Management control (MC) is a behavioural issue. Senior managers seek to align managerial endeavours with the organisation’s objectives. Traditionally, alignment has focused on seeking to ensure that managers support organisational aims by motivating, rewarding, and even monitoring, the achievement of assigned targets. MC was originally mainly about financial targets, before broadening to include nonfinancial performance measures. However, there is evidence to suggest that organisations may also seek to align managerial “values” with those of the organisation. Organisational attempts to influence managerial mindsets through the MC process raise non-trivial questions regarding the procedures and systems involved, the reasons for apparently expanding into attempts to influence thinking, and the possible consequences of such attempts. These questions form the basis of the present study. This thesis reports on a case study of Compartamos Bank, a Mexican organisation with a religious ethos, selected through theoretical sampling. Compartamos claims to have the “person” at the centre of its philosophy. The thesis contributes to the MC literature by broadening the scope of value systems. The findings suggest that value systems are not just a means of boosting performance and accomplishing organisational aims; they may also be used to foster managers’ development on various personal dimensions. Evidence from the case study suggests that frequent reinforcement of the organisation’s philosophy through its value system, along with a boundary system, may enhance “value congruence”. However, using these MC mechanisms may also cause various unintended side-effects. In detailing the implementation process of a value system, the study fills a gap identified in the MC literature regarding whether and, if so, why organisations may implement “softer” approaches involving the encouragement of shared values, and what may be the possible consequences of doing so.

Digital infrastructures characteristically expand and evolve. Their propensity for growth can be attributed to the self-reinforcing mechanism of positive network externalities, in which the value and attractiveness of any digital infrastructure to users, is generated from and sustained as a function of the size of its existing user community. The expansion of any digital infrastructure, though, is ultimately underpinned by an inherent architectural capacity to support unanticipated change, that may include changes to architecture itself. However, as digital infrastructures scale, their usage grows, and they encounter and become entangled with other digital infrastructures. As such, the capacity of digital infrastructure architecture to accommodate change, under conditions of positive network externalities that attract users, conversely leads to intensified social and technical dependencies that eventually resist certain kinds of change. That is, it leads to sociotechnical ossifications. Changing underlying architecture in existing digital infrastructures, thus, becomes increasingly prohibitive over time. Information Systems (IS) research suggests that architectural change or evolution in digital infrastructures occurs primarily via a process of replacement through two means. An existing digital infrastructure is either completely replaced with one that has an evolved architecture, or intermediary transitory gateways are used to facilitate interoperability between digital infrastructures of incompatible architectures. Recognising the sociotechnical ossifications that resist architectural evolution, this literature has also tended to focus more on social activities of cultivating change of which the outcome is architectural evolution in digital infrastructures, than directly on architectural evolution itself. In doing so it has provided only a partial account of underlying architectural evolution in digital infrastructures. The findings of this research come from an embedded case study in which changes to underlying architecture in existing networking infrastructures were made. Networking infrastructures are a prime instance of sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures. The case’s primary data sources included interviews with 39 senior networking and infrastructure virtualisation experts from large Internet and Cloud Service Providers, Standards Development Organisations, Network Equipment Vendors, Network Systems Integrators, Virtualisation Software Technology Organisations, Research Institutes, and as well technical documents. A critical realist analysis was used to uncover generative mechanisms that promote underlying architectural evolution in sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures. This thesis extends IS understanding of architectural evolution in digital infrastructures with the complementary finding of, architectural evolution through softwarisation. In architectural evolution through softwarisation, the architecture of sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures, is evolved via the exploitation of features inherent to digital entities, which have been overlooked in extant research on architecture in digital infrastructures.

Purpose/objectives: This research deals with the development of a consensus construction to understand and to optimize factors affecting service technicians response time in corrective maintenance processes for stationary equipment, i.e. equipment that can generally not be re-located for maintenance and repair, in different business areas, i.e. elevator, mining equipment and IT hardware. In this context, the goal of this research is to identify competitive objectives with respect to corrective maintenance, factors that are perceived to influence service technicians in this process as well as perceived improvement opportunities. Based on this, a consensus construction to be utilized in the researched community has been developed in order to optimize the according response times. The construct may also be used as a baseline for further research in this context. Design/methodology/approach: The empirical part of the research conducted has been targeted with an abductive, qualitative, multiple case study approach. The need for this research has been identified through an in-depth and iterative literature review and the methodology chosen, i.e. multiple case study research, has been justified. The empirical part to contribute to closing the research gap has thereby been divided into four parts: 1. Preparation of research and pilot 2. Case studies and result documentation 3. Analysis, interpretation and consensus construction development 4. Conclusions, limitations, outlook and recommendations Findings: The findings represent a significant contribution both for knowledge as well as business practice. In addition to the identification of further gaps in research, the literature review thereby isolated a specific need with regards to understanding and improving factors affecting service technicians in stationary equipment corrective maintenance response time. In this con-text, numerous concepts, such as PSS, servitization, competitive objectives/priorities, correc-tive maintenance, response time reduction, etc. have been reviewed, put into context, dis-played in a structured way and contributed to by this research. Furthermore, a set of 57 per-ceived factors influencing the corrective maintenance process and 87 perceived improvement opportunities has been identified. The consensus construction structures and prioritizes these, gives action recommendations and makes the findings available for application in business practice in the community studied. Last but not least, the research conducted has risen the awareness for the importance of this topic.

This dissertation explores the value of disclosure in sustainability reports. Sustainability reports are part of the information provided publicly by companies and may reveal information about the type of sustainability practices adopted by the company and extent of implementation. To this end, we explore (1) developed constructs using sustainability reporting, and (2) consistency with established sustainability performance measures. Till now, limited research has been conducted pertaining to the specific operational practices that companies are reporting on for the sake of developing a new measure of social and environmental sustainability out of them. Finally, (3) using the proposed measure, we explore links to financial performance and firm size. To meet these three research objectives, we first synthesize and obtain from the literature and relevant guidelines a list of operational practices for environmental and social sustainability. Next, content analysis of 331 sustainability reports is implemented. In particular, scoring is carried out on the identified environmental and social practices to see which of those are prioritized in companies’ sustainability reports. Based on the prevailing practices, we develop two constructs for social sustainability and three constructs for environmental sustainability. These constructs allow us to identify ‘leader’ and ‘laggard’ companies in four industrial sectors for comparison and provide illustrative text from their sustainability reports to demonstrate our scoring methodology. Second, we check consistency of our developed measure with existing measures of sustainability that are considered valuable. Specifically, we correlate our measure with Dow Jones Sustainability Index and Environmental Social and Governance data and find that all three measures are positively and significantly correlated with each other at the same level. Given the consistency between the three measures, we argue that our measure for sustainability performance is valuable and thus sustainability reporting appears to have some value. Finally, we explore the link between our developed measure with financial performance and firm size. Existing literature has extensively studied this relationship using established measures of sustainability performance, thus the results remain inconclusive. We revisit this relation by investigating whether our developed measure can shed light on that relationship. Structural equation modeling is performed, which indicates that there is not a significant relationship between our developed measure and financial performance, at least in the short term, as is consistent with similar research using ESG or other established measures. Thus, some aspects of sustainability but not all appear to be positively linked to financial performance. Also, to account for the industry effect, we are performing cluster analysis in four industrial sectors and identify upper and lower clusters, based on companies’ total sustainability disclosure score. Our analysis indicates sector specificity as regards the relationship between sustainability disclosure and financial performance based on the proposed instrument. Also, size expressed by revenues does not affect the measure we developed, as suggested by some of the literature.

This thesis explores an important yet underexplored aspect of management studies, which is that some individuals and organisations in business gain a cultural significance and popularity in society, which goes beyond simply being known as being high quality. Specifically, I explore how business actors garner celebrity value and explore consequences it can have for themselves and those around them. In paper 1, co-authored with my thesis supervisors, I explore how the press construct entrepreneurs as celebrities and this study provides new knowledge about how certain individuals in business become celebrities and how the press create their personas. In the second paper, under the guidance of Michael Pfarrer and Daniel Gamache while a visiting scholar at the University of Georgia, I theorise the formation and consequences of hubris developing at a collective level in an organization. In my third paper, I explore a celebrity spillover effect from a focal celebrity actor to those that they compete with.

This research approaches the personalities of luxury brands as understood and voiced by consumers. In an attempt to address the criticisms on the appropriateness and applicability of the generic brand personality typology to luxury brands, this work pursuits a new examination of the concept. Drawing on the experience of human personality trait framework development methodology, an “a posteriori” approach is grounded in consumers’ natural language to examine luxury brands’ personality disparateness from other brands. A combined methodology using online text mining and in-depth interviews was used to capture consumer vernacular for luxury brands. After separating brand personality traits from other brand descriptors, analysis of semantic similarity was performed. Based on the semantic distances of the cropped up traits, a new typology of luxury brand personality was developed. The new measure was purified and calibrated using two separate luxury consumer samples. This process led to the identification of six salient dimensions of luxury brand personality specific to the luxury domain and distinct from the existing frameworks. In addition, the new scale was employed to show that: a) member group fit positively influences self-congruence; b) self-congruence positively affects a number of consumer outcomes directly (purchase loyalty) as well as indirectly (purchase loyalty, purchase intention, and word-of-mouth communication outcomes) through emotional brand attachment, brand attitude, and brand personality appeal (purchase intention outcome only).

The central objective of this thesis is to investigate, understand and explain the conditions under which the administrative problem known as potentially avoidable failure induced demand (PAFID) arises in UK public services and might be prevented. PAFID is defined as “customer contacts that appear to be precipitated by earlier failures, such as failures to do things right first time, which cause additional and potentially avoidable demands to impinge upon public services”. A secondary objective of the thesis is to establish how, and under what better conditions, the public sector could successfully exploit the management paradigm called Lean thinking, as an alternative to the current New Public Management method, in order to address the PAFID problem. An analysis of the results from three case-studies conducted in UK local authority settings confirms that nearly half of all customer contacts in high-volume services such as housing benefits are potentially avoidable. The extrapolation of this finding to the contact volumes and handling costs in one UK council alone suggests possible savings of more than £1 million a year. The potential benefits that are available to the case-study councils and nearly 500 other local councils, together with numerous other providers of UK public services, are also very substantial. A variety of conceptual lenses are applied to the PAFID problem in order to generate alternative explanations and policy options. This thesis makes a number of contributions to public sector management theory and practice, including the finding that councils might reduce principal-agent problems that add to PAFID by espousing more supportive and enabling environments, and by adopting systems-oriented approaches that acknowledge the complex and subjective nature of real-world problems. The findings also suggest that, while the deployment of Lean ‘tools' can result in short-term savings and performance improvements, the adoption of Lean thinking as a comprehensive management approach is more likely to bring about fundamental changes.

This research explores the existence and evolution of organizational routines in small firm Project-Based Organisations (PBOs). To reach this aim, it investigates the interplay between the two aspects making up a routine: ostensive – i.e. the abstract representation – and performative – i.e. actual implementation. PBOs represent an interesting context, because project differences and discontinuities challenge the emergence, development and evolution of routines, yet the requirements of efficiency and co-ordination through repeated, similar actions would suggest the need for routines even in small firm PBOs. I have adopted an inductive case study research. The empirical setting is a Public Relation and Communication agency, where small firm PBOs are a typical form of organisation. The process nature of the subject of inquiry required a combination of bottom up and top down approaches that enabled me to identify and analyse routines in depth. As per the topdown approach, relying on extant theory, I developed a list of concepts discussed in the literature on organisational routines that in turn provided the basis for a framework within which analyse the empirical evidence. The bottom up approach draws on descriptive narratives, visual mapping, and grounded theory. The research provides both theoretical and empirical contributions towards a better understanding of the characteristics and evolution of organisational routines in small firm PBOs. Routines exist and are important for coordination and efficiency even in small firm PBOs. They are project procedures not necessarily embedded in any artefact, but perceived as regular processes by project participants. Across projects routines evolve by adapting to the context where they take place. Contexts are in turn shaped by contingencies pertaining to the actors, the project, organisational departments, and the specificities of the customer and the markets they serve. These contingencies define problems and issues that actors involved in the routine face. Facing problems and issues causes the routine to adapt, making the sequence and the content of the actions forming it different across projects. Predictability and recurrence of contingencies and related issues determine how routines adaptation occurs. When contingencies and issues are expected and recur across several projects, adaptation is planned in advance and is supposed to concern both ostensive and performative aspects of the routine. When contingencies and issues are less predictable or occur in just a single project, adaptation concerns only the performative aspect, keeping unchanged the ostensive one. In line with the low level of codification that informs small firm PBO activities, routines' adaptation is not necessarily embedded in any artefact. However, when adaptation is imposed by the owner or senior management, it can be communicated clearly to the interested actors. For small firm PBOs, the research suggests that adaptation of the routines they implement is fundamental to carrying out project activities effectively. It also implies that when aiming to change the way the organisation operates, entrepreneurs and managers should pay attention to both to the design of the routines themselves and the way actors perceive and implement changes to the routines. In addition, the study suggests that further investigation on how firm size and sector shapes the characteristics and dynamics of routines would be invaluable to the field. Regarding theory, the thesis contributes an articulation of the relationship between the two aspects of routines, performative and ostensive. Further research on the nature and functioning of routines in other types of organisation and sector would address the limitations of extant literature and achieve a more comprehensive understanding of routines.

The employee-organisation relationship (EOR) has received considerable attention in the organisational behaviour literature. This line of research has heavily emphasised positive relationships, or has examined negative events within an overall positive or neutral relationship. Influenced by the tenets of social exchange theory (Blau, 1964) and the norm of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960), this strand of research assumes that positive and negative relationships are mirror opposites, rather than discrete forms of interaction. In an attempt to expand negative EOR research, this thesis focuses on exploitation, which has been under-researched in the organisational behaviour literature. This thesis presents a multi-study investigation of a new construct termed perceived exploitative employee-organisation relationships (PERs), employing five independent samples. First, a new measure was developed and evaluated using four samples. PERs were found to be distinct from related constructs, explaining additional variance in negative emotions above and beyond other established constructs. The new scale was then used to examine a hypothesised model of the antecedents and outcomes of such exploitative relationships in a longitudinal study of medical doctors in training. Findings indicate that an effort-reward imbalance which favours the organisation is a pre-condition for the development of PERs, supporting the distributive nature of this phenomenon. Contrary to expectations, however, abusive supervision was not found to predict exploitation perceptions among employees. PERs predicted several attitudinal and behavioural outcomes, and this relationship was partially mediated by the emotions of anger, hostility, shame and guilt. The findings appear to support a thesis of negative asymmetric relationships viewing negative and positive relationships as discrete phenomena that develop differently and have divergent impact on outcomes. The contributions and implications of this thesis as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.

Although information on variations in healthcare utilisation is increasingly available, its constructive use to improve health systems is often hindered by the lack of a clear standard to evaluate what is “good“ and “poor“ performance. This thesis investigates how regulators and managers of the system might address this lack of a standard. The thesis distinguishes between the purpose (to manage ambiguity in the absence of a standard or to determine a meaningful standard) and the approach used to achieve either purpose (socio-political or technical-evidential). The resulting four types of strategies are examined by drawing on concepts and methods from public health and epidemiology, health economics, operations research and public administration and empirical evidence from England and Scotland. To manage ambiguity in the absence of a standard using a socio-political approach, the thesis finds that one must overcome a series of barriers including awareness, acceptance, perceived applicability and capacity of potential users. Clinical and managerial leadership appear to be enabling factors for the use of information on variations for strategic problem framing and stakeholder engagement. To manage ambiguity in the absence of a standard using a technical-evidential approach, the use of ranking intervals and dominance relations obtained from ratio-based efficiency analysis can help to avoid the forced assignment of a single, potentially controversial ranking to each organisation under scrutiny. To determine a standard using a technical-evidential approach, estimating capacity to benefit in populations provides a theoretically sound and feasible benchmark to assess the appropriateness of service utilisation against population needs. However, uncertainty about criteria of capacity to benefit and lack of epidemiological data remain practical challenges. To determine a standard using a socio-political approach, an experimentalist governance logic focused on learning and dialogue between central government and local organisations can complement a hierarchist logic focused on accountability when both the ideal ends and the means for attainment are ambiguous. As a whole, the thesis reinforces the insight that both improved technical tools and social and political processes are required to make information on variations useful to decision-makers.