This PhD by published work comprises 11 papers published between 2006 and 2009. The research is focussed upon voluntary and related financial reporting by UK companies in their annual report. The level, and more importantly, the importance of voluntary disclosure has significantly increased over the last 20 years (Campbell, Moore and Shrives, 2006) and this submission provides academic and policy relevant contributions to that field. The papers make specific contributions to the extant literature in discrete areas primarily; philanthropy, social and environmental reporting. These 11 publications adopt a range of research methods appropriate to different research questions. The qualitative papers demonstrate successful engagement with a number of high level participant stakeholders from the building society sector, fair trade organisations and UK capital markets as well as capturing disclosure content relevant to other stakeholder groups. Other papers have adopted a positivist approach with appropriate longitudinal and cross sectional data used to test theory. Two of the research projects relating to strategic philanthropy and decision–usefulness of disclosure were supported by external research funding and therefore demonstrate the policy relevance and impact of the research contribution in those areas. Within the commentary, the research is presented in two sections, followed by a conclusion which shows the research impact of the publications and the international dissemination of the research contribution and findings. The key findings of Section 1 show the financial and non-financial influences on levels of philanthropy; inconsistency of philanthropy policy reporting; social disclosure responses to legitimacy threats and the reporting validity of the annual report; a holistic approach to responsible business practice and insights into the mainstreaming of Fair Trade. Section 2 provides findings into the decision-usefulness of a range of voluntary disclosure narratives in the annual report, developed in detail in respect of environmental disclosures and related risk factors and insights into the current issues facing accounting.

There is myriad research that explores the nature of marketing generally, and more specifically within SME (small to medium sized enterprise) contexts. Most of this research, however, focuses upon orthodox and relational marketing. Recently, it has also been argued that the literature fails to pay adequate attention to the role that critical studies might take in helping to understand marketing. Moreover, qualitative approaches to researching SME marketing have recently gained favour. This thesis takes the opportunity to employ a qualitative approach to researching SME marketing while at the same time exploring the implications for education, training and development (ETD). This research explored how the subjective individual can make sense of particular social arenas. Adopting a social constructivist approach involving the researcher and participants, this research offers some clarity to the SME marketing ETD context. To illuminate new ways of seeing, this research looked to both SME and ETD participants to be part of a study located in the North East of England. The study employed a semi-structured interview that, when transcribed, provided research texts that were then analysed through a Discourse Analysis lens. This allowed discourses to emerge from the texts that illuminated aspects of marketing in a SME context, as well as aspects of ETD. It is clear from the research that the extant nature of orthodox marketing’s central model, known as the 4Ps, is for the SME participants obvious and in the background. For the ETD participants this model is still central to how they see marketing ETD for SMEs in their role as educators, trainers and developers. However both SME and ETD perspectives include relational components, particularly networking. Critical components, in the light of Critical Theory and the turbulent business environment, can also be seen in the discourses of this thesis. The standpoints that the participants of this study combine, adapt, juxtapose or shape to fit conditions to their everyday lives, were exposed. The research texts contain metaphoric and other references that negotiate key tensions leading to confrontation and resistance to the dominant orthodox marketing form. This thesis explores the ways that participants use marketing-related discourse to inscribe their behaviours in a complex ideological system, immersed in social worlds. Marketing realities are found to be more critical than at first assumed. A schema is developed that portrays the relationships between these actors and this social arena. I therefore assess themes that emerge from the narratives of participants and within each theme discourses are used to describe participants’ world views. This thesis provides a new way of seeing marketing and develops the relational, orthodox and critical (ROC) schema of SME marketing, applied to ETD. This schema informs thinking on a range of issues such as flows of information, relationships, network coordination and specific competencies. The schema should be considered carefully before the design and delivery of any form of SME marketing ETD programme and any materials are devised. The findings of this thesis suggest that the ROC schema is potentially applicable to other marketing contexts.

Despite the many benefits that good governance brings to investors, academics contend that individual investors have no significant role to play in governance as it is economically unviable and too time consuming for them. On the other hand, regulators encourage and seem to expect individual investors to be governance interested, especially in exercising their ownership rights and making use of governance redress mechanisms whenever the need arises. Are such expectations of how these investors should behave at all reasonable? More importantly, there is anecdotal real-life evidence that at least some individual shareholders in Malaysia do play a role in governance such as attending AGMs. If, as assumed by academics that it is not viable for them to do so, what is the logic and/or motivations behind such observed behavioural tendencies? This study explores the many possible ways by which investors take governance into account (including harder-to-observe treatments – e.g. governance featuring in the form of share investment evaluation criteria). Yet unidentified, important actual motivations and justifications for all reported governance-related tendencies are studied as well. The actual relevance and also prevalence of such treatments and reasonings are largely unexplored in the empirical literature. Essentially, the study considers all governance-related attributes (both firm-level and country-level) that are potentially important to individual investors as well as all governance-related actions/tendencies exhibited by them throughout the typical share investment cycle. Each action/tendency is viewed and made sense of (i) as an integrated part of the sets of behaviours identified, (ii) within the governance environment and investment context where it takes place and (iii) from the standpoint of individual investors. Individual investors‘ relative propensities toward considering governance and/or undertaking governance-related actions are found to be (i) affected by, and are thus rational responses to, the governance-related institutional, environmental, cultural constraints they face and (ii) influenced by their personal investment inclinations, stylistics and preferences such as their primary investment strategies. These entail a number of implications that inform both policy and practice.

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It is increasingly being recognised that service quality has a strong correlation with customer satisfaction. Researchers have debated the topic of private banking sector versus public banking sector in both Western and Far East countries, and found that the private banking sector outperforms the public banking sector in many areas, including productivity, efficiency, and profitability. However, literature and empirical studies on banking service quality in Libya are scarce, and this potentially impacts on organisation performance. This research aimed to assess and compare the levels of service quality provided by the Libyan private and public banking sectors to identify if there are significant differences between the private and public banking sectors in terms of service quality levels, as perceived by bank customers. The research adopted a survey questionnaire based on the amended Banking Service Quality Scale. It included six service quality dimensions, broken down into 31 statements, for capturing the wide range of services offered by banks. A total of 2000 questionnaires were administered to customers of the two banking sectors (public and private) and 740 (370 from each sector) were returned, which amounts to a 37% response rate. The research findings show that there are significant differences between the Libyan private and public banking sectors in terms of customer perceptions of service quality and the degree of importance attached to various dimensions of service quality. The results also suggest there is a relationship between bank status and customers’ age, occupation, number of branch visits, and period of relationship with a bank. The study has revealed, however, that there is no relationship between customer gender and bank status. The research has significant implications for Libyan banks in terms of developing operational, marketing and human resource strategies, and can help Libyan banks to incorporate service quality issues into their strategic planning. The study may be useful for application in countries with a similar banking culture as Libya. This study contributes to the understanding of service quality in terms of the Libyan banking context. The added value of this study emanates from the fact the research was conducted in Libya (a developing country with an extremely limited amount of service quality research conducted therein), and the fact it measured and assessed the service quality in both Libyan private and public banking sectors which form, along with the central bank, the entire Libyan banking system.

This study investigates the effect of supervisors and specifically trust and respect for supervisors on job satisfaction, and the causes of job satisfaction within a sample of Libyan Manufacturing Organisations (LMOs). The specific focus of this study is on whether the employee-supervisor relationship is related to job satisfaction and can lead to positve outcomes for LMOs.

This study aims to bring a gender perspective to the study of entrepreneurship and followers' perspectives of entrepreneurial leadership. The study contributes to emerging entrepreneurial leadership research considering gender, acknowledging follower involvement, individual agency, and recognising entrepreneurial leadership as a social process. Secondly, the study contributes further empirical research from a gender perspective of women entrepreneurs tot he authentic leadership theory base.

Management Control Systems (MCS) have been intensively studied in organizational research in the past five decades. Most of existing studies, however, dominantly focus on the traditional control role of MCS. Recently, adequate attentions have been paid to the role MCS for innovation. By recognizing the importance of both control and innovative role of MCS, the MCS researchers have argued that the control and innovative roles of MCS are incompatible with each other. Dynamic tensions exist between them, and how to balance the dynamic tensions of these two contradict roles has emerged as an interesting topic in MCS research, especially in the context of Asian culture. Given the growth in interest of balancing traditional control role and innovative role of MCS, this study aims to explore ‘How do managers attempt to implement and balance the traditional control and innovative roles of MCS in a Chinese organization?’ Coherent with this research question, the main objectives of this study are to discover what kinds of tensions exist between control and innovative roles; how these tensions can be balanced. In addition, influencing factors and organizational capabilities in relation to balancing different tensions are explored. Taking social constructionism philosophical paradigm, an in-depth single case study is conducted by sampling a Chinese joint-stock commercial bank in China. Due to heavy regulations, the Chinese government imposed on banking industry, Chinese state-owned banks often over emphasize the control role. Chinese commercial banks, differently, have more freedom to introduce and implement MCS for innovation. To gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, a set of data, including semi-structured interviews with senior and middle level managers, observations of management meetings and secondary data including organizational internal and government reports, are collected. Template analysis is employed as the main data analysis technique with the assistant of Nvivo 8 qualitative data analysis software. The findings reveal that the Chinese managers use a wider range of MCS frameworks, including formal accounting and performance controls, as well as strong culture and social controls. In drawing upon these sources, three levels of tensions between control and innovative roles of MCS have been emerged: 1) MCS for controlling strategy implementation VS. renewing strategy; 2) MCS for controlling risks VS. exploring new business; 3) MCS for controlling employees’ behavior VS. enabling employees’ behaviour. Moreover, by discovering external environment and internal demand factors, this research identifies certain levels of organizational capabilities that are in relation to balancing different levels of tensions, including abilities of designing and implementing suitable MCS package, appropriate organizational structure, effective communication channels and information systems, positive organizational culture and leadership. This research presents a holistic picture of balancing the control and innovative roles in a Chinese organization in the context of banking industry. Proactively, this study provides Chinese organizations valuable information when designing their organizational MCS package as a whole. Furthermore, it offers valuable insights to the Chinese bank managers and guides them to balance the different tensions between control and innovative roles of MCS. By highlighting the cultural role in balancing the three levels of tensions, it is hoped that this research offers an alternative way to inspire Chinese banking institutions and individual managers to develop and use a suitable MCS package that can balance the dynamic tensions between the control and innovative roles of MCS.

The published work in this thesis is based on a number of studies that utilise a suite of (related) “best practice” benchmarking tools, providing an evaluation of the North East England’s manufacturing and service sectors and the UK Further Education sector. Within this submission, a supporting commentary in the form of a critical literature review is provided. The complementary review initially provides an introduction and background to the studies that as a whole comprise this PhD by publication. Consideration is then given to the literature specific to benchmarking, particularly in terms of its role in facilitating organisational improvement and learning, as well as its take-up and applications. The studies described above relate to the implementation of related “best practice” frameworks, yielding data from the self-assessing participating organisations. This leads to the third part of the literature review where the association between practice and performance is assessed relating to certain connected themes. The final part of the commentary assesses the contribution to knowledge that is made by this PhD submission in terms of the literature that existed at the time the constituent papers and reports were developed, along with my specific contribution to these outputs and the potential future research that could lead from this contribution. A key contribution of this work to the benchmarking literature rests in the deployment of a framework in two new sectoral contexts, the regional application being underpinned by a novel approach to supported self-assessment. This complemented the case-based literature dominant at the time, the review providing a critical comparison of “best practice” frameworks and the adoption of generic benchmarking metrics. The empirical assessment of practice against performance suggests that the former does impact on the latter, but with greater influence internally. The association between excellence achievement and stakeholder satisfaction is holistically positive, although the findings are perhaps both less than clear-cut and unexpected. The contribution to knowledge provided here relates to the assessment of the broader service sector, including dual consideration with stakeholder perception and examination of additional performance areas, such as corporate social responsibility, thus moving this evaluation into areas under reported at that time.

This thesis discusses many vital issues related to the Libyan economy in general and the privatization programme in particular. The current study has adopted a triangulation strategy to achieve its objectives including descriptive-analytical and field study approaches. It has relied upon a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews to acquire the necessary data. The most important reason for relying on these two methods was primarily due to lack of information on the subject of this study. The study addresses the main barriers that impede the successful progress of the privatization programme in Libya. In this regard, the 21 factories of the Libyan National Textile Company (LNTC) were selected as a case study, through which the disadvantages inherent in the privatization programme have been exposed. Moreover, in a comparative analysis, the field survey included 40 New Private Firms (NPFs) initially owned by the private sector. In this context, the hedonic technique has been applied in order to make comparison between the two groups of firms in terms of their performance and profit maximization. This study specifically addresses both the administrative and the economic aspects of privatization, raising the following three main questions concerning the status of privatization in the context examined, and the factors influencing the outcomes observed: (1) Has the privatization programme been a success or a failure and what have been the main underlying reasons? (2) To what extent were the attitudes of managers and workers in privatized factories a barrier to the smooth implementation of privatization? (3) What are the main prerequisites for a successful privatization programme in Libya? Among the major findings of this study are that privatization in Libya had been negatively influenced by many fundamental problems prevailing at both the micro and macro economic levels. In particular, as found from the application of the hedonic technique, the NPFs have been more successful in attaining profit- maximization than the LNTC. This is particularly worrying as the latter group were privatized well over 15 years ago with a resulting much larger share of the market.