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.

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.

With a dramatic economic growth rate of 10% per year, China, as one of the Big Emerging Markets, has drawn increasing attention from both academia and industry. Its market potential and growth rate is believed to be the top attraction for global investment. In many sectors, the increasing number of options available to consumers has led to the emergence of a consumer society in China and has further fed the development of variance in consumer behaviour. This has imposed imperatives of consumer research in China, especially market segmentation research, on both foreign multinational companies and indigenous 5 manufacturers, in order i) to identify the unique needs of consumers, to provide more desirable product/service packages, and iii) to communicate brand value via more appropriate messages to targeted consumers.

The recent improvements and developments on Intelligent Agents (IA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 3D visualisation, coupled with an increasing desire to integrate interactivity within virtual spaces bring concerns in regard to the articulation of narratives in such environments.

The amount of textual information available electronically has made it difficult for many users to find and access the right information within acceptable time. Research communities in the natural language processing (NLP) field are developing tools and techniques to alleviate these problems and help users in exploiting these vast resources. These techniques include Information Retrieval (IR) and Information Extraction (IE). The work described in this thesis concerns IE and more specifically, named entity extraction in Arabic. The Arabic language is of significant interest to the NLP community mainly due to its political and economic significance, but also due to its interesting characteristics. Text usually contains all kinds of names such as person names, company names, city and country names, sports teams, chemicals and lots of other names from specific domains. These names are called Named Entities (NE) and Named Entity Recognition (NER), one of the main tasks of IE systems, seeks to locate and classify automatically these names into predefined categories. NER systems are developed for different applications and can be beneficial to other information management technologies as it can be built over an IR system or can be used as the base module of a Data Mining application. In this thesis we propose an efficient and effective framework for extracting Arabic NEs from text using a rule based approach. Our approach makes use of Arabic contextual and morphological information to extract named entities. The context is represented by means of words that are used as clues for each named entity type. Morphological information is used to detect the part of speech of each word given to the morphological analyzer. Subsequently we developed and implemented our rules in order to recognise each position of the named entity. Finally, our system implementation, evaluation metrics and experimental results are presented.

This thesis is an exploratory study on how people of African descent in the UK use blogs as social, cultural and counterhegemonic practice and is positioned within the theoretical frameworks of alternative media and critical race theory (CRT). The research questions at the centre of this study are what motivates African Caribbean people in the UK to become bloggers; what gratification they experience through authoring blogs; how they use blogs to address issues of representation in the mainstream media and their perceptions of the social impact of their activities as bloggers. The findings reveal that motivation for blogging is linked to voice, visibility and empowerment and gratification is linked to voice, knowledge sharing, knowledge acquisition and social interaction. While voice, as a motivational factor and gratification for some participants is linked to interests in creative writing and journalism, for many others motivation and gratification are driven by a complex set of factors linked to issues of race and representation. These stem from feelings of being voiceless, invisible and marginalised as African Caribbean people in British society and blogs function as an assertive strategy and medium for self-representation. The constructed narratives of the bloggers who participated in this study reveal their experience of subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination perpetuated through dominant discourses in the mainstream media and marginalisation in the wider society. The findings demonstrate that race and ethnicity are inextricably linked to motivation and gratification and influence blogging practice and content production. This thesis expands on current literature by documenting how African Caribbean people have appropriated blogs to harness social and cultural capital, to mediate against racism and marginalisation within British society and to empower themselves and their communities.

Capturing, recreating and representing a high fidelity virtual representation of the dynamic human form has long been a target for a diverse range of applications including tele-presence, games, film and TV special effects. The complexity of the challenge, to achieve a lifelike, faithful and believable representation, is such that a wide range of techniques and approaches have been developed. These are both due to research lead curiosity and requirements to address specific objective for particular problems. This work starts from a novel standpoint: that the processes of surfacing, tessellation and texturing, commonly used in 3D reconstruction, are computationally expensive and un-necessary. This work argues that by integrating the reconstruction and rendering processes into a single process that is aligned with the architecture of modern graphics hardware, a lightweight component solution can be achieved that is suitable for application on the end user systems within the many application domains. In order to achieve this aim the research undertaken seeks to both define an appropriate technique and develop detailed understanding of the reconstruction process pipeline and impacting factors. This is achieved through a complementary investigation of the tools and frameworks that are necessary to support iterative development of the approach with reliable, repeatable objective assessment. This reasons that by understanding the nature of the capture, reconstruction and presentation pipeline and by objective evaluation of the emerging reconstruction techniques this research will define an approach for 3D video based reconstruction that effectively utilises the processing potential of a single system to deliver acceptable levels of performance (speed) and fidelity (visual quality) for a componentised, multi-purpose 3D reconstruction and rendering solution. This thesis describes the research that has driven the evolution of technique and documents the iterations made. It presents a novel framework for experimentation and evaluation of the techniques and demonstrates how the use of these tools has enabled both rapid prototyping of approach and objective evaluation of improvement. The work concludes with a review of the approach taken and identifies approaches for evaluation of performance (speed) and fidelity (visual quality) that enable both repeatable experimentation within the research pipeline and reliable comparison of the end-to-end process against other techniques.