The aim of this study is to explore the nature of productivity problems in building project coalitions arising from contractual interfaces and conflict. The study investigates the impact of contractual interfaces on the emergence of conflict in both the interorganisational relations of the contracting parties and the operational context of the building production process management. It analyses the dynamics of conflict in the behaviour and performance of the project participants to establish a link between conflict and productivity problems. The focus of the study is the interface between the mechanical and electrical (M&E) contractor and the main contractor. The interface between the main contractor and the client, as well as the design team members, is examined in so far as it affects the relationship between the main and the M&E contractor. The investigation reveals conflict as a potentially creative or destructive behavioural process that emanates from competition between the economic interest of the client and the professional/commercial interests of the consultants and contractors, in conjunction with low levels of trust. In so far as the building production process requires the inputs of all the participants, i.e., the client, the consultants and the contractors, competition gives rise to negotiati6ns. As long as the negotiations comprise integrative bargaining, conflict is creative and results in collective problem solving. In the presence of low levels of trust as reliability or predictability, the more powerful party resorts to strategies of control, domination or manipulation to pursue its own interests at the expense of those of others. Thus negotiations become distributive and conflict becomes dysfunctional. The weaker negotiating party either resists the strategies of power of the more dominant party by applying discretion in the use of their knowledge, and by matching their level of effort to rewards, or capitulates. The level of resistance or capitulation of the weaker party is dependent on their relative size and financial strength compared to those of the dominant party. The study indicates that the nature and level of conflict has a direct impact on the level of motivation, performance and consequently the productivity of the project participants. The investigation finds that conflict is inherent to the contracting system and needs to be managed (Lavers, 1992; Smith, 1992; Langford et ai, 1992). It finds that building project coalitions are organised as networks at the start of the project but may be transformed into political organisations during the project life-cycle (Mintzberg, 1991 (d): 374; Pfeffer, 1981 : 27-9). The imprecise definitions of functions and activities contained in the contractual documents provide the grounds for and facilitate the political activity of the project participants. The investigation therefore supports Clegg' s (1992) postulation that 'contractual documents provide the constitutional and constitutive grounds and framework within which the meaning of the contract is negotiated, contested, and contained' (Clegg, 1992: 135). The opportunistic interpretations resulting negotiations over the meaning of the contract (Tavistock Institute, 1966) very often impecle the full or effective enforcement of the contractual functions and activities, thus reinforce conflictual behaviour. The project managers' capability to manage conflict, though important in terms of preventing escalation of conflict, is indicated to have limited impact on performance levels of project participants. The research concludes that the economic and legal governance structures in the wider business context of building production processes do not foster fair, co-operative and non-confrontational exchange relations (Lane and Bachmann, 1996), and do not appear to discourage the imposition of onerous business agreements by the economically more powerful on those more dependent. It therefore suggests that fundamental changes in both governance structures of building project coalitions as well as attitudes of project coalition representatives are required as the means by which productivity improvements may be carried out.

This work deals with the problem of landscape planning in the landscape area of Kojatice. In the theoretical part we introduced the literary background to the problematics. We also set up a network of geobiocenology areas, characteristic types of the geobiocen and habitant types. The work includes map of biocens and maps of military mapping and sozological map which contains environmentally significant landscape segments, locations of important species of plants, animals and significant trees. Finally the set of recommendations to solve the specific problems in the area was proposed.

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This thesis aims to drawn on theoretical insights from science and technology studies and rural studies literatures to interrogate the potential agricultural system and on-farm changes required for developing lignocellulosic biofuel supply chains in the UK. Previous work has largely examined first generation, food based biofuels, with limited focus on the prospects for lignocellulosic technologies. Likewise policy identifies a number of challenges for lignocellulosic biofuels, commercial, technical, and sustainability, that require policy solutions. However, biofuels straddle the agricultural-energy sectors. The deployment of these technologies will demand the adoption of certain practices and crops by farmers, as well as broader changes to agricultural systems. These important components for delivering lignocellulosic biofuels require examination which has so far been limited. Using semi-structured interviews alongside documentary analysis I identify the ways in which policy constructs and imagines the interface between lignocellulosic biofuels and agriculture, before interrogating these tacit assumptions through comparison with perspectives from farmers, agricultural intermediaries and industry representatives. A key finding is that through knowing farmers and agricultural systems with modelling alone, important avenues for producing and procuring biomass for use in lignocellulosic biofuel production are obscured, whereas significant barriers are presented as readily negotiable. This thesis argues the following points. Firstly, there is an emerging disjuncture between biofuel imaginaries and agricultural imaginaries. This is particularly apparent as food security concerns re-emerge and Common Agricultural Policy moves towards embedding types of multifunctional arable production which both exclude dedicated non-food energy cropping. Secondly, policy understands farmers as rational economic decision makers influenced by price, ignoring entrenched on farm practices, technologies, values and farmer decision making which are difficult to untangle. These factors can create resistance to increasing straw baling, or the cultivation of dedicated energy crops. Fourthly, marginal land and straw are material heterogeneous resources not the fungible commodities imagined in policy. This materiality shapes how land and biomass is and can be used. Foregrounding these considerations identifies oil seed rape straw as a potentially large, but challenging opportunity. Finally, agricultural intermediaries are a crucial link in biomass supply chains but have been entirely ignored in policy. Contractors and merchants undertake in-field operations, own large scale machinery and manage inter-relationships between farmers and end users. Agronomists are important land management advisors and involved in the soft sell of new technologies and practices. Neither groups are addressed in policy and require active enlistment in lignocellulosic developments. These insights highlight the following: a need for policy makers to forge better linkages between biofuel, bioenergy and agricultural policy domains; the incorporation of qualitative insights into policy understandings of on-farm decision making, practices, biomass materials and farmer values; the engagement with a wider range of agricultural actors to better deliver desired agricultural change.

This thesis contains four main analytical chapters. The first three examine some specific issues relating to the school-to-work transition in Northern Ireland. These are based on an econometric analysis of microeconomic survey data, containing work-history and family background information on a single cohort of young people aged 16-18. The main findings of these chapters are as follows: firstly, decisions about destinations post-16 are significantly influenced by factors relating to the school attended by the young people up to the age of 16. In particular, young people from schools which perform well, in terms of overall examination performance and attendance rates, are more likely to remain in full-time education, ceteris paribus. This can be interpreted in terms of aspects of ‘school culture' such as the attitudes and aspirations of pupils and teachers, which have received considerable attention in the educational literature. Secondly, psychometric tests which are used as part of the careers guidance process do not significantly affect young people’s experiences of unemployment post-16. Qualitative evidence suggests that this can be attributed to some aspects of test administration in Northern Ireland, such as blanket testing and feedback on test results, which in many cases fall short of recommended guidelines. Thirdly, the majority of young people in Northern Ireland who leave school at age 16 enter Further Education (FE) colleges or vocational training schemes such as the Youth Training Programme (YTP). The choice between these two activities does not significantly influence young people’s chances of gaining additional qualifications between the ages of 16 and 18. Rather, there are factors common to both, such as lack of entry level qualifications, which have a more significant influence. The fourth analytical chapter examines the nature and extent of hidden unemployment amongst adult males in Northern Ireland. The analysis in this chapter is non-econometric and is based mainly on a descriptive analysis of data from the 1991 Census of Population and the Labour Force Survey. The research found that there are a large number of jobless people who can be considered to be unemployed, but who do not appear in official unemployment figures. The majority (around two thirds) of these are registered as long-term sick, and the remainder are on government employment or training programmes, or unemployed teenagers who are not eligible to claim benefits.

This thesis examines the contribution to social and political theory of the flexible specialization research programme (henceforth FSRP). It explores systematically the sociological and political underpinnings of this research programme, with a view to critically explicating its understanding of industrialisation and industrial transformations in the contemporary world. While examining the unity in diversity of the various researchers working with the FSRP it also contrasts the FSRP with other cognate research programmes (regulatory theory, post-Fordism, flexible accumulation, etc). The thesis explores further the FSRP and its relationship with political transformations, defined in the broadest sense to include meta-theoretical reflections on meaning of the political in the FSRP, the transformation in industrial relations, the trend toward economic and social dualism, polarisation, marginalisation and segmentation and the meaning of locality, industrial districts and regionalism in the FSRP. The thesis is sympathetic to the FSRP and views it as a progressively developing one (in both a political and epistemological sense) but is nevertheless critical of some of its foundational assumptions and policy prescriptions As a research programme that is still developing in a cumulative direction this thesis can only claim to be provisional in its problématisations.

With the current trend toward globalization and the increasing competitive and technological challenges of today’s environment the formation of international strategic alliances between firms have become an important part of many firm’s strategies and have grown in importance as a mode of international business operations. However, experience with international strategic alliances has shown that they face a number of problems which can often result in the termination of the alliance. For this purpose it is important to address the factors that are impacting the success of international strategic alliances. Behavioural and organizational characteristics of interorganizational relationships have been identified as being important to the successful management of the international strategic alliance. However, a clear understanding of their impact on performance in the academic literature is deficient. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to address the behavioural and organizational characteristics of international strategic alliance success. The specific objectives of this study are (i) to provide an empirical analysis of UK strategic alliance activity with firms from Western Europe, the USA and Japan (ii) to determine the successful characteristics of strategic alliances between UK firms and their international partners and (iii) to assess the influence of behavioural and organizational characteristics on the success of UK international strategic alliances. Data was collected using both primary and secondary sources. The creation of a database of UK international strategic alliances through secondary sources was the first stage of the research. This allowed the identification of a number of international strategic alliances used in the second stage of the research, which involved the collection of data through a mail survey. The data was analysed using factor analysis, descriptive statistics, t-tests, multiple discriminant analysis and multiple regression. The results of the study have shown that while both behavioural and organizational characteristics are important to UK international strategic alliances, behavioural characteristics distinguish successful UK international strategic alliances from less successful international alliances. Successful UK international strategic alliances are characterized by higher levels of commitment, trust, coordination, interdependence and communication and lower levels of conflict. Performance of UK international strategic alliances was also found to be positively related to commitment, trust, coordination, interdependence and communication. Relatively few differences were found between successful and less successful alliances in terms of structure and control. Furthermore, very few relations were found between performance and structure and control characteristics.

This study explores the subject of cross-national variations in industrial conflict, looking specifically at a 'matched set' of factories in Canada and Britain. The comparison between these two countries is intriguing. Since 1943, Canadian governments have sought to regulate industrial conflict by a distinct formula whose three pillars are a) legally enforceable collective agreements meant to circumscribe disputable issues, b) the outlawing of strikes during the term of the collective agreement, and c) the substitution, for industrial action, of a well-defined grievance and arbitration procedure to settle the disputable issues arising during that term. Dispute resolution is formal, collective agreements are comprehensive and arbitral jurisprudence is encyclopaedic. In Britain, on the other hand, dispute resolution has been left almost entirely to the parties themselves. Collective agreements are not enforceable and sketch the barest details of co-regulation. An ill-defined body of 'custom and practice' still governs in most day-to-day disputes. Strikes are legally possible for all groups of employees at any time on any issue related to the workplace. And arbitration, though available, is voluntary and widely shunned by both parties. Dispute resolution is highly informal. While one might, from this comparison, predict a higher level of strike activity in Britain, Canada has equalled or surpassed Britain over the past twenty-five years in industrial conflict. Why might this be so? The study reviews several sets of theories on cross-national variations in industrial conflict and finds that the Canada-Britain comparison does not fit any of them. Suggesting a synthesis of the "institutional" and "political economy” theoretical approaches, it proposes to concentrate on the political struggle over production at the shop floor in a "politics of production" approach. Defining four "political apparatuses of production" (interests, rights, adjustments and enforcements), the study examines how these "microinstitutions" for conflict-handling articulate with three key loci on the frontier of control where conflict can erupt (discipline, the structuring of the internal labour market and job control). Through the use of intensive interviews in four workplaces (two in each country) in the brewing and aluminium fabrication industries and the analysis of general data on industrial relations in the two countries, the analytical framework is applied to examine the generation and resolution of industrial conflict.

The thesis examines the role of formal and informal relations in the social organisation of production through a case study of two railway repair plants, one in Britain and one in Russia, both of which privatised in the course of the research. Although many Western commentators have noted the importance of informal relations in the social organisation of production, very little systematic research has been devoted to this theme, while in Russia it has only just begun to be a legitimate object of research. Moreover, most of the studies of informal relations have viewed their role within the framework of workers’ resistance rather than seeing them as a universal aspect of social organisation which perform functions for all actors and which are a contested terrain. This thesis studies informal relations as a field of conflict and compromise between workers and managers. The thesis is based on fieldwork carried out in both plants over the period 1993-7. In each case special attention is paid to a number of key areas of informal organisation: the management of the production process, the determination of wages, the differentiation of the labour force, the role of line managers and relations with customers. Both enterprises were state enterprises at the beginning of the research and were surprisingly similar, with a very formal hierarchical management structure and an extensive network of informal relations. The rigid planning system led to similar problems of meeting the plan, and similar informal solutions to those problems. In both plants the initial preparation for privatisation was associated with formal initiatives to restructure the internal relations of the plant, but these had very little impact. The striking contrast came when the plants were fully privatised. While privatisation for the Russian plant was a means of consolidating its privileged monopoly position, leading to few real changes within the plant, the British plant was subjected to a very radical restructuring which sharply reduced the significance of informal relations, although these changes were not made without resistance and informal relations began to take on new forms. In both plants the power of workers was at the same time being sharply reduced by the growing threat of redundancy.

This thesis is an empirical study of wage determination mechanisms in the context of the Italian economy. The research presented here addresses a number of issues concerning theories of wage determination, and investigates their relevance for a better understanding of the functioning of labour markets. In particular, the thesis intends to evaluate the adequacy of traditional competitive theory for the explanation of several labour market phenomena. The approach adopted uses econometric techniques and micro-data (at the individual level) to investigate the determinants of pay levels and the structure of wages in Italian manufacturing industry. The vast literature on wage determination of the post-war era extensively documented the existence of large and persistent wage differentials among industries and workers of comparable skills. The empirical evidence analysed in this work suggests that the structure of relative industry wages is very stable over-time. The results obtained provide no evidence in support of the view that wage dispersion can be explained by either unmeasured workers characteristics or compensating wage differentials. Conversely, the pattern of industry-occupation wage differentials seems to suggest that rent sharing mechanisms and fairness considerations are important determinants of wage levels. A significant wage dispersion was also detected among firms operating in the same sector. Firm size, product market conditions and firm's financial structure, through their effect on ability-to-pay, proved to be central features of firms' pay policies. Firm's profitability, in contrast with the view commonly held, showed a positive impact on wage levels. A common finding of empirical studies on wages is that women are paid less than comparable male workers. Our findings for the Italian economy indicate that, although male/female pay differences - on average - are not large in magnitude, nevertheless women tend to be segregated in low pay jobs with poor advancement prospects. In Italy, wage formation is characterised by a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, negotiation between trade unions and employers set a wage level which can be subsequently modified, in the second stage, by overpayments at the firm level. This second stage originates the so called "wage drift". The analysis in this thesis considers the empirical relevance of wage drift, in pay setting mechanisms, for productivity and bargained wage levels. A positive effect of overpayments on productivity was detected and an efficiency wage interpretation is offered. Finns' discretionary payments were shown to be shaped so as to reduce shirking, increase effort and retain high quality workers. Finally, if labour relationships are characterised by long term employer- employee attachment then the traditional "spot” labour market characterisation does not appear well suited to explain job tenure. A "career" labour market interpretation, where internal rather than external mobility is important, can provide a better framework of analysis. The analysis of the determinants of job duration showed that: high educational attainments, work experience and firm size - ceteris paribus - have a negative impact on the probability of job separation.