This thesis is concerned with understanding the way in which knowledge creation was sustained over time within a particular type of knowledge intensive firm referred to as an expert consultancy. Expert consultancies are differentiated from generalist management consultancies in terms of their knowledge intensity i.e. the high levels of expertise of the workforce and their focus on the development of highly customised creative and innovative solutions rather than on the diffusion and implementation of pre-packaged 'best practice' solutions. Two longitudinal case studies were conducted in expert consultancies and a critical interpretative approach, characteristic of the constructivist paradigm was adopted for their analysis. Processes of knowledge creation are intrinsically complex and unpredictable. The leaders of such finns then are perpetually seeking ways to manage the fundamental tensions that exist between autonomy and control and efficiency and uncertainty. A retrospective historical analysis was developed of the way in which knowledge creation occurred and the organisational conditions that served to shape the process over time within both firms. The organisational conditions that were considered included not only structural aspects of the firm but also cultural and social conditions. Any changes that had occurred over time with regard to the way in which knowledge creation occurred were considered in relation to the organisational conditions that may have stimulated such changes in order to develop this analysis. The research found that a number of distinctive structural conditions contributed to sustaining processes of knowledge creation over time, including profit satisficing behaviour, an absence of professional management, and a resource rich environment. Critically, a strong yet ambiguous culture was found to be important for sustaining processes of knowledge creation. Organisational ambiguity promoted quasi-normative control, regulating individuals' dual identities as both 'consultant' and 'expert'. Quasi-normative control promoted both creative and selfdisciplining behaviour such that processes of knowledge creation occurred in ways that were ultimately efficient for the finn. These findings represent a new contribution to knowledge with regards to organisational culture and the management of knowledge workers and will hopefully stimulate further research in this area.

This thesis is concerned with the question of how the return to investment in human capital, as represented by the attainment of professional status, has changed over time in Great Britain. In addition it is concerned with differences between different professional groups. Because of data limitations a very simple methodological approach is adopted building upon work by previous researchers. This uses age earnings profiles at a point in time as a guide to the future earnings associated with different career profiles. The main developments to the conventional methodology are concerned with adjustments to' these profiles to reflect differences in the characteristics of different professions. Previous work in this area for Great Britain has been limited in both the time period covered and the types of qualification and profession considered. The major contribution of the present study is to provide a perspective on how rates of return have altered over time and to compare differences between different professions. The main finding is that there has been a dramatic secular decline in rates of return from around 176 per cent in 1955 to 76 per cent by 1975. This has been common to most professions. The explanation for this phenomenon is argued to be in broad changes in the balance of supply and demand for highly qualified persons. Another important finding is that social as opposed to private rates of return show a similar pattern over time although there are some marked differences in rankings between different professions for the two measures of return. It is argued that a regular monitoring of rates of return to entering different professions would provide a valuable guide to important policy decisions regarding the pay of people employed in the public sector and on the identification of restrictive practices in professional labour markets.

Strategic projects form the core of corporate growth, change and wealth creation, which enable a firm to achieve and sustain long-term success. However, a traditional engineering perspective on project management still seems to dominate. In general terms, manages are fully aware of some traditional techniques, such as NPV, but these can undervalue a strategic project. They occasionally apply techniques for controlling projects, and often lack a practical understanding of recently developed techniques. The purpose of these recently developed techniques is to create a project's value from the outset, and to drive a firm to superior performance and aspiration. The current research project aims to explore the role of techniques in facilitating successful strategic project management, and the elements involved in it, as applied to the UK upstream oil and gas sector. At first, the existing literature on successful strategic project management is reviewed, with major emphasis given to the techniques applied to managing projects. The proposed methodology follows a triangular approach. First, exploratory interviews essentially describe fifty multidisciplinary elements involved in strategic project management. Second, an exploratory deskwork explores the extent to which techniques address, in theory, these elements. Third, a main survey describes the elements managers pay considerable attention to, searches for the elements that are believed to explain a strategic project's success and identifies the techniques that often address each element in practice. Finally, follow-up interviews validate some questionnaire findings. As a result, sets of techniques for successful strategic project management are proposed, and validated through assessment sheets. The present study represents an embryo for future investigation in the project management field. First, it explores the gap between elements that are believed to explain a project's success and those that managers pay most attention to in managing strategic projects. Finally, it suggests that the convergence of financial, environmental (green) and internal business issues might be a healthy route for the UK upstream oil and gas sector towards successful strategic project management.

Quality management (QM) has without doubt been one of the leading management fashions of the 1990s. QM programmes derive from a growing belief during the 1980s that commercial success comes not simply from low cost competitiveness but from high and reliable quality. The aim is to foster the commitment of employees across the organisation to quality in terms of product and service delivery, and to create a culture of "continuous improvement".

This thesis critically reviews and evaluates theories of organisational knowledge and knowledge-related activities. Specifically, it assesses and synthesises relevant theories and thoughts to develop a conceptual model of the knowledge integration process. Empirical evidence, collected from two organisations- Boots The Chemists and NatWest Global Financial Markets is also exploited as a means of building a grounded theory of knowledge integration This theory explains the processes of knowledge integration within the context of crossfunctional project teams. It also considers the general factors that influence these processes, as well as the dynamic interrelationships between the proposed processes. The theory provides a framework not only for future research to systematically examine and test knowledge integration processes within different organisations, but also allows management to continuously anticipate knowledge integration activities within their own organisations. Based on a social construction perspective, this thesis demonstrates that knowledge integration is more than merely the representation of intellectual activities underlying the planning, redesign and implementation stages of a cross-functional programme. It also argues that cross-functional knowledge integration is a continuous process in which programme participants establish emotional alignment through social interaction. This research contributes to studies of organisational knowledge and knowledge-related activities by providing an explorative account that synthesises existing literature with empirical evidence. Secondly, this research contributes to the theoretical development of knowledge integration by focusing on its processes rather than just its outcomes and implications which have been the main concern of other researchers. Finally, the development of a cross-functional knowledge integration theory contributes to the consolidation of the intellectual and emotional dimensions of knowledge-related activities that have in the past been treated in isolation.

The main objective of this exploratory study was to add to the almost non-existent Thai literature on women in management. Three key themes were pursued throughout the study, i. e., the representation of Thai women in management, their work versus family responsibilities, and the barriers they encounter in ascending the managerial hierarchy. The study was conducted in three distinct phases. First, a survey questionnaire was distributed to 536 male and female middle-level managers across diverse organizations in Bangkok. Second, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 67 women managers. It was likely that those in public sector organizations differed in their background and work experiences from their counterparts in private firms, hence data was collected from women managers in the two sectors and comparisons made. Lastly, structured interviews were held with 25 Human Resource/Line managers from a crosssection of firms in which the women managers worked. The study found that the women who have succeeded in these organizations are the ones who have very similar backgrounds and attitudes to the men. They work the same long hours, and have the same interest in furthering their careers as men. Therefore we cannot explain women's career barriers in terms of individual characteristics, such as their motivation or commitment to work. The results suggest that organizational structures and processes are central to an understanding of the ways Thai women are marginalized and excluded from managerial positions. For instance, women were clustered in relatively few occupations, received less in terms of earnings and training, had smaller spans of management, and less authority for final decisions than men. During interviews, women managers mentioned that the negative attitudes of male managers and gender biases in organizational practices, were barriers they had frequently encountered. The data also revealed that the contradictory and ambiguous values that underlie women's role as wife-mother at home and manager at work, necessitated a constant struggle for balance and remarkable personal sacrifices on the part of Thai women managers. By way of conclusion this dissertation submits that there is not a single cause that constrains women's advancement but rather a pattern of cultural, social and legal factors that characterizes the general situation of women managers in Thailand. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for women in management are discussed and future directions for research in this area are suggested.

There is a widespread view in the relevant academic literature that the UK's economic performance would be better if the situations of its engineers, engineering and manufacturing were more favourable. In particular the apparent dominance of accountants and financial expertise and the relative lack of influence of engineers and technical and productive expertise in manufacturing companies have been much discussed. As a presumed consequence of this, and despite a shortage of empirical evidence, engineers are apparently marginalised in managerial hierarchies, particularly in the most senior positions, and there is a subordination of technical to financial and other commercial priorities and objectives. The role of engineers in construction, however, has been virtually ignored despite the sector's economic importance and the relatively large numbers of engineers employed in it. The author and his supervisor conducted 25 interviews with representatives of the engineering and other main organizational professions, management institutes, employers' associations and a small number of academic and policy researchers. Their aim was to help identify the main issues which were relevant to UK engineers. From these interviews, and from reviewing the literature about engineers and management, the author decided upon the aims of the research. These were: to examine how engineers in manufacturing and construction feel about their influence and career prospects vis-ä-vis the members of the other professional groups with whom they work; to explore the perceptions of management-level people in industry about the managerial abilities of engineers and their colleagues; to investigate how engineers feel about the trade unions and professional associations which represent many of them; to examine the views of engineers about issues surrounding it engineering education and the importance which employers place on formal engineering qualifications; and to determine how engineers feel about the social place of their profession and about their levels of remuneration. Eighty-two interviews were conducted with engineers and their colleagues in three industrial sectors: mechanical and electrical engineering, chemicals, and construction. In manufacturing the main functional groups seemed to enjoy more constructive relationships than was apparently the case during the 1970s and 1980s. Although they appeared to form an influential group, the author found little evidence to support the notion that accountants dominate manufacturing companies, and they were generally considered both by themselves and by engineers and other colleagues to be performing a support function. Engineers appeared to enjoy the widest range of career opportunities of all the main management level groups, with the possible exception of chemists in chemicals. These opportunities included promotion to the boardroom. However some respondents felt that engineers needed to become rather less involved in the technical aspects of their work to advance their careers. In construction it was found that the main professional groups appeared to operate in varying degrees of mutual opposition. Their roles and influence depended to a large extent on the nature of the product and on the method of contracting chosen by clients. Architects in building and design engineers in civil engineering appeared to have lost their dominant positions in the management of projects. In both cases the main beneficiaries were contracting companies, which are staffed at management level mainly by engineers, and to a smaller extent quantity surveyors. 111 The author found no evidence to support the view that engineers are superior or inferior to other professional groups in terms of their `management' abilities, although the latter are clearly very difficult to measure. Only three of sixty-one engineer respondents were trade union members and most engineers appeared to believe that trade union membership was incompatible with their professional and/or managerial identities. About half of the engineers in the sample were members of professional engineering associations but this varied between sectors, as did the importance attached by respondents and their employers to chartered status. The engineer respondents tended to believe that their profession was poorly organised and ineffectual. Although employers appeared to rely heavily on formal qualifications to distinguish between different grades of technical staff, most respondents felt that engineering degrees needed to more practically oriented. The social standing of engineers and engineering was generally considered to be low. Many engineers believed that the general public neither understood nor appreciated fully what they did. However, engineers in the manufacturing companies in the study were generally satisfied with their levels of remuneration, although most respondents in construction felt that they were underpaid. The thesis concludes by arguing that when taken together with other evidence, particularly the many useful developments in education for management, the results suggest that the prospects for the UK economy might be considered to be improving, and certainly better than they were during the 1970s and 1980s.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 326-372.

The Minimum Score Separation Problem (MSSP) is a combinatorial problem that has been introduced in JORS 55 as an open problem in the paper industry arising in conjunction with the cutting-stock problem. During the process of producing boxes, áat papers are prepared for folding by being scored with knives. The problem is to determine if and how a given production pattern of boxes can be arranged such that a certain minimum distance between the knives can be kept. While it was originally suggested to analyse the MSSP as a specific variant of a Generalized Travelling Salesman Problem, the thesis introduces the concept of twin-constrained Hamiltonian cycles and models the MSSP as the problem of finding a twin-constrained Hamiltonian path on a threshold graph (threshold graphs are a specific type of interval graphs). For a given undirected graph G(N,E) with an even node set N and edge set E, and a bijective function b on N that assigns to every node i in N a "twin node" b(i)6=i, we define a new graph G'(N,E') by adding the edges {i,b(i)} to E. The graph G is said to have a twin-constrained Hamiltonian path with respect to b if there exists a Hamiltonian path on G' in which every node has its twin node as its predecessor (or successor). We start with presenting some general Öndings for the construction of matchings, alternating paths, Hamiltonian paths and alternating cycles on threshold graphs. On this basis it is possible to develop criteria that allow for the construction of twin-constrained Hamiltonian paths on threshold graphs and lead to a heuristic that can quickly solve a large percentage of instances of the MSSP. The insights gained in this way can be generalized and lead to an (exact) polynomial time algorithm for the MSSP. Computational experiments for both the heuristic and the polynomial-time algorithm demonstrate the efficiency of our approach to the MSSP. Finally, possible extensions of the approach are presented.