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The thesis examines Flexible Work Arrangements (FWAs) in the Greek labour market and theoretical perspectives that may explain employers’ and employees’ perceptions of flexible working in Greece. Its objectives are: (1) to contribute to the sociology of work and labour economics literatures, by revisiting theoretical perspectives, applying them to the Greek labour context and adding empirical evidence on different FWAs; (2) to contribute to the literature on flexible working and new forms of management practices, by not only focusing on a context that has been neglected, but also by developing a two-level study of both employers’ and employees’ perspectives; (3) to assess potential implications of flexible working by focusing on the job quality of flexible workers and, in doing so, contribute to the growing literature on the impacts of new forms of work. In Chapter 3, the datasets are presented. First, the fourth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) and the second European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) are described and employed to benchmark employee use of FWAs in Greece. Second, a survey conducted in Greece during the period 2010-2011 is described. The resulting Greek Dataset on Flexible Work (GDFW) covers 40 companies and 492 employees. The second part of the thesis reports three empirical studies. In Chapter 4, EWCS and EQLS show that the use of FWAs in Greece is significantly lower (compared to other EU countries) highlighting the question: why is the incidence of flexible working lower in Greece? Four FWAs forms are studied: part-time, temporary, telework and work from home as well as a hybrid category, “no contract”. The findings suggest that part-time, temporary and “no contract” employees characterise a secondary labour market, while telework and work from home, though rare are more noticeable than previously observed in the literature and demonstrate characteristics of a primary labour market. Overall, this first empirical study enabled a reassessment of the research questions, data needed and provided further insights into how chosen theoretical perspectives could be further explored to set hypotheses concerning employers’ as well as employees’ perspectives. The first study (Chapter 5) analyses the GDFW through institutional theory. Its purpose is twofold: first, to examine at an organisational level the environmental factors that may impact on employer offer of FWAs. Second, to explore characteristics, that are directly associated with employee use of / interest in FWAs. Additionally, the relationship between FWAs with Work-Life Balance (WLB) and life satisfaction is examined. Results show that pressures coming from competition, EU, legislation and labour market are significant predictors of employer offer. With regard to employees, the results suggest that the use of FWAs and employee interest in FWAs are associated with: their role in the organisation, tenure and family obligations. Implications of these findings for human resource management, industrial relations and the spread of flexible working in Greece as well as future research are discussed. The second study investigates FWAs quality in Greece through dual labour market theory (Chapter 6). Hypotheses are set and tested using the GDFW. Perceptions of employees and employers on FWAs show that these are associated with low job quality. Flexible workers are mostly females, younger employees and those with lower educational background, suggesting a segmented workforce and a distinction between full-time employees (“insiders”) and flexible workers (“outsiders”). These inequalities are likely to remain, thus showing that convergence in the labour market is a distant European goal. Chapter 7 summarises the research objectives of the thesis. It summarises the results obtained for the Greek case, and compares them to the European context. It further describes how findings may be generalised. Most importantly, it provides the practical implications of the thesis, acknowledges its limitations and addresses how what has been learnt by this research can foster future research.

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The central purpose of this thesis is to explore the dimensions of labour market adjustment in Jamaica. The paper adopts a microeconometric approach, relying on new and more detailed Jamaica Labour Force Survey data for the period 1983-2006. Over this period, Jamaica has experienced significant expansion in its external trade which has been characterized by a severe import bias. Also, during this time, Jamaica's agricultural and manufacturing sectors experienced declines in their respective employment shares of 44% and 36% while service sectors expanded. One chapter of the thesis explores the empirical link between expanding trade flows and manufacturing labour market adjustment. The thesis also explores whether and to what extent sectoral labour market adjustment in Jamaica has been accommodated by an accompanying occupational transformation. Central to analyzing the issue of occupational adjustment however, is the careful definition of what constitutes a skill in order to elucidate the role of skill specificity in labour market adjustment. The thesis then investigates the incidence of unemployment in Jamaica in an attempt to identify key factors leading to escape from unemployment within a low skilled, high-unemployment, developing country context. The study finds an important role for worker characteristics, trade and industry information in affecting labour market adjustment in Jamaica. Using occupational skill definitions due to Dolton and Kidd (1998), the study also finds that most of the occupational and sectoral mobility in Jamaica, over the review period, took place among unskilled manual workers. As such, the Jamaican employed labour force experienced very little skill upgrading over the 24 year period covered. The very limited up-skilling observed over the review period was due to the emergence of relatively more highly skilled, sales and distribution related occupations. As far as adjustment costs are concerned, across all mobility types, simple sectoral moves were- in general, relatively less costly; with occupational transformation playing an accommodative role to the sectoral adjustment. Industry information, educational qualifications, geographic location, gender and the degree of skill specificity and were all critical determinants of the type of adjustment observed in the Jamaican labour market. Finally, the thesis underlines the very high incidence of long-term unemployment among uneducated, unskilled, young males in Jamaica. The study reveals negative duration dependence in the Jamaican labour market and suggests a critical role to be played by worker training in affecting unemployment escape probabilities.

Repercussions of the demographic shift for firms include issues such an incremental rise in the average age of the workforce, unequal inflows and outflows of labour and managing organisational skill levels. In the case of Germany, organisational responses to demographic change are exacerbated by a predominant early exit culture, legislation which protects against the dismissal of older employees and related provisions set out in collective bargaining agreements. The aim of the research is to examine how demographic shifts impacted on German companies in the steel, chemicals and utilities sectors. After discussing these challenges, the thesis analyses measures implemented by these firms and explains differences in the responses between the sectors. The empirical findings clearly indicate that far more was being done to prepare for, and to counter, the effects of demographic developments than the extant academic literature suggests. Companies which responded most proactively to demographic change issues perceived this to be part of their role as a responsible and caring employer. The end to the financial support of early retirement by the German government was found to be an important catalyst for firms to develop measures to accommodate older workers, instead of offering them an early exit from the company. Nevertheless, a failure to respond effectively to the end of state-funded support for early retirement, as well as the tendency of some firms to ignore deep-seated motivational issues in older workers, suggests that companies have some way to go before they can be described as effectively tackling demographic change. Hence, this thesis is unable to prove conclusively that critics of the German management of demographic in organisations are wrong in pre-empting that German firms run the risk of falling into a demographic trap (Thun et al, 2007). The thesis frames demographic change within a wider context of organisational shifts, by examining external and internal drivers of change. Variations in responses between sectors are explained by drawing attention to drivers of change within the three industrial sectors which have shaped the behaviour of firms, including past experiences of organisational restructuring. Finally, the thesis makes a number of important theoretical, empirical and practical contributions to the academic literature. The most important contribution is to provide qualitative, empirical data on how firms in Germany are dealing with demographic developments to address gaps in the literature on company responses to demographic change.

This study seeks to understand how agencies with strict land use requirements and plan formulate and translate land use objectives into budgets and spending priorities. Characteristics such as legislation, policy and management body structure were examined alongside various influences to determine the extent to which these decision processes are impacted and provide insight into how such influences may be usefully levered and potentially transferred to other situations. In particular, the research was focussed on some of the "drivers" to the budgeting and land use prioritising processes. It is often argued that objectives are established in the annual business or corporate plan for the area and the budget follows this. However the intention of the research is to show that finances do indeed affect achieving the objectives but not in a direct cost manner. The research is primarily qualitative given the nature of what was being evaluated; the discrepancy between the offici al view of what should be, and what is taking place from the decision makers view was brought to light through a study of the intervening processes. This study strongly suggests that, although the organisational structures and administrative processes have substantially changed and evolved over the past twenty years resulting in today's Parks Canada and Scottish Natural Heritage, the tools used by these agencies to translate land use objectives into budgets and spending priorities have not. As a result, external influences that could be anticipated and planned for are excluded along with recognition of any potential benefits these influences could bring. Further, efforts to facilitate collaborative management have had only limited successes due on the most part to the constituent authorities using these antiquated tools and the lack of a meaningful evaluation process to measure the success of collaborative management efforts. That is budgeting and planning/resource allocation processes do not reward or encourage collaboration and may, in fact, inhibit such efforts at a management level.

Engineering Design Re-use refers to the utilisation of any knowledge gained from the design activity to support future design. As such, Engineering Design Re-use approaches are concerned with the support, exploration and enhancement of design knowledge prior, during and after a design activity. Modular Design is a product structuring principle whereby products are developed with distinct modules for rapid product development, efficient upgrades, and possible re-use (of the physical modules). The benefits of Modular Design centre of a greater capacity for structuring component parts to better manage the relation between market requirements and the designed product. This work explores the capabilities of Modular Design principles to provide improved support for the Engineering Design Reuse concept. The Modular Design principle is extended to structure not only the artefact's components but also their associated knowledge, to support, explore and enhance the knowledge genera ted during the evolution of the design process. A novel modular design approach, termed a Multi-Viewpoint Modular Design Methodology, is developed to address identified requirements including; support for evolutionary design knowledge, exploration and identification of inherent modularity and maintenance of the modular solution. The overall concept of the Methodology is to support the designer in evolving a modular artefact whilst utilising the principles of modularity to structure the artefact knowledge to enhance its potential applicability for re-use, the concept is termed knowledge modularity. Based on the results of a state of the art review deficiencies of existing approaches are identified including; insufficient support of evolutionary design knowledge, insufficiencies in the modelling, exploration, identification and representation of knowledge modularity, limitations in the module identification process. Declarative and procedural knowledge is developed to define a novel Modular Design Methodology to address these deficiencies. As such, the Methodology presents a formalised approach to support the modelling, optimisation and identification of modularity, both within and across viewpoints (function, working principle and structure) of the product structure, and evolutionary design knowledge. The core phenomena of a knowledge module is formalised in terms of the knowledge of design concepts and their dependencies. The formalism supports the identification of inherent modularity. An alternative model, termed the Modular Structure Matrix is developed as part of the Methodology to represent this inherent modularity. In addition, the Methodology has been developed, through a 12-month industrial residency, to address the requirements of practising designers. The Methodology is applied throughout a design activity to formalise and represent (in a matrix formalism) knowledge of the concepts embodied by a design artefact. The resulting model provides the basis to determine and represent interdependency knowledge between design concepts. The modelled concept and dependency knowledge can be utilised to support a modular analysis of the product structure both within and across design viewpoints. An optimisation and module identification mechanism can then be applied to the model and, based on the dependency data, identify inherent modularity within individual viewpoints of the product structure. Further, a mapping methodology has been developed to support the maintenance of the modular solution, and its associated artefact knowledge, across multiple viewpoints of design. The new methodology can be applied in a cyclic and iterative manner to support modularisation of the artefact design knowledge through the evolution of the design. A computational implementation has been developed to aid the evaluation of the Methodology. The functionality ofthe Methodology has been illustrated through two literature based case studies and two industrial implementation evaluations. An implementation and evaluation methodology was formalised through the rationalisation of the activities carried out during the first, and further utilised as the basis to support the second, industrial implementation. The two literature based studies evaluate the functionality of the methodologies optimisation and module identification mechanisms. These evaluations result in the identification of modular hierarchies that were not evident in the findings of the original publications. In addition, both industrial implementations result in the identification of potential improvements in the design. The evaluations illustrate the functionality of the Methodology in identifying and maintaining modularity, structuring design knowledge, supporting decision-making, learning, and improving design understanding. In addition, the evaluators outlined further potential Methodology application fields such as team design, manufacturing design and technology life-cycle management. Further the strengths and weaknesses of the Methodology, the computational implementation, and the research methodology utilised to facilitate the work presented in this thesis, are discussed. Finally, future work required to enhance the capabilities of the Multi- Viewpoint MD methodology and the functionality of the computational implementation have been identified, including; the development of more advanced modular clustering criterions, the introduction of constraints and constraint management, and the development of module costing mechanisms/metrics.

Das Internet ist in aller Munde. Als neues Medium bietet es vielfältige Möglichkeiten der Kommunikation und der Informationsbeschaffung. Doch wird wirklich das geboten, was die Nutzer wollen? Wollen private Internet-Nutzer nur Unterhaltung, aber nichts kaufen? Wozu nutzen Geschäftsleute das Internet? Wie weit ist die Kundenorientierung von Internet-Dienstleistungen fortgeschritten? Wie soll die ideale Homepage gestaltet sein? Im Mittelpunkt dieses Projekts stehen damit - im Gegensatz zu vorliegenden Untersuchungen - die Anwendungswünsche privater und geschäftlicher Nutzer.

Inclusion of local knowledge in decision-making is recognized as important for land-use planning. However, this is prevented by communication constraints. Increasingly local communities throughout the world are using community mapping and simple Geographic Information Technologies (GIT) to communicate information about traditional lands to decisionmakers. This corresponds to the trend, primarily in North America, for practitioners to apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies in public participation settings. Claims have been made that use of Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) by disadvantaged groups can be empowering. However, others claim that PPGIS is disempowering due to the cost and complexity of the technologies, inaccessibility of data, restrictive representation of local geographic information, and the low level of community participation. The research described in this thesis sets out to contribute to the debate regarding PPGIS and empowerment. Participatory Geographic Information and Multimedia Systems (PGIMS) technologies were developed for this project in an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of PPGIS described above. A PGIMS project was introduced into two communities in West Kutai, Indonesia. The PGIMS technologies enabled local communities to gather information using a digital camera and video camera, and store, manage and access it. A participatory process ensured that communities made all decisions related to the project and were trained in the necessary technical skills. Functional PGIMS were created in both participating villages. These PGIMS were relevant to the communities’ needs to record information for future generations and communicate information about boundaries and land use to outsiders. The research question addressed in this thesis was: How does the PGIMS project empower or disempower local communities? The author developed a working definition of empowerment to enable evaluation: empowerment is an increase in social influence or political power. Furthermore the author determined that empowerment is achieved through a combination of internal changes in an individual or community as well as external factors. These are defined as changes in ‘empowerment capacity’. This thesis presents a framework to structure an analysis of empowerment. It enabled the author to examine how four catalysts related to the PGIMS project empowered and disempowered, as well as increased and decreased empowerment capacity of the individual and community. Catalysts included the information contained within the PGIMS, the participatory process used, the technological skills acquired and the tools applied to develop the PGIMS. Qualitative data were gathered in the field using participant observation, semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Data were categorised into indicators of increased or decreased empowerment and empowerment capacity. These indicators were sorted into the relevant cells of the framework. The empowerment framework offered a logical structure to categorize the data and enable an analysis of how different components of the PGIMS project impacted individuals and communities. It was also useful for differentiating between empowerment and empowerment capacity impacts. There were weaknesses with the methods and framework. These included the inability to determine the extent to which the PGIMS project contributed to the observed indicators relative to other influences; the difficulty of interpreting the data to create indicators, and the difficulty of measuring some indicators or defining their relative importance in the framework. This research concluded that the PGIMS project empowered participating individuals and communities, and also increased their empowerment capacity, but it is difficult to determine how lasting or significant this is. It also disempowered individuals and communities. Individuals were more empowered by skills and processes, while communities more empowered by information and tools. The benefits of individual empowerment can conflict with community empowerment. Empowerment in the PGIMS project was highly influenced by pre-existing conditions in individuals and communities. / Graduate

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