The practice of German companies to indulge in forum shopping in England to achieve beneficial treatment under English insolvency proceedings has encouraged the German Government to make significant changes to German insolvency laws by introducing new legislation in the form of the Law for the Further Facilitation of the Rehabilitation of Companies (“Gesetz zur weiteren Erleichterung der Sanierung von Unternehmen” “ESUG“ ). The Act states that the impetus for the reform was the move of German companies to England which started a general discussion of “Germany, as a restructuring jurisdiction” (“Sanierungsstandort Deutschland”). Such forum shopping activities increased the awareness of the perceived weaknesses of the German system. This research looks at forum shopping from a Darwinian perspective. Germany and England as Member States of the European Union compete with each other as movement of capital to another Member State has a negative effect on the country’s economy. A reputation as a “bad restructuring jurisdiction” has an impact on the choice of business location and could act as a disincentive to company incorporations in Germany. Freedom of establishment allows companies to choose a regime which fulfils their needs, the Member States have to be motivated to attract companies and be willing to adapt to changes to keep up with business demands. In particular it should be borne in mind that forum shopping is not a one-dimensional activity and in itself constitutes an element of investment. The quality of a country’s legal restructuring framework has an impact on a company’s choice of business location in the first place and its willingness to invest and hence to attract debt financing. Taking the example of Germany and England, it is argued that forum shopping activities foster the development, improvement, reform and revision of existing laws. This thesis argues that Insolvency Darwinism results in a global alignment and convergence of insolvency systems so that the jurisdictions within the EU imitate each other with their rescue-friendliness. This competition for the “best insolvency regime” results in a more perfect insolvency landscape. The alignment with more rescue-friendly insolvency regimes is preferred to avoid unwanted forum shopping activities, whereas a “fettered Darwinian approach” of partially imitating another system will fail to deliver the desired result. This thesis critically examines whether Germany has achieved its aim of establishing a “culture of second chance” in changing the Insolvency Code (“Insolvenzordnung”) introduced by the ESUG. Chapter one serves to explain why forum shopping functions as a driver of insolvency law perfection, using a “Darwinian approach” and Darwin’s core thesis of “natural selection” to explain the competition of jurisdictions in insolvency law. Chapters two and three give an overview of the developments of the rescue culture in Germany and England. Chapters four to eight compare and contrast the different key areas in Germany and England, examining the situation in Germany before and after the introduction of the ESUG. Specific focus is put on the question of whether the changes introduced by the ESUG were driven by forum shopping activities and whether these changes led in fact to a more “perfect“ insolvency regime, in the sense as examined in chapter one. Chapter nine is dedicated to the conclusion.

Word of Mouth (WOM) is produced as a result of an interaction between a dyad of sender and recipient. Previous research on WOM has focused on the phenomenon's effect on the recipient's attitudes and behaviour, emphasising the role of WOM in customer acquisition. In contrast, little research has examined the effect of WOM on the person generating it: the WOM sender. Consequently, this study examines the consequences of acrticulating offline WOM, both positive and negative on this participant in the WOM dyad. These consequences of WOM can be categorised as firm-related and self-related outcomes. This study is the first of its type to examine these outcomes simultaneously and it provides empirical evidence that singular episodes of WOM not only hold implications for the firm but also have psychological implications for the sender. The firm-related implications comprise WOM sender's affective commitment towards the firm, their loyalty intentions and their likelihood to give future WOM about the services provider. The self-related outcome is the sender's self-enhancement. Our understanding of the impact of this WOM interchange on the sender is enriched by examining certain moderation and mediation effects. Tie strength within the WOM dyad is posited as a moderator of the effect of WOM on the sender's firm-and-self-related outcomes; affective commitment with the services provider is suggested as a mediator between WOM behaviour and firm-related outcomes. Finally, this study is the first to investigate the relative impact of WOM valence on the sender's firm- and self-related outcomes, complementing prior research which examined the relative impact of WOM valence on the recipient. Scenario-based experimental research design is employed to test the theoretical framework with mobile phone services and health club services as the research settings. A representative sample of respondents with an existing relationship with a services provider in these research settings are recruited via an online customer panel company. Pre-tests conducted to validate the scenarios and their realism suggests that the scenarios produce the intended effect. This study contributes to the WOM literature, by providing empirical evidence that WOM behaviour by an individual is likely to spawn their future WOM behaviour about the services provider, whatever the WOM valence. Furthermore, novel to the WOM literature this research indicated that self-enhancement is an outcome of WOM behaviour irrespective of WOM valence. On the other hand, the research findings show that the articulation of PWOM and NWOM have a converse effect on the affective commitment and loyalty of the sender. With regards to the relative impact of WOM, the research results suggest that NWOM holds a greater effect than PWOM on the sender's firm-related outcomes, whereas the impact of PWOM is stronger than NWOM on the sender's self-related outcome. Finally, this study indicated that the tie strength between the WOM participants does not influence the effect of WOM on the sender's firm- and self-related outcomes. This contrasts with prior research which suggests that tie strength is a key influence on the effectiveness of WOM on the recipient's behaviour (Bansal and Voyer, 2000). In addition, the analysis shows that affective commitment partially mediated the relationship between WOM behaviour and and future WOM intentions of the sender and fully mediated the relationship between WOM behaviour and willingness to pay more (attitudinal loyalty) regardless of valence. However, affective commitment fully mediated the relationship between WOM behaviour and switching intentions (behavioural loyalty), but only in the NWOM condition.

There is a deficit in the literature of research evaluating the impact of contemporary theories of leadership and followership on follower work outcomes in developing countries in the Middle East (Metcalfe & Murfin, 2011). This research examines the relationships between the three variables pertaining to follower work outcomes (job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and work engagement) and the full range of leadership styles (transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire) (Avolio & Bass, 1995), and associated followership performance and relationship characteristics (Potter III & Rosenbach, 2006) in Libya. It explores to what extent the full range of leadership styles predicts follower work outcomes; to what degree follower characteristics predict follower work outcomes; and to what extent follower relationship and performance characteristics moderate the relationship between each of the transformational and transactional leadership styles and follower work outcomes. A deductive approach is employed, using a questionnaire to collect data from 667 participants, from 141 work groups, from across 24 Libyan public sector organisations (LPSOs). The data was analysed using multi-level modelling analysis to investigate the relationships between dependent and independent variables; moderation analysis was then used to examine the impact of followership on leadership performance. The findings inform the literature in various ways. Primarily, these suggest that transformational leadership induces positive levels of job satisfaction, organisational commitment and work engagement among LPSOs employees. This is consistent with existing literature (Griffith, 2004; Judge & Piccolo, 2004; Emery & Barker, 2007; Akeel & Subramaniam; 2013). The findings support ongoing, cross-cultural leadership research (House et al., 2014) that advocates a universal positive performance of transformational leadership across nations. The findings suggest that transactional leadership is linked with positive job satisfaction and work engagement, which supports current research (Breevaart et al., 2014). Laissez-faire leaders do not seem to influence their followers’ work outcomes, which concurs with Bass (1997). The study also suggests that followers with high levels of performance characteristics demonstrate positive attitudes of job satisfaction and work engagement, while those who have strong relationship characteristics are associated with positive levels of work engagement. This is in line with the emerging literature on followership (Potter III & Rosenbach, 2006; Judge et al., 1998; Kelley, 1988) that suggests positive links between followers’ characteristics and work outcomes. It also suggests that followers’ relationship characteristics alongside transformational leadership predict follower organisational commitment, expanding the research in this field (Zhu et al., 2009). These results might serve as a basis for future cross-cultural studies to compare LPSOs’ leaders’ and followers’ effectiveness with those in similar regional or international organisations. The study also has several practical recommendations. Firstly, it suggests that organisations should invest in leadership development to improve employee work outcomes and that organisations such as LPSOs, should capitalise on the existing strength of their transactional managers in order to build a wider base of transformational leaders, enhancing organisational effectiveness. Secondly, organisations should recruit managers with the suitable leadership style for projects with certain desired follower work outcomes. Managers should adopt an appropriate leadership style to achieve the desired follower work outcomes and organisations would benefit from investing in followership development to enhance these work outcomes. Specifically, followers should be educated on how their characteristics might affect not only their own performance, but also that of their leader. Finally, organisations should recruit employees who exhibit positive characteristics that enable them to be more engaged in their work when this behaviour is desired for achieving the job task.

The research presented here is firmly embedded within the broad area of design of channels of distribution, and in particular, the functional perspective of the subject matter. The conceptual foundations of the research can be found in the model developed by Rangan et al. (1992) (referred to in the thesis as the RMM model) and the prioritisation methodology proposed by Barich and Srinivasan (1993). Rangan and his co-authors posit that the design of channels of distribution for new industrial products can be based on the following eight determinant functions: product information, product customisation, product quality assurance, lot size, assortment, availability, after-sales service and logistics (these functions formed the dependent variables of this study). They go on to suggest that an appropriate channel structure can be predicted by examination of the importance of these functions as specified by industry experts, and weighted by their level of confidence in their estimates. Barich and Srinivasan (ibid.) used conjoint measurements in developing a methodology designed to offer guidelines as to the prioritisation of managerial actions. The main aim of this research has been the development of a normative model for the design of distribution channels in the UK trade of WBPs. Because of the wide range of wood-based panels (WBPs) traded in the UK market, a calibration method has been developed that, based on two boundary defining panels (i.e. standard-grade OSB and exterior-grade MDF), allows the interpolation of the functional profile of all other panels. A third WBP, namely particleboard, has been used to test the predictive powers of the model. Examination of actual flows of distribution lead to the specification of the following two independent variables: type of WBP (studied at three levels - OSB, MDF and particleboard) and type of channel intermediary (also studied at three levels - overseas manufacturers, domestic manufacturers and endusers). In order to fulfil the research aim eight hypotheses have been formulated and presented under the following conceptually related headings: • Justification for Weighting the Data H [sub]A: There is no association between expert respondents' 'level of confidence in response' and 'type ofWBP'. H[sub]B: There is no correlation between the pattern of solutions obtained from weighted and unweighted data . • Predictive Powers of the RMM Model H[sub]e: There is no significant difference in predictive accuracy between MDF and OSB as the base of the calibration method. H[sub]D: There is no significant difference in predictive accuracy between unweighted and weighted data. • Model Stability H[sub]E: There is no correlation between the rank order of channel function importance ratings obtained from the RMM model and the conjoint measurement approach. • Explanatory Powers of the RMM Model H[sub]F: The main effects of the 'type of expert respondent' variable are not significant in explaining variation in the importance placed on the eight channel functions (either collectively or individually). H[sub]G: The main effects of the 'type of WBP' variable are not significant in explaining variation in the importance placed on the eight channel functions (either collectively or individually). H[sub]H: The interactions between 'type of expert respondent' and 'type of WBP' are not significant in explaining variation in the importance placed on the eight channel functions (either collectively or individually). Data were collected through a series of four cross-sectional surveys of industry experts, and analysed using a variety of classical inferential statistics and conjoint analysis. On the strength of the results, all ofthe above hypotheses were rejected. The research findings cast doubt on the use of weighted data in the design of channels of distribution for established products. In addition, it is indicated that when predicting channel structures, the level/degree of similarity between the base and predicted products is an important consideration, thus justifying the use of boundary defining products in the development of the proposed model. Furthermore, during the development of the final model, the analysis has provided evidence to suggest that some of the function-related heuristics specified in the literature are context-specific, thus questioning their generalisability. Finally, the findings are synthesised into a normative model and a method designed to enable providers to prioritise adjustments to channel structures if proposed. Finally, it is believed that the research presented in this thesis contributes to the general understanding of issues related to the design of channel structures by: (a) offering empirical evidence that questions some of currently accepted principles, such as functional heuristics, (b) modifying and, at least partially, validating the RMM model, (c) making suggestions as to calibration methods that may be used to interpolate channel structures, (d) proposing a new method of predicting channel structures based of the functional requirements of endusers, and (e) offers guidelines as to the prioritisation of adjustments that need to be made in existing channel structures in order to bring them in line with endusers requirements.

The aim of this study was to investigate the factors that affect the utility of the statutory accounts to the directors of small companies in the UK. The directors' views are important, as they are the main users of the accounts; small companies are important because of the significant role they play in the economy. In this thesis, small companies are defined according to the 1999 EU size thresholds (turnover £4.2m, balance sheet total £2.1m, and employees 50). The study is set in the context of the continuing development of little GAAP in the UK; whereby small companies are offered some simplifications and exemptions from mainstream requirements. The government's rationale for regulatory relaxation is based on an assumption that it will reduce burdens. However, the costs and benefits of financial reporting by small companies is an under-researched area in the literature and, to a great extent, the views of the directors have been ignored. Proposals to raise the qualifying thresholds for small companies to the EU maxima have resulted in controversy, but so far, the debate has been dominated by mainly anecdotal evidence from the regulators and the accountancy profession. The present study addresses this deficiency and is set within a positivist paradigm. The methodology included a small preliminary survey and exploratory interviews. The main survey took the form of a postal questionnaire sent to a random, systematic sample of independent, private limited companies filing full accounts. The sample was chosen to represent those that were likely to qualify for little GAAP as well as those were likely to do so if the thresholds were revised to the EU maxima at the time of the survey in 1999. Usable responses were received from 385 companies, giving a response rate of 17%. Tests for generalisability and non-response bias were non-significant. Due to the nature of the selection criteria and limitations of the sampling frame, the findings cannot be generalised to companies with a turnover less than £0.5m, very young companies that had failed before filing accounts or those that had not filed full accounts at the time of the survey. The research updates and extends previous knowledge. The study reveals a considerable amount of detailed information concerning the factors that influence the directors' financial reporting choices and the factors that influence their use of the statutory accounts. Using a series of logistic regression models, four factors were found to be significantly associated with the utility of the statutory accounts :from the directors' point of view: The accounts are audited. The annual accounting package includes management advice or recommendations from the accountant. The accounts are used for planning, control, long and short-term decisions. The accounts are used for confirmation, assurance and inter-firm comparison. The empirical evidence provided by this thesis makes an important contribution to knowledge by developing financial accounting theory and aiding evidence-based policy decisions on financial reporting by smaller entities.

The service component of manufacturing activities has largely been neglected. Small firms are of particular interest because services are often seen as especially critical in establishing their competitive advantage. Drawing on data from face-to-face interviews with the owner-managers of Finnish and UK small printing firms and their employees and professional print buyers, this study addresses the earlier neglect by offering a theorised analysis of service capability in printing firms, that is the role and scope of the services within the manufacturing context as mediated through customer-firm interaction. Although the interviewees perceived services as being important, the findings show that their role and character varied among firms, depending on the type of product, customer characteristics and other factors including national differences. However, quality, price and delivery always had to be taken into account in service provision. The conceptualisations of, and importance attached to, these elements varied and often contradicted each other in practice. A concept, 'the printer's triangle', was valuable in analyzing the multiple perspectives and in showing the differing strategies employed in service provision when quality, price, delivery and other factors were included. In some instances, long-term customer relations were crucial to service delivery. In others, product type and infrequent interaction with customers accompanied differing service forms. UK firms stressed the importance of cost efficiency and flexible labour strategies while Finnish firms relied more on self managing staff and the latest technology in delivering services. Innovative products were especially important in developing added value services in Finland. However, most firms in the study offered products and services where short delivery times and competitive prices rather than added value services were important. A key strategy used by professional buyers was the 'supplier pool', which combined long-term supplier relations with competition between suppliers and downward pressures on prices. The findings and theorization show services as being integral to printing but subject to variations in managerial strategies, internal operational constraints, market and customer characteristics and national differences. The broader implications for small manufacturing firms, service and quality theorisation are outlined with suggestions for further research.

The analysis of contractual relationships between different parties has been the subject of wide research aimed at understanding the factors that affect project outcomes in major capital investments. Yet experience from the construction industry has shown that conventional project execution, based on transactional contracting, may not be suitable in ensuring delivery of high profile projects on time, within allocated budget and to the required standards. In addressing such issues, this research investigates an innovative approach to project management, adopted by BAA for the building of Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport. During this major £4.3 billion project, the overall manager BAA attempted to create an environment for collaborative behaviour amongst parties to the contract by, firstly, managing the majority of the risks and, secondly, through integrating construction contractors within teams at several levels, thus establishing the concept of integrated teams. In addition, reward and monitoring procedures were deployed to motivate suppliers to deliver in accordance with the project parameters. In the event, BAA found that certain integrated teams performed better than others even when they contained the same set of contractors. This affected the overall project performance in terms of cost and delivery because of the inter-dependency of work output between different integrated teams. In an effort to understand and explain this phenomenon, research on this case study adopted a qualitative approach to establish key behavioural and organisational attributes that can lead to desired performance. Semi structured interviews were adopted for data collection and analysis, and were used to develop a Framework that can explain and account for performance drivers when delivering large capital projects of this nature. Using an integrative approach based on agency theory, organisational control, and motivational dynamics, this research has enabled the devlopment of a Framework that can help a construction client focus on controlling factors that affect the supplier's performance. The results suggest that these factors fall into four quadrants of control; behavioural, social, output and process. That is, the client has to ensure control mechanisms are prevalent in these four areas and exerted through their constituent factors such as the skills of the project manager, training, appropriate performance measures, goal congruence and leadership. The existence of these factors in the right magnitude is a vehicle in realising the potential of the performance Framework.

Despite the widespread adoption of governance best practice generated by government reports such as; Cadbury (l992), Greenbury (l995) and Higgs (2003) in response to the collapse of several multi-billion dollar public entities, accounting and governance scandals continue to proliferate. The scale of failures such as Enron, and the fact that they were not foreseen, lead the author to conclude that the relationship between the way in which a corporation is governed and how it performs is far from fully understood. A comprehensive review of existing corporate governance research highlights two major shortcomings. Firstly, literature and managerial best practice is biased towards understanding the need to control agents charged with the running of firms that they do not own, so called agency theory (Berle & Means, 1932; Williamson, 1964; Jensen & Meckling, 1976). Where other theories, namely resource dependency theory (Pfeffer &.Salancik, 1978) and stewardship theory (Boyd,1995; Donaldson, 1990), have been explored, they have been largely considered in isolation in an attempt to contradict rather than compliment the conclusions that arise from the adoption of an agency stance. Secondly, corporate governance guidelines and academic research has, thus far, failed to sufficiently define firm specific circumstance, or context specific variables, and, therefore to reflect that such variables could significantly alter the relationship that a given model of governance could have upon firm performance. Consequently, this study develops and applies a theoretically integrated research model that defines governance in terms of all three aforementioned theories and utilises the entrepreneurial venture, with its unique ownership and leadership structure, as a lens through which to observe the effects of context specific variables on the governance to performance relationship. Using a combination of publicly available, independently audited, corporate reports and primary data collected from the leaders of 204 companies listing on London's Alternative Investment Market (109 of which meet the author's definition of an entrepreneurial venture), an analysis of the collected data, using partial least squares, reveals that for both entrepreneurial and non entrepreneurial ventures, significant relationships exist between constructs of; ownership; non-financial reward; the services provided by the board; financial motivation and financial corporate performance. However, in non entrepreneurial firms, significant relationships also exist between the control of the agent construct; duality and financial corporate performance. Finally, the identified constructs of corporate governance explain 14% of return on capital employed and 17% of return on assets in entrepreneurial ventures, whereas they explain 7% and 26% respectively when the firm is deemed non entrepreneurial. These findings provide an original contribution to academia by highlighting the manner in which the choice of performance indicator can alter the nature of the observed relationship. Furthermore, by identifying the manner in which the context specific variables associated with entrepreneurialism alter the governance to performance relationship, the author has contributed fresh insight into this economically important sub set of firms, increased the granularity of academia's understanding of corporate governance and, in the case of all three of the mentioned contributions, clarified the previously confounding results that have emerged from a tendency to research single items of corporate governance defined by a single theoretical stance within samples of largely ubiquitous firms. In addition, a contribution has been made to business practice through the development of guidelines that call for managers, owners and policy makers to dig deeper into the role of the governance system and what it is that they need it to deliver given their specific circumstances and operating environment - rather than slavishly following a static model of best practice that, at best, provides the outward signs of compliance but that, in fact, has a greater potential to create a false sense of security.

This thesis examines a quest for Value for Money in the United Kingdom National Health Service, and how this quest has evolved over time. In the 1980s and 1990s the main issue was efficiency. After 1997 the focus shifted to effectiveness in achieving centrally determined targets. This thesis argues that in spite of considerable achievements, the Value for Money approach has "crowded out" CARE. Essentially, CARE involves sympathy, empathy and compassion. It has so many different manifestations in practice that a) it can only be shown through narratives, and b) this requires a more decentralised-bottom up approach than has been adopted by the Value for Money strategy. We represent Value for Money as a Grand Narrative in the sense of Lyotard (1979, 1984), and treat it as a representation of the archetypal Net Present Value model. The Grand Narrative is adapted to form the proposition of an Adapted Grand Narrative; that is, if implementers of the Value for Money strategy have different views of the categories than the designers of the strategy, then it will not be carried out as originally conceived. To capture the idea of CARE, a story approach, which we summarise as multi narratives, is adopted. The multi narratives derived from interviews are deconstructed using panel data, further stories and Socratic Dialogue, including ongoing academic dialogues. Using an openended interview approach, we find that disparity exists between the Value for Money strategy as perceived by the strategy designers in one part of the National Health Service hierarchy (or network) and those implementing the same strategy in another. The methodology adopted in the thesis becomes part of its recommendations. Asking people who implement strategies to tell individual stories that illustrate CARE will enhance the Value for Money strategy, and CARE can then become a route for enhancing the existing Value for Money strategy by placing value on the stories about the delivery of CARE. CARE, we will demonstrate, has multidimensional qualities, with some unique characteristics determined by situations and experiences. The framework of the approach emerges from a wide range of current and historic literatures related to Value for Money, ranging from the models of Irving Fisher to postmodern and post-structural perspectives of deconstruction, narratives, Socratic Dialogue, Differance, and the presence of the 'Other'. This multidisciplinary approach constitutes a significant contribution to the body of academic knowledge. In addition to this academic contribution, practical aspects result from the commissioning of parts of the study by the National Health Service.

Over the last three decades important advances have been made in developing sales forecasting methods that more accurately reflect market place conditions. However, surveys of sales forecasting practice continue to report only marginal gains in sales forecasting effectiveness. This gap between theory and practice has been identified as a significant issue for sales forecasting research. The literature suggests that this gap should be addressed by examining new factors in sales forecasting. Accuracy, bias, timeliness, cost and environmental turbulence are the most studied forecasting criteria in sales forecasting effectiveness. There are some literatures which address how these factors are affected by the forecast methods the firm uses. Empirical evidence on such a role of the forecasting method is lacking, and existing literature does not take into account whether forecasting criteria's influence on export sales forecasting effectiveness vary depending on the forecasting methods used by the firm. This is the first research gap identified during the literature review. Furthermore, the role of export sales forecasting. effectiveness on export market performance have received only limited attention to date. Linking the forecasting effectiveness to the business performance was reported to be critical in evaluating and improving the firm's sales forecasting capability and sales forecasting climate. However, empirical evidence of this linkage is missing and this is the second gap this study addresses. A conceptual model is proposed and multivariate analysis technique is used to investigate the relationship between dependent (forecasting effectiveness and export performance) and independent variables (forecasting criteria, forecasting methods, managerial characteristics, organizational characteristics and export market orientation). Our finding revealed the impact of bias, timeliness and cost on forecasting effectiveness varies depending on the forecasting methods used by the firm. But no moderating impact of forecasting methods has been found for accuracy and environmental turbulence. Moreover, this study reported the linkage between forecasting effectiveness and export performance when composite forecasting method is used. Identifying the relative importance of all the factors (i.e. accuracy, bias, cost, timeliness, forecasting methods, etc) it becomes possible to set priorities directly reflecting managerial preferences for different forecast criteria. If implementation of such priorities is seen to contradict principles of good forecasting practice, action can be taken to inform managers of the potential negative consequences.