published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The growing global presence of China’s state-owned enterprise (SOEs) has captured much of the world’s attention. Continuous waves of SOEs’ overseas ventures, a result of government-led transnationalization officially dubbed the “Going Out” strategy, have generated great uneasiness in international relations. This dissertation, The Politics of China’s “Going Out” Strategy: Overseas Expansion of Central State-owned Enterprises, seeks to answer the following question: how the Chinese central state and central SOEs interact with one another as the “Going Out” strategy has evolved. This dissertation finds that the transnationalization of SOEs is by no means a coherent policy but rather is fraught with power struggle, with various bureaucratic agencies setting different goals for SOEs on the one hand and with SOEs managers defending corporate interests without incurring political setbacks on the other. The state’s advocacy of the overseas expansion of SOEs was aimed at achieving national economic and security goals, but SOEs, with their expanded autonomy gained from the new state-market relationship, have been able to ignore state directives that were detrimental to firms’ financial performance. This dissertation also finds that negotiation and bargaining between China’s fragmented bureaucracy and SOE managers over the terms of firms’ “going out” grow more intense as corporate autonomy become increasingly institutionalized with the progress of reform. Over time, SOEs’ overseas expansion reflected more the firms’ corporate strategy than the state’s policy objectives. / text

Master of Arts - Human Geography / The purpose of the research report is to investigate the role that tourism plays in developing black-owned small enterprises and how it has contributed towards Black Economic Empowerment in the ten-year period between 1994 and 2004. The research drew from the aims of the Tourism White Paper and sought to review the problems and progress in transforming the tourism industry in South Africa and establish whether black entrepreneurs are making headways into an industry that can potentially change racial imbalance in economic control. The research was conducted among 40 black tour operators based mainly in Gauteng using a questionnaire. The report established that black tour operators, because of their previously disadvantaged background, are struggling to make an impact into the seemingly white-dominated industry.

Despite important advances in family business research over the past decade, the effects of family ownership and control on firm performance and strategy remain equivocal. First, is family involvement beneficial or costly to the firm? Leading management and family business research theories proffer compelling arguments, but none have been able to present unassailable theoretical support for any one particular side. Second, how do family firms make capital structure decisions? Although there are widely-accepted theories of capital structure policy in the corporate finance literature, they have limited power in explaining financial decision making in family firms. Furthermore, empirical studies on both the performance and capital structure policy of family firms have generated mixed results. This divergence in theory and empirical evidence suggests that earlier studies have not been able to consider other critical factors that drive value creation and strategy formulation in family businesses. This dissertation addresses these gaps in the literature with two studies that are derived from the question of how the performance and behavior of “Overseas Chinese” family firms are influenced by Confucian values and practices. In the first study, I developed a theoretical framework based on social capital theory which posits that long-term orientation (LTO) acts as a mediator in the relationship between family ownership and control (FOC) and firm performance. In addition, I hypothesized that Confucian characteristics, such as filial piety (FIL), traditionalism (TRA), and guanxi (GUA), act as moderators in the model. In the second study, I built a framework using the theory of planned behavior, which explains how FOC and Confucian values jointly affect the firm’s capital structure decisions by influencing the decision maker’s beliefs and attitude toward debt, by fostering societal pressures regarding the use of debt, and by creating perceived behavioral controls in terms of risk exposure, family control, and the cost of debt. According to this framework, Confucian values moderate the relationship between FOC and financial leverage by reinforcing the family firm’s intention not to borrow. Using data from a sample of small- and medium-sized firms in the Philippines and the partial least squares structural equation modeling methodology (PLS-SEM), analysis reveals that LTO partly explains the positive influence of FOC on firm performance, and that TRA enhances the positive relationship between FOC and LTO. In the second study, the results suggest that firms which have a high degree of FOC borrow less. In addition, at high degrees of FIL, firms with a lower FOC have a lower financial leverage while firms with a higher level of FOC have a higher financial leverage. This dissertation contributes significantly to the family business management and family firm finance literature and the management literature in general. First, the social capital framework developed in the first study identifies specific circumstances in which family ownership and control can enhance firm value. Specifically, family firms are able to achieve better performance by promoting LTO in the organization, and cultural traits such as traditionalism enable the family business to achieve a higher degree of LTO. Second, the analytical framework based on the theory of planned behavior that was developed in the second study provides an alternative explanation for capital structure policy for small- and medium-sized private firms. The results of the study demonstrate that a high degree of family ownership and control results in use of less debt, and that Confucian values such as filial piety can moderate the firm’s bias against borrowing contingent on the degree of family ownership and control.

Performance Management is both a strategic and an integrated approach to delivering successful results in organizations by improving the performance and developing the capabilities of teams and individuals. The term performance management gained its importance and popularity in the1980’s when the competitive pressures in the market place started rising. This is when organizations felt the need of introducing a comprehensive performance management process into their systems for improving productivity and performance effectiveness. Performance management can be regarded as a continuous process of managing the performance of people to get desired results. Performance management is beneficial to major stakeholders of an organization by clearly describing what is supposed to be done for attaining certain desired goals. However focus on performance management may be fruitless without the existence of effective implementation, proper organizational design and management systems.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of a daughter's managerial style and her personal relationship with her father in father-daughter work relationships in family-owned businesses. This research is an attempt to reveal daughters' perceptions of these occurrences and interactions which often are overlooked in current research and everyday practices. The theoretical framework stems from four distinct but connected areas of research: family-owned businesses, father/daughter relationships, father-son relationships in and outside of family-owned businesses, and men and women in management. The data in this study revealed that the majority of the daughters chose and implemented managerial styles different from their fathers'. However, the daughters reported that differences in style did not create substantial problems for their father/daughter work relationships. Six of the seven daughters reported that having had the experience of working outside of their family-owned businesses provided them the opportunity to develop their own personal differences in management styles. Yet, the apparent incongruence of these daughters' reports reveals that the daughters were more concerned with preserving intergenerational continuity than with facing up to conflicting beliefs in management. Furthermore, the research found that the decision-making styles in which the fathers and daughters engaged did differ and the differences affected their familial relationships in limited ways. Overall, the daughters perceived the interaction between their managerial style and personal relationships with their fathers to be compatible and not debilitating. / Graduation date: 1993

Since 1989 government due to the economic liberalization and internationalization policy operation, the privatization of public enterprises as one of its specific policies. So state-owned enterprises to seek business strategy that towards the diversification of development. Brand extension of the approach is state-owned enterprises typically use the marketing strategy. For example, Taiwan Sugar Corporation entered the biotech cosmetics industry, the introduction of Stanlen series of cosmetic products. CPC Corporation branched out into health food industry, in petrol station sale of a series of health food stations. State-owned enterprises in the introduction of extension products is often accompanied by promotional activities conducted. According to scholars, Mela, Gupta and Lehmann (1997) found that long-term use of price promotion strategy (e.g.: discounts), may have a negative impact on the brand. Therefore, this study is to investigate the marketing activities with the brand extension strategy for the extension of product attitude and purchase intention impact, and the extension fit whether interfere with or affect the effectiveness of brand extension strategy. This study adopt 2 (state-owned brand attitude: good attitude, bad attitude) X2 (Promotion Type: Price promotions, non-price promotion) X2 (extension fit: high, low) experimental method. Discussing independent variable state-owned brand attitude and Promotion Type, interfere with variable extension fit , to dependent variable purchase intention and extension of product attitude interaction effect. state-run business of Taiwan Sugar Corporation and Taiwan Water Corporation, which produce the packaging water as the brand of experimental. And promote type (price, non-price) and the extension fit (high, low) composed of four kinds of scenario, each scenario sample number of 41 ~ 43, the total valid sample size was 167, mainly test on three university of the students in Kaohsiung. The results showed, the subjects of the original state-owned brand attitude will be transferred to the extension product, thereby affecting the purchase intention and extension product attitude. The subjects which to price promotion have more purchase intention than non-price promotions, but do not affect the extension product's brand attitude. Different extent ion fit will interfere purchase intention and it will effect different attitude, promote type, extension product's attitude.

Maritime is a very competitive industry in global market. In addition to political, economic and prosperity, container carriers have to confront oil prices and climate. It gets high risk and uncertainty in operation. The threat of oversupply of capacity will affect the operation and development of container carriers. Costs is aggravated on container carriers due to they brought too many new vessels when previous boom but economic declined soon. Fleet deployment is a big issue when making operational strategies and plans. Container carriers have to plan how to purchase and lease vessels. People said that the proportion of owned container vessels of Europe container carriers is lower than Asia container carriers. Europe container carries may not spend too much cost to purchase container vessels so it would be more flexible to lease container vessels and able to deploy container vessels in/out of route and create brand new service more mobility. For this reason, operating performance is better than Asia container carriers. This study is base on secondary data from Alphaliner, Containerisation International and American Shipper database and periodical in 2007 and 2008: net profit, total revenue, the numbers of owned, leased and operated container vessels. The 15 major container carriers are divided into three segments: Asia-Chinese, Asia-Non-Chinese and Non-Asia container carriers. The General Linear Mode is practiced on these to find out if any impact or correlation from the proportion of owned container vessel to performance. The conclusions of this study are as following. 1. It¡¦s no correlation between the proportion of owned container vessels and net profit and total revenue in 2007 and 2008 2. The proportion of owned container vessels can not be fixed at a value 3. The proportion of owned container vessels is dynamic, may not be operated by container carriers.