This investigation is concerned with how financial services retailers approach the retention of customers. Markets for financial services have become saturated, competition has become fiercer and consumers have gained greater confidence in the consumption of financial services. Traditional retailers of financial services have begun to look to their existing customers to maintain and improve their profitability in these turbulent times. They hope that by retaining selected customers, they will be able to lower their costs by cross-selling financial products. In spite of considerable practitioner interest in customer retention, to date there is limited empirical study, in particular, into how retaining customers might actually be achieved. This study adopts a pluralistic methodology and uses the perceptions of staff working for financial services retailers to build a picture of how retention is organised. Interviews with managers and two surveys are conducted to gather the data, which are then evaluated within a framework of contemporary marketing. The study finds that there are a number of aspects involved in retaining customers that include information systems and strategy. The results of the investigation also suggest that these retailers are organised around the acquisition of customers and that balancing retention with acquisition may prove challenging.

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This thesis explores the creative development of advertising through a discourse analytic method. The 'creative development of advertising' refers here to the intra-agency process of developing advertising from client brief through planning, research, creative brief, design and execution. The thesis draws on a wide ranging literature review of research papers and popular texts to locate the study within marketing management as the superordinate field, and within marketing communications and advertising as the immediate domains. The main data gathering method is the dyadic depth interview, supplemented by observation in the field, informal primary data and agency archive material. The empirical focus is placed on a top five UK advertising agency, BMP DDB Needham, London. Transcribed interview data as text is subject to coding and categorised according to the 'interpretative repertoires' agency account team professionals draw upon to articulate and substantiate their positions and arguments, following well established discourse analytic procedure in discursive psychology. The empirical section argues that eight distinctive interpretative repertoires may be discerned from the data. These repertoires interact dynamically in agency discourse to circumscribe the social construction of advertising. The repertoires also act as resources from which account team members construct their professional identities and reproduce discursively proscribed power relations within the agency. The discussion explores the implications of the study for marketing management, marketing communications and related fields of research, theory and practice.

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This thesis develops and tests a dynamic economic model of the mining firm where changes in pollution per unit of output are related to changes in competitiveness. The model assumes that mining companies compete through the generation of technical change and competition selects between successful and unsuccessful companies through variations in their stocks of production capacity and technological capability. The mining company model, therefore, comprises a system of equations which describes its investment behaviour and another which describes its pollution per unit of output. A multiple case-study, encompassing four Bolivian mining companies and seven mining operations, was used to test the model. Competitiveness was evaluated at the corporate level and estimated through the mining firm's market share of worldwide production. Pollution per unit of output was evaluated at the operation level using both quantitative and qualitative data concerning metal recovery rates, reagent consumption, water management and waste disposal systems. The main finding of this study is that a mining firm's dynamic efficiency significantly affects the internalisation of its environmental costs. A firm's dynamic efficiency is its ability to innovate and gain economies of scale. As a mining firm's ability to compete is significantly influenced by its dynamic efficiency, the improvement of (decline in) a mining firm's ability to compete tends to reduce (increase) its pollution per unit of output. This is because improvements in a firm's ability to compete encourage investment in technological capability and production capacity. The accumulation of technological capability results in technical change. Incremental technical change reduces waste and losses in harmful substances per unit of output and prompts enlargements in production capacity. The accumulation of production capacity associates improvements in waste disposal and/or reductions in the use and pollution of complementary environmental resources used in the mining production process (such as water). At the theoretical level, the thesis connects the theory of production, in particular, the theory of depletion with the theory of pollution. It shows that changes in expectations of the growth rate of user cost (which is the opportunity cost of exhaustible resources) influence a firm's dynamic efficiency through changes in technological capability and production capacity. Since under conditions of dynamic competition, a firm's externalisation of environmental costs is determined by its dynamic efficiency as well as by market failure in pricing environmental resources. Environmental policy must comprise policies to deal with not only externalities, which are inherent to the management of environmental resources in market economies, but also dynamic inefficiency.

This thesis examines the organisation of innovative activities at the firm level by proposing a conceptual framework that is built upon a survey of the recent economic literature on technical change and by applying this framework to the computer software and services industry. The objectives of the study were the following: to analyze the nature of technical change in the software industry, the sources of firms' innovation and the competencies used in the innovative activities; to focus on the relationship between internal competencies and external sources of innovation~ and to give a picture of the division of labour among firms in the innovative activities. This work proposes a conceptual framework that takes into account the interactions between technical and organisational innovations at the firm level and focuses on the innovation process as a 'division of knowledge' that involves different types of actors: individuals, with different skills, working in the same organisation, firms specialising in substitute or complementary products, users and academic research centres. The empirical analysis employed qualitative data drawn from interviews with both large a.nd small firms, and quantitative data on corporate changes of large firms (e.g., creation or shut-down of subsidiaries, launch of new producis, set up of cooperative agreements). The main results of the research can be summarised as follows. First, software firms show a cumulative, incremental pattern of product innovations and an increasing commitment to process innovations. The research shows the linkages between technical and organisational changes. Process innovations affect the retraining of software analysts-programmers and project managers, encounter obstacles in the transmission of new software engineering knowledge from the R&D department to business departments, and shape the division of tasks throughout the firm. The second research result concerns the correlation between internal skills and the firms' propensity to set up linkages with external sources of innovation. The use of generic-abstract capabilities (mathematical skills) in innovative activities make firms more open towards external channels of technical change. On the contrary, the use of context-specific capabilities (experience with the development of software applications) reduces finns' propensity to interact with external sources of technical change. Finally, there is evidence of an increasing division of labour among firms in the software industry, as indicated by the large and rising number of inter-firm cooperative agreements stipulated during the period between 1984 and 1 ?92. The analysis of inter-firm linkages and internal restructuring also points to the importance of organisational change as one dimension of the general corporate change.

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In the eighties the Spanish Government launched an ambitious policy aimed at restructuring the militaryindustrial base. Central to it was a remarkable defence R&D effort. Government sources often argue for the military industry as an engine for the modernization of the Spanish industrial base. The object of this dissertation is to reach conclusions on the potential role of Spanish military production as a technological engine for the Spanish economy. This is done through an analysis of the structure of the Spanish military-related industry and its linkages with the rest of the economy. Up till the present most research on the role of military production has adopted too narrow a view focusing mainly on arms producers. This work presents an alternative way of conceptually focusing research of this nature. It expands the ambit of the study to examine all firms involved in military production from components to systems producers, no matter the degree of their involvement. In this way, we find that the strongest linkages with the rest of the industrial and research activities appear in the more "mature" sectors of the economy (mainly in the metal sector) and among producers of components and sub-systems. Consequently, more channels for technological diffusion from military to civilian production are found in these sectors. Yet, these areas have been found to be overlooked by and large by the present defence industrial policy which targets systems assemblers and the electronics, aerospace and software producers as the main recipients of research contracts and incentives. These results further question the conventional usage of implicitly treating defence production and technology as homogenous entities. Through our broad conceptual approach we obtain new insights into the linkages between military-rel~ted and civilian activities. The study reveals that the potent1al effects of military research and production on the rest of the economy depend on the specific sect~rs and,stages,of production targeted by the defence 1ndustr1al policy.

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