimes characterized by patterns of creative accumulation and from combinative capabilities based on accumulated internal knowledge competencies as sources of both technological learning and creation. The second study investigates the presence and the determinants of technological diversification across small serial innovators. After presenting stylised facts on the relationship between serial innovators and technological diversification, we focus on the elements that may bring small innovative firms to engage in the costly process of technological diversification, analysing the trade-off that is likely to take place between the need to explore new technological opportunities and the significant element of path dependency delineated by the specific core technological competencies that usually characterise small innovative companies. Using a fractional response model for panel data estimated within a GEE framework, we find that increasing technological opportunities present an inverted U relationship with diversification, while technological trajectories defined by coherence in both technological search and core competencies support specialization. The third study addresses the question of whether there is persistence in innovative activities across UK companies. In particular, we analyse the presence of persistent innovation through a panel dataset obtained from three successive rounds of the UK Innovation Survey, covering the period of time between the year 2002 and the year 2008. Explicitly accounting for unobserved firm heterogeneity, we provide evidence of persistence in innovation for both large and small companies. Moreover, our findings confirm that important interaction effects exist between the effect exerted by the presence of persistent innovation, in the form of dynamic increasing returns within the process of knowledge accumulation, and technological intensity inherent to firms' innovation activity, at least among small companies.