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.

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.

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.

Nepalese banks have witnessed a considerable shift in recent years towards its loans and advances by focussing on consumer credit. The traditional method of evaluating applicants that is based on the judgmental system is increasingly becoming inappropriate for the large volume of applicants. As a result of the shift in the lending market and the increased emphasis placed by the regulator on risk management, Nepalese banks have to rethinking on the way they assess their applicants for credit. Traditionally, the credit decision whether to accept/reject an applicant has been based on the subjective evaluation of the credit application forms and supporting documents. The literature advocates an objective approach on the lines of credit scoring which is fast, reliable, consistent and risk-based. On the strengths of this argument, this thesis presents the qualitative and quantitative considerations including issues relating to data capture, model development and implementation of a formal credit scoring model within the Nepalese Banking sector. The questionnaire was administered with the non-managerial level staff, the respondents in the expert interviews were managerial level staff and the database for model development were taken from a home loans customer database of a typical Nepalese bank. The findings of this work point to the fact that it is possible to develop such an objective model using six key characteristics and jointly produce a model that will predict the quality of loan with an acceptable degree of confidence.