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.

This thesis investigates the importance of temporal rhythms in the study of information infrastructures (IIs), responding to the call to address an II’s “biography” by focusing on its evolution over time. It enriches understanding of how socially constructed rhythms, a temporal structure under-examined in the II literature, influence II cultivation. A strategic niche project to develop an e-mobility II in Berlin is used as the case study and reveals the influence of rhythm in disciplining (constraining) and modeling (motivating) II cultivation. It demonstrates how the intermediary may mediate these influences through the interventions of harmonising, riffing and composing. Based on these interventions, the study develops the concept of facilitated II cultivation, which adds to the emergent literature exploring the tension between planned and emergent infrastructure work. In doing so, the study presents a framework that helps combine short-term implementation concerns (strategic interventions by the intermediary) with long-term path dependency and evolutionary concerns (influences of past and future temporal rhythms) for IIs.

Knowledge management can play a central strategic role in organisational life, potentially initiating from strategy planning to performance achievement. The continuous adjustment of organisational strategy and performance can be powerful in knowledge intensive organisations such as think tanks. Think tanks are policy research organisations, usually of small to medium size, and non-profit in nature. The Pakistani think tank ‘industry’ is at an important tipping point in terms of establishing knowledge ‘impact’ for the state and the wider society. Think tank organisations are gaining dual attention for creating awareness in society and suggesting policies to the state. The central purpose of this research is to provide an explanation of why and how knowledge management plays a role within think tanks, especially with regards to organisations linking strategy and performance. It also seeks to provide evidence from Pakistani think tanks providing suggestions for organisational improvement that may be applicable to think tanks in other developing countries. A thorough literature review from the field of knowledge management includes knowledge, knowledge management, and the strategic relationship of knowledge management, organisational strategy and organisational performance. Specifically, the research seeks to analyse knowledge management in social sciences policy research think tanks based in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. The participation of eight think tanks provided access for field visits to conduct interviews, observations and document collection. From the findings, it is recommended that consciousness towards knowledge management can highlight the natural and independent process to keep organisational strategy and performance improving continuously in a cyclic manner. Knowledge resources with Pakistani think tanks demand proper recognition and valuation, as they are potentially being worth more compared to material resources. Amongst the knowledge resources, cultural values and norms, multilingual skills, ‘friendly’ internal environments and leadership are found to be important. The strength of Pakistani think tanks is in their Relational Capital, which they appear to be utilising. Informal-Tacit knowledge management practices are highlighted more in the context, though gaps do appear to exist for formal practices. It is suggested that think tanks could further enhance real visibility through their Relational Capital and making use of tacit informal practices leading to friendly, multilingual and effectively leadership cultures with positive values. Think tanks have the potential to help provide solutions during turbulent times, both leading and managing knowledge – effecting a positive impact upon both state and society.

Since the emergence of reshoring, it has received huge interest and become a hot topic in academia, industry and policy circles. Most extant research has focused on defining the reshoring concept, its synonyms, the trends and the drivers behind reshoring decisions. Recently, the research scope has expanded to the reshoring decision-making process, right-shoring and advanced manufacturing having affected reshoring. However, this line of research is still in its infancy. The reshoring phenomenon and the concept are still not thoroughly understood. The impact of reshoring has been rarely researched. In addition, cross discipline research into the association between reshoring and other fields, such as the role of reshoring or shoring decisions played in global manufacturing strategy and business performance (BP) have remained under-researched. Besides, the entire body of research lacks empirical quantitative data as a methodology to enrich people’s understanding of the practice of reshoring. This research attempts to address these gaps empirically, by mainly focusing on an exploration of the current UK manufacturing reshoring status and the relationship between shoring decisions, competitive priorities and BP. The research develops a framework for reshoring to synthesize the related factors which need to be considered during the decision-making process by following a 360-degree approach. The framework also guides an exploration of the realities of reshoring from the UK perspective. In addition, a theoretical moderation model has been devised from the literature, supported by contingency and congruence theory, to explore the correlation between shoring decisions, competitive priorities and BP, with ten hypotheses built up. This research conducted data collection through a survey and obtained 298 completed responses by UK manufacturers. The analysis is based on 261 reliable responses through descriptive analysis, and hierarchical regressions, by using Excel 2016, PPT 2016 and SPSS 24 tools. From the descriptive analysis results, the research has revealed a clear current status of UK manufacturing reshoring from multiple perspectives including: overview of shoring decisions, strategic realities, operational considerations focusing on competitive priorities and products, impacts on supply chains, and comparisons of BP. Based on the statistical analyses results, six out of the ten hypotheses have been supported, moderation relationships have been discovered to exist among the SC cost and BP, delivery and BP, and flexibility and BP. The results identified that SC cost and delivery are the key competitive priorities to improve BP for the companies who took no shoring decisions; delivery is the key competitive priority to improve BP for the companies who conduct both direct and indirect reshoring; delivery and SC cost are the key competitive priorities to improve BP for the companies who are indirectly reshored; and finally flexibility and SC cost are the key competitive priorities to improve BP for the companies who offshored overseas. With a better understanding of reshoring decisions and their current status in the UK, also a clear role of shoring decisions made among manufacturing strategy and BP, academics can use the results of this research as a foundation for future research, industry practitioners can use it to make more considered reshoring or shoring decisions and develop an appropriate operational capability emphasis aligned with the shoring decision, and policy makers can develop more and suitable polices to further support this trend and revitalize the manufacturing and economics areas of the UK.