Managers frequently deal with risk by considering uncertainty as an element of the decision problem over which they can exert control — for example, lobbyists trying to exert influence over regulators or managers trying to mitigate Operational Risks related to human processes. This perspective that the probabilities of uncertain events are at times ‘mutable’ — i.e. subject to one’s influence — has an important and previously under-appreciated role in decision-making under risk. The present research, structured as a series of three papers, addresses this gap between theory and practice on the topic of ‘control’ from a descriptive, theoretical and prescriptive perspective. The descriptive paper discusses a novel empirical test of the behavioural effect of ‘control’ on risk taking. The key finding that control does not always enhance risk taking but, instead, has a moderating effect on attitudes to risk, extends insights from related research. Strong preference for exerting control to eliminate uncertainty is also revealed. Affective and cognitive interpretations of the findings are offered and their correspondence with managerial attitudes to risk taking is discussed. The theoretical paper builds on methods in Decision Analysis and Philosophy, and develops a new probability revision rule for modelling control as interventions on uncertainties. This rule is shown to dramatically alleviate the judgmental burden of analysing multiple interventions. Foundational properties for probability revision rules for interventions, similar to the coherence criterion for Bayes rule, are also constructed and a proof that the proposed rule satisfies these properties is offered. In the prescriptive paper, a real world application of the probability revision rule is illustrated in the context of Operational Risk assessment, where several uncertainties are controllable (e.g. staff strikes). It is shown how this rule can be integrated with Operational Risk calculations to explicitly incorporate the effect of managerial mitigations on loss events, thus making a useful contribution to the field. In summary, this research explores the concept of ‘probability control’ as a way to manage risks in the context of Decision Sciences. It furthers our behavioural understanding of risk attitudes to better resonate with managerial perspectives on risk taking and extends the relevance of Decision Analysis methods to corporate risk management.

This research examines the rationale of geographic co-location of entrepreneurs who do business on internet platforms. Prior research has shown that entrepreneurs gain valuable synergy benefits from being embedded in industrial networks. Nevertheless, the advantages of geographic clustering when business is conducted via the internet are still to be understood. This research aims to understand how internet-based economic activity interacts with local social relations and structures, thus seeking to explain the phenomenon of industrial clustering of internet-enabled entrepreneurial activity. Guided by theories of relational and institutional embeddedness, we examine the way social relations are formed online, trace the rationale of local social relations while business is conducted online, and study the role of major institutional actors that support the economic activities of the entrepreneurs. Empirically, this thesis examines two regional clusters of Chinese microentrepreneurs who conduct their business on an e-commerce platform and form dynamic interpersonal ties with business partners and customers both online and offline. The method of ethnographic case study is adopted to gain in depth understanding of the ways various internet networking tools have been appropriated in business practice in these two cases and the ways local microentrepreneurs build up collaborative networks in geographic place as well as cyberspace. The study of Chinese micro-entrepreneurs reveals and substantiates the formation of a hybrid sociality, whereby economic exchange via the internet and business conducted by electronic tools are complemented by local social relations and actively supported by local government and the IT service corporation. This research also contributes to development policy considerations; it shows that regions that are usually unattractive to capital and knowledge/talent flows can gain economic development momentum by entangling the conduct of business on web platforms with local social institutions.

This thesis is composed of three stand-alone essays interlinked within the context of banking markets in sub-Saharan Africa. This research is motivated by the lack of comparative research on North-South and South-South foreign direct investment (FDI), especially on the service sector and on the African context, despite the rapid expansion of multinationals from developing and emerging countries over the last two decades. Theoretically, this thesis builds on strategy, corporate finance and organizational economics theories. The first chapter compares the financial performance of the foreign affiliates of global banks to that of regional African banks in sub-Saharan Africa over a 10-year period. The results suggest that affiliates of regional African banks are significantly less profitable (lower return on equity and higher cost income ratio) than those of global banks. Furthermore, the performance differentials are not strongly related to the quality and sectoral allocation of banks’ loan portfolio but to differences in their access to funding. The second chapter examines the benefits and drawbacks of being part of a large banking group by analyzing the flows of internal capital between foreign affiliates located in an emerging economy, South Africa, and their global headquarters. It provides evidence for a support motive to internal funding, as foreign affiliates receive on average more internal group funding when their solvency ratio declines. However, using the event of the East Asian Crisis, I show that foreign affiliates’ balance sheet are not immune to “reversal of fortune” when other members of their banking group need large amounts of internal capital to cushion capital losses, leading to abrupt reallocation of internal capital. Finally, using an instrument variable technique I find a positive impact of the volume of internal funding received by a foreign affiliate on its credit supply in the mortgage market. In the third chapter I examine how environmental and firm factors influence the organizational structure of multinational banks relying on survey data on commercial banks located in 14 sub-Saharan African countries. I find evidence of a positive and significant association between several indicators of environmental distance between host and home countries (institutional, economic and cultural distance) and centralization of operational processes inside multinationals. In addition, I find that lower quantity of “hard” information available on borrowers in the host markets and higher reliance on qualitative or “soft” information by bank managers is negatively and significantly associated with centralization.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the role interpersonal networks play in determining innovation outcomes, and the antecedents of individual behaviour in networks by “players” in the innovation game. These investigations—two qualitative studies and a detailed, highly developed conceptual framework — give rise to a number of propositions that may serve as a foundation for greater understanding and which make a range of novel contributions to the literature on networks and innovation management. Too little is understood about social networks and their impact on innovation. As the world of business continues its move away from bureaucratic hierarchies to projectified network organisations, from integrated monoliths to modular specialists, the importance of such an understanding grows. Innovation has always taken place in the context of embedded ties—its prospective nature does not normally sit well with a depersonalised, arms-length, market-based approach. Yet our understanding of the intersection of individuals’ and teams’ networks (and networking) with their ability to succeed in innovative action is limited. There are various trajectories within both the innovation management literature and the networks literature which take on the challenge, but often the theoretical roots on which they draw are planted in old forms of organisation and this limits the speed of their advance in delivering understanding of the new realities in bringing innovations to market. Hence, this thesis uses qualitative methods and conceptual models to propose new contributions to these fields. The principal contributions of this thesis are: • A new perspective and theoretical offering concerning how innovation teams can succeed, synthesising boundary-spanning with Burt’s models of brokerage, and Obstfeld’s tertius iungens. • A team- and leader-based model of the characteristics needed over the stages of business model innovation. • A fresh perspective on how agents (specifically venture capitalists) select and pursue networking strategies to “hunt” or “harvest” opportunities.

The concept of organizational culture has been an enduring managerial fad, with more recent studies highlighting the benefits of fun workplace cultures. This thesis presents the findings from a longitudinal ethnographic study of the I.T organization, WebCo; an organization that emphasizes its unitary culture as the central driver of its success. The author conducted two separate periods of ethnographic research and interviews in order to understand the managerial attempts at sustaining WebCo’s strong organizational culture that exhibited many elements of fun. The dynamics between employees and the on-going managerial attempts at sustaining normative forms of control are used to explore the manageability of organizational culture debate. Furthermore, this thesis comprehensively analyzes the interrelationship between organizational culture and structure. Through the longitudinal research design, this study explores the use of a range of introduced structural practices in order to sustain the organizational culture through a period of rapid growth in organizational members. The results of this study contradict any notion of unitary culture and indicate major fractures between different sub-cultures located within WebCo. The highlighted complexity of social relationships critiques the dominance of functional literature in the area of organizational culture and attention is drawn to the knowledgeable employees and their agentic power in circumventing normative forms of control. A further finding of this study is that the management of culture can be effective, but only when supported with other aspects of ‘good work’. The study concludes therefore, by noting how organizational culture can be managed, yet not as a distinct and separate activity.

The rise of China as an economic power has been accompanied by Chinese companies’ active engagement in international business. This study looks into two Chinese service suppliers, which are involved in international contracting with Japanese companies, and operate in both China and Japan. It examines how these service providers develop and implement their management systems in order to meet their international clients’ requirements, and how these management systems are experienced by the employees at workplaces. Taking a Critical Realist ontology (Bhaskar, 1975), and drawing on intensive observation and interviews in both China and Japan, this study develops a multi-level approach to understanding the management, organisation and employment practices in Chinese supply firms. This approach is based on the global value chain discussion (Gereffi, Humphrey, & Sturgeon, 2005) and the System-Society-Dominance-Corporate (SSDC) framework (Delbridge, Hauptmeier, & Sengupta, 2011; Smith & Meiksins, 1995). It locates the construction and development of management policies, practices and work relations in the global supply chains, while considering their institutional contexts at the international, national, local and corporate levels. It thus provides a holistic understanding of how SSDC effects are brought together in different supply chains and how they are manifested within the workplaces, as corporate actors respond to, struggle over and manage these supply chain relationships and the structural forces. This thesis contributes to existing studies on global suppliers in three key ways. First, it compares the supply firms in two different patterns of global supply chains (i.e. the market-based supply chain and the captive supply chain). In doing so, it is shown that the influence of clients is exerted in different ways under different governance structures and this leads to divergent consequences in terms of the management practices and employment relations in supply firms. Second, it extends the global value chain analysis of global supply firms by considering the social-institutional embeddedness of the supply firms. Third, it advances our understanding on the workplace dynamics in global supply firms, by focusing on the indeterminacy of labour power and the contested construction of workplace relations.

This study examines IS project trajectories in a Saudi organisation showing how the project is shaped and re-shaped in day-to-day activities. Three project features are adapted to characterise project phenomena: project complexity, embeddedness and project learning. Accordingly, the first objective is to investigate project complexities showing how they are dynamically changed due re-defining project properties of goals, methods, deadlines and team relations. The second objective is to understand the interactions between project members and external groups and individual from the surrounding context and how those interactions shape and re-shape local project context. The third objective is to analyse the challenges which bound project members’ knowledgeability. The research methodology incorporates a self-ethnography over twelve months of participation and observation study of three IS projects in a Saudi organisation. Structuration theory is used to guide the research philosophically and to offer an analytical perspective to understand collected data. Structuration theory is implemented to highlight the dynamic nature of project trajectories taking into consideration that project is not a result of an isolated local context or shaped only according to surrounding organisational procedures: rather project trajectories are results of a series of recursive interactions between the project’s local and surrounding contexts, where project member’s knowledgeability plays a role in informing actions. This research can be considered as a theoretical contribution to IS project management literature. This study is situated in new project management literature as distinct from dominant traditional project management prescriptions. This study suggests a view of the project phenomenon merging the three separate project features: project complexity, embeddedness and learning. On the methodological level, this study introduces the project phenomenon as an ethnographic object stressing its dynamic and social nature embedded in daily activities. Finally, on the context level, this study contributes towards compensating for the paucity of studies about the context of Saudi Arabia in project management and management studies in general.

This study examines the nature of knowledge creation and transfer in multinational companies and the configuration of the human resource management (HRM) system to sustain the relevant practices. It makes three contributions. Firstly, it argues that the nature of knowledge varies according to the organisation of work. Accordingly, it takes two functional activities, research and development (R&D) and marketing, and identifies the distinct processes of knowledge creation in each. Secondly, it also shows that the processes of knowledge transfer vary on the basis of project characteristics. Thirdly, it links debate on knowledge to debate on HRM and issues of ‘best practice’ or ‘best fit’. This research applies the best fit theory of HRM and the MNC knowledge transfer perspective to explain how and why the sets of HRM practices are configured. The basic premise is that the configurational approach of HRM systems based on different functional contexts is viable to MNC subsidiary settings. The perception of MNC employees confirms that HRM practices should be aligned internally with tasks and bundled to create better outcomes. Comparisons among tasks, work structures, or skill levels make a specific architecture of HRM practices internally consistent. Investigating the attributes of tasks and work structures is thus necessary for the understanding of HRM systems configured. Configurational fit related to knowledge processes has been explored mostly through qualitative approaches. This research employs quantitative approaches as well as a qualitative method to look into how, within the functional areas of R&D and marketing, knowledge is generated and transferred. These processes can be shaped by the industry context as well as the function. The research design thus takes two industries, ICT and automobiles, and looks at the functions within each. This produces a 2x2 research design. The subsidiaries of two Korean firms in each cell, that is eight subsidiaries in total, were studied through 35 interviews. These interviews shaped the design of a questionnaire that generated 558 responses from R&D and marketing employees in these eight subsidiaries plus eighteen others. In relation to knowledge creation, the study finds that there are greater complexity and interdependence in R&D than in marketing. This is true in both sectors. In relation to transfer, marketing subsidiaries are more embedded in their local context than their R&D counterparts are because marketing is directed at specific national markets while R&D is more related to the development of new products across the MNC as a whole. Factors such as cooperative work structures, work reporting types, information dependence, and decision autonomy in a subsidiary or the relationship with the parent company are identified as critical factors that distinguish R&D from marketing in knowledge processes. They bring about distinctive attributes such as procedural ambiguity, which requires a specific focus to support knowledge processes through the internal alignment of HRM. For example, the nature of performance incentives and the role of training differ between R&D and marketing subsidiaries.

The concept of employer branding has recently gained prominence due to its involvement in talent management, reputation and the engagement agendas of organizations. This has been the result of emerging factors in the global economy, including rapid globalization, a growing skills gap (ageing population and baby boomers), global recession, intense global competition, skills shortages and the resulting talent wars. It is also believed that employer branding is an important ‘tool in the box’ for addressing the dual International Strategic Human Resource Management (ISHRM) problems of global integration and local responsiveness in complex organizations that operate globally but have to simultaneously respond to local needs. However, it is argued that employer branding’s ability to deal with the integration-responsiveness problem depends upon its authenticity; the reflection of the authentic voice of local employees in the employer brands through involving them in strategizing. In this thesis, I draw on signaling theory to help understand these problems and the limitations of current employer branding research, which has to date focused on signals transmitted from employers in the corporate headquarters to employees in the local subsidiaries (mainly top management level) but has significantly ignored the voice of employees at the local level by ignoring the ‘counter-signals’ flowing back from local employees. This provides a significant gap in the extant literature on employer branding, which I attempt to fill. In doing so, my study contributes to signaling theory in three directions: by examining how negative signals impact the signaling environment; how feedback-seeking behaviour improves the signaling process; and how signal precedence impacts receiver’s interpretation. Exploring these gaps shall help in developing new insights in signaling theory research. Since most of the employer branding literature has been developed in the West, it is relatively context-bound. Much has been written about employer branding in the SHRM literature but there is little empirical evidence concerning its relevance to global companies for dealing with the integration-responsiveness problem or its need and importance for the under-developed economies, outside of the Anglo-Saxon world. This also leaves an important gap that this study seeks to fill. To do this, the study explores the influences of different context levels upon employer branding change programs in the context of Pakistani economy, which is currently passing through its developing phase. Therefore, conducting this study in the Pakistani context has aided in examining the issue from the perspective of a developing country, which has been stressed by scholars of Strategic and International HRM as a gap that needs to be filled. In this way, the study has made several important contributions at both, theoretical and contextual levels. A case study research design was adopted comprising of qualitative semi-structured and focus group interviews and analysis of relevant company documents. These were conducted in subsidiaries of three foreign multinationals with senior managers and employees at different hierarchical levels in order to gain rich insight into the application and practice of employer branding and to explore its potential role in addressing the integration-responsiveness problem. The signaling process within each firm was also deeply examined in order to further explore the significance of signaling theory in employer branding research. My findings have significant implications for theory and practice of employer branding. They suggest that ‘authentic’ employer brands that respond to the local needs can play a crucial role in addressing the integration-responsiveness problem through adopting strategy-as-practice approach. It was also revealed that the success of this process largely depends upon the influences of different contextual factors and the efficiency and effectiveness of the signaling process; the more effective and efficient the signaling process is, the more authentic is the resulting employer brand. The study also finds that there is little possibility of designing a ‘one size fits all’ approach to employer branding, which is able to address the integration-responsiveness problem. Multinationals operate in different environments possessing their own unique characteristics and fundamental differences from others. Thus, as in most studies, context matters, and in a Muslim country such as Pakistan, context matters more due to factors such as strict religion and unique culture, which is not widely prevalent in the Western developed economies.

This thesis is about how insider and outsider CEOs use language to accomplish strategic change. It argues that language matters to strategy. It also argues that research and theory have neglected language. It finds support from the literature and empirical evidence. Data came from CEO communication in two large US corporations over twenty-five years. The study explores CEO use of language, including the textual production, dissemination, and consumption of discourse, to investigate mechanisms for legitimating authority discourse, transforming organizational and individual identities and renegotiating the prevailing strategic narratives. It makes several original contributions to the field of strategic management research, particularly in the areas of change and leadership. It contributes to the emerging micro focus on strategy as actions and as process – the study of 'strategy as practice'. First, it reveals strategy narratives, how they change over time and in different contexts. It shows discourse is effective at tracking patterns and mechanisms of strategic change. It throws detailed empirical light on discourse as a vehicle for change. It does this in a novel way contributing new inductively derived categories and concepts. Second, it offers a new way of conceptualizing the role of CEO in the constitution of strategy as maker of discursive bets in the form of various language games. These games play out internally and externally. They shape organizational outcomes – creating, sustaining or slowing change. Third, it sets out a discursive-recursive model to explain how CEO discourse leads to strategic action or inaction. It describes different characteristics of this model with empirical examples. Fourth, most importantly it examined the role of insider and outsider CEOs in strategic change. It contributed specific new understanding of how success is accomplished. It shows how and why certain language games work. It contributes new concepts, relationships, and theory.