Recent strategy formation process literature has claimed organisations increasingly have to adjust dynamically their characteristics to the requirements of the environment by constantly changing their strategies and strategic capabilities (e.g. Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997; Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1998; Mintzberg, 1994). Behind these claims lies the interest to develop an interdisciplinary view of strategy that captures the interplay between the company and its business environment. This thesis makes a marked contribution to this debate by arguing that a key component in a firm’s strategic response to a change in market conditions is the result of the interpretation people develop about the event itself. It is argued that this development is a context dependent process, with outcomes emerging not merely as a product of bounded rational debates, but also shaped by the interest, commitment, and perception of individual organisational members. This study therefore argues that an understanding of the development of this cognition/action relationship is critical. This research seeks to shed light on the question: “How do managers of multinational firms perceive and respond to the impact of the Euro over time?” A qualitative case study methodology was used to examine the context dependent cognition/action relationship in eight multinational organisations by tracing the intended strategy before the event took place, and compare it with the realised strategy after the Euro was introduced. In total 87 interviews and 16 focus group discussions were conducted to capture the plausible and coherent explanations. Our study suggests the probability of firms introducing new strategies quickly and proactively depends on the anticipation, interpretation and capability of managers to recognise and to exploit changes. Motivation to do so is based on the perceived match or mismatch of the developments with the strategy in use prior to change.

This research study contributes to emergent interests in both academic and professional literature to uncover variations of corporate social responsibility practices across national institutional contexts by focusing on stakeholder salience as a precursor to corporate social responsibility and its ancillary constructs and practices - e. g. corporate governance and accountability. The stakeholder groups considered in the study are: (1) Employees, (2) Networks, (e. g. alliances/partnerships and suppliers), (3) Shareholders, (4) Environment, (5) Community, (6) Consumers and (7) Management. Stakeholder salience, as used in the study, in a nutshell refers to the importance accorded to any of these particular stakeholder groups by firms. The study complements the managerialist theorisation of corporate stakeholder salience, which has hitherto dominated the extant stakeholder management literature, by leveraging the institutionalist theoretical lens. It draws specifically from the varieties of capitalism model to examine how corporate stakeholder salience patterns are not only products of managerial strategic choices, but are also reflections of the institutional contexts in which they are embedded and enacted. To do this, the study focuses on a specific population of firms - i.e. Fortune Global 500 firms - across two national institutional contexts (UK and Germany) and three sectoral contexts (Aviation, Financial Services and Utilities). This yielded a total of 73 firms (37 UK and 35 German firms). It particularly tracks the manifestations of stakeholder salience in corporate social reports, produced by these firms, as artefacts of organisational communication, accountability and legitimacy. The study is longitudinal (2000 - 2006) in order to capture the dynamics of corporate stakeholder salience patterns in the two institutional contexts over time. Empirical data are extracted using the content analytical methodology focusing on such disclosure media as texts, graphics and photographs. In all, the corporate social reports of the firms used in this study from 2000 to 2006 - which amounted to a total of three thousand eight hundred and twenty two pages of report (3,822) - generated a cumulative total of two thousand nine hundred and eighty six (2,986) images, one thousand eight hundred and thirty three (1,833) graphics, and one hundred and twenty five (125) pages of Chairman (management) Statements (CS) and eight hundred and seventy two (872) paragraphs of these Chairmen (management) Statements. Data from corporate social reports are triangulated with data from online survey of these Fortune Global 500 firms (61% response rate). The data are analysed using three different but complementary statistical methods: (1) correspondence analysis, (2) Pearson's chi-square statistic and (3) multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The results of the study identify recognisable and differentiable patterns of corporate stakeholder salience between the UK and German institutional contexts moderated by sectoral patterns of corporate stakeholding patterns - thereby suggesting that corporate stakeholder salience patterns are implicated in interactions between national institutional characteristics and sectoral attributes. This finding confirms the main proposition of the research study that corporate stakeholder salience patterns are not only outcomes of managerial discretional choices, but that they are also products of their institutional contexts. However, it brings to the fore a different dimension to understanding the impacts of institutional contexts on corporate stakeholder salience patterns and broader corporate social responsibility practices, which have hitherto being under-explored in the literature. This different dimension is the fact that institutional contexts are not necessarily homogenous, as often presented by the varieties of capitalism model, but are outcomes of continuous contestations between heterogeneous local and global influences, sometimes embodied in trans-national spaces exacerbated by either globalisation and or trans-national actors. The study further explores this interaction between heterogeneous local and global influences on corporate stakeholder salience patterns; and later concludes by highlighting possible areas for complementary future research.

This research is a predictive study of managerial success by specific job type in a single British company. Seventy-four managers, at the same level, in specific jobs differentiated by degree of task structure, completed a battery of tests of cognitive abilities, personality, and self-perceived leadership. Three years later their status was checked to determine if they had been promoted or not. Differences examined in Successful managers between job types, Unsuccessful managers between job types, and between Successful and Unsuccessful managers within job type, for all managers as a whole regardless of job differences. The basic hypothesis of the research, that a situational approach to the prediction of managerial success differentiating managers by job type, would yield results than predictions of managerial success regard for job differences was supported. Significant differences in cognitive abilities, personality, self-perceived leadership style were found between Successful managers in the two job functions, and classification of Successfuls and Unsuccessfuls by discriminant analysis was more accurate for managers within specific job types than for the total sample of managers regard for job differences.

The objective of this research was to investigate the generation of uncertainty within industrial supply chains. Since the late 1950's it has been recognised that the systems used internally within supply chains can lead to oscillations in demand and inventory as orders pass through the system. The uncertainty generated by these oscillations can result in late deliveries, order cancellations and an increased reliance on inventory to buffer these effects. Despite the best efforts of organisations to stabilise the dynamics generated, industry still experiences a high degree of uncertainty from this source. Greater understanding of the generation of uncertainty within the supply chain could result in improved management of the systems and consequently competitive advantage being gained by organisations. The investigation used simulation models of real industrial supply chains to identify possible sources of uncertainty. The complexity of the models was adjusted by increasing the number of echelons and the number of channels in the supply chain. One source of uncertainty investigated was the generation of deterministic chaos and a methodology was developed to detect and quantify this within the supply chain. Parallel interactions, which occur between suppliers in the same tier in the supply chain, were also modelled and quantified. In addition to demand amplification, which has been recognised as a source of uncertainty by both academics and industrialists, two additional sources of uncertainty were identified: namely deterministic chaos and parallel interactions. The relationship between these causes of uncertainty was established and the original concept of the "supply chain complexity triangle" is proposed. The "average prediction horizon" was calculated by the use of Lyapunov exponents and was used to quantify the amount of chaos experienced by supply chain members. This chaos was found to be dependent on the number of echelons, which also impacts on the amount of chaos experienced by all members of the supply chain, both up and down stream. Parallel interactions impact on all the members of the supply chain resulting in reduced performance. However, the number of channels in the supply chain modelled had little effect on the amount of chaos. Implications for reducing supply chain uncertainty either by managing or removing these effects is also discussed.

The governance of information technology (IT) service provision entails all those elements of the structure and process of contracting and organisation that are necessary in order to deliver effective and efficient IT services within today's organisations. This thesis develops a framework integrating those elements of governance with a view to explaining actual governance structures and to guiding relevant decisions in practice. Until the late 1980s, the principal concerns with respect to the organisation of IT activities revolved around the issues of centralisation versus decentralisation and end-user computing versus specialist control. Whilst contracts for various systems and services have always been a significant part of the IT department's activity, the issue of structuring such contracts took a prominent position on the management agenda in the beginning of 1990s with the proliferation of large contracts of the 'total outsourcing' kind. IT outsourcing rekindled interest in and reshaped the agenda of the organisation of IT provision. The debate on IT outsourcing provided the motivation and the starting point of this thesis. Thus, chapter 1 reviews this debate and, following on the opinion of others, recasts the question of 'whether to outsource or not' as 'how to set up the governance (i. e. the structure and process of contracting and organisation) of IT service provision'. In order to shed some light on the elements of governance, chapter 2 turns on a range of economic theories of the firm. These theories are critically reviewed and some preliminary suggestions as to how they might inform the governance of IT are put forth. The chapter concludes by setting the theoretical foundations for the rest of the thesis. The notion of a governance continuum between the ideal pure market and the ideal pure hierarchy is introduced. Actual governance structures, it is argued, can be placed on this continuum as individual instances. Before advancing onto more substantive work, chapter 3 pauses to reflect on the epistemological basis of this research project. The main principles of the epistemological position adopted here are taken from the philosophical arguments of transcendental realism. The implications of this epistemological position for the empirical methods and the theoretical claims made in this thesis are also examined. Chapter 4 documents an intensive case study at British Petroleum Plc. The purpose of this case study was to draw lessons from practice and to assess the relevance of the theories of chapter 2. This case study was an interactive learning process through which the researcher sought access to management practice in order to assess economic theories, while the managers at BP sought a broader understanding of IT outsourcing. The outcome of this interaction was the S-CAGE framework which coupled theoretical insights with practical relevance. The S-CAGE (Service Clustering And Governance Establishment) framework is described in detail in chapter 5. It is put forth as both an explanatory and a normative account of the governance of IT service provision. It is based on the notion of governance continuum, it introduces the idea of grouping services into clusters and it provides a classification of the elements of governance that should be customised to the characteristics of each cluster of services. Chapter 6 presents two further case studies aimed at evaluating the usefulness of SCAGE in understanding and explaining alternative outsourcing practices. ICI and Anglian Water have been visited for this purpose. On the basis of these cases, the concluding chapter summarises the strengths and limitations of the proposed framework. An attempt is also made to set forth some preliminary theoretical ideas extending the notions of clustering and governance continuum. The thesis concludes with a final short illustration of the use of the S-CAGE framework.

The relationship between organisational behaviour research and commercial companies is complex, primarily because academic researchers and companies expect different outcomes from participation in the research. Businesses are usually looking to improve organisational performance and seek immediate, practical and applicable outcomes. Academic researchers seek an extension of theoretical knowledge and a contribution to the advancement of their field. Thus a researcher with a foot in both camps is seesawing between organisational behaviour and managerial practice. The task is to manage the tension to satisfy both parties. The study is an example of a piece of research aiming to satisfy the academic criteria for a PhD thesis and the commercial criteria of the sponsoring organisation, in this case British Airways (BA). BA had noted a number of business costs associated with senior managers who joined the organisation from outside. The aim was to find a way of reducing the costs and improving the joining experience for these individuals in a way which got them to high performance quickly. The theoretical field of organisational socialisation, described as having no unifying and coherent 'theory' of socialisation (Saks and Ashforth 1997:235), provided a substantially appropriate conceptual lens through which the current research could be analysed and subsequently applied in a commercial setting. In summary the two aims of this study were, first, to extend theoretical knowledge of organisational socialisation, specifically by confirming or disconfirming the relationship between investiture and performance found by Ashforth and Saks (1996) to a standard which met PhD award criteria. Second, to find a way reduce the cost and improve the experience of senior managers joining BA in a way which met this and other organisations' needs to improve performance.

This thesis is concerned with the development of decision support systems for determining performance targets and allocating resources in multi-unit organisations. These organisations are organised into networks of decision making units (DMUs) that seek to satisfy demand for services in the public sector or attract demand for services in the for profit making sector. Mathematical programming methods in general, and data envelopment analysis in particular are the methods chiefly used throughout the thesis. The decision support systems sought to address two distinct problems faced by multi-unit organisations. The first is concerned with the allocation of recurrent type of budgets to decision making units which use their resources without interference from their headquarters. This type of problem is called a-posteriori decision support and it is addressed by developing a framework of effective target setting. Data envelopment analysis models are developed for setting targets at the DMU and the global organisational levels. Two target-based resource allocation models are then developed seeking to encapsulate alternative organisational structures and objectives of resource allocation, namely equity, effectiveness and efficiency. The second case concerns problems where the allocation of resources is made directly to prespecified DMUs. This problem is called a-priori decision support which includes a phase of managerial diagnosis and planning. In the diagnostic phase performance targets for different management tiers are assessed, and systematic procedures of micro level benchmarking are developed. In the planning phase targets for improving the scale size of individual units are assessed, the long & short run viability of the network of outlets is examined and, fmally, the marginal impacts of past investments on the performance of DMUs are investigated. The two phases of the decision support system would aid management in making decisions regarding the future of individual DMUs (e.g. investment, expansion, divestment). Application of the method to a network of 154 public houses is incorporated throughout the relevant chapters of the thesis.

This is a study on organizational knowledge and capacity, with a particular focus on how learning takes place and how capacity can be developed to improve public service organizations. It has wider implications for how we think about learning in all types of organization. The study adds theoretically and empirically to the limited literature that addresses organizational capacity in public organizations. It examines explanations of capacity that may be associated with better performing local authorities and organizational sharing of knowledge and service improvement. The research design and methodology incorporate a conceptual framework and an empirical measurement instrument designed to investigate factors that explain organizational capacity. A longitudinal, quantitative survey of the population level of all 388 English local authorities examined comparisons of organizational capacity between better performing and lower performing councils. The findings provide empirical evidence of the relationship between better performing organizations and greater organizational capacity. Those organizations with greater capacity for learning can draw on prior knowledge to increase their current capacity. Capacity contributes to explanations of the relationship between an organization’s particular environment, and utilization of its internal potential, including organizational knowledge, for future performance. The study concludes with a reformulated definition of organizational capacity. It also finds that capacity building derives from different perspectives and is conceptually different from organizational capacity. It draws attention to the importance of context for organizational studies, and calls for definitions and operational measures that are suitable for all sectors.

Over the last two decades, supply chain researchers have sought to find appropriate ways of achieving lean and agile “LeAgile” supply chains. However, the differences in the priorities of the lean and agile paradigms multiply the challenges in lean and agile combinations. The most discussed approaches in the literature are the decoupling point and the late customisation (postponement) strategies. Supply chain visibility as a solution is less frequently discussed though the ‘Smarter Supply Chain of the Future’ report states that ‘70% of supply chain leaders view Supply Chain Visibility as their number one challenge ... the need to ‘see’ and act on the right information’ (IBM, 2010). Technologies such as EDI and RFID have been implemented to improve visibility, have not gained general acceptance. Newer, low cost ‘Cloud’ solutions may be able to address the need better. Previous research has suggested that increasing information visibility improves supply chain performance, though the relationship between the degree of visibility and resulting performance does not appear to have been addressed. Therefore, a role playing simulation methodology was devised to evaluate the effect of supply chain visibility on improved LeAgile supply chain performance. Role playing simulations better emulate the human control actions in supply chains, but can also suffer/benefit from traits such as learning. A low cost Web and Cloud based system was devised to enable visibility and communication in the simulation. Different information sharing configurations (visibility levels) were evaluated for a typical four-echelon supply chain. The results show a correlation in improved supply chain LeAgility with the degree of visibility of demand and/or operational information, but this was not a linear relationship. A degree of ‘digital’ waste eroded performance with increasing levels of visibility. Comparison simulations were then conducted to compare the supply chain visibility strategy with ‘decoupling point’ and ‘postponement’ strategies for the same four-echelon supply chain. The results suggest that after adopting the supply chain visibility approach, the overall performance of the simulation supply chain increased by 26.3% and 26.4% compared to the decoupling point and postponement approach scenarios. Further simulation experiments with different supply chain configurations are required to test the wider applicability of the results.

This thesis develops a contemporary problematisation of software requirements. It departs from traditional conceptions of requirements as simple, tamed objects with deterministic force over socio-technical actors and based on assumptions of stability. Such views can lead to a narrow, ultimately unfruitful understanding of the significance of requirements and denied wider consequences of their modes of articulation. Instead, the thesis builds on perspectives where requirements are complex and interactive actors. The thesis uses openEHR—an open source health IT project aiming to build interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHRs)—as a case study. Studying open source practice offers a good opportunity to consider the nature of requirements because there is an ongoing debate about requirements’ role and influence on development activities and project organisation. The analysis uses Deleuzian concepts of assemblage, multiplicity and becoming. These themes align with a larger body of work influenced by STS and process oriented theorisations, which see the world as dynamic and performative. The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in particular provides a counter-balance to any assumed stability in the world. The thesis presents a new account of the nature of requirements, one that reflects their complex entanglement within software development and open source in particular. Requirements are not insipid descriptive statements that abstract and simplify the world deterministically. They have an intricate existence which serves to hold the potential in the assemblage to become many things. In particular, requirements insinuate themselves into a project’s identity, guide a project through territories—some to be explored, some to be disregarded—and demand specific ways to be recognised, engaged, and cared for. The thesis argues that requirements are more virtual than originally thought, having a subtle, not necessarily visible influence on their assemblages and the way socio-technical actors can potentially relate to the project itself.