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This thesis mainly focuses on three essays on cross-border M&As. A sample of Chinese outward mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between 1997 and 2011 involving Chinese listed firms as the acquirers is analysed in the first essay to highlight the relationship between political connections, financial constraints, and stock returns. On average, Chinese firms, especially private firms, are more likely to face financial constraints. However, the political connections can release these kinds of financial constraints. Less financially constrained firms have higher stock returns when there is an announcement of outward M&As. The second essay investigates whether foreign acquisitions can mitigate financial constraints, improve Chinese target firms’ research and development (R&D), and productivity, based on a sample of 914 inward M&As deals over the period of 1994-2011. Empirical results show that foreign acquisitions in China are associated with a reduction in target firms’ financial constraints, which is pronounced for non-state owned enterprises. I also provide evidence that foreign acquisitions can improve target firms’ R&D investment and productivity post acquisition. The third essay investigates the impact of strategic assets with firm heterogeneity on location-takeover choices by Chinese multinational enterprises by employing a dataset of 978 outward M&A cases over the time period 2000-2014. There is positive correlation between strategic assets and location-takeover choices. Technology is the most important factor in comparison to brands and management practices. Firms with a higher degree of R&D expense are sensitive to host country’s strategic assets. Government-involved firms care more about ‘hard’ technology (e.g. advanced innovation of product, plant, or equipment) than ‘soft’ technology (e.g. management quality).

This thesis empirically investigates the relationship between globalisation and labour market outcomes by exploring Chinese data. It is motivated by the fact that China has experienced a rapid pace of globalisation in the past two decades and has witnessed increasing wage inequality at the same time. It is a collection of three self-contained studies that examine the effects of various aspects of globalisation on employment or wage inequality. Chapter 1 presents research background and general motivations, followed by a simple description of the outline and the structure of the thesis. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between globalisation and inter-industry wage differentials in China by using a two-stage estimation approach. Taking advantage of a household survey dataset, this study estimates the wage premium for each industry in the first stage conditional on individual worker and job-related characteristics. Alternative measures of globalisation are considered in the second stage; trade openness and capital openness. The regressions do not reveal a significant relationship between overall trade (import and/or export) openness and wage premia. However, disaggregation of trade into trade in intermediate and final goods is shown to matter. Increases in import (export) shares of final goods tend to reduce (increase) the wage premium significantly, whereas imports or exports of intermediate goods do not explain differences in industry wage premia. This finding is supported by stronger effects for final goods trade in coastal than non-coastal regions. Our results also show a positive relationship between capital openness and industrial wage premium, though this relationship is less robust when endogeneity issues are allowed for. While Chapter 2 focuses on wage differentials across industries, Chapter 3 turns to wage inequality within industries. Specifically, this chapter examines the relationship between average income of exporting destinations and skill premium using Chinese manufacturing industry-level data from 1995 to 2008. To do so, we construct weighted average GDP per capita across destinations employing within-industry export share to each industry as weights, and then link it with industry-level skill premium. Empirical evidence shows a positive correlation between average destination income and average wages, which is consistent with existing literature. More importantly, we find that industries that export more to high-income destinations tend to pay a higher skill premium, suggesting that skilled workers benefit more from high-income exports than unskilled workers on average. IV estimates confirm causality and this positive relationship identified is robust to the inclusion of additional control variables. However, the positive relationship only applies to ordinary export whereas processing export tends to induce a reduction in skill premium. Our results also reveal a stronger effect during the post-WTO accession period when China integrated into the world economy rapidly. The findings in this study provide evidence in support of the relationship between export destinations and within-industry wage inequality. Chapter 4 incorporates labour market conditions and investigates whether the nature of firm-level employment adjustment is affected by the flexibility of the labour market. We take advantage of the differences in local labour market conditions created by the non-uniform implementation of the hukou reform in China. Then we identify the employment effects of the reform by comparing firms in reform regions to those in non-reform regions. Combining firm-level and city-level data, we adopt a difference-in-difference approach. Empirical results find that firms exposed to the hukou reform have higher employment on average than similar firms without the reform, which indicates that a more flexible labour market allows for an easier employment adjustment. We then extend our empirical framework to explore the conditioning effects of the hukou reform on employment adjustment following trade openness. Consistent with our expectations, firms respond to trade shocks by increasing employment relatively more with the presence of the hukou reform. These findings offer important implications to the current labour market reform in China and to other developing countries with inter-region labour movement barriers like India and Vietnam. Finally, Chapter 5 summarises main findings of the thesis and briefly discusses potential directions for future research.

The surge of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBM&As) from China, the largest of the emerging economies, has attracted considerable scholarly attention recently. The unique institutional context in China, i.e., heavy government involvement in business activities and imbalanced development of subnational institutions among Chinese regions, raises two interesting questions: whether, or not, CBM&As of Chinese firms create value for acquirers in the short and the long term; and what special sources of value creation exist in Chinese firms’ CBM&A? The main focus of this thesis is to investigate the impact of multi-level institutional variables on short- and long-term value creation in Chinese firms’ CBM&A in the unique Chinese context. Using a sample of 279/192 CBM&A events collected from the CSMAR database over the period 1999-2013, we find that the market reacts positively to CBM&A announcements, but the accounting performance of acquirers fails to improve after CBM&A in the long term. Based on the selected sample, we employ Ordinary Least Squares to analyse the data and find the following results. First, the study reveals government is an important source of value creation, but its effects on the short- and long-term value creation in Chinese firms’ CBM&A are reflected by government ownership and political connections. We find Chinese market investors reward acquirers with political connections at the time of CBM&A announcements, but explicit government ownership contributes more to long-term performance improvement of acquirers after CBM&A. Second, in the long term, we find there is U-shaped relationship between R&D intensity and the long-term post-CBM&A performance of acquirers, which suggests acquirers with moderate-level R&D intensity suffer from more integration problems resulting from the dilemma of compatibility. Third, at the macro level, we find that higher-quality institutions among the Chinese regions and higher-quality host country institutions provoke more positive market reactions, while less cultural distance and greater formal institutional distance contribute to performance improvement of acquirers after CBM&A in the long term. Furthermore, the effects of micro-level institutional factors, i.e., government ownership and political connections, on the value creation in Chinese firms’ CBM&A are dependent on the macro-level institutional environments. In the short term, the market responds more positively to acquirers with higher government ownership, but less positively to acquirers with political connections with an increase in subnational institutional quality. With the increase in host country institutional quality, the market responds less positively to both the larger government ownership and the presence of political connections. In the long term, we find that the influence of government ownership on value creation is enhanced with the increase of cultural distance, but declines with the increase of formal institutional distance.

My thesis explores the growing research area of social entrepreneurship by exploring the struggles over the meaning of social enterprise which emerged during the institution-building process of social enterprise as a new organizational form in South Korea. Although the initial idea of social enterprise was self-sustaining and self-financing to pursue their own social agenda, some of them have been integrated into the existing taxonomy of business or public policy system. In my thesis, I aim to reveal how independent bottom-up social enterprise initiatives are integrated or not into public policy through the case of the emergence of Korean social enterprise. In Korea, the government’s attempts to integrate social enterprise activities resulted in struggles over the meaning of social enterprise between top-down and bottom-up actors especially after the legalization of the Social Enterprise Promotion Act in 2006. To explore how each actor is involved in institution-building projects and how their activities influence specific institutional changes in the context of social enterprises in Korea, I present multiple data sources. Collected data includes official documents, meeting and public hearing minutes, newspaper articles, but mainly semi- and in-depth interview data with social entrepreneurs and professionals from different groups working with social entrepreneurship during a fieldwork in Korea between March and August in 2014. I used a macro discourse perspective to explore how actors understand and use discourses of social enterprise differently in changing economic, social and political environments. Then I analyzed how actors take different strategies based on their positions and own interests in order to legitimize the claim they make against the existing discourse. In this process of analysis, I will conclude that a dominant discourse can be contested by relatively powerless bottom-up actors in the institutional field through constant struggles over the meaning of social enterprise and that these struggles can put bottom-up actors in a higher institutional position that can make institutional changes.

This thesis explores the enabling role of bureaucracy in cross-expertise collaboration. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the engineering unit of an aeronautical company, and focusing on a myriad of different specialists involved in the company’s product development, I show that bureaucracy (i.e., understood as the rationalization of work) provides the infrastructure for the collaborative work of various experts. More specifically, through eight embedded cases, I examine how bureaucracy shapes cross-domain meetings, knowledge exchanges, and the work of intermediaries, making these dynamics more unambiguous, calculable, reliable, and precise. By reducing uncertainty, bureaucracy enables specialists to engage in focused and productive exchanges and interactions. I identify three conditions that underpin the positive impact of bureaucracy in this context and present four of its enabling roles in cross-expertise collaboration. Namely, these are: clarifying responsibilities, interconnections, and complex processes; promoting impartial relations and reducing tensions; ensuring participation in systemic matters; and streamlining integration. Overall, the thesis takes bureaucracy out of the shadows in our understanding of collaboration processes. It also contributes to studies on expertise coordination by highlighting that in highly-interdependent work situations formal organizational elements co-exist — and complement — emergent integration/coordination mechanisms. The thesis also contributes to the general organizational scholarship by putting forward a more appropriate understanding of bureaucracy in contemporary organizations which underscores its multifaceted nature. The work also has implications for the practitioner-oriented literature on collaboration, emphasizing the value of functional structures and formalization when most authors sing the praises of team-based arrangements and ‘organic’ structures.

This thesis analyses the role of the Chinese state in overseeing the low-carbon transformation of its economy. It looks more particularly at the changing power dynamics surrounding the production of electric power provoked by the combination of market reforms and the rise of environmental concerns since 1978. The Chinese case is not only relevant for global environmental change, but also because it interrogates the classical understanding of developmental and environmental politics. The thesis explores how, in China, the necessity to address environmental issues has transformed the way in which the state exercises power over the economy, particularly over the electric power system. The research method pursues a historical analysis of the normative and distributive struggles involved in the transformation of the Chinese Party-state institutions in relation to economic development and environmental protection, especially the field of energy. This approach stems from a definition of low-carbon transformations as complex processes of change unfolding over long periods of time, involving not only technological innovations, but also contentious confrontations of interests and ideologies. Consequently, in the thesis, environmental goals, as well as different modes of exercising political power in the economy, such as the developmental state and a regulatory state, are taken as ideational factors in the political battles and practices that construct continuous institutional change, rather than super-structural trends to which China would be submitted. The research traces the parallel institutional transformations induced by China’s market reforms and the concomitant rise of environmental concerns. Subsequently, the impact of these processes on low- carbon development are explored in the case study of renewable energy development and the implementation of administrative pollution targets. The analysis draws on 50 interviews, numerous participatory activities, as well as the systematic collection and analysis of relevant Chinese policy documents. The research finds that the absorption of environmental claims by the ruling Communist Party has validated the resort to authoritarian interventions in the economy, and by the same token has increased resistance to them, undermining the construction of a rule-based state power. The thesis demonstrates that the mobilisation of the Target Responsibility System, -an institution at the heart of command structure of the Party-state in the reform era-, to pursue environmental goals has undermined the power of environmental regulators. The unresolved institutional tension regarding the exercise of state power is shown to have adversely impacted on the implementation of environmental targets, as well as the development of the renewable energy sector.

Good relationships at work are thought to enhance various symbolic and material benefits, such as well-being, assistance on the job, and other resources. However, more research is needed to understand the intricacies between the quality of work relationships and organisational context. Therefore, this thesis adopts a social constructionist view to explore how people construct a quality of relationships at work. Moreover, to examine how people make sense of a ‘good’ way to behave with each other at work, this study investigates the construction of ethical issues at work. While research on ethical behaviours highlighted the role of intuitive processes, more research is needed to understand how these intuitive processes play a role in the construction of ethical awareness. The quality of work relationships is a quotidian phenomenon and has an ambiguous ethical meaning. Hence, work relationships is a way to study of the construction of ethicality in work organisations. A naturalistic multiple case study is adopted to investigate the phenomenon of work relationships in context. The researcher conducted in- depth qualitative inductive studies in two work organisations in France, including observations (330 hours of nonparticipant observations, 14 hours of audio and video recordings), interviews (45 participants), and questionnaires (N=106). Data was analysed separately, then compared in order to build theory on the construction of the quality of work relationships and underlying ethical issues. Findings show that relationships at work are a site of conflicting responsibilities: to care for work and to care for co-workers. The ethical meaning that people ascribe to the quality of work relationships is primarily related to individuals’ responsibility for the work, trumping a responsibility for co-workers. However, the salience of personal life at work increases the tension felt between caring for work and caring for co-workers. This tension can be rationalised into the belief that both caring obligations are complementary instead of competitive. This research shows that affects play a critical role in the issue construction phase and evidences the role of implicit processes at the collective level. The thesis contributes to research on work relationships in three ways. Firstly, this study demonstrates that the organisational context shapes the quality of work relationships, which reside in the interplay between care and instrumentality. Secondly, previous research was fragmented on the definition of work relationships, thus this research presents a typology of good relationships at work with an empirical definition. Thirdly, this study draws on an ethics of care to add to understanding care in organisations by showing how workplace instrumentality hinders the possibilities to care for co-workers. Thus, the thesis critically considers the role of work organisations on social welfare.

This thesis puts forward a problematization of key assumptions within the field of organizational memory and develops a phenomenology-infused theory of organizational memory as a practice. The aim of the research is to depart from existing theoretical preconceptions of organizational memory in order to observe what organizational memory means, and looks like, to practitioners as they engage with it in their daily practice. Data collected during a 15-month long ethnography of architectural work is used to call into question an existing, broadly anthropocentric, understanding of organizational memory in favour of one where organizational memory is seen as distinct from practice memory (following Schatzki, 2006) and proceeds as an emergent, episodic accomplishment bound by local material arrangements and dynamics of organizational power. A new theoretical framework for classifying the literature is proposed alongside an emergence/submergence model of organizational memory as a practice (for illustrative purposes), implications for industry and further research, and a methodological approach to the study of such temporally-sensitive phenomena.

This thesis is a qualitative study of a group of leaders from the Westminster Parliament, the Financial Services Authority and three UK high street banks following the 2008 financial crisis and has been undertaken to further our understanding of interorganisational trust. The study is ethnographically informed, but makes significant use of focus group and interview data. It also uses data collected from Treasury Select Committee meetings and other publications relating to the policy debate following the publication of the draft Independent Commission on Banking Report in April 2011. There is currently a gap in our knowledge about how interpersonal trust relates to trust between organisations. There has been a good deal of empirical work on interpersonal trust between individuals and within organisations; on the other hand, our understanding of interorganisational trust tends to be more theoretical, lacking the same breath of empirical work that has been undertaken on interpersonal trust. This thesis attempts to better understand interorganisational trust building by using what we know from the trust literature. It then proposes a practice-based approach to studying trust-building to address the challenge we face in conceptualising trust coherently at micro and macro levels together, moving our understanding beyond thinking about trust as a construct or as existing at a level. The thesis firstly identifies three practices that help us better understand how trust-building takes place in the complexity of the interorganisational system. The first of these practices is storytelling, the second is curating space, the third is managing knowledge flows. The thesis secondly proposes that understanding individual and organisational actors as occupying a liminal state, existing in a state of being both individual and organisational actors. This allows us to begin to consider trust-building as both a micro and macro concern at once and provides fresh insight into trust-building.