Psychological research on expatriation has been dominated by North American researchers, and expatriation models have been tested using predominantly US employee samples. This dominance may bias our understanding of expatriation and influence the practice of expatriate assignments within organisations. This thesis addresses the need for European expatriation research, and investigates expatriate assignment success from a British employee perspective. A sequential mixed-methods design was used to examine whether existing knowledge on predictors for successful expatriate assignments can be generalised to British samples. The first phase of the research was a qualitative exploration of factors that contribute to expatriate assignment success from the British employee perspective. Four focus groups were conducted with formerly expatriated British employees (n=14). An inductive thematic analysis was conducted on the focus group transcripts, which resulted in nine themes highlighting the importance of individual, organisational, and contextual-level variables. Moreover, the analysis highlighted an important outcome variable that has been largely ignored in previous research: whether or not the employee would go on another expatriate assignment. From the results of phase one, an initial model of British expatriate assignment success was hypothesised. Phase two involved the practical application of the variable considered most important in contributing to expatriate assignment success from study one: personality. A new expatriate assignment personality instrument was developed in phase two using a sample of British employees (n=402). The third phase of the research combined the results of the previous two phases, and employed an embedded mixed-methods design to further investigate British expatriate assignment success. Data (n=155) was collected using an online questionnaire sent to currently expatriated (n=91) and formerly expatriated British employees (n=45), as well as their accompanying partners (n=19 expatriate/partner dyads). The quantitative element explored the influence of several individual, organisational, and contextual variables on various expatriate assignment success outcome measures. Qualitative data was also collected through open-ended questions placed within the questionnaire to help explain and support the quantitative results, and identify potential areas for future research. Finally, the newly developed personality instrument from phase two was further examined for psychometric robustness. Overall, this thesis presents an initial model of British expatriate assignment success and a new personality instrument for British expatriate selection and assessment contexts. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed together with suggestions for future research.

The emergence of Southern powers constitutes a defining feature of contemporary global governance. Their rising impact has been particularly evident in the Doha round of WTO negotiations where leading developing countries have come to play an increasingly important role in the negotiating process. India and South Africa are two Southern powers that played a central role in WTO negotiations during 2001-5. Acting as representatives of the global South, the two countries determined to a considerable extent the positions of developing countries in conceding to the agenda being negotiated or blocking different stages of negotiations. They also projected, however, different strategies, interests and world-views, and ultimately achieved, with varying degrees of success, their relocation within the WTO. The experience of India and South Africa in the first four years of the Doha round constitutes a framework for understanding the conditions under which Southern powers are repositioning in the global trading system and in the international political economy. To understand the role of India and South Africa in the Doha round, this thesis will deploy a synthesis of middle power approaches as the theoretical prism for analysing the trade diplomacy of the two countries. Middle power approaches offer an ensemble of conceptual categories which allow for theorising the rise of Southern powers, delineating both the nature of their influence and their broader systemic role. The middle power roles of India and South Africa will be assessed through a detailed analysis of documents and public statements in the period under examination. It will be demonstrated that during the Doha round, both countries emerged as middle powers projecting a reformist world-view of multilateral trade negotiations. Their ability to effect change was severely conditioned by the leadership provided by the two major trading powers, the US and the EU, and their own capacity to sustain broad bases of followership in the global South.

This thesis investigates the advertising strategies used in marketing cars in Italy and the UK, with particular reference to the employment of translation. Fieldwork has been undertaken within advertising agencies, with a view to establishing how translation is used, whether translators in the industry are professionally trained and how significant translation is generally maintained to be. The role of advertising agencies in both contexts has been considered in terms of their development over time and their cultural prominence. A qualitative analysis of a corpus of Italian and British car advertisements from the 1980s to the present has been undertaken, with the aim of determining how car advertisements have changed across two decades, during which advertising techniques have tended to become more complex and both societies have undergone significant changes. This is particularly apparent with regard to issues of gender representation and the balance between verbal and visual text. The analysis of the corpus focuses on the use of translation. It is suggested that car advertisements, as cultural products, are reconstituted and rewritten when translated, so that advertisements of the same product tend to be very different across cultures, both in terms of textual content and visuals. Investigating the cultural value of advertisements demonstrates the continuing tension between perceptions of what is termed ‘mechanical translation’ and ‘creative rewriting’ as well as the social and economic value ascribed to each in marketing discourses. The general aim of the thesis is to establish the involvement of translation in economic and cultural exchanges within which advertising plays a part. It is argued that despite what advertising professionals appear to believe, the cultural and economic impact of advertising is assisted by translation, which plays a significant role in the transmission of information and values.

Professional intercultural communication is of growing importance in today’s globalising world. This study analyses the dynamics of relating that occurred between Chinese officials and American officials and other professionals during a three-week delegation visit to the USA. Drawing on concepts and frameworks in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural psychology, communication studies and translation studies, it takes a data-driven approach to explore Chinese officials’ professional interaction with American/British professionals. This kind of interaction, which involved government officials, has rarely been studied before. During the delegation visit, over twenty authentic professional intercultural events including formal meetings and banquets were recorded in six major cities in the USA. Relational issues and the interactants’ interpretations of these issues from both sides were extracted and examined from twenty-hour-long video recordings and two-hour-long audio recordings of official interaction, fifteen-thousand-word notes of the delegation’s evening meetings where they reflected on the day’s events, forty-one individual post-event and post-trip interviews with the Chinese and fourteen open-ended questionnaire responses from the Americans. Taking a first order approach, I place the interactants’ perspectives at the core and significantly reduce my interference by starting from the natural and spontaneous reflections made by the participants in the evening meetings. I then check the generality of the findings by comparing them with a second dataset which comprises eighty-six narrative accounts of Chinese-non-Chinese professional communication reported by thirty-seven Chinese officials and three businesspeople. My analysis takes a developmental perspective, and reveals the complexities of relational management as it unfolds over time. A number of different norms and interactional principles emerge, and my investigation of relational management combines motivational (e.g., Rapport Management theory) and descriptive aspects (e.g., dialectical theory). The study contributes to our understanding of the conceptualization and operationalization of the key concepts face, politeness and relations as well as the major practical concerns of gifts, hosting and interactional styles, including language and interpreting. For example, the findings suggest that while the concepts face, politeness, guanxi and the “relational”, i.e., relations/relationships/relating, tend to be conflated and remain largely entangled in the literature, all of them are distinguishable. First, face and politeness are conceptually distinct, and their connection is not as strong as we have assumed. Second, while both face and guanxi can be viewed as enduring yet not static entities, they are two separate concepts. Guanxi work is much broader than facework and face is only one of the major motivations behind it. Yet guanxi dynamics frequently have face implications. Face can be gained when guanxi goes well and is very likely to be lost when it goes wrong. Additionally, face and the “relational” are not synonymous. In spite of the emerging call for a relational study of face, it is not a property of a relationship and merely analysing it in talk-in-interaction is inadequate.

There is a need to understand what makes information security successful in an organization. What are the threats that the organization must deal with and what are the criteria of a beneficial information security policy? Policies are in place, but why employees are not complying? This study is the first step in trying to highlight effective approaches and strategies that might help organizations to achieve good information security through looking at success factors for the implementation. This dissertation will focus on human factors by looking at what concerns employees about information security. It will explore the importance of information security policy in organizations, and employee’s attitudes to compliance with organizations' policies. This research has been divided into four stages. Each stage was developed in light of the results from the previous stage. The first two stages were conducted in the Sultanate of Oman in order to use a population just starting out in the information security area. Stage one started with a qualitative semi-structured interview to explore and identify factors contributing towards successful implementation of information security in an organization. The results suggested a number of factors organizations needed to consider to implement information security successfully. The second stage of the research was based on the first stage’s results. After analysing the outcomes from the semi-structured interviews a quantitative questionnaire was developed to explore for information security policy. The findings did suggest that the more issues the organization covers in their security policy the more effective their policy is likely to be. The more an organization reports adoption of such criteria in their security policy, the more they report a highly effective security policy. The more the organization implements the ‘success factors’ the more effective they feel their security policy will be. The third stage was conducted in the UK at Glasgow University because employees are somewhat familiar with the idea of information security. It was based on the findings derived from the analysis of the quantitative questionnaire at stage two. The findings revealed different reasons for employee’s non-compliance to organization security policy as well as the impact of non-compliance. The fourth stage consolidates the findings of the three studies and brings them together to give recommendations about how to formulate a security policy to encourage compliance and therefore reduce security threats.

Unprecedented movements in real exchange rates during the 1980s led to suspicions of instability in the exchange rate - trade relationships in the UK and elsewhere. 1be research in this thesis investigates the sensitivity of UK trade volumes to movements in the real exchange rate, and considers various interpretations of the alleged parameter instability: econometric misspecification; theoretical inadequacy due to the neglect of possible hysteresis effects and/or the neglect of supply side factors; and the Lucas critique effects of a changed policy regime on expectations formation. Against the background of UK experience we examine specific questions of theory and evidence within partial equilibrium frameworks. These share a common concern: considering the (macro economically important) case of mean reversion in real exchange rate expectations. Clapters two and three introduce mean reversion into Dixit's (1989a) theory model of sunk cost hysteresis in trade. This research uses both analytic and numerical methods to characterise solutions with mean reversion in greater detail than elsewhere and uncovers some striking and unexpected results. Most important is the possible reversal of the stochastic and perfect foresight triggers under asymmetric sunk costs which reflects the essential difference between costly reversibility and strict irreversibility in investment Uncertainty does not always delay action, because the possibility of reversal must be allowed for. Chapter four explores the wider significance of the analysis for similar stochastic saddlepoint models such as the analysis of exchange rate target zones. Chapters five and six consider the significance of the short run dynamic specification of quarterly UK manufactured export volumes equations to the reported instability in estimates of the long run competitiveness elasticity in the light of evidence that UK competitiveness measures follow stationary processes within an institutionally identified policy regime. Hausman specification tests, show that the long run competitiveness elasticity is misspecified and underestimated in recent (error correction mechanism) specifications of UK manufactured export volume equations. This inadequacy reflects the omission of long 'smoothing' lags on the competitiveness variable Subsequently, chapter seven considers simulation evidence from the Dixit model as to the potential relevance of such effects to the UK experience under the large shock to competitiveness of 1980-1 but emphasises that the aggregate implications are not clear cut chapter eight considers whether the expectational effects of the 1979 Thatcher government's change in policy regime can be separated out from the other influences at work behind reduced form models but finds that the data do not support the particular approach adopted. Concluding. we emphasise that the potential importance and complexity of expectational factors and theory combines with the our empirical findings to suggest that exchange rate uncertainty may be crucial to trade behaviour and that macroeconomic adjustment may be inhibited by excess exchange rate uncertainty. Overall export performance may also reflect supply factors which are not captured in existing models, such as hysteretic exit. or expected cost changes. But we doubt whether future research will achieve a data consistent aggregate econometric model of UK trade which is fully grounded in appropriate optimising economic theory with realistic adjustment costs. We may have to settle for approximations to the data generation process which do not employ recent theoretical insights. In that event. the use of such models in policy design should be circumscribed due to the possibility of Lucas critique effects, hysteresis mechanisms and supply side factors.

Although Social Networking Sites have become dominant in the lives of many consumers, research on virtual brand communities in the context of Social Networking Sites is scarce. This study focuses on addressing this gap by investigating how identification with the brand and the brand community, participation on official brand pages on Facebook, and attachment to the brand develop and support brand equity in the context of Social Networking Sites. Participation in virtual brand communities has been generally viewed as posting and lurking. This study has developed new participation scales to address the limited perspective of participation in the literature. In addition, this study aims to investigate the types of members of brand pages on Facebook and the nature of their participation. The author developed a model that provides a new understanding of how brand equity develops in Social Networking Sites. The study was conducted in two stages. Firstly, a pilot study was conducted that used focus groups to build new scales to measure participation in Social Networking Sites, which were tested and validated by analysing quantitative data collected from an online and offline survey. Secondly, the main study was conducted by collecting data from an online panel of 436 UK consumers. Structural equation modelling techniques were then used to assess the validity of the new proposed participation scales and to test the set of interrelationships among the proposed variables. The findings indicate that consumer identification with the brand and the community has a positive impact on participation on brand pages as well as on attachment to the brand. The findings also reveal that brand loyalty, perceived quality, willingness to pay a price premium, and word-of-mouth are all predicted by brand attachment. Finally, this study has shown that participation is a two level behaviour that is based on three member types: tourists, minglers, and fans. The model and the new participation scales proposed in this study present a new perspective on online consumer behaviour. In addition, the findings of this study have implications for understanding and building consumer-brand relationships in Social Networking Sites. Keywords: Brand Equity, Brand Identification, Brand Community Identification, Virtual Brand Community, Perceived Quality, Brand Loyalty, Word-of-Mouth, Willingness to Pay a Price Premium, Brand Attachment, Participation, Social Networking Sites, Structural Equation Modelling,fACEBOOK

This thesis examines the effects of product placements on consumer attitudes toward the placed products, in the genre of television sitcoms. The study utilizes the integration of balance theory, parasocial interaction theory and genre theory to evaluate the “Balance Model of Sitcom Product Placement Effects” and test its applicability under the conditions set for the execution of the present research. Through the utilization of the three theories, the character-product associations existent in the conventions of contemporary sitcoms and the consumer-character relationships likely to be developed with the viewing of serialized television programs, are examined with regard to the way that their interaction influences consumer attitudes toward placed products. As the model has its foundations on balance theory, it is suggested that the theoretical premise of attitudinal alignment can explain the interactions existing in the model’s relational system which consists of three elements; the consumer, the character and the placed product. The consumer attitude alignment process toward the character is tested as being guided by the consumer-character relation variables of consumer attitude toward character and parasocial attachment with character, and the character-product relation variables of character’s attitude valence toward, and strength of association with, the placed product. The methodological premises set for this research involve the utilization of a contemporary sitcom as stimulus, a sample consisting of a particular target group of 128 participants who hold specific characteristics and are regular viewers of the sitcom, and an online survey research instrument for the measurement of the variables. The findings support the predictions regarding consumers’ attitudinal alignment toward products according to characters’ attitudes toward products, with consumer parasocial attachment with character constituting the most influential factor in the process. This research supports the generalizability faculty of the balance model of placement effects, by corroborating previous findings. Moreover, this study facilitates the accretion of product placement knowledge by following the methodological underpinnings of the replication approach, and fulfils its major purpose of providing corroborated, generalized and extended propositions regarding placements’ effects in the television media context, thus offering valuable practical implications for the practice’s employment by marketers.

In this thesis I examine two widely held beliefs. First, I examine the belief that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the contemporary global trade regime are unjust. Second, I examine the belief that individuals should purchase Fair Trade goods. The purpose of these investigations is twofold. My major aim is to elaborate an account of global trade justice that combines research in international political economy with insights drawn from moral and political theory. These two disciplines are often separated in academic research and, as such, there is a need to combine an understanding of the reality of global trade arrangements with rigorous evaluation from the point of view of political morality. This thesis undertakes this task by engendering synergy between these literatures on the WTO and Fair Trade. The selection of these topics also provides a chance to subject the aforementioned beliefs to rigorous moral analysis. This is the second rationale for the project. In brief, my arguments are as follows. I argue that there are demands of global justice. I argue that this requires the WTO to meet certain democratic standards and certain demands of economic justice. I argue that the WTO does not meet these demands and I propose according reforms. I argue that the WTO must offer member-states substantively equal participation rights and that it should enact a policy structuring the global economic framework so as to help finance the development of welfare and legal provisions in developing countries. In addition, I make two arguments in relation to the belief that individuals should purchase Fair Trade goods. I reject one common defence of this idea but I argue that individuals should purchase Fair Trade goods because in doing so they can help generate a widespread contribution to addressing important moral concerns.

Improving public sector managers' accountability with performance measurement is one of the dominant themes of the New Public Management (NPM) literature. With a case study of HM Customs & Excise (HMCE), this PhD research analyses NPM-inspired accounting changes using evidence from interviews with HMCE personnel, official publications and parliamentary reports. There are four important research findings. First, unlike other service delivery organisations, two sets of competing accountability relationships exist in a tax administration, which are operationalised by two performance measurement regimes. This necessitates adaptation of leading private sector performance measurement models to accommodate the duality. Second, HMCE used accounting as a change vehicle in an attempt to shift emphasis from a traditional, compliance-driven accountability relationship to a customer-focus driven one. Third, the compliance-driven relationship remained the dominant relationship in practice despite implementation of the first round of customer-focused accounting changes. Fourth, a second round of accounting changes, i.e. a tax gap reduction approach, attempts to harmonise the two competing performance measurements. This arguably represents a notion of shared accountability of taxpayers and tax administration for 'tax gap' reduction. From an institutional theory perspective, however, adoption of the tax gap approach represents an exercise to (re)gain legitimacy in the eyes of Government. The PhD evidence, therefore, suggests that success of accounting changes is context specific. Moreover, based on a notion of reciprocity of accountabilities in the public sector, the PhD research also develops a theoretical framework. This is a significant contribution as existence of multiple accountabilities is recognised in the literature but using accounting changes to shift emphasis from one accountability form to another is not well addressed. In addition to these theoretical contributions, this PhD research is a first field study of PMS of a tax administration, and therefore, also improves our understanding of managerial issues of a neglected, but important, research site.