This study focuses on the experiences of a group of women made redundant from public sector institutions in Sudan. It aims to explore the consequences of privatisation and redundancy on women's employment, and economic and social positions. It also considers whether the women's experiences varied according to their occupations, as the study sample comprised women professionals and women workers made redundant from the banking and manufacturing sectors respectively. This research is of particular importance, because it primarily sets out to investigate the changes that happened in women's employment status, as well as women's economic and social positions, as a result of privatisation policies that emerged in a fast-track process implemented in public sector institutions in the early 1990s. In addition to the socio-cultural factors that are structurally rooted in that society, particular aspects undermine women's position in society, including patriarchal structures that were historically institutionalised at the household, society, labour market, and state level, and the discriminatory gender inequalities practised against women in the domestic domain. The collective interactions among these have seriously undermined women's employment, and their economic and social positions in Sudan. The findings from this study indicate that women, made redundant as a result of privatisation, experienced adverse impacts on their employment status, as well as their livelihoods. Constraints within the context where women experienced redundancy due to privatisation, still do not consider the changing positions of women in public sector institutions, and at the household level as well.

This research investigated the training needs of South Asian male adults in Hong Kong. It aimed at understanding the social forces behind the social exclusion and the disadvantageous employment conditions being faced by them, with a view to designing appropriate training programmes for improving their employment prospects and integration into the Hong Kong society. The literature review suggested the view that there were gaps between our existing knowledge about the training needs of South Asian male adults in achieving economic and social integration and the reality. A mixed-method approach of qualitative research was adopted, in which first stage data were collected by questionnaire survey, and qualitative data were obtained by subsequent face-to-face interviews. In general, the South Asian male adults who participated in this study faced problems to various extents in job seeking, employment and receiving training. They considered language barriers, unfair treatments, cultural and religious differences, and racial discrimination as problems which hindered their economic and social integration into the Hong Kong society. The social policy recommendations drawn from the research findings to improve the economic and social positions of South Asian male adults in Hong Kong included: provision of dedicated training services, equal education opportunities, formulation and implementation of Chinese language enhancement policies, fostering of mutual help among ethnic minorities and the ethnic enclave economy, and last but not least, promotion of multiculturalism and interculturalism for achieving racial harmony and mutual understanding.

The present thesis comprises three essays on the labour market outcomes of immigrants in the United Kingdom (UK). Chapter 1 introduces the thesis, outlines its contribution and provides an overview of each of the three essays. Chapter 2 evaluates the role of immigration policy on the occupational outcomes of immigrants to the UK. We use a quasi-natural experiment to tease out the role of immigration policy on the occupational outcomes of immigrants from other factors that affect these outcomes. Looking at a sample of immigrants who entered the UK shortly before and after 2004, the findings suggest that the change in the UK’s 2004 immigration policy only led to a slight increase, although not statistically robust, in the odds of observing A8 immigrants who entered the UK after 2004 in elementary occupations relative to professional occupations. We unearth evidence that A8 immigrants with longer durations of stay in the country have better occupational outcomes. Also, the occupational attainment gap between A8 immigrants and UK-born individuals reduces drastically once one controls for income levels in the source country of the immigrant. In Chapter 3, we examine the implications of networks of social contacts for the occupational outcomes of immigrants with different lengths of stay in the host country. It is commonly assumed that immigrants principally rely on co-ethnics to find employment. Using a direct measure on whether employment was obtained by referral or other means, we find that while this common assumption remains true for immigrants who recently arrived in the UK, co-ethnics no longer appear to be the main source of referrals for more established immigrants. Thus it seems that the social network of contacts of an immigrant potentially extends to include individuals from other countries as their stay in the host country lengthens. This implies that immigrants may undergo a process of “social assimilation” by broadening their network of social contacts. If this diversification improves the “quality” of the network, it could lead to better labour market outcomes. In Chapter 4, we look at the labour market outcomes of different groups of immigrants and the children born to them in the UK, in comparison to natives. Most previous studies assume that all UK-born of non-White ethnicity are children of immigrants because the data commonly used do not identify the place of birth of the respondent’s parents. In light of the history of immigration of some ethnic groups in the UK, however, such an assumption may lead to classification errors in the data, which could have severe consequences for implications of intergenerational mobility in labour market outcomes. Our analysis shows that even an apparently negligible amount of classification errors in the data can cause high level of uncertainty in the estimates of the parameters of interest. Additionally, for the first time in this literature we use a dataset that contains information on parental country of birth to examine labour market outcomes across all major ethnic groups in the UK. Chapter 5 concludes the thesis, and future research topics/directions are discussed.

There is a general consensus regarding the positive relationship between trade and productivity growth. Openness to trade encourages an efficient allocation of the factors of production within that trade. This thesis encompasses three studies that analyse the relationships between trade policy and openness and economy-wide productivity growth and its components through different channels. In doing so, we attempt to add to the existing literature on international trade, while accounting for some observed shortcomings in the existing literature. Firstly, empirical studies examining relationships between trade, resource allocation and economy-wide productivity tend to focus only on developing economies and as such our studies comprise a mix of developed and developing nations. Furthermore, in the case of productivity growth, attention is usually biased in favour of looking at aggregate productivity, potentially missing important details at a disaggregated level. We account for this by conducting studies using disaggregated data so that we can identify any patterns or trends that may be masked by aggregate data. In addition to this, the trade-growth literature faces criticisms regarding its inability to identify an exogenous measure of trade and as such we employ the use of an exogenous instrument for trade to conduct a study on trade and productivity. In our first study (Chapter 2), we examine the relationship between trade liberalisation events and structural adjustment in employment and output. To conduct this study, we employ the 3-digit level of the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC), Revision 2 data for the manufacturing sector, covering the period 1976 to 2004 for a sample of 35 countries. We also investigate the conditioning effects of complementary policies, in particular institutional quality, on the trade-adjustment relationship. We use data on institutions from the Economic Freedom of the World Index. We find that the use of aggregate data indicates the absence of a systematic relationship between trade liberalisation and structural adjustment. However, through disaggregation, we find that the occurrence of a trade liberalisation event reduces adjustment in intermediate goods employment and output and increases adjustment in capital goods output. In our second study (Chapter 3), we use a panel of 38 countries and employ the 10-sector productivity database derived from the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) for the period 1990 to 2005, in order to explain labour productivity gaps across developing regions. Specifically, we analyse patterns of economy-wide productivity and its two components across countries within Latin America, Africa and High-Income regional groupings. The first component, structural change, captures changing sectoral shares of employment as labour reallocates across sectors. The second component, the within component, captures the reallocation of resources within sectors as well as technological improvements occurring within sectors. Our findings suggest that differences in economic performances across regions are accounted for by negative structural change occurring in individual countries within these regions. This means a reallocation of employment from high productivity activities in favour of lower productivity ones, thereby contributing negatively to overall productivity growth. Furthermore external shocks such as falling oil prices appear to drive this type of growth reducing structural change. Finally in Chapter 4, we investigate the relationship between trade openness and economy-wide productivity and its structural change and within components as defined in Chapter 3. We use a panel of 38 countries, again employing the GGDC 10-sector productivity database for the period 1965 to 2006, along with the complete gravity dataset provided by Head, Mayer and Ries (2010). Our findings of this study support theories that suggest a positive relationship between trade and economy-wide productivity. Our results also indicate that it is the within component of economy-wide productivity that is driving this results.

The concept of ‘diversity’ has become a common feature in UK organisations over the last twenty or so years. It offers arguments about what the world is like, who people are, how they relate to one another, and how the world should be. It has been used to bring about a host of different actors, objects and practices. Yet, we know relatively little about one of the central elements of this field – diversity practitioners. They play an important role in defining what diversity means in local contexts, they are the experts of the field. Drawing on Foucault’s theories of power/knowledge and the ‘subject’, along with the notion of bricolage, the research examines the different forms of knowledge that diversity practitioners use to construct themselves as expert subjects, and in turn how they seek to construct a particular subject of others, the ‘diversity trainee’, as the subject who is the outcome of diversity training. The findings show how the subjects of the diversity practitioner and the diversity trainee are shaped by dominant societal discourses of the expert and the neoliberal subject, as well as by the history of equality work and the organisational challenges that diversity practitioners face. But they also show that diversity practitioners are actively involved in forming themselves as subjects by producing subject positions and rationalities, which construct skills, values, and knowledge. Diversity training is shown to mobilise a form of power known as ‘modern government’ in seeking to constitute the diversity trainee as a selfregulating subject, which adds complexity to previous discussions of the ethics of this form of power. Diversity practitioners are central elements of their field, so recognising the relations of power/knowledge in their practices is fundamental to considering any future development of their practices, as well as better understanding the concept of diversity itself.

This study aims to expand Weick and his colleagues' (2005) sensemaking framework by exploring prospection, work role identity, and emotion in the sensemaking process. It adopts a qualitative case study approach and examines the sensemaking of employees (both professional and non-professional) during a multi-skilling project. The study reveals three forms of sensemaking, namely 'wide sensemaking', 'narrow sensemaking' and 'ambivalent sensemaking', depending on the dynamics among prospection, work role identity, emotion in sensemaking. The study finds that people's sensemaking is affected by the disparity between the core attributes in their initial work role identity and those in the newly designed role of a multi-skilling project. Moreover, this study extends theories of prospection in sensemaking, arguing that people experiencing different disparity between their original work role identity and the work role identity associated with the Project display different patterns of prospective sensemaking. In addition, the thesis considers emotion in sensemaking, which was induced from the data. Emotions elicited in sensemaking affect the selection of anomalies as sensemaking cues, and indicate the need for identity work. Furthermore, in making sense of a multi-skilling project the valence and intensity of emotions elicited are determined by the level of difficulty to restore to one’s acceptable work role identity.

The thesis critically examines the main theories of union growth, especially white-collar unionism, and argues they have inadequately analysed the labour process and its precise importance in understanding the development of unionization. It is suggested that unionization is better understood through analysing (a) the various pressures which imply changes in the labour process; (b) the impact of these changes on the relationships between employees and not just those between employer and employees; (c) how this shapes the patterns of employees experience and their response in terms of collective organization and action. This allows a clearer understanding of how certain conjunctural influences may affect union organization and activity; in particular, the role of employers policies, state intervention and the autonomy of trade unions from the labour process. These arguments are developed in the context of a detailed analysis of the Bookmaking Industry, the rise of The Union of Bookmakers Employees (TUBE) in the early 1970s, and its subsequent merger with the TGWU.

Exact solutions to stochastic, capacitated, multi-commodity, multi-stage production/inventory models are in general computationally intractable. The practical application of such models is therefore inhibited. In this thesis a general stochastic, capacitated, multi- commodity, multi-stage production/inventory model with linear cost structure is proposed. Under convexity conditions it is a stochastic linear program. A good computationally efficient approximate solution technique is developed and some numerical results reported. It is important to assess the merit of approximate techniques and this is done statistically by replicative simulation. But the accuracy of this method improves only as the square root of the number of simulation trials made, so it is important to eliminate any unnecessary variability in each trial. It is proposed that this be done by the use of control statistics. Several novel control statistics are developed, the most powerful being a martingale control statistic constructed independently for each trial from information provided by the approximate technique being tested. Results are reported of testing the approximate solution technique developed for the general model, ordinary linear programming ignoring all the stochastic elements in the problem, and two other approximate techniques, by replicative simulation. These suggest that the penalty incurred by ignoring the stochastic nature of the problem is significant, but that first order deviations from optimal decisions may lead only to second order penalties. This is a desirable feature of the stochastic models, for it indicates that approximate solution techniques to stochastic programs may be more reliable than would be supposed from the approximations made.

Middle managers play a crucial role in contributing to strategy. Much existing research focuses on trying to understand the desired characteristics and competencies of these managers, in order to explain their ability to sell issues to top executives (upwards) and external stakeholders (outwards). Though this yields valuable insights, it does not account for the role of an institution as: 'more or less taken for granted behaviour that is underpinned by normative systems and cognitive understanding that give meaning to social exchange and thus enable self-reproducing social order' (Greenwood, Oliver, Sahlin and Suddaby; 2008:4). This thesis examines how middle managers sell issues upwards and outwards, in a setting where attending to institutions is central: public service reform, concerning home improvement. It does so by looking through the lens of institutional work. This allows insight into how different jurisdictions and organizational and professional boundaries overlap and at times conflict. In analysing interviews and observations, the thesis mobilizes a central concept in institutional work: the concept of institutional pillars, to explain differential levels of success in implementing reform. These pillars can be regulatory (to do with policies and conventions), cultural ('the way we do things around here'), or normative (concerning basic values). In broad terms the thesis demonstrates that reform in this setting is progressively less likely to be implemented as one moves from the regulatory domain, to the cultural and normative domains. This complements accounts of middle manager competence, with a more fine-grained insight into how contextual complexities can prefigure the likelihood of successful strategy implementation.

The evolution and impact of North-North and North-South trade have been among the main areas of research in the literature of international trade. But how trade shocks emanating from a low-wage southern country affect the manufacturing sector of other low-wage countries has been little researched. In particular, there is a lack of evidence on firm-level adjustment to low-wage trade shock in a low-wage developing country context. The main objective of the thesis is to fill this gap in the literature by empirically examining the impact of import competition shock from China on the evolution of manufacturing sector in India. This thesis combines plant level data from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) 1998-2009 with the product level trade data from UN Comtrade database. The thesis contains two main chapters –chapter 2, which explores the impact of a sharp rise in Chinese import exposure on overall plant performance and product reallocation dynamics within-plant, and chapter 3. The latter dwells on wage inequality and employment within-plant. Chapter 2 finds that increased import competition from China following its WTO accession leads to improvements in revenue productivity and a reduction of product scope at the plant-level. A 10 percentage point increase in Chinese import exposure leads to a 3.7 percent increase in large plants’ total-factor productivity. The same amount of increase in exposure to Chinese imports leads to a one percent decrease in the number of products produced by the plant. Plant product-level analysis suggests that the impact on selection of products is not symmetric. Plants drop the product in which Chinese import exposure is higher; however, the closer the product is to the core competence of the plant, the less likely it is to be dropped. Although import competition from high-wage countries has no statistically significant impact on plant performance or product scope, plant product-level adjustment shows that import competition shocks from both high-wage countries and China have a similar impact on the selection of products within a plant. Chapter 3 finds that the rise in import competition from China leads to a general increase in within-plant wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers in large plants. But the overall pattern is driven by much greater adjustment in flexible labor markets or states that have employer friendly industrial relation regulation, while no significant adjustment is evident in the inflexible market. I find that a 10 percentage point increase in Chinese import exposure leads to a 1.35 percent increase in skill premium in the sample of large plants, whereas the same change leads to a 2.65 percent increase in skill premium in the flexible market. It is also observed that increase in import competition from China causes a downsizing of low-productivity plants through employment destruction, and an expansion of high-productivity plants via employment creation. Again, the reallocation of employment is only evident in the flexible labor market.