This thesis is concerned with establishing whether particular sourcing strategies lead to the achievement of sustainable competitive advantage, and the affect that the type of power relationships have on the situation. The theoretical framework for the study was grounded in the resource-based view. A survey was undertaken of twelve sourcing strategies within six organisations. The organisations varied in size and were from different industries. Furthermore, the sourcing strategies comprised six reactive and six proactive approaches and exhibited a varied mix of different power relationships. This enabled a thorough examination of the variables to be carried out. Three critical cases were then analysed in greater depth in order to investigate some of the contextual factors and second-order findings that were uncovered during the survey. The study found that proactive sourcing strategies may lead to sustainable competitive advantage, particularly when combined with buyer dominant or interdependent power relationships, but reactive approaches do not. However, a number of intervening variables were identified that also appear to influence the situation, such as the nature of the purchase, the objective of the sourcing strategy, and the degree of commitment to and investment in the sourcing strategy. A model is developed which explains the relationship between sourcing strategies and sustainable competitive advantage.

Despite impressive advances in technology and a plethora of Information Systems development methods there remain plentiful stories of Information Systems project failure. Risk Management promises a positive impact on Information Systems Development and has raised hopes of alleviating such problems This thesis summarises the earlier literature on the topic of Risk and Risk Management. It reports the results of an empirical study into the Management of Risk in Information Systems Development and provides both a better understanding of Risk Management in Information Systems Development and suggestions for the improvement of the theory and practice of Risk Management in Information System Development. In the review of the relevant literature about Risk, Risk Management, and Information Systems Risk Management, the thesis describes the essential concepts of the notion of Risk The suggested methods and practices of Risk Management in Information Systems Development are reviewed and critiqued and this lays down the basis for an empirical exploration, which includes a questionnaire survey. The empirical study undertaken investigates the nature of risks, current risk management practices, and their effect on Information Systems Development in the UK The study shows that there is a lack of rigorous research into Risk Management. The current literature provides useful knowledge and guidelines on Risk Management, but many of the claims made in the literature have no empirical validation. According to the empirical findings, the application of Risk Management to Information Systems Development is not a common practice. Furthermore, the positive effect of Risk Management on Information Systems Development is not very high and practitioners hold

The decline of high streets due to external factors, such as changing consumer trends, the growth of alternative forms of retail, changing economic conditions etc., is a topic that has received a great deal of political and media attention during the last decade. The performance of high streets is influenced by a multitude of complex and conflicting economic, environmental and social factors. However, despite this, existing performance measures continue to place emphasis on the retailing and economic functions of high streets. As consumer needs and expectations shift towards a preference for social and experiential high street features, the need to change the perception of high street success is increasingly important. This study has identified statistically significant differences between importance scores allocated to high street assessment criteria by a range of high street stakeholder groups. These differences reveal the varying priorities of key stakeholders when it comes to high streets, and the subsequent need to account for the varied needs and expectations of stakeholders when it comes to assessing high street performance. This research contributes new and original knowledge through the development and application of a high street sustainability assessment model that incorporates criteria weightings to reflect the needs and expectations of key high street stakeholders. Utilising Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods, the model comprises an all-inclusive set of weighted criteria that reflects a high street's economic, environmental and social functions. The model is applied to a practical example of eight English town centre high streets. The thesis presents the ranking of the high streets in terms of their relative sustainability and provides a step-by-step guide of how key stakeholders can apply the model for their own high street decision making needs. The model can inform national and local high street policy, strategies and decision making, and provides benefits to a range of stakeholders, including national and local government, town centre managers, local businesses and local communities. The model output can inform recommendations and indicate areas of improvement that would be most beneficial to improved high street sustainability.

Purpose - to investigate the phenomenon of sustainable social (enterprise) entrepreneurship from both organisational and individual/personal identity perspectives. Two research questions ask: (RQ1) what are the key organisational identity (OI) and governance issues associated with sustainable social enterprises (SEs) and social entrepreneurship?, and; (RQ2) who are the social enterprise (SE) leaders/entrepreneurs (and why are they important from an identity perspective)? Design/methodology/approach – A stage 1 interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) employed 30 semi-structured interviews of social entrepreneurs in the (UK) South East; a macro-level conceptualisation of social enterprise (organisational) identity, sustainability and governance issues being the key deliverable. This was followed by a stage 2 social constructionist and social entrepreneurial identity study; whereby, 16 in-depth interviews, with 3 case study social enterprise leaders were conducted over a period of three years. Stage 3 involved 2 employee and volunteer focus groups to help triangulate data from the previous stages. Finally, stage 4 follow-up interviews with 4 selected informants helped evaluate the impact of the Brexit vote on my thesis arguments. Various third sector and government policy documents were consulted throughout the study. Findings – Firstly, I argue that understanding who organisations are, as well as, what they do, are important for understanding the sustainability of social enterprises, and the third sector. A new conceptual social enterprise grid (SEG) is developed to distinguish who social enterprises are; relative to other third and public-sector organisations. Secondly, a Ricoeurian narrative analysis helps demonstrate the agentic role of social entrepreneurs; how social enterprise sustainability is motivated by personal beliefs, social values and an idem (i.e. almost permanent) sense of identity. Similarly, results demonstrate how social enterprise sustainability could be at least part-attributed, to the lifetime agentic function of social entrepreneurs. Originality/value – This PhD thesis addresses fundamental definitional and theory gaps in the social enterprise and third sector identity literatures. It contributes by offering fresh perspectives on the complex and inter-related issues of (organisational and socio-entrepreneurial) identity, governance and sustainability.

Pharmaceutical managers and sales representatives (PSRs) rely greatly on relationship marketing activities in order to develop relationship quality (RQ) with physicians. The aim is to influence physicians' prescription behaviour to engender positive sales outcomes based on their RQ. There is little known about how PSR-physician RQ develops in the context of Pakistan, or how far RQ helps a PSR to achieve objective outcomes for a firm (i.e. positive sales), when it interacts or interplays with product price, particularly in specific economic conditions such as those of patients in Pakistan - who pay directly for their medicines. Drawing on available literature on RQ, this research firstly aims to discover what determinants are required and why they help to achieve RQ between a PSR and physician. Secondly, by integrating the literature on physician's prescription decision making, it seeks to identify how far product price affects RQ’s objective (or sales) outcomes under contingent patient economic conditions. Based on critical realism's guiding philosophical principles, this qualitative research adopted an embedded case study strategy; and using a semi-structured interview method 22 participants (i.e. pharmaceutical sales managers and physicians) from urban and rural sales areas of Multan in Pakistan were purposively interviewed in two sequential phases. Findings revealed that along with determinants identified through RQ literature, i.e. firm's image product quality, PSR's visit frequency, product knowledge, ethical selling behaviour and relationship investments, some additional determinants such as PSR's appearance, communication, and flexible responses to varied situations were also required by a PSR to achieve RQ with physicians in the context of Pakistan. These determinants were essential in order to fulfil physicians' technical, as well as social needs. When a PSR fulfils these physician needs, both physician's self-interest and emotional sentiments for a PSR are engendered, which serve as mechanisms that further foster the physician's reciprocity mechanism for a PSR. The presence of a reciprocity mechanism for a PSR thus influences the physician's prescription decision making in terms of a PSR's product. However, findings also indicated that higher product price serves as a barrier, which mitigates the effect of reciprocity mechanism because of the presence of more prevalent mechanisms, i.e. patient's non-affordability due to overall poor economic conditions. This engenders further mechanisms such as physician's emotional sentiments for patients, physician's self-interest in patient's wellbeing, their retention and physician's own practice viability. Therefore, the price of a product did not affect subjective or behavioural outcomes, such as physicians providing more time and priority to the PSR, when they had RQ. However, PSR-physician RQ worked more effectively for PSR in terms of achieving his objective (sales) outcomes, when product price and quality was competitive. Thus, the findings of this research suggest that RQ determinants are contingent to the research context and the context of the research should be taken into account. Furthermore, RQ's objective outcomes cannot be seen in isolation or by just predicting that RQ between the partners will ultimately lead to objective outcomes. For its comprehensive understanding and implementation, it is crucial to investigate other prevailing factors, such as: broader economic conditions and the presence of various relationships in the value chain that either support, or restrain, RQ between partners. Because, RQ works more effectively in terms of achieving its objective (or positive sales) outcomes in the context where overall economic conditions and product price related mechanisms support salespeople-customer's RQ related reciprocity mechanism.

Change is an inescapable aspect of natural and artificial systems, and adaptation is central to their resilience. Optimization problems are no exception to this maxim. Indeed, viability of businesses depends heavily on their effectiveness in responding to a change in the myriad of optimization problems they entail. Changes in optimization problems usually are result of change in the objective function and/or number of variables and/or constraints. Such optimization problems are denoted as dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) in the literature. Despite the large body of literature on DOPs and algorithms in this domain, there are still noticeable gaps between real-world DOPs and academic research. The first objective of this thesis is investigating DOPs to identify any class of DOPs or any DOPs' characteristics that are common in practical situation but have not been studied by the researchers. In this thesis, two important gaps are identified, namely considering switching cost in DOPs and large-scale DOPs. Both are common in many real-world dynamic problem but a few research investigated them in the past. In an attempt to bridge these gaps, this thesis makes the following contributions: First, this thesis considers the impact of cost for changing solutions after environmental changes. In fact, changing solutions in real-world problems is costly. Furthermore, larger changes have higher cost and need more resources such as time, human resources and energy. Thus, lack of switching cost consideration in most previous algorithms makes them unsuitable for many of real-world DOPs. In this thesis, different scenarios of DOPs with switching cost are investigated, their challenges are identified, and the performance of the state-of-the-art methods are investigated for solving them. Contributions include developing a novel robust optimization over time (ROOT) framework, a novel adaptive method for maximizing efficiency by changing or keeping solutions after environmental changes, and a novel multi-objective and time-linkage based method for minimizing switching cost. Second, this thesis investigates large-scale DOPs. Up to now, little attention has been given to the scalability of DOPs. Indeed, the dimension of typical DOPs studied in the literature hardly exceeds twenty. In this thesis, the challenges of large-scale DOPs are studied, then the efficiency of the current methods are investigated for solving them. Moreover, this thesis proposes a novel cooperative coevolution algorithm based on a multi-population approach which benefits from a new resource allocation method for DOPs with high-dimensional search space. All the proposed methods in this thesis use particle swarm optimization as the core optimizer embedded in a multi-population framework. The performance of the proposed methods are compared with state-of-the-art methods on a wide range of problem instances generated by the state-of-the-art and the proposed DOP benchmarks. The comparison results indicate the superiority of the proposed methods.

Academics and professionals have paid attention mainly to performance measurement systems that have implemented financial and non financial measures. However, the majority of previous studies were conducted in developed countries, but very little had been carried out in developing countries. Therefore, this study aims to investigate performance measurement systems in developing countries in twofold. Firstly, examine the existing uses of financial and non financial measures in Libyan banking industry and, secondly, analyze the contextual factors that may affect the use of these measures. In order to fulfill this study's aim managers from top and middle managerial levels have participated to the survey. Data were collected through a series of quantitative and qualitative approaches while obtained data were analyzed by employing numerous statistical methodologies. The study findings indicate that most of the Libyan banks use a mixture of performance measurement systems that include a combination of financial and nonfinancial measures. However, the Libyan banks are still relying on more financial measures than non financial measures as important information used for various purposes. In addition, several contextual factors represent the core of the study and they are of great importance for the use of performance measures according to banks' size within the banking industry in Libya. This study contributes to bridge the gap in the literature of performance measurement by providing theoretical and empirical evidences of how performance measures could be used more proficiently in developing countries. Furthermore, the study's findings offer an overview of the performance measures used currently in Libyan banking industry and suggest the implementation of the outcome of this study that will instigate important improvements to the current performance measurement systems.

Despite the growth of studies in contextual strategic human resource management (SHRM) investigating the linkage of competitive strategy (CS) and human resource management practices (HRMp), there have been minimal studies on the phenomenon in emerging economies such as Nigeria. Notably, the applicability of western models of SHRM in Nigeria has shown a lot of difficulties over time due to the peculiarity of the Nigerian context. This study therefore addresses the key question of a context-specific model of CS-HRMp linkage in Nigeria medium-sized enterprises (NMSEs). Due to the dearth of literature on CS-HRMp linkage in Nigeria, this study adopted a sequential exploratory mixed method (SEMM) which involved qualitative and quantitative methods. Exploratory interview was conducted with 10 managers and HR professionals in NMSEs and thematically analysed to contribute to the development of a questionnaire for data collection. Survey data was obtained from 323 top management and HR professionals in NMSEs and tested to achieve the aim of this study. The outcome of this study established the adoption of business-level strategies and people management practices suited to the Nigerian context. This study also examined the linkage between CS and HRMp in NMSEs and identified the direction of the linkage; also the strengths of linkage which ranged from weak, moderate to strong which previous SHRM literature has not emphasised were identified. In SHRM literature, four levels of linkages are associated with business level strategies and HRMp; however, this study found three levels of linkage in NMSEs, which are administrative, one-way and two-way linkages. In addition, contrary to previous SHRM literature suggesting only positive organisational outcomes of CS-HRMp linkage, this study found both positive and negative outcomes in NMSEs. Furthermore, in this study, key contextual factors: culture, religion, language differences, ethnicity, Nigerian economy, currency value, corruption, governmental policies, labour union, family and personal relationships that impact on CS-HRMp linkage in Nigeria were also identified. Most importantly, this study suggests a model of linking CS and HRMp signifying the context of practice in NMSEs. Therefore, this study contributes to the contextual approach to SHRM by providing key information on practice of CS-HRMp linkage in Nigeria, filling the gap created by the dearth of studies on CS-HRMp linkage in an emerging economy context such as Nigeria, and developing a management model of practice in NMSEs.

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This thesis concerns the field of business-to-consumer electronic commerce. Research on Internet consumer behaviour is still in its infancy, and a quantitative framework to characterize user profiles for e-commerce is not yet established. This study proposes a quantitative framework that uses latent variable analysis to identify the underlying traits of Internet users' opinions. Predictive models are then built to select the factors that are most predictive of the propensity to buy on-line and classify Internet users according to that propensity. This is followed by a segmentation of the online market based on that selection of factors and the deployment of segment-specific graphical models to map the interactions between factors and between these and the propensity to buy online. The novel aspects of this work can be summarised as follows: the definition of a fully quantitative methodology for the segmentation and analysis of large data sets; the description of the latent dimensions underlying consumers' opinions using quantitative methods; the definition of a principled method of marginalisation to the empirical prior, for Bayesian neural networks, to deal with the use of class-unbalanced data sets; a study of the Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM) as a principled method for market segmentation, including some developments of the model, namely: a) an entropy-based measure to compare the class-discriminatory capabilities of maps of equal dimensions; b) a Cumulative Responsibility measure to provide information on the mapping distortion and define data clusters; c) Selective Smoothing as an extended model for the regularization of the GTM training.