Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2008. / Includes graphs and tables. Title from title screen (viewed December 17, 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

The regulation of assets and infrastructures has always been a central problem of economic theory. The first approach of regulatory and antitrust authorities was to regard assetownership as a source of welfare inefficiency. This was the “monopoly explanation” that was contested by Coase. Developing from Coase’s original intuitions, a contractual approach emerged in regulatory economics. This second tradition relies on the concept of transaction costs, or market failures, to justify the role of ownership for welfare and regulatory purposes. Yet, even though in the contractual approach ownership is not regarded as a necessary source of welfare inefficiencies, it still remains the necessary consequence of some dysfunctional characteristic of the market mechanism. This study addresses the role of asset ownership understood in terms of the owner’s subjective use value. The aim is thus to provide a theory of ownership based on a reinterpretation of the concept of value, relying on the classical dualism between value-inexchange and value-in-use. Private ownership of a good or resource becomes relevant for welfare and efficiency purposes whenever assets can be redeployed internally across alternative subjective opportunities by the owner to satisfy their private, subjective, requirements. Through in-house redeployment, the asset owner becomes independent of the performances and requirements of external market mechanisms. If auto-employment is allowed, then two conditions are satisfied. First, the performance of the market mechanism becomes unnecessary to understand how assets are allocated among alternative uses. This makes market failures and transaction costs a non-necessary requirement to justify asset ownership and to understand its welfare implications. Second, the knowledge of an actor’s subjective capabilities in the use and employment of the asset (knowing how an actor prefers to privately use and consume an asset) becomes necessary in order to understand how different ownership patterns affect the set of idiosyncratic opportunities perceived by different potential assets owners. If auto-redeployment (in-house enjoyment or auto-consumption) is allowed, then we can see that the idiosyncratic opportunities perceived by the actors are not necessarily driven by external market mechanisms, nor by its performance. Yet, they remain relevant in order to derive normative conclusions on the allocative outcomes. This can be seen as a make-or-buy problem where the trade-off between “make” and “buy” can be reinterpreted as a trade-off in value terms, between subjective value-in-use and objective value-in-exchange. The different interpretation of the make option marks the difference between the make-or-buy problem modelled in the contract-based theory of ownership versus a capability based theory of ownership. The work argues that, whenever physical assets are privately owned and can be employed “in-house”, in order to legitimately derive normative conclusions on how privately owned assets ought to be employed in a society, some form of public regulation is always needed in order to overcome the inherent presence of subjective (actor-specific) valuations. For this reason, the work concludes that whenever value in not a monism, the legal framework should always have logical and temporal priority over the competitive mechanism of the market, independently from the performance of the latter.

A significant body of empirical work attests to the negative consequences of psychological contract breach for employees and organizations. Two dominant explanations draw on social exchange theory and affective-events theory arguing that breach influences employees’ felt reciprocity and feelings of violation respectively, which in turn influences their contributions at work. However, breach has been found to produce stronger effect on attitudes versus behaviours (Conway & Briner, 2009), suggesting that there is insufficient knowledge about employees’ motivation after the experience of psychological contract breach. Herein lies the starting point of this thesis, which adopts a thwarted psychological need perspective to examine the motivational mechanism between psychological contract breach and employees’ behaviour. The focus on thwarted needs offers an alternative explanatory reason for why psychological contract breach matters, and extends the impact of breach from cognitions and emotions to psychological needs. With three empirical studies, this thesis aims to explore the role of thwarted need to control in understanding how employees’ respond to psychological contract breach. Study 1, a scenario-based experiment, supports the idea that breach can thwart employees’ state of need to control, which can in turn influence their intentions to engage in citizenship behaviours. Study 2 consists of a time-lagged survey with multi-source data of 163 Taiwanese employees in the service industry. The study findings reveal that thwarted need to control mediates the effect of breach on employees’ citizenship behaviours, and that employees’ implicit theories of employee-organization relationship moderates this mediating process. Study 3 consists of a three time-point survey of 124 EMBA Taiwanese employees over a six-month period. Study 3 replicates and extends the findings of study 2 by demonstrating that thwarted need to control provides a unique explanation (beyond established mechanisms such as felt obligation and feelings of violation) to explaining why employees withdraw their citizenship behaviour towards individuals, demonstrating its uniqueness in the aftermath of employees’ breach experience. This thesis expands existing knowledge of why psychological contract breach matters, and discusses the implications and directions for future research.

Identity research in consumer studies typically perceives consumers as bearers of fragmented, multiple postmodern identities. Contemporary social theory, broadly supporting this perspective, suggests that tradition is no longer required for the successful construction and maintenance of an identity. Unfettered from the restrictions of tradition, identities are asserted to have been liberated from the impositions of social and cultural institutions. However, this perspective appears to neglect the notion that individuals might actually desire tradition and social practice to develop a coherent, stable sense of self. This thesis explores the meanings of tenure - private renting and owner-occupation - to elucidate how these deeply felt connotations can affect individuals’ identities and their sense of self. In doing so this thesis articulates how the prospective consumption, or non-consumption, of a traditional practice – home ownership - can potentially have profound implications for one’s identity, overall sense of self and consumption behaviour. The results of this thesis were generated by conducting 30 qualitative interviews with private renters aged between 24 and 30 years old in Stoke-on-Trent using a case study approach. The findings indicate that identities are heavily influenced by the different meanings and interpretations of private renting and owner-occupation. Furthermore, the role of tradition to identity, and in particular to an overall coherent sense of future self, was found to be highly salient. Contextualised by Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘Liquid’ sociology, the findings of this study suggest that a threatened sense of future self can engender identity and consumption related practices that seek to affirm, re-affirm and defend one’s sense of self against stigmatising discourses.

Recent research has questioned the commonly accepted notion that transformational changes are instigated when compelling evidence establishes a clear sense of urgency for action. Following these intriguing results, this thesis set out to investigate why some leaders avoid taking action even when a crisis is threatening their systems. For that reason, a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach was designed, which allowed insights from the discipline of psychology and the study field of management to be reviewed and meta-synthesized into a conceptual framework that expands the myopic paradigm of urgency and thereby elaborates the process of change instigation. The findings suggest that once a crisis is faced, leaders engage in an emotional change process during which the compelling evidence is appraised in reference to business goals and ego-commitments. These appraisals give rise to negative emotions as they inform the individual of the encountered threat. As a result, a self-protective regulatory mechanism is triggered, the operations of which determine the future of subsequent appraisals and thus the response to be adopted. That is, action might be taken to secure business continuation (adaptive), or the leader could trigger defence mechanisms (maladaptive) and thus respond in ways which might go against organizational interests, but protect the threatened ego. Although the theorization has not yet been empirically validated, the thesis bears significant contributions to knowledge. It demonstrates that urgency a) is a necessary yet insufficient element of the emotional change process; b) provides a superficial explanation of how transformations are instigated. Its logic is grounded in the outdated assumption that human beings are purely cognitive, cold and rational processors of information. Instead, the suggested framework emphasizes the important role that the unconscious hot cognitions and the emotional experiences play. Ultimately, through the analysis of more than 1200 multi domain sources, this theorization provides a viable alternative to the current urgency paradigm. It facilitates the diagnosis of defensive appraisals and paves the way for the development of tools to assist the agents of change.

This work attempts to explain the relationship between innovation expenditure, innovation outputs, and firm productivity. It investigates the key factors that drive these relationships using unbalanced German manufacturing panel data at firm level captured by the Mannheim Innovation Panel (MIP) between 2003 and 2013. A structural equation model is employed to test the data consisting of three stages proposed by the Crepon, Duguet, and Mairesse econometric model (CDM) framework. The first stage is a Heckman model to control for selection bias and to explain the firm’s decision if participating in innovation activities or not, and the level of expenditure on innovation in relation to its previous labour productivity. The second stage is the knowledge production function in which innovation expenditure generates economically valuable knowledge in the form of different types of innovation. The third stage is the production function, which describes the relationship between generating innovation and labour productivity. This work focuses on testing the CDM and the expansions on process innovation and organisational innovation in the production function using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) approach. The results imply that the firm’s decision to involve itself in innovation activities is positively associated with its previous labour productivity. However, for those firms which participate in innovation activities, the previous labour productivity affects the level of expenditure on innovation negatively. The estimation results of the knowledge production function suggest that product innovation in the form of new to the firm of clearly improved products rises with innovation expenditure. The estimation results of the production function promote the role of presenting market novelties, process innovation targeted at the reduction of average costs, and organisational innovation as sources for labour productivity. A set of determinants that might affect innovation and productivity were investigated. The empirical results suggest that market novelties are driven by qualified personnel, however, this study was unable to find drivers for process and organisational innovations.

This thesis explores the state of existing knowledge on expatriate work assignments and matters of adjustment and adaptation as they affect Western, non-Western and host workers in Arab countries, specifically Oman. The main purpose of the research is to provide an integrated analysis of expatriate adjustment from the perspectives of Western and, crucially, non-Western expatriates and their host national counterparts. It offers a critical appreciation of factors included in Black, Mendenhall, and Oddou's (1991) influential Framework for International Adjustment (FIA). The thesis identifies weaknesses in the Black et al approach, drawing insights from more recent literature to consider the dynamics of cross-cultural interaction and offer a deeper understanding of reciprocal influence, accommodating the neglected viewpoints of non-Western expatriates and focusing greater attention on host national attitudes and responses to dealing with Western workers. This sort of relational approach is rare in this area, as much of the literature talks only about the Western expatriate experience. A crucial point borne out by this research is that the way host nationals and expatriates cooperate and interact helps to explain: (i) why host nationals are often reluctant to integrate with Western expatriates in particular; and (ii) how host national reluctance can influence the adjustment experience of wider expatriate communities. These neglected factors were explored by developing an understanding of the extent to which host nationals interpret differences in culture and forms of behaviour within and across multinational work groups, and also by investigating host national attitudes towards unacceptable cultural behaviour on the part of expatriates. Quantitative and qualitative data on these issues was gathered through a detailed survey, supplemented by in-depth interviewing. Semi-structured face–to-face interviews were conducted with 18 expatriates and 22 Omani managers and employees drawn from petroleum and educational institutions. The results show important differences between Western and non-Western expatriates in terms of both their sense-making about adjustment and attitudes and orientations to working with host national Omanis. The research also highlights significant challenges for the cultural adjustment and workplace effectiveness of host nationals themselves. These centre on competing ideas about the significance of religion, customs, traditions, and gender segregation. Cultural novelty emerges as a significant phenomenon, showing positive links to cultural (social) and work adjustment. The analysis of these factors demonstrates that Western-centric accounts provide an inadequate basis for understanding and facilitating multinational work assignments in Oman.

When people engage in physical activity they often report that it alters the way they think and feel. These lay beliefs are generally supported by research on the cognitive benefits of physical activity. But despite the evidence on benefits of physical activity for cognition, little research has investigated whether physical activity has any effect on judgment and decision making, particularly in unrelated domains such as consumer decision making. This thesis presents seven empirical studies which demonstrate that both regular and single bouts of physical activity influence consumers’ product judgments and decision making. Specifically, the key results indicate that physical activity leads decision makers to weigh different product information more appropriately. The results were robust to the inclusion of various control variables. In the first part of this thesis, five studies investigate the effect of physical activity on decision makers’ ability to rely on relevant versus irrelevant information. Past research has shown that when faced with irrelevant product information, consumers often find it difficult to ignore the irrelevant information, and typically dilute their judgments (i.e. their judgments are less extreme). In contrast, the results of this research show that regular physical activity aids people’s ability to focus on relevant information and ignore irrelevant information in product judgments. In the second part of this thesis, three further studies indicate that physical activity influences attribute weighting in consumer decisions that require trade-offs between desirability and feasibility attributes. Decision makers tend to place a lot of emphasis on the desirability attributes, often at the expense of feasibility attributes. The findings of this research indicate that physical activity leads consumers to not overly focus on desirability, and consider feasibility attributes more in choices that require trade-offs between them. The findings have important implications for marketing and public policy since they extend the benefits of physical activity to a novel domain – information processing in consumer decision making.

The growth in mobile ownership and increase in Internet connectivity has led many developing countries to actively pursue the creation of application development sectors within their economies. Application development appears as a feasible option to even the less developed regions, as most of the technological resources needed in application development can be accessed with relative ease and low cost, no matter the location. What is more, in addition to economic benefits the applications can also have a role in solving societal challenges. Although technologically application development seems relatively straightforward, what remains less well understood is how contextual factors, such as norms and cultures, impact the application development process within these countries. This thesis approaches the research area through the concept of societal routines. Societal routines are seen as proxies to local context, and the aim of this research is to analyse how these routines affect application development throughout the application development process. The research takes the form of a case study and studies the topic from the perspective of application development that occurs in Kampala, Uganda. Although the local developers and start-ups are generally comfortable with the technological affordances provided by the technological resources, the local context poses certain conditions, which not only impact how applications are built, but also what kinds of application are developed. The results show how existing societal routines form the basis for the applications, and how technology that originates from outside carries meanings and structures that may or may not fit with local realities. Overall, the research proposes a framework for understanding context and its impact on application development. With this, it aims to contribute to our understanding on local technology production, technology implementation and digital divide in developing countries. Furthermore, it also questions the role often given to technology in addressing societal challenges.

If I take my umbrella, having seen that it’s raining outside, we might say that my reason for taking my umbrella was that it was raining. However, if I’d believed that it was raining when it wasn’t, we might say that my reason for taking my umbrella was that I believed that it was raining. In the first case, my reason for acting seems to be a feature of the world, whilst in the second it seems to be a feature of my psychology. According to most theories of reasons, we are mistaken about what my reason for acting was in one of these cases. However, I argue, these theories all entail several awkward claims. I argue that there is a theory of reasons that can reconcile these two accounts of what my reason for acting was without entailing such awkward claims. I argue that what the fact that it is raining and the fact that I believe that it is raining have in common is that, in their respective cases, they each explain why it was rational for me to take my umbrella and why I took it. More generally, I argue that there is at least a sense in which all practical reasons explain why it is, in some respect, rational for the agent to do the actions for which they are reasons. The major challenge for this account is the claim that only features of an agent’s psychology can explain why they act or why it is rational for them to act. I provide a formal construal of this challenge and argue that the fact that it is raining can explain why I take my umbrella and why it was rational for me to do so, by explaining the fact that I believed that it was raining.