Some studies have shown that managers concentrate large fractions of their wealth in the equity of their own firm. In this paper we use a unique dataset and investigate how Swedish owner-managers invest remaining wealth conditional on a major investment in their own firm. We find no[JR1] evidence that owner-managers seek diversification benefits when they invest remaining wealth. Instead some owner-managers invest remaining wealth in the industry where they already have a substantial capital investment. We conclude that some owner-managers seek to exploit their industry-specific superior information when they invest wealth not tied up in their own firms. / <p>QC 20130515</p>

This thesis adds to the literature on strategy and enterprise discourses by analysing how they are used in interviews with small-firm owner-managers. The literature describes features of strategy and enterprise discourses and their shaping by historical developments. There is much work on the operation of these two discourses at societal and large-organisation levels. Much less researched is how these discourses are used by small-firm managers or how these discourses interact in use. This work characterises a particular discourse-analytical approach to the research interview as suitable for advancing the literature. Small, young publishing firms producing business magazines in late ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland are argued as an apposite context. Detailed analysis of three selected interviews illustrates the relevance of enterprise and strategy discourses in the particular ways these owner-managers talk. Drawing on the notion of ideological dilemmas, this work gives an explicit account of how strategy and enterprise discourses are used and interrelated in a manner described here as a ‘dichotomous unity’. This unity depends not only on the discourses’ commonalities but also on the dilemmatic tensions between them. These tensions allow creative and subtle uses of the unified discourse. Yet these same dilemmas also constrain the discourse within the bounds marked out by them. The persistence and creativity, noted by the literature, in the use of enterprise and strategy discourses is explained by the interpretation offered here. This work also stresses the need to research these discourses as two aspects of the same phenomenon. The interview method used reveals the wholeness of a discourse that other methods might show as fractured. Discourse analysts generally recognise that people both shape, and are shaped by discourses. By explicating how strategy and enterprise discourses operate, this work adds to human agency. Small-firm managers may become more aware of the constraints otherwise implicit in enterprise-strategy discourse. Policymakers may gain an appreciation of the discursive balance that the promotion of enterprise and strategy demands of small-business managers, along with the kind of costs such balancing might entail.

This thesis seeks to gain insight into environmental management implemented by micro and small tourism enterprises and explore levels of awareness and interest among owner-managers of micro and small tourism enterprises toward schemes aiming for the environmental improvement of business. The research uncovers findings that elevate possibilities for reducing misinterpretation of terminology relative to sustainable tourism business. This research seeks to understand why the suggested lack of sustainable tourism implementation remains evident in tourism. Discussion from findings intends to draw attention to central themes relative to achieving research objectives and seeks to yield important information in the pursuit of sustainable tourism business. A qualitative, semi-structured interview approach was used to gain in-depth and detailed perspectives from owner-managers of micro and small tourism enterprises. Owner-managers interviewed were purposively chosen using non-probability sampling. Selection was based on providing a variety of tourism businesses and physical business locations across the case study region. Overall, findings suggest that owner-managers are implementing low levels of environmental management and have limited knowledge of what implementation of environmental management specifically involves, such as, how long it takes and how much it costs. The underlying values of owner-managers demonstrate potential opportunities for further implementation of sustainable business practice. In addition, owner-managers seemed to place importance in conducting business responsibly and having minimal impact on the environment so that quality of life remains for future generations. Essentially, research findings aid in the understanding of why the suggested lack of sustainable tourism implementation remains evident in tourism and pose future avenues for research in the pursuit of sustainable tourism business.

The Internet is becoming a more and more influencing factor in our everyday life. It affects many of our daily tasks and it is a determining factor we built our decisions on. Especially in Sweden, retrieving information about products or services online prior to the purchase is a matter of course and emphasizes therefore its importance. A website offers a costefficient potential for smaller firms with limited resources to be visible for consumers and to compete on the larger market. However, the website adoption has been neglected amongst 41% of Swedish micro Small- and Medium sized Enterprises (SME), which raises the question why this phenomenon exists. Existing literature does not provide a solid explanation of this occurrence and this is where our study steps in. In order to answer our research question and to fill this gap, the study is designed as a qualitative multiple-case study with twelve semi-structured interviews conducted amongst the owner-managers of micro SMEs in different parts of Sweden. The study aims to fill the theoretical gap by identifying and explaining the reasons why micro SMEs in Sweden do not adopt a website. The empirical contribution is the development of managerial recommendations about how micro SMEs can overcome the barriers to adopt a website.  This research was guided by a conceptual framework, including strategic, consumer and customer, communication and interaction perspectives, as well as the perspective of the perception of websites. In order to carry out a profound analysis, we decided to apply two steps. The first step of the analysis was to connect the themes itself to theory in order to explore what the collected data represents so that reasons explaining why micro SMEs do not adopt a website could be found. The second step of the analysis included the exploration of the identified reasons in order to understand why these exist. The results from this study are expressed as six reasons why the owner-managers of micro SMEs in Sweden have not adopted a website. These reasons are: a wrong perception of a website, the lack of resources and competences, precaution, being a contractor to an umbrella company, being unaware of a website’s impact on the business and having successful network and offline-communication methods. The findings leave practitioners and researchers with an idea about what reasons are leading owners of micro SMEs to neglect a website and why these reasons exist.

The focus of this study is to examine the factors that lead to growth in small firms in a Least Developed Country (LDC). The research is based on the manufacturing sector in Ghana. The main objectives of the research are to identify the key variables that lead to small firms' growth and to ascertain the critical barriers that impede growth. A research model which is developed out of an initial exploratory research and existing literature focuses on how the characteristics of the owner/manager, the characteristics of the firm and the business strategy variables interact to affect growth in employment. In addition factors that are perceived to have constrained the growth of the small firms during the study period are ascertained and discussed. To properly test the hypotheses developed a face to face interview survey involving 122 owner/managers of small manufacturing firms is conducted. This resulted in a range of variables that allowed for the construction of a comprehensive multivariate model of small firm growth. A resulting regression model provides about 68 percent of the explanation for the growth of the small firms sampled. It also indicates that the owner/manager characteristics variables offer the most powerful explanation to small firm growth. We find that the owner/manager's growth aspiration is the most influential factor in achieving growth. The other owner/manager characteristics variables that have positive influence on growth are level of education, prior industry experience and entrepreneurial family background. Owner/managers with local experience and/or with other business interests are less likely to achieve faster growth. Foreign owned/managed firms grow faster. Younger and smaller firms appear to grow faster. While firms with multiple ownerships tend to grow at a slower rate than firms owned and managed by one person. Business planning, marketing and export have positive and significant impacts on growth. Other business strategies such as innovations and staff training also have direct relationships with growth but not significant. Some of the main constraining factors to growth are cost of borrowing, lack of access to credit, high cost of inputs, lack of trust within the business community, high bureaucracy, late payments and lack of efficient support system. While the external environment plays important role in small firm growth and development, the behaviours, response and strategies pursued by individual owner/manager are significant factors that determine the rate at which a firm will grow.

This original research seeks to identify unique predictive relationships between the characteristics, values and expectations of entrepreneurs in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and the management practices they choose; and then, the relationships between those practices and business performance. It adds to the current understanding of the impact of entrepreneurs on the performance of their businesses and has also led to the development of two new tools for assessing the performance of SMEs. Growth of the SME sector is important to the public policy agendas of governments, like those in Australia, that are seeking to optimise the employment opportunities associated with an SME sector in which "success" is the norm because SME failure, or underperformance, is associated with many social costs; costs that include reduced earnings for proprietors, potential job loss for staff and financial hardship for suppliers, as well as a reduction in the average per capita spending power of the community in which the failed or under performing business is based. For the SME, business strategy development and implementation is often the role of the entrepreneur owner-manager. The characteristics, values and expectations of entrepreneurs in SMEs may thus influence their choice of management practices and thereby the performance of their businesses. As Cooper (1998) argued: "the primary motivations of the entrepreneur bear upon not only the decision to start but also upon the decisions about how to manage, including whether or not to grow the firm aggressively" (p. 247). Johnson (1990) suggested that there is a strong need to focus future research on the motivation mechanisms of entrepreneurs as drivers of the entrepreneurial process. Johnson's view supports the entrepreneurial trait school of thought that development of an understanding of the individual entrepreneur's characteristics, values and expectations might provide worthwhile insight into her or his behaviour and its relationship to SME success and failure. The purposes of this research, therefore, were, first, to determine the importance of the attributed and attained characteristics of the entrepreneur on the formation of his or her values and expectations; second, to determine the influence of those values and expectations on the choice of management practices; third, to determine the degree to which those management practices influence business performance; and last, to develop a scale of measurement for entrepreneur characteristics, values and expectations that can be used to predict business performance. To enable limited comparison with Kotey's and Meredith's (1997) findings and to control for between industry and between state influences, the chosen context for the research was the furniture industry in Queensland. To add to current knowledge in SME management practices and performance, two new measurement tools were developed for this research. The first quantifies the positiveness of the business intentions of the entrepreneur. The second is a scaled index of perceived performance that takes account of the importance given by an entrepreneur to eight common business objectives and the degree to which he or she is satisfied with the performance of the business for each objective. Both tools are important additions to the limited existing armoury of tools available to researchers seeking to understand and predict SME performance. For the first time, the findings of this research indicate negative relationships between parent occupation skill levels and the importance given by entrepreneurs to the values of responsibility, honesty and competence and the negative role of the entrepreneur's achieved highest qualification on the importance given to values of affection, compassion, religion and national security. The findings thereby highlight the important role played by an entrepreneur's attained characteristics on the formation of his or her values. As well, the results show the important role played by values such as power and responsibility, as well as by high internal locus of control, on an entrepreneur's selection of planning, marketing and future management practices. In turn, the impact of those practices on business performance, as measured by the overall satisfaction of the entrepreneur and the newly created Scaled Index of Perceived Performance, is demonstrated. In so doing, the results shed more light on the complex relationships between entrepreneurs, the management practices they choose, and business performance. For the furniture industry in Queensland, the findings confirm Cooper's (1998) view that there is an empirical relationship between business founding processes and the performance of the business. Also supported is Kotey's and Meredith's (1997) broad finding for the furniture industry in New South Wales that "personal values of owner/managers, the strategies they adopt in operating their firms, and the performance outcomes of their businesses are empirically related" (1997, p. 59). Future research is needed to develop a causal model for those relationships in a variety of SME and other contexts.

This thesis comprises five empirical essays using Swedish data. Three of the essays examine open market share repurchases, one essay investigates changes in investors’ shareholdings surrounding equity rights offerings (ROs), and the last essay investigates owner-managers’ equity portfolio choices. The first essay examines stock performance around initiation announcements of open market share repurchase programs, the price impact of repurchase trading and the long-run stock performance following the initiation announcements. The study uses a unique data set of initiation announcements and actual share repurchases conducted by firms listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange (SSE). The results show that initiation announcements of open market repurchase programs exhibit a 2 day abnormal return (AR) of 2% on average. The price impact on the actual repurchase days is positively correlated with the daily repurchase volume, and is both statistically and economically significant during the first 3 repurchase days in a repurchase program. The long-run abnormal stock performance is positively associated with the fraction of shares bought in the program and is on average 7% for the first year following the initiation announcement. The results indicate that repurchase trading provides price support and that the market participants detect and perceive the initiation announcement and the first repurchase days in a repurchase program as a signal of undervaluation. The second essay examines differences in the market performance of Swedish firms that initiate repurchase programs infrequently (1-2 programs), occasionally (3-4 programs) and frequently (5 or more programs) over the period 2000-2009. It is found that infrequent repurchase programs are greeted with a stronger positive reaction than occasional and frequent programs. However, over the long-term, infrequent repurchase programs show no AR while occasional and frequent repurchase programs show significant positive ARs. A positive relationship between AR and repurchase size is documented for all types of repurchase programs. The third essay examines the market liquidity impact of open market share repurchases in an electronic order-driven market. The study uses a detailed data set of daily repurchase transactions on the SSE together with intraday data on bid-ask spreads and order depths which enables an investigation of the liquidity effects on the actual repurchase days. It is found that repurchase trades inside the order-driven trading system contribute to market liquidity through narrower bid-ask spreads and deeper market depths. After controlling for trading volume, price and volatility, a significant decrease of the bid-ask spread on repurchase days relative to surrounding non-repurchase days is still found. However, repurchases executed as block trades outside the order-driven trading system have a detrimental effect on the bid-ask spread, consistent with a negative response to the presence of informed managerial trading. The fourth essay examines changes in equity ownership surrounding ROs by firms listed on the SSE. The results show that domestic individual investors on average reduce their shareholdings following rights issues, whereas domestic institutional investors and foreign investors increase their holdings. However, when ownership changes are adjusted with changes in ownership in matched non-issuing firms, it is documented that domestic institutions significantly increase their shareholdings in RO firms, whereas foreign investors decrease their holdings in these firms. A positive (negative) association between the 6 month benchmark adjusted return following the offering and the change in shareholdings by foreign investors (domestic institutional investors) is also documented. Finally, the fifth and last essay investigates how Swedish owner-managers (CEO or Chairman) invest in the Swedish stock market conditional on a major investment in their own firm. No evidence is found that owner-managers seek diversification benefits when they invest in other Swedish stocks. In general, they choose other stocks that show higher correlation among themselves than the average Swedish stocks. It is also found that owner-managers within high-tech industries invest significantly more of their total Swedish stock investments in IT stocks than owner-managers within other industries. / <p>QC 20130515</p>

The focus of this study is to examine the factors that lead to growth in small firms in a Least Developed Country (LDC). The research is based on the manufacturing sector in Ghana. The main objectives of the research are to identify the key variables that lead to small firms' growth and to ascertain the critical barriers that impede growth. A research model which is developed out of an initial exploratory research and existing literature focuses on how the characteristics of the owner/manager, the characteristics of the firm and the business strategy variables interact to affect growth in employment. In addition factors that are perceived to have constrained the growth of the small firms during the study period are ascertained and discussed. To properly test the hypotheses developed a face to face interview survey involving 122 owner/managers of small manufacturing firms is conducted. This resulted in a range of variables that allowed for the construction of a comprehensive multivariate model of small firm growth. A resulting regression model provides about 68 percent of the explanation for the growth of the small firms sampled. It also indicates that the owner/manager characteristics variables offer the most powerful explanation to small firm growth. We find that the owner/manager's growth aspiration is the most influential factor in achieving growth. The other owner/manager characteristics variables that have positive influence on growth are level of education, prior industry experience and entrepreneurial family background. Owner/managers with local experience and/or with other business interests are less likely to achieve faster growth. Foreign owned/managed firms grow faster. Younger and smaller firms appear to grow faster. While firms with multiple ownerships tend to grow at a slower rate than firms owned and managed by one person. Business planning, marketing and export have positive and significant impacts on growth. Other business strategies such as innovations and staff training also have direct relationships with growth but not significant. Some of the main constraining factors to growth are cost of borrowing, lack of access to credit, high cost of inputs, lack of trust within the business community, high bureaucracy, late payments and lack of efficient support system. While the external environment plays important role in small firm growth and development, the behaviours, response and strategies pursued by individual owner/manager are significant factors that determine the rate at which a firm will grow. / Ghana Leasing Company Limited.

Well-being at work is of major public interest, and justice at the workplace can be a key factor contributing to employees and managers feeling well. Research has found direct relationships between organizational justice perceptions and work and health outcomes. With research on the justice–health link still emerging, this thesis examines the moderating and mediating processes for the effects of justice perceptions on work outcomes and especially health outcomes. As little is known about those who enact justice, the antecedents and consequences of justice enactment are also studied. In Study I, the relationships between organizational justice and work and health outcomes were in focus, as the moderating role of job characteristics was investigated utilizing the demand–control(–support) model. Organizational justice and job characteristics were associated with work and health outcomes within and across time. The multiplicative effects showed that the organizational justice effects were stronger when perceived job demands were high, job control was low or social support was low. Study II examined the processes through which justice perceptions translate into health outcomes. Building on the allostatic load model, mental preoccupation with work was found to be a relevant mediator of the justice–health relationship, with locus of control moderating the mediated relationships. Study III focused on the actor perspective. Investigating predictions based on the deontic model of justice and ego-depletion theory, moral regard and justice self-efficacy predicted justice enactment positively, and justice enactment had positive effects on feeling professionally recognized but also negative health consequences for the actors themselves. This thesis contributes to advancing the emergent justice–health research stream by providing insights into the processes underlying these aspects, and by incorporating this stream into the actor perspective. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Submitted.</p>