This thesis explores the effects of trade costs on international trade at macro and micro levels. It focuses on traditional and non-traditional sources of trade costs that imped trade flows at various phases of a typical export shipment: behind the borders, at the borders and beyond the borders. It initially examines the connection between trade costs and the composition of developing countries’ exports and then explores the responses of firms to additional costs associated with the security of supply chain imposed on Pakistan’s firms in the wake of events of 9/11. Following this, it investigates the differential effects of domestic and international transportation distance on the reactions of firm-level trade flows and multiple margins of trade. Finally, it considers the effects of exchange rate movement on agricultural exports. The thesis primarily uses micro-level information from administrative datasets of exports and intra-country trade (VAT dataset) from Pakistan. It also benefits from international data sources, such as the WB-UNESCAP trade costs dataset, WITS, WTO tariff profiles and the World Development Indicators (WDI). This thesis comprises four core chapters (2 to 5), excluding the introduction and conclusion. The analysis at a macro level (Chapter 2) finds the trade costs negatively affect the composition of developing countries exports in that the industries located in higher trade cost countries gain a relative smaller share of manufactured exports in the country’s overall exports. The effect is relatively greater for high trade cost sensitive industries (such as automobiles, electronics) and for high trade cost regions, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. The evaluation of trade effect of US security policy on Pakistan’s exports (Chapter 3) shows that following the implementation of Integrated Cargo Containers Control (IC3) programme, Pakistan’s exports to the US relative to the EU dropped by 15%, on average. Pakistan’s firms that were forced to switch from various export-processing stations to the one specific sea port equipped with the intrusive scanning and live monitoring technologies of the export cargos, experienced the largest decline. The subsequent policy interventions aimed at facilitating the process moderated this effect to some extent. The examination of differential effects of domestic and international distances on trade flows (Chapter 4) reveals that the marginal effect of inland distance to sea ports is much larger than that of international distance from sea ports to export markets. Moreover, both distances have heterogeneous effects along trade margins. Domestic distance impedes exports primarily through extensive margins (EM) of firms and product, whereas international distance restricts these mainly through quantity margins, in addition to constricting the EM. Although the trade-impeding effects of both components of distance have reduced over time, the drop has been relatively greater for the international leg. Finally, the investigation of response of agricultural exports to the exchange rate movement (Chapter 5) indicates that the domestic currency depreciation positively affects both intensive and extensive margins (IM and EM). The increase in the IM operates mainly through the channel of prices (75%), whereas the response of quantities is relatively smaller (25%). Similarly, the increase in extensive margins operates through widening of export basket and expansion of firms’ client base within existing markets. These responses however vary widely across products, markets, firms’ exporting experience, exchange rate regimes type and invoicing currency use. Four key policy implications emerge from the thesis. First, reducing trade costs could increase manufacturing exports from high trade cost regions, and the response would be larger in high trade cost sensitive industries. Second, improving access to trade-processing infrastructure could incentivise entry of more firms into exporting and encourage widening of export basket. Third, the unintended effects of response to potential threats to supply chain could offset the trade facilitating aspect of these scanning technologies and further restrict trade flows across national borders. Finally, the policy makers need to be cautious in using domestic currency depreciation as a policy tool to promote the growth of agricultural exports as the trade response might not be commensurate with the level of depreciation.

Performance appraisal is one of the most popular and widely studied areas in human resource management, industrial relations and organizational psychology. However, most research in this area has been conducted in the USA or UK and reflects a Western context. Some studies on performance appraisal in Chinese organizations have been carried out, but, in the main, these concentrated on the periods of command economy (1949-1984) and transitional economy (1985-1997). In recent years, more and more Chinese state-owned companies and private companies have started to reform their performance appraisal system, by adopting Western style performance appraisal systems. However, there has to date been no academic research on performance appraisal system in Chinese companies with different types of ownership in a market context. The Chinese cultural factor “guanxi” has been found to be one of the most important cultural factors which influences performance appraisal in Chinese organizations. Nonetheless, no study has clearly analysed how guanxi influences performance appraisal in Chinese companies, leaving a significant research gap in our understanding of the impact of guanxi on appraisal and its outcomes. Therefore, this thesis conducted in-depth case studies, consisting of both quantitative (employee survey) and qualitative research (interviews) methodology, on the performance appraisal system in three banks with different ownerships in China, exploring a range of research objectives drawing on performance appraisal theories, justice theories, and guanxi and guanxi practices theories. Based on the results of the pilot study, a scale, which includes two factors “guanxi’s impact on outcome” and “guanxi’s impact on communication”, was developed to measure the impact of guanxi on performance appraisal in Chinese organizations. The statistical analysis of the employee survey indicated that guanxi’s impact on appraisal outcome was negatively related to employees’ perceptions of distributive justice, procedural justice, satisfaction with performance ratings and trust in supervisors; while no significant relationship has been found in this study between guanxi’s impact on communication and employees’ attitudes and behaviour. According to the comparative study of the appraisal system in the state-owned bank, foreign bank and city bank, significant differences of employees’ reactions to guanxi in appraisal, appraisal fairness and appraisal itself were found among these three banks. The employees in state-owned banks perceive less fairness and satisfaction with appraisal, but greater and stronger guanxi impact on appraisal, compared to employees in the foreign and city banks.

This dissertation is comprised of three empirical studies that examine the effect of platform-level variation on value creation strategies and market performance for providers of complementary goods (“complementors”) in platform-based markets. The studies all investigate the video game industry as a canonical example of a platform market. Three empirical studies are preceded by an industry chapter outlining the evolution of the video game industry as perceived by one of the industry’s key actors: Nintendo. How does platform maturity affect the adoption of complements in two-sided markets? A key feature of two-sided markets is the existence of indirect network effects. In the first empirical study, I argue that demand heterogeneity from end-users adopting the platform at different points in time, moderates the extent to which complements enjoy these indirect network effects. An inflow of late adopters that buy fewer complements and mimic earlier adopters’adoption behavior, increasingly offsets the benefits of a growing installed base. Using a dataset of 2,855 sixth-generation console video games, I find that platform maturity has a concave curvilinear effect on video games’ unit sales. Platform maturity, however, does not affect all types of games equally. Late adopters increasingly favor non-novel video games at the cost of innovative ones. Furthermore, the adoption disparity between superstars and less-popular video games also widens as platforms mature. In the second empirical study, I and my co-authors (Joseph Lampel and Thijs Broekhuizen) contribute to the debate between researchers who argue that the emergence of online distribution platforms allow content producers in the creative industries to bypass powerful publishers and distributors, and other researchers who argue that this strategy cannot succeed without the complementary assets that these intermediaries provide. We use a case study of the Dutch Video Game Developer (DVGD) bringing to market an identical video game using two different but comparable distribution platforms as a quasi-experiment: in the first release DVGD used online distribution to reach consumers directly, whereas in the second it used an alliance with an established video game publisher. We find that, while the alliance required DVGD to share with the publisher a substantial fraction of the value appropriated by the game, the alliance strategy resulted in greater absolute financial performance and relative market performance compared to the self-publishing strategy. We conclude that the differences in performance can be traced back to specialized complementary assets required for successful commercialization. Technological change, such as the advent of digital distribution platforms, facilitates the implementation of novel business models. Yet, we know little about how managers make sense of novel pathways for doing business after the emergence of a widespread technological change. The third empirical study aims to shed light on this issue by asking why managers in the context of the video game industry changed their business models following the advent of digital distribution platforms, and how? A mixed-method study comprised of a sector-wide survey and four in-depth case studies in the market for digital video games in the United Kingdom provides insight into mangers’ reasons and motivations. I and my co-authors (Joost van Dreunen and Charles Baden-Fuller) find that managers moved away from the de facto work-for-hire business model into three novel business models: artist-led-distribution; freemium; and multisided. In changing their business models, managers do not have increased economic gains as solitary objective per se. Instead, novel business models offer ways of doing business in which a cognitive tension between important organizational objectives – a desire for creative autonomy versus mitigation of financial risks – can be resolved in alternative and typically preferred ways.

Although human resources have been positioned as a key enabler for gaining and maintaining competitive advantage for organisations, the processes through which such advantage is achieved are poorly understood. As the psychological contract is considered a central construct in studying the employee-organisation relationship, this thesis proposes that it is likely to be an important mechanism explaining the relationship between HRM practices and employee outcomes. A framework in which psychological contract fulfillment acts as a mediator of the relationship between both human and structural agents (HRM practices, frontline management leadership behaviour and co-worker support) and employee outcomes (affective commitment, job satisfaction, intention to quit and absenteeism) is proposed and empirically tested. Theories of social exchange, organisational support, signalling and social information processing are used to explain these relationships. Data were collected through a staff survey based on 1,051 frontline employees employed in 35 private-sector work units in India. The proposed model was tested using PLS-SEM. A unique methodological contribution of this thesis is the treatment of high performance work systems and psychological contract fulfilment (facet) as formative constructs. The results largely support the proposed theoretical framework. Specifically, HRM practices, frontline management leadership behaviour and co-worker support had significant positive relationships with psychological contract fulfillment. In turn, psychological contract fulfillment was found to be positively linked to affective commitment and job satisfaction and negatively related to intention to quit and absenteeism. Moreover, the results provide substantial support for the partial mediation hypotheses, thus psychological contract fulfillment is an important conduit of the relationships between the three antecedents and employee outcomes. This thesis also considered two-way and three-way interactive associations among HRM practices, frontline management leadership behaviour and co-worker support while predicting psychological contract fulfillment. A significant positive interaction effect was observed for HRM practices and co-worker support, and a negative interaction effect between frontline management leadership behaviour and co-worker support. Thus, where co-worker support was high, the effects of HRM practices on psychological contract fulfillment was stronger. Whereas, co-worker support reduced the effects of frontline management leadership behaviour on psychological contract fulfillment, thus acted as a substitute.

The study investigates how SMEs generate new product creativity through different means of innovation strategies and their antecedents. It examines the fundamental role of the CEO in directing a firm’s information seeking orientation, a firm’s absorptive capacities in facilitating the process of absorbing information and lastly the combination of exploitation and exploration innovations to achieve ambidexterity. To this end, to address the bottom line importance of the ambidextrous strategy, new product creativity is hypothesised to be positively related and acts as a vital bridge linking ambidexterity and financial performance. Existing literature shows limited empirical support for a firm’s ability to pursue both exploitative and explorative innovations for performance outcomes. In particular, very little is known of the ambidexterity consequence in new product creativity. Literature also lacks empirical evidence on leadership-based antecedents and understanding of how ambidexterity works in the context of SMEs. To examine the relationships, the study uses mixed methods of content analysis, econometrics and financial ratios to generate longitudinal and objective data for 148 SMEs. Seemingly Unrelated Regression is then employed to analyse and test the hypotheses. Findings show the importance of generating a high number of creative ideas by demonstrating a positive empirical link with future financial performance. It also found that given the resource impediments of SMEs, the most appropriate approach to successful new product creativity is to manage exploitation and exploration innovations sequentially. In addition, contrary to the popular view of external information driving firms’ innovation strategy, deep understanding of the firm internally may be most important. Lastly, the result proves that despite being generic in nature and having an insignificant effect in driving either exploration or exploitation separately, future focus becomes an important factor when it comes to the firm’s ability to balance innovation ambidextrously.

Service quality appears to transcend a number of, as yet, only loosely related fields including operations management, service management and consumer behaviour. The intention of the first part of this research was to draw together some parts of these complementary literatures in order to understand the nature of service quality. The objective of the empirical study was to identify the customer-based determinants of service quality, in particular to identify those service quality factors which tend to lead to satisfaction, those that tend to lead to dissatisfaction and those that are important to the process of service recovery. The purpose of the research was to add to the growing body of knowledge on service quality and to help managers undertake activities for the measurement, control and improvement of service quality. The empirical study took a logical positivist/empiricist approach using customer's perceptions of reality. The chosen research instrument was the critical incident technique. The study found that the various quality factors do have different, though not exclusive, effects on the outcome of the service experience in terms of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. It was also found that the dissatisfaction factors and the satisfaction factors are not the obverse of each other. Furthermore, the satisfaction factors are primarily tangible factors, underlining the critical role of service staff in providing satisfaction, and the dissatisfaction factors are primarily intangible factors stressing the more systemic issues that tend to result in dissatisfaction. It was suggested that these factors may either act as switches, amending customers' perceptions of the service experience during the service itself, or act as levers upon the customers' satisfaction or dissatisfaction thresholds. Service recovery was also identified as a key creator of satisfaction and a number of factors were identified that support the recovery process. It has been suggested that operations managers should be concerned with designing-in satisfaction switches/levers and removing dissatisfaction switches/levers. They should also be concerned with implementing systems to seek out failures and to try to recover from them.

This document effectively works as a montage inasmuch as it is a collection of various thoughts, ideas and arguments brought together to create a composite whole. According to Denzin and Lincoln (2000: 6) these various elements “shape and define one another, and an emotional, gestalt effect is produced”. In what follows, the contributions from a series of published papers intermingle despite their different motivations, contexts, and outputs: “points of view and style collide, switch back and forth, co-mingle”, (Denzin 2001: 29). Montage also incorporates polyphony, as different voices vie for attention. To this end, I have incorporated elements from these papers, personal reflections on them, assessments of the work by those using them for their own purposes, and, ultimately, I attempt to situate the whole within the context of current literature. Montage presumes active readers, encouraging them to draw a series of interpretations that build one upon the other (Levitt-Jones and Lathlean 2007). Such interpretations emerge largely from “associations among the contrasting images that blend into one another” (Denzin and Lincoln 2000: 6), and, as such, your role in this endeavour is not without import. Naturally, I will be attempting to structure those interpretations through my craft such that we all arrive at a shared understanding of my contribution. Finally, montage blurs the line between cause and effect (Denzin 2001), as any sense of linear temporality fades into the background.

This thesis contains three self-contained studies on firm bahaviour during a period of trade liberalisation and export boom in China. In Chapter 1, we describe the general institutional background of the Chinese export boom from 2000 to 2007, look into the structure of this growth by examining the sources of the changes in export value, and give the outline of each core chapter. In Chapter 2, we use a new linked firm-product data to measure the domestic value-added and technology intensity of Chinese exports over the period 2000-2007. We re-evaluate the extent of value-added in China's exports, using a modification of a method proposed by Hummels et al. (2001) which takes into account the prevalence of processing firms. In addition, we provide new estimates of the skill- and technology-intensity of China's exports. Our estimates of value-added suggest that, in 2006, the domestic content of China's exports was below 50%, much lower than previously estimated. We also show that Chinese exports have become increasingly skill- and technology-intensive, but this intensity is lower when the exports are evaluated by domestic value-added than by final value. Chapter 3 looks into the effect of the elimination of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) quotas in 2005 on prices of products exported by Chinese firms to the U.S. Using transaction-level customs data from China over the period 2000-2006, we find that the MFA quota removal reduced average export prices by about 30%, which is compatible with other findings in the literature. A distinguishing feature of this study is that our data allows us to examine the sources of the price reductions. Evidence also shows that more than half of the price drop was due to firm entry and that the MFA had a smaller effect on the pricing behaviour of state-owned firms. As an extension of Chapter 3, Chapter 4 presents evidence on how multi-product firms adjusted their product structure as triggered by the MFA quota elimination. We find that the removal of MFA quotas induced firms to abruptly expand their product scope by as much as one third, and meanwhile caused firms to reduce the share of their core product in export sales by nearly 10 percentage points as a result of a more diversified export product mix. While these effects are obvious for private and foreign-owned firms, they are very insignificant for state-owned firms, probably due to the fact that the latter were not constrained as much by the quotas because of their closer political connections to the quota allocation authorities. Our evidence also suggests that an increased weight was placed on the U.S. market relative to the Japanese market within exporting firms after the quotas were lifted, highlighting the trade barriers created by U.S. quotas. Chapter 5 summarises the main findings of the thesis and discusses our future research directions.

In value creating contexts, customers often have to be clear about the roles they are required to perform (Kleinaltenkamp et al., 2012; Bitner et al., 1997), and may be required to develop their knowledge and skills in order to participate (Hibbert et al., 2012). This typically necessitates the ability to use and integrate resources in exchange encounters containing social and economic actors (Kleinaltenkamp et al., 2012; Hibbert et al., 2012; Arnould et al., 2006; Sheth and Uslay, 2007) to co-create value for each other (Vargo and Lusch, 2008; Payne et al., 2008). This research adds to the burgeoning literature on customer resource integration that calls for more insights into the roles of customers in creating their own value (Hibbert et al., 2012; Kleinaltenkamp et al., 2012; Arnould et al., 2006). This can help firms to develop an appreciation of the customer value process and design co-creation activities that can support their customers’ capability to create value (Vargo, 2007; Vargo and Lusch, 2004; 2008; Sheth and Uslay, 2007; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Payne et al., 2008; Frow et al., 2010). The research has indicated that customers learning styles in do-it-yourself activities reflected learning styles represented in experiential learning theory (ELT) (Kolb, 1984). ELT stipulates that individuals learn by experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting. Knowledge is seen as a transformation of experience along two continua: (1) how individuals best grasp experiences (i.e., concrete experience versus abstract conceptualisation), and (2) how individuals best transform experiences (i.e., reflective observation versus active experimentation). The study identified five distinct learning styles adopted by DIY members, which differ along these two continua and are reflective or active-orientated. Adhering to existing typologies, these were labelled as Diverging, Assimilating, Converging, Accommodating, and Balancing styles and helped shape customers’ learning self-management and self-regulation processes and use of learning resources.

Current Migration Studies literature in Europe can broadly be divided into two major strands. First is dominated by studies on the East-West migration of working class or asylum seeking, postcolonial ethnic groups and problems associated with their subsequent integration/assimilation into the host society. The second, more recent, strand of migration research is that of highly skilled professional migrants, usually hypermobile white men moving across highly-developed countries (for example within the EU), or from developed to less developed countries. This thesis aims to fill a major gap in the existing migration studies literature by focussing on a group of highly skilled Pakistani professionals. Based on a combination of participant observation and in-depth interviews with thirteen Pakistani male accountants and their partners in London, this thesis will explore their personal and professional lives in detail. In particular, it aims to compare this group with a) other highly skilled migrants in Europe and b) working class Pakistani immigrants who have dominated the migration stream to the UK. In terms of their social background, this group is strikingly different to the latter due to its urban, middle class origins where all men and most women possess tertiary level degrees. They do not follow the typical migration channel of chain migration to the UK and do not tend to live in ethnic clusters as other Pakistani migrants. Marital status sets them apart from European migrants of similar professional background. The thesis shows that experience of working in the one of the biggest accounting firms in the UK is overall positive for many participants but the overemphasis on social skills over technical expertise in the firm’s appraisal system is a major problem since the centrality of drinking in after-work socialisation meant they could not fully participate in such bonding activities. This thesis also captures the life experiences of migrant spouses in terms of marriage, migration, children and “incorporation” into husband’s work. Last, the thesis explores the future aspirations of the participants which mainly include a long term plan of acquiring British nationality as the means to a more lucrative job in the Middle-East. The Middle-East as a permanent destination was considered perfect due to its booming economy, proximity to Pakistan (still viewed as “homeland”) and most importantly Islamic culture which was seen fundamental in upbringing of their children. However, some women were apprehensive of such a move due to the restrictions on women in some Middle-Eastern countries.