The legal duty of Best Value requires local authorities to fundamentally review all services in order to achieve continuous improvement. They must challenge how services are delivered, compare performance with those of others, consult the local community to assess whether needs are being met and explore the potential use of competition in future delivery. 'Challenge', 'compare', 'consult' and 'compete' are referred to as the 'Four Cs' and underpin the legislative Best Value framework. This research aims to explore how effectively Best Value can be applied to the provision of Emergency Management services by U.K. local authorities. Five key factors were identified as influencing the way Emergency Management services are provided: level of funding; legislative base; service monitoring; culture and public awareness. A census of service stakeholders within all mainland U.K. local authorities was conducted. Analysis of data collected revealed a range of associations between the five key factors and stakeholder perceptions relating to Best Value implementation. This data was also used to identify and critically evaluate the application of several existing quality management models in assisting local authorities achieving the 'Four Cs' within Emergency Management. This evaluation revealed usage of these models, either in isolation or combination, exclusively within the service would not achieve the effective measurement of the 'Four Cs', nor address the perceived drivers and barriers to Best Value implementation. Using primary data and literature review findings, a specific support model applying Best Value principles to Emergency Management was developed. This support model is regarded by practitioners as having the potential to assist local authorities in achieving implementation of rigorous and comprehensive Best Value Reviews within Emergency Management.

The pursuit of "excellence" is a preoccupation for leaders and change agents who wish their organisations to be the best that they can be. "How do we achieve excellence?", they ask. "Is there a formula, a roadmap?" There is no shortage of offerings: total quality management, business excellence, process redesign, lean thinking... the list seems endless. Advocates of the latest offering trumpet its efficacious properties, sceptics see reinvented wheels, scholars bemoan hype that threatens to discredit worthy methodologies. Diagnostic benchmarking attempts to bottle organisational excellence and make it accessible and usable for change agents and their colleagues. It presents in various forms, from Ishikawa's quality diagnostic to the Baldrige Framework, the EFQM Excellence Model, the PROBE tools and many others. It offers a means of checking the organisation's health and identifying actions that will help it to progress on its journey towards excellence. This study has subjected diagnostic benchmarking to intensive scrutiny to better understand its role as an enabler of organisational improvement, thus addressing an important gap in the body of knowledge. It has deployed an inductive methodology in the case study setting of an English local authority, which has committed energy and resources to diagnostic benchmarking and has been officially designated as an "Excellent Council". Through the eyes and interpretations of those who are engaged in its deployment, the role of diagnostic benchmarking is revealed to be less formula or roadmap, more stimulus and aid to reflection and learning. Its meaning for participants ranges from "a gold bar that others won't share" to "a waste of time when I might have been doing my job". The study concludes that diagnostic benchmarking has played a role as an enabler in this particular setting, and suggests contingent factors that may have worked for and against its effectiveness in that role.

Information Systems (IS) alignment is one of the most significant areas of concern in terms of priority for both the Information Technology and the Management fields. In this context, many scientific research organisations face the challenge of integrating their IS with organisational strategic objectives. This research aimed to develop a practical model of IS strategic alignment, that can be adopted by scientific research and development (SR&D) organisations in order to improve technology transfer activities. The research involved a single exploratory case study of an SR&D organisation in Kuwait, the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR). Thirtyseven respondents from the research management, IS management, and planning and support groups of KISR, namely, the scientific research senior managers, IS senior managers, and consultants, respectively, were interviewed concerning issues related to the organisational, strategic, and IS domains. Semi-structured interviews have been designed as a data collection method. The study has utilised certain data analysis techniques including template analysis, coding and classification, and interpretive analysis methods. In the analysis of the external and internal contexts, briefly, Kuwait’s IT plan was discussed, along with the challenges, and in detail, the description and analysis of KISR’s strategic plans. Twenty-two factors were identified and have emerged in this study which have effects on IS alignment. The key contributions, including a critical and comprehensive survey of IS strategy literature has led to the identification of factors that may affect IS alignment. A conceptual framework was designed to enable a better insight of the IS alignment challenges. A practical road map was developed in this study to guide and direct SR&D organisations in achieving IS alignment effectively and efficiently. This road map is aimed at bridging the gap between theory and practice for organisations. The proposed practical road map will help KISR and other SR&D organisations to achieve both successful and feasible IS strategic alignment to enable effective technology and knowledge transfer.

This thesis describes a sociocultural study which addresses the question of how New Product Development (NPD) practices in small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) are influenced by obscure practices, deployed to meet emerging challenges that enable SMEs to remain relevant to their markets. Prior research in this area has assumed that a company’s innovation potential can be objectively explained by looking at critical factors such as peoples’ skills (e.g. leadership), company resources, capabilities, and its external orientation. However important, these variance-based approaches are generally discussed in isolation from the dynamic and idiosyncratic contexts where they emerge (such as the NPD process). As a result they fail to provide a holistic view of the phenomena that promote agility and innovation. This study’s purpose was to develop a methodological approach to explicate obscurity in SMEs’ innovation practices. To achieve this, the study employed a design-led qualitative research strategy to bring to the forefront the underlying contextual, situational and relational phenomena impacting a common core practice in manufacturing SMEs, their NPD process. The aim was to increase our knowledge of the notion of obscure practices in their effort to meet their emerging challenges. The research began by developing a theoretical model to consolidate ideas derived from: 1.Strategic management variance literature, which led to a multi-level theoretical framework (people, firm, and external levels). 2. Models of NPD processes, which led to the adoption of a generic process-model (Initiation, Development and Implementation) used as periods to study organisational practices. 3. Sociocultural literature, which led to the adoption of Activity Theory (AT) to guide analysis of NPD activities. The study approached its methodology in order to meet two key requirements. With regards to the sensitivities of the SME context (such as the disruption to participants’ day to day practices), the study developed a design-led process-mapping tool for data collection that provided rich insights in an engaging and fast way, whilst it allowed the triangulation and visualisation of the data, which was collected from staff members across different expertise and positions. In addition, an Activity Theory framework was adopted as a means to analyse the data and make sense of its complexity in line with the need to capture multi-level phenomena across different periods of the NPD process. The thesis provides a number of contributions to contemporary design research and beyond. First, it demonstrates the value of integrating variance and process-based research approaches and the richness of insights gained by applying them to organisational settings. Second, it argues for the usefulness of ‘obscurity’ as a term to describe the not-well-articulated practices that take place in the day-to-day business, as opposed to terms such as hidden, invisible, silent, and/or tacit. Third, it shows the value of the adopted research method (i.e. the Pytheas tool), to surface obscurity in innovation practices in a non-prescriptive, fast and engaging way by enabling participants to self-reflect on their own practices and by visualising organisational contexts in such a way that the richness and the depth of the practices can be captured and better appreciated. Consequently, the contributions of the study primarily concern design practitioners and strategists who need to find ways to better construe the organisational settings to which they are called to offer their expertise. Businesses may also benefit by this method as it provides a platform through which members can develop a greater awareness of their respective strengths and weaknesses and, through the visualised outcomes, it offers a legacy that businesses can use, revisit and refer to during their efforts to achieve agility and increase their innovation potential.

Ongoing research has identified a potential disconnect in academic and pedagogic expectation between academic staff and students. At the same time a context of higher tuition fees and changing student expectations renders this relationship even more important to the success of higher education institutions. This research investigated the sources of student expectations for the pedagogic relationship, the alignment between staff and student expectations and the potential impact of expectation fulfilment and frustration on the student experience. The study used the Psychological Contract as a theoretical framework, responding to recent calls for the further use of psychological contracts in education. The author has taught business in both secondary and university contexts for a number of years. This experience informed the phenomenological positioning of the thesis, its focus, its location in a large post -’92 business school, its mixed methods and an analytical method (template analysis) which has enabled both anticipated and emergent themes to be explored. Data was collected from a sample of students at regular intervals throughout their first year of study and from staff. Both exploratory statistical analysis of survey data and template analysis of interviews suggested that staff and students’ initial expectations broadly concur. However the practical implications of such notions as ‘independent learning’ develop significantly over the first year and it is contended that pre-entry expectations are significantly influenced by students’ experience of the pedagogic relationship at tertiary education level. The initial pedagogic psychological contract changes significantly over the first year as post entry experiences (or the ‘reality shock’) reshapes and reconfigures their expectations. The research developed a series of recommendations to both secondary schools and universities to improve the management of expectations.

A firm’s ability to survive and prosper is often a function of its ability to design and develop new products that meet the needs of heterogeneous markets. The way in which a product is designed can have profound implications for product market structure and who is able to profit from an innovation, but despite this few industry studies have examined how and why product and industry architectures co-evolve and correspond across time. Notions of architectural co-evolution and correspondence are grounded in the modularity literature and assume a path towards increasing product modularity and industry specialisation. However, scholars have recently hinted that a reverse path towards increasing product and industry integration may be equally feasible. This research study contributes to the literature by proposing three stylised hybrid product and industry reintegration types that enhance our understanding of how and why reintegration may occur in product markets. Furthermore, the presence of a correspondence in the design characteristics between architectural layers (the so-called ‘mirroring hypothesis’) has also been suggested in the literature, such that product component design is often a blueprint for the way task, knowledge and firm boundaries are partitioned within a given product market. This research study finds that architectural correspondence is hard to sustain over time as firms often maintain a broader knowledge than task boundary for strategically important product components that offer differentiation opportunities or competitive advantage, contributing to the literature on contingencies that ‘mist the mirror’. Of particular interest to this research study is the UK personal pensions sector, a non-physical product, largely under-explored in the product modularity literature. By analysing the co-evolution and correspondence of a non-manufactured product over a 30-year period this research study breaks new ground. The research study makes use of a retrospective longitudinal research design, based upon semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 31 key personnel. The interview data was subject to a combination of matrix and template analysis.

This thesis provides empirical evidence on the degree of banking sector competition in the Central and East European (CEE) countries and the impact of competition on banks’ risktaking and interest margins. The thesis uses data on around 300 banks from 17 CEE countries for the period 1999-2009, and employs a variety of estimation methodologies. The first objective of the thesis is to measure the degree of banking sector competition in CEE countries. Using the Panzar-Rosse approach, we found that the banking sectors of the CEE countries have been characterized by monopoly behaviour. By distinguishing between the non-EU and EU countries of the region, we found that banks operating in the non-EU countries faced a lower degree of competition compared to banks operating in the EU members of the region. The separate estimation for Kosovo indicated that the competitive behaviour of banks operating in this country was consistent with monopolistic competition. The second objective of the thesis is to estimate the impact of banking sector competition on the degree of banks’ risk-taking. Using country-level Panzar-Rosse H-statistic estimates as a measure of competition, for the overall sample, we found that competition enhances the quality of the loan portfolio, thus providing evidence against the mainstream view on the trade-off between competition and stability. However, for the non-EU countries of our sample the impact of competition on banks’ risk-taking appeared positive, which implies that more effective authorities are needed in these countries to oversee the banks’ behaviour when competitive pressures increase. The third objective of the thesis is to estimate the impact of banking sector competition on banks’ interest margins. The results suggest that competition had a negative impact on net interest margins. The impact of competition in reducing the net interest margins was stronger in the non-EU countries compared to the EU countries of the sample. Overall, the results suggest that the banking sectors of the CEE countries are characterized by low levels of competition, implying higher risk and larger interest margin.

The starting point for this research study is the application of astrological consulting in the area of business consultancy. In many Western civilisations there is considerable prejudice regarding astrological consulting especially when it is active in the area of business consultancy. In contrast to this, astrological business consulting is encountered much more commonly in Asia and the USA, where it is not unusual that enterprises enquire for astrological consulting service. The research aims to investigate the applicability of astrological consulting in the domain of business counselling within a context of economic sociology. Management consulting has been used as a reference concept of business consultancy. The realm of systems thinking is considered to be suitable as the theoretical framework for this research. The systems methodology of the Networked Thinking approach of the interpretive tradition has been used to determine the systems of astrological business consulting as well as that of management consulting. This research proposes that, from a system-theoretical view or, let us say, from a technical-oriented perspective on management, astrological business consulting as compared with management consulting is not an applicable and justifiable consultancy concept in the area of business consulting. The research methodology used aims to set up a direct confrontation between the system of astrological business consulting and that of management consulting. For this purpose the thesis has been broken down into five stages. In the first stage each of the two consulting concepts was theoretically developed as a hypothesis on the basis of a comprehensive review of the literature with the aim of determining its systems structure. In this stage of theory-building, an exploratory as well as a descriptive type of research was employed. By applying an exploratory research type, the author’s intention is to look for ideas and patterns in order to construct the systems of reference as hypotheses. This research type has been supported to an even greater extent by a descriptive type to identify and classify the structure of each of the systems. Hence an inductive and a basic research approach are embedded in this first stage of the research process. The secondary data collection involves a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The knowledge acquired from this secondary data collection comes from multi-disciplinary but scientific sources. In the second stage of the research process the structure of each of the two systems derived from literature was statistically verified and modified where necessary. In the third stage, subsequent to the statistical verification, the two hypotheses were tested in practice. The primary data collection represents a deductive and a quantitative research approach mixed with qualitative components by using survey research as a suitable research method. The Delphi technique is regarded as appropriate to be employed as a data collection tool. Astrological and management consulting experts were contacted by a questionnaire procedure to achieve consensus with regard to the structure of each of these two consulting systems. Prior to this survey procedure, the questionnaires were subject to a pilot testing. The analysis of the findings from the primary data collection required modifications in each of the two consulting systems with regard to their systems structure. In stage four the two system models theoretically derived from the literature were compared with the empirical data. Subsequent to this comparison, in stage five, the two consulting systems empirically validated were confronted with each other by comparing their determinants.

Despite high investments and low success rates for Joint Ventures of Western companies in China, there has been no systematic investigation into the problems which cause these alliances to not achieve their goals. For this reason, this work aims to provide academically researched insights while also addressing a business need. The objective of this research was to develop a classification of Sino-Western JV problem attributes according to their similarities in a hierarchical cluster structure. The classification enabled the generation of a better understanding of typical problem areas based on problem attributes. Further analysis and interpretation of the identified problem areas and problem patterns allowed for the identification of resolution measures and the examination of their potential effectiveness. This work classified a large number of multi-layered JV problems, varying widely in nature. For this purpose, problems derived from empirical case studies documented in the literature were arranged according to their subject-related similarities and a hierarchical structure consisting of problem attribute clusters was developed. The result is the establishment of a polythetic classification of approximately 700 Sino-Western Joint Venture problem attributes. Through the process of problem statement selection, problem attribute extraction and their clustering, the attributes were grouped and condensed. This reduced the initial complexity of the wide range of problems and enabled specific problem domains with related problem attribute clusters to be identified. The structuring of the problem elements showed how problem clusters are interrelated and helped to differentiate between complex and more easily resolved problems. The overall classification of attributes illustrates the domains in which problems occur. Eight problem domains are revealed and refer to: differences in the Western and Chinese cultures, business practices, business operations, JV expectations, Chinese history, Chinese government involvement, disparities between Western expatriated managers and local Chinese managers, and opposing fundamental concepts. Further, communication and culture challenges were identified as recurring themes among the problem attribute clusters. Based on an improved understanding of key problem areas, it is suggested to focus on strengthening communication capabilities and cultural awareness with the aim of increasing the success rate of Sino-Western Joint Ventures. It is recommended that Western companies concentrate on problem attribute clusters which are considered to be potentially solvable or reducible rather than those related to intrinsic differences in order to have the greatest effectiveness. This work exemplifies the important role which classifications play in social sciences research and demonstrates the problem solving capability of classifications. Consequently, a classification approach which is suitable to make new kinds of investigations in social phenomena has been suggested. An improved understanding has been achieved which enabled these phenomena to be reviewed and addressed from new angles. Further, the work both confirmed existing research results related to Sino-Western JV problems and gathered new insights by analysing these problems in a consolidated, structured form through the development of a classification.

The PhD research is concerned with investigating the communication aspect of relationships. In particular, the research focuses on the impact of marketing communications on customer relationships. The communication aspect of customer relationships is an empirically under-researched area. Two disciplines which are relationship marketing research and marketing communications research were drawn together in order to present insight into the investigation, and hence to build on the limited existing knowledge. The banking sector was used as the context of the investigation. The context of the research is the UK banking sector. Adopting a primarily qualitative approach, data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with bank customers. Research participants were recruited through advertising and snowballing methods. The analysis was guided by the principles of content analysis. This research offers three main contributions. Firstly, the current research has extended the work on service provider and customer relationships by presenting an insight into the nature of customer relationships and their underlying dimensions. In particular, four relationship types were identified which can represent various types of relationships customers may establish with financial institutions: (1) faltering, (2) functional, (3) interactive and (4) affective. Secondly, the research presented empirical evidence on the potential of advertising, corporate sponsorship and direct marketing to promote various types of relationships. Thirdly, this research provides an enhanced understanding about the aspects of service encounters, that are likely to promote (or threaten) the development of certain relationship types.