One of the most problematic issues to face airlines in recent years has been service failure/breakdown. Consequently, the notion of effective recovery, in terms of retaining customer loyalty, has become increasingly important. The aim of this study is to examine incidents of airline service failure and identify optimal recovery strategies. The study evaluates the service failure and recovery strategies in full-service airlines and low-cost carriers, the comparative effectiveness of alternative recovery actions/strategies (e.g. apology, compensation, correction, explanation) and their impact on post-recovery satisfaction and loyalty for a range of failure types. It also examines the mediating effect of emotion and justice on post-recovery behaviour. A total of 387 useable questionnaires were obtained from three different sources: a street intercept survey in Manchester (n=50); an online survey at Salford University (n=52); a Marketest panel survey (n=285). A number of important findings have been obtained from the hypothesis tests. Firstly, the severity of service failure and failure criticality were found to have a significant impact on customer satisfaction, negative word-of-mouth communication (WOM) and customer loyalty. Secondly, the results revealed the following five service recovery actions are particularly effective for airline service recovery: acceptance of responsibility of service failure; correction; compensation; apology and follow-up in writing. Thirdly, the results show that three recovery actions (e.g. compensation; acceptance of responsibility and correction) have a significant impact on customer post-recovery satisfaction when severity is high (>4). The implications of these results are that operations manager and staff can use these five recovery actions to deal with service failure (e.g. acceptance of responsibility of service failure; correction; compensation; apology and follow-up in writing). Frontline staff needs to be aware of customer emotions during service failure incident and good service recovery can therefore avoid negative customer emotion.

The philosopher James Mylne (1757-1839) vindicated the rational powers of humanity against the sceptical and “common sense” philosophies of his Scottish predecessors and earned the trust of his contemporaries for his Whig politics. He and the largely neglected philosophy and political economy classes he taught in Glasgow clearly merited closer study. My thesis thus contains a biography of Mylne and interpretative essays on his lectures on moral philosophy and political economy and his political views. James Mylne attended St Andrews University where he acquired a liberal education in the Scottish tradition and a particular knowledge of theology. He became a Deputy-Chaplain with the 83rd Regiment of Foot during the American War of Independence and his experience sheds light on his later advocacy of a militia. Thereafter he served for 14 years as a Minister in Paisley where he was exposed to the literary culture of Glasgow and the radical tinged politics of the French revolutionary era. From 1797 until his death he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, where he delivered effective lectures on moral philosophy and political economy. His impact of his teaching was enhanced by student exercises in essay-writing, following the method of George Jardine. He was also active and influential in the Whig politics of the day. Mylne broke with the political caution of Adam Smith, Thomas Reid (1710-96) and James Beattie. Smith’s warning of a “daring, but often dangerous spirit of innovation” in politics contrasts with the “speedy and substantial reform” advocated by Mylne, who extended the Whig thought of John Millar (1735-1801). The lectures contain material common to Scottish traditions of mental philosophy. However, Mylne’s philosophy is anchored in a tradition of “rational piety” that places individual judgements at the core of mental life and in a philosophy of history that sees intellectual progress at the heart of social, economic and political developments. In place of the scepticism of David Hume (1711-76) and the common sense of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), he proposed a constructive account of experience, developing directly from John Locke (1632-1704) and his French follower Condillac (1714-80). In two particular respects, Mylne’s thought diverges from the ‘moral sense’ and ‘common sense’ traditions associated with Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid in Glasgow. These are his doctrine of the external world and his account of free will and providence. Mylne draws on Condillac to argue that there is no need to draw on common sense to explain belief in an external world as this is explicable by an analysis of touch. He considers that the mind is determined to act by rational motives and the concept of freedom without motive is incoherent. As a result of these views, Mylne reinstates reason as the guiding principle of conscience and argues for utility as the predominant criterion of morality. His views of political reform and the concept of value in his political economy lectures on the emerging market economy are related loosely to these features of his philosophy. The influence of Mylne’s teaching was extensive both in Scotland and the English-speaking world. This can be documented by acknowledgements and reminiscences by his students, many of whom who went on to teach themselves and by comparison of their published works with the content of Mylne’s teaching. More distantly, I argue that Mylne had an indirect influence on the ethos of the early Idealist movement in Glasgow. Mylne’s philosophy evinces a sense of the unity of experience, drawn initially from the universal elements of sensation and judgement, but with religious overtones. His commitments to inquiry and social reform and critique of the common sense school prepared the ground for the Glasgow idealists.

This thesis presents the results of a narrative inquiry study conducted in the context of Higher Education Institutions. The study aims to describe and foster understanding of the beliefs, perceptions, and felt constraints of ten academic researchers deeply involved in digital scholarship. Academic research, as one of the four categories of scholarship, is the focus of the analysis. The methods of data collection included in-depth online interviews, field notes, closed blog posts, and follow up dialogues via email and web-telephony. The literature review within this study presents a narrative on scholarship throughout the ages up to the current environment, highlighting the role of technology in assisting different forms of networking, communication, and dissemination of knowledge. It covers aspects of online participation and scholarship such as the open access movement, online networks and communities of practice that ultimately influence academic researchers’ sense of identity and their approaches to digital scholarship. The themes explored in the literature review had a crucial role in informing the interview guide that supported the narrative accounts of the research participants. However, the data collected uncovered a gap in knowledge not anticipated in the literature review, that of power relations between the individual and their institutions. Hence, an additional sociological research lens, that of Pierre Bourdieu, was adopted in order to complete the analysis of the data collected. There were three major stages of analysis: the construction of research narratives as a first pass analysis of the narrative inquiry, a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts, and a Bourdieuian analysis, supported by additional literature, that reveals the complexity of current academic practice in the context of the Participatory Web. This research set out to study the online practices of academic researchers in a changing environment and ended up examining the conflicts between modern and conservative approaches to research scholarship in the context of academic researchers’ practices. This study argues that the Participatory Web, in the context of academic research, can not only empower academic researchers but also place them in contention with traditional and persistent scholarly practice.

This study aimed to investigate the factors that affect e-commerce adoption in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the developing country context of Botswana. The research was undertaken using an interpretive paradigm with multiple case studies in nine SMEs that were codenamed C1Alpha, C5Home, C6Lodge C2Beta, C3Gamma, C4Teq, C7Panda, C8Estate, and C9Autoco. Data collection tools and techniques involved face-to-face semi-structured and unstructured interviews, telephone interviews, website content analysis, document analysis of SME reports and observations. A conceptual framework was developed to capture elements from extant e-commerce adoption literature that are defined in the research question. Data collected from each of the SMEs was analysed to present the findings based on the elements described above. These elements include the following: 1) the nature and characteristic of the business environment, 2) use of ICT and Web Applications; 3) managerial characteristics and perception of e-commerce; 4) factors that affect e-commerce adoption or the lack of it; 5) the interaction of the factors and how they determine the level of e-commerce adoption, and 6) the role of the local business environment. The main findings of this study are the factors for e-commerce adoption for each of the SMEs. The study emerges with factors of e-commerce adoption that have been derived from various patterns of e-commerce adoption as represented in the nature and characteristics of the SMEs. This study makes a theoretical contribution by proposing a conceptual framework for investigating factors affecting e-commerce adoption in SMEs. Methodologically, the study adds a different blend to the research approach by undertaking in-depth studies on selected SMEs in Botswana, and provides an interpretive assessment of e-commerce adoption research in a developing country context of Botswana. Strategies for improving e-commerce development in the selected SMEs are presented, as well as implications of the research findings. This study provides insights into understanding SME e-commerce adoption factors in other contexts with similar characteristics.

This thesis investigates how developments in audio for digital television can be utilised to improve the experience of hearing impaired people when watching television. The work has had significant impact on international digital TV broadcast standards; it led to the formation of the UK Clean Audio Forum whose recommendations based on the research have been included in ETSI international standards for digital television, adopted into ITU standards for IPTV and also into EBU and NorDig digital television receiver specifications. In this thesis listening tests are implemented to assess the impact of various processes with a phantom centre channel and with a centre loudspeaker. The impact of non-speech channel attenuation and dynamic range control on speech clarity, sound quality and enjoyment of audio-visual media are investigated for both hearing impaired and non-hearing impaired people. For the first time the impact of acoustical crosstalk in two channel stereo reproduction on intelligibility of speech is quantified using both subjective intelligibility assessments and acoustic measurement techniques with intelligibility benefits of 5.9% found by utilising a centre loudspeaker instead of a phantom centre. A novel implementation of principal component analysis as a pre- broadcast production tool for labelling AV media compatible with a clean audio mix is identified, and two research implementations of accessible audio are documented including an object based implementation of clean audio for live broadcast that has been developed and publicly demonstrated.

Toward A Hybrid Music Theatre explores the coming convergence between the English-language musical theatre and contemporary opera. The research focuses specifically on the implementation of avant-garde compositional techniques within a commercial music theatre form. Areas of application include practices in narrative structure, multiplicity of character portrayal, instrumental and vocal characterizations, vocal writing, and soundscape narrative. Works by Italian and American twentieth-century composers have been examined for the use of such techniques including Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim. Works such as Berio’s "Outis" and Sondheim’s "Merrily We Roll Along" have influenced the thinking on narrative structure, while Dallapiccola’s "Volo di notte," Maderna’s "Don Perlimplin," and Sondheim’s "Into The Woods" have contributed to the discussion of instrumental and vocal characterizations. Choral techniques such as those found in the works of György Kurtág and Krzysztof Penderecki influenced the quasi-soundscape effects. Three full works accompany the portfolio, "The Proposal," "The Passion of John" and "The Rose Prologues." The work embodied in these projects represent a significant development to the journey moving toward hybridity. The narrative structure of "The Proposal" addresses two sides of a musical story told simultaneously. The two primary characters are portrayed by seven singers and various instruments. "The Passion of John" explores timbre, time and space as a means of musical storytelling while "The Rose Prologues" explores a single image from multiple perspectives in short-form opera. The direction taken with these works lays out a path for future composers to explore.

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the impacts of political, social and economic dynamics of contemporary “free-market cities” on indigenous people that leave their traditional territories to settle on Latin American metropolises. The thesis examines the case of indigenous Shipibo migrants from the Amazon that have occupied in Lima, Peru a landfill site owned by the municipal government, and developed there a shantytown. The analyzes of the case sheds light on the innovative strategies that the Shipibo resort to in order to survive in the absence of formal jobs and social programs, and even despite recurrent threats to their social and cultural rights. Through the production of traditional handicraft, they collectively become ethnic entrepreneurs and enter the vast urban informal economy. Beside its interesting consequences for local politics and gender relations, this ethnic economic practice also becomes a way of group making and community building. After prolonged waits –during which the state appeared intermittently and with ambiguous messages–, the Shipibo finally face they most dreaded fear: eviction. Upon confronting this situation, and lacking the clientelistic networks in which Andean migrant peasants could count on in past decades, the Shipibo utilize a innovative repertoire of contained contention to appeal to the leftist municipal authority and thus articulate functional alliances with the goal of gaining land tenure. / text

A very important phenomenon observed in the last decades is the development of the so-called "New Economy", characterized by the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). During this episode, very favourable economic conditions have characterized the US economy: high growth rates of output, strong growth in labour, low level of unemployment. As a consequence, a strong attention has been devoted to the study of what has been called the "ICT Revolution", both from an empirical and from a theoretical point of view. This thesis proposes some theoretical models that are able to describe the most important characteristics of the new economy, explaining the associated growth performance. In particular, Chapter 1 develops a model that is able to reproduce some features of the ICT revolution that emerge from the data, underlining the importance of embodiment and the long-run implications of embodied technological change, and focusing on the role of R&D and of innovation in the growth process of the new economy. In Chapter 2 the model is extended considering also the presence of human capital, in line with the recent theoretical and empirical advancements in the endogenous growth literature according to which not only R&D activity, but also human capital accumulation, is a primary determinant of economic growth. Indeed, in the new economy human capital can be of great importance, since education is crucial in acquiring the knowledge necessary to use the new technologies, and at the same time an increase in ICT makes it easier to accumulate human capital, that in this model is the true engine of growth. In Chapter 3, finally, the issue considered is represented by the role of another form of capital, organizational capital, that has recently been advocated to explain the productivity slowdown and that can be linked with the analysis of the ICT boom. The model proposed allows to deal with the phenomenon, observed in the last decades with the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies, represented by the adoption by many firms of new organizational practices, characterized by a tendency towards multi-tasking. Other aspects recently observed, and that the model is able to reproduce, are the increase in the share of skilled workers and in the proportion of workers employed in managerial occupations. The dissertation therefore elaborates some models that underline the fundamental role of a number of factors (innovation, human capital and organization) that are at the origin of the growth performance of the recent ICT-based economy.

<p>Software design decisions were considered in this study, as the possibly principal factor for unplanned adjustments related to the embedded software handling, at production- and service processes. The study reveals an increase of requirement changes during the last phases in then software development projects execution, which forces late design decisions in order to fulfil the changed requirements. Consequently, the likelihood of risks for unexpected impacts on the subsequent processes will increase.</p><p>A research approach based on interviews and data from previous projects at Volvo CE was performed. The process methodology used at Volvo CE for software development was investigated from the project planning and control view and the project team member’s perspective.<em></em></p><p>A high amount of software-design decisions were encountered at the end of the software development process at Volvo CE, as a result of numerous requirement changes at the final phases of the projects execution. A gap was identified between how the process methodology specified the progression of activities for software development and the actual progression of the project activities in Volvo CE.</p><p>This study discusses problem areas in the software development process at Volvo CE from an embedded design decisions perspective. As future work, the study recommends three steps to find improvements to the process methodology: 1) Update the process based on standardized procedures for management of requirements changes, risk handling, and communication. 2) Further analysis and possible adaptations of the process model 3) Develop methods and/or tools for process quality assurance.</p><p>The management of the embedded software decisions appears to be a very complicated area, the conventional statements on the importance of the decisions in the earlier phases, at least, should be further discussed and investigated.</p> / PREPARE

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