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(2014)ThesisThe thesis seeks to demonstrate that tax havens are used for a number of purposes that provide planning which is not contrary to the domestic laws of Australia and the United States as indicative regimes. The thesis will primarily utilise doctrinal research in reviewing and applying the legislative methods adopted to make the use of tax havens ineffective. Theoretical research will be conducted in a number of chapters where an in depth analysis of the legal principles involved in the methodologies and structures will be undertaken. In the final chapter reform-oriented research will be utilised. Part A of the thesis will review a number of situations which it is submitted are legitimate and beyond the scope of the laws of OECD countries to prevent. The thesis will demonstrate that operations with substance established in tax havens to undertake the following types of activities will be effective to reduce the incidence of taxation on a corporate group – operation of a regional headquarters, treasury function or captive insurance company. The thesis will also demonstrate that basing operations in a tax haven to facilitate the use of an international agreement would also be effective in many cases. A review of the use of tax havens for asset protection will demonstrate that a number of tax havens provide extensive mechanisms which are established for purposes other than taxation. As these were found to be legally effective they are legitimate in the context of this thesis. Part B of the thesis will consider a number of structures which have as one of their key design elements the non-application of the attribution regimes of Australia and the United States. The thesis will show that non charitable purpose trusts, star trusts, protected cell companies, foundations, companies limited by guarantee and insurance arrangements are effective to circumvent the attribution regimes of Australia and the United States. The thesis will however show that blind trusts are ineffective to circumvent the attribution regimes. The thesis will also address the weaknesses in the attribution regimes and provide recommendations to overcome these weaknesses.
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Customer Retention and Customer Complaints: An Empirical Analysis of Two Subscription-based Products(2015)ThesisThis research is undertaken within the field of relationship marketing. The study focuses on customer retention with emphasis on understanding customer defection in the context of customer complaint behaviour. The study examines two telecommunication products, Internet services and voice services. These represent two telecommunications products, which are at the growth and decline stages of the product life cycle, respectively. A number of explanatory variables are examined in detail with the objective of exploring the effect on customer retention, in terms of relationship strength and relationship direction. This study extends existing studies of retention by not only looking at explanatory variables that have been studied in previous research, but extending the range of explanatory variables to focus on a number of key aspects related to customer complaint behaviour. These additional variables include a) whether a customer ever complained, b) the number of complaints, c) the time since a customer last made a complaint, d) severity of the complaints, and e) length of the recovery from the complaint. The study involves an analysis of longitudinal data, using survival analysis, for 15,000 to 20,000 customers over three years. Three increasingly descriptive models are estimated for each product: a baseline model that utilises customer characteristics to explain retention; a comprehensive model including time-varying explanatory variables and finally, possible interactive effects based on the comprehensive model are evaluated. Factors such as non-complainants, length of recovery, communication encounters, household size and household income are found to contribute to an increased risk of defection. On the other hand, the number of complaints, high severity incidents, ‘recency’ of complaints, usage and, length of the relationship are found to contribute to a decreased risk of defection. Compared with previous studies, additional depth of analyses is provided through a comparison of products at different stages of the product life-cycle and the varying descriptors presented. This research has important theoretical and practical implications. The study identifies that using a combination of customer characteristics, customer transaction behaviour and customer complaint provides a much greater understanding of customer retention behaviour
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(2014)ThesisIn the information systems (IS) discipline, there has been a continued interest in comprehending and explaining how the implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems instigate organisational change processes and bring about desirable outcomes. Extensive literature on ERP implementation identifies numerous factors that affect organisational changes, including staff training, top management support and involvement, active user participation, external knowledge acquisition, knowledge co-creation and sharing, staff learning and many more. Despite the maturing of ERP technologies and a wealth of knowledge available on ERP implementation, organisations continue to experience considerable difficulties and rarely achieve desired outcomes. The key challenge for an organisation implementing an ERP system, emphasised in the literature, is to understand and enact new business processes inscribed in ERP and thus undergo a profound organisational change. The thesis addresses this challenge by approaching ERP implementation as an organisational learning process. When an organisation is planning and configuring ERP and then implementing it in its specific business processes, all its actors have to learn, individually and collectively, and engage in instigating change in practice. To conceptualise ERP implementation as an organisational learning process, the thesis builds from two theories of learning: community of practice (CoP) theory that draws attention to situated learning in practice and a theory of single- and double-loop learning by individuals, groups and an organisation as a whole. Within such a theoretical foundation, the thesis examines the following research questions: How does organisational learning emerge and assist the actors in an ERP implementation? How do CoPs facilitate organisational learning during an ERP implementation? To answer these questions, a qualitative case study was conducted in an information technology (IT) services company in Australia during its SAP implementation (over 14 months in 2009–2010). The analysis of empirical data (interviews, observations and company documents) reveals that the company first failed to implement SAP (Phase 1), then succeeded in SAP-enabled transformation at the operational level (Phase 2) and eventually achieved the desired organisation-wide transformation (Phase 3). Importantly, these three phases of SAP implementation were characterised by not learning, single-loop learning and double-loop learning respectively. In-depth analysis also revealed that the spontaneous formation of communities of practice around SAP interpretation and application in practice in different departments stimulated ‘learning by doing’, leading to single-loop learning. Further institutionalisation of communities of practice and the formation of a ‘community of communities of practice’ across the company resulted in double-loop learning and a successful transformation of processes company-wide. Lessons from this case study suggest that the emergence, maturing and institutionalisation of communities of practice were the key mechanisms by which SAP implementation transformed from not learning to single-loop and double-loop learning, leading to gradual SAP-enabled transformations. Grounded in the empirical findings, the thesis proposes a processual model of ERP implementation as practice-based organisational learning as a major theoretical contribution. It posits a relation between a gradual ERP-enabled organisational transformation and ongoing practice-based learning by doing in emerging communities of practice mutually intertwined with single- and double-loop organisational learning. The proposed model addresses the key challenge of ERP implementation by contributing to a practice-based and more refined understanding of its complex and emergent nature. Further, it opens up new avenues for exploration of practice-based learning and ERP-enabled organisational change processes. The model is also expected to help practitioners to plan, monitor and manage ERP implementation and organisational change better.
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(2014)ThesisModern retail-environments demand ever less physically and ever more cognitively from consumers. Customers barely have to move to make a purchase but need to go through countless options, many of which might not even be available by the time they make a decision. Research considering consumers’ reactions to these developments is contradictory and largely ignorant of consumer differences. Across three research projects, each of which comprises of three studies, we illustrate how consumers’ locomotion and assessment orientations determine reactions to body movement, large assortments and missed opportunities. We explore underlying mechanisms, show that effects hold when priming or measuring orientations and when accounting for alternative accounts.
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(2015)ThesisThis research examined the drivers of Human Capital (HC), Social Responsibility (SR) synergies and their perceived impact on the Sustainability of grassroots level organisations. This was done in the form of a case study of Sri Lankan Nenasala telecentres. The e-Sri Lanka program, funded by the World Bank as a South Asian first, has established a network of 1000 Nenasala telecentres (Knowledge Centres) over 10 years. However, Nenasala telecentre models point to dissimilar sustainability records. Royal and O'Donnell (2008) models were used to investigate these dissimilarities. Royal and O'Donnell (2008) models identified some key indicators and drivers of performance, which were represented as ‘Human capital drivers of the value of the firm' model. Prior research investigated how these drivers act on individual segments of human capital systems with Royal and O'Donnell’s (2008) ‘human capital wheel’. However, these models have not been empirically investigated in developing countries, in an area such as telecentres in ICT4D, which are grassroots level small-scale organisations. Likewise, it has also not been examined how the drivers of human capital systems and social responsibility collaboratively affect sustainability of organisations. This theoretical gap will be bridged through this research. The research undertook a comprehensive archival material analysis, focus group discussions with Nenasala stakeholders and interviews with Sri Lankan Information and Communication Technology Agency officials, to uncover how different operationalization of the human capital drivers within different Nenasala models may lead to more or less sustainability outcomes. The findings showed leadership, which research termed Socio-Cultural Leadership, intertwined with SR synergies was a key to success, although it was controlled by numerous other variables such as funding and parent organisations’ influence. Microfinance and crowdfunding were specially found to be potential tools that could aid SCL. This research succeeded in modifying Royal and O’Donnell’s (2008) model and identifying how drivers of human capital systems affect the sustainability of grassroots enterprises. The model developed through a unique South Asian experience of a developing country, could be applied to other countries in the region that have similar social, cultural and religious boundaries as the underlying unifiers for overall grassroots programs.
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(2012)ThesisThis study examines how emerging market firms (EMFs) develop capabilities to leapfrog in the knowledge intensive global information technology (IT) industry. Academic literatures have thus far focused on globalization of large multinational companies (MNCs) from developed countries, mainly from the OECD. While firms from the OECD are well endowed in resources, firms from developing countries are generally resource poor and their establishment, development and international expansion have taken place within an institutional environment that is different from those found in western economies. Hence how resource poor EMFs learn to transform comparative advantages into dynamic firm-specific capabilities deserves attention. The study explores how Indian IT firms “moved up the value ladder,” moving out of the “low road” where the barriers to entry are low and competition is based mainly on price and squeezing wages, to the “high road” where competition is based on differentiation. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methodology is used. The qualitative part focused on inductive case study research, moving along observation, categorization and association, finally giving rise to constructs and models. The quantitative part entailed deductive econometric studies on 703 companies using panel data method, testing hypothesis to identify which factors contribute to globalization of EMFs. The findings reveal that globalization of EMFs is an evolutionary process and in each phase of evolution, the EMFs progressively learn from their linkages with MNCs and leverage them to globalise rapidly. Through linkages with MNCs, EMFs gained access to markets, technology, and reputation. The research identified the distinctive capabilities acquired by the EMFs in each phase of their capability lifecycle. Linkages with and learning from international and domestic innovation networks transformed EMFs’ business model and upgraded their capabilities. The study shows that dynamic capability in the form of powerful intellectual property enabled EMFs to evolve from service provider to a partner status. Findings of this study present a novel and contemporary insight on how EMFs evolve to develop dynamic capability, which enables them to leapfrog in a fast changing technology space. The results challenge the view that the Indian software industry presents the classic problem of locking-in a low road of the innovation trajectory.
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(2017)ThesisThe current study responds to calls for research to increase the knowledge on how development firms could generate and enhance value from their distributed IT projects. Recent literature indicates the need for studies to address significant challenges of distributed information systems development teams, such as cultural incompatibility, lack of trust, customer collaboration, communication, lack of control and coordination (Mattsson et al. 2010). Based on a qualitative exploratory single-case study, this dissertation is concerned with the institution of effective governance frameworks to address distributed development project challenges, an area of research that is currently lacking empirical studies. In particular, the current study is seeking to understand how social governance mechanisms affect the governance of distributed software development projects. The current study shows the role and intervening processes of social governance mechanisms (Jones et al. 1997), including restricted access, macroculture, collective sanctions and reputation, to coordinate activities and safeguard exchanges. Furthermore, the current study suggests that to apply these social governance mechanisms effectively, it is critical that organisations maintain congruency among them. The study also found that all the four social governance mechanisms of the Jones et al. (1997) model interact with each other, thus showing the critical importance of macroculture among the social governance mechanisms and the impact that macroculture has on other mechanisms. Moreover, the current study found that the mentioned four social governance mechanisms are context dependent and have different impacts on safeguarding and coordinating exchanges in various contexts including Open Source Software. The current study also found a new construct, ideological similarity , which is about a preference for more frequent interactions among project teams with similar interests to facilitate smooth interactions and enhance coordination. The study also provides effective practices, such as co-locating distributed teams at the start of the project and through the project life cycle.
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(2019)ThesisThis thesis examines the role of reputation on a firm’s financial and non-financial outcomes through three studies. The first study examines whether the reputation incentives of busy audit committee members improve their effectiveness in monitoring the financial reporting process. I find that firms with a larger proportion of audit committee members where the membership is the most prominent are associated with higher financial reporting quality and more effective monitoring of internal control. Additional analyses reveal that my results are driven by audit committee members’ reputation incentives rather than independent non-audit committee members’ reputation incentives. I conclude that audit committee member reputation is a strong incentive for audit committee members, such that it influences their monitoring effectiveness over the financial reporting process. The second study explores whether the reputation incentive offered by a firm’s directorship has an impact on a firm’s CSR performance. I find that firms with a larger proportion of independent directors where the directorship is the most prominent are associated with better CSR performance. The positive effect of independent directors’ high reputation incentives on CSR performance is driven by better performance in CSR strengths rather than CSR concerns, and by better performance in both stakeholder CSR and third-party CSR. The effect is more pronounced in an environment where firms face less external pressure to perform CSR, and in firms with a less diverse board. Overall, my results suggest that independent directors have incentives to develop their reputation as a socially responsible director. The third study investigates the role of corporate reputation in enhancing the timeliness of external audits and earnings announcements. Changes in audit and financial reporting regulations have resulted in longer audit delay, leading to an increase in firms that announce earnings prior to audit completion, both of which have implications on the quality of financial information. I find that corporate reputation is negatively associated with audit report lag and the likelihood of firms announcing earnings after audit completion. I document important benefits in the form of timelier audits and earnings announcements derived from developing and maintaining a good corporate reputation.
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(2018)ThesisThis thesis contributes to our understanding of the role of employees' intra-organizational social relationships (ISRs) during a major organizational change process such as a post-merger integration (PMI). I focus on two central questions: (1) which ISRs would benefit or detriment employees’ perception of PMI process? and (2) how these effects would be influenced by conflicts employees or their connections face during organizational change? Combining existing research on post-merger integration, organizational change, social networks, leader-member exchange, newcomer socialization, and organizational identification, I develop hypotheses and test how employees' relationship with their supervisors and peers affect their perception of the PMI process and how their relationship with the overall organization during PMI affects perceived association between them and the organization. Central to these investigations are ISRs of employees, i.e. advice-seeking and giving connections, and the conflicts employees face in their work processes due to the PMI process. Specifically, through these three studies I find that those employees who are socially connected with their supervisors in the advice-seeking and giving network perceive the PMI process more positively due to supervisors’ central or brokerage position in this network, or supervisors’ ability to communicate with or energize their connections (Chapter 3); those employees who newly join the merged firm after the merger benefit professionally but perceive PMI adversely due to their ties with incumbent employees (Chapter 4); and those employees who suffer conflicts during PMI end up disassociating from the organization (Chapter 5). I draw on a unique dataset from an international professional services firm in Vietnam, which merged with another domestic professional services firm in 2014. Between 2014 and 2017, I used online surveys, qualitative interviews, and HR archives of the firm to collect empirical evidence for the three studies. Because PMI process in particular and organizational change in general creates uncertainty and ambiguity, looking at the effects of employees' ISRs, and various types of support such relationships generate, within this specific context, would contribute significantly to our understanding of employee perception of the PMI process, their socialization and identification with the firm during this process, and their turnover.
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(2019)ThesisThis dissertation extends knowledge on the behavioral view of organizational aspiration determination following the seminal work of Cyert and March (1963), which suggests that organizations determine aspiration levels based on three reference points: historical aspiration, past performance, and social reference group performance. Addressing gaps in this literature, my investigation is grounded in three specific research questions regarding the role of environmental context. I develop the arguments drawing on logics from the research on the behavioral view of organizational aspirations, the attention-based view, environmental context, environmental jolts, and strategic issue interpretation. The first research question addresses the contingent role of three environmental dimensions in aspiration determination. The second research question investigates how an environmental jolt leads to aspiration level changes and attention shifts among the three reference points. The third research question addresses the role of opportunity and threat orientations in aspiration determination during environmental jolts. I collected data from multiple sources and used a panel sample of U.S. publicly traded firms (1998-2016) to test my hypothesized relationships. I find that, (1) organizations shift their attention among the three reference points under varying environmental conditions regarding munificence, dynamism, and complexity; (2) organizational aspiration level and attention allocation among the three reference points are different during an environmental jolt versus a non-jolt period; (3) organizations’ opportunity and threat orientations during environmental jolts play an important role in regulating attention allocation among the three reference points. This research mainly contributes to the behavioral aspiration literature. First, my investigation explicitly theorizes and tests the contingent role of three environmental dimensions, thereby advancing the explanatory power of aspiration determination models by accounting for attention shifts under different environmental conditions. Second, my research investigates organizational aspiration determination in a sudden and discontinuous environmental jolt; thus, it complements previous aspiration theory that focused on relatively stable environments. Third, my work enhances behavioral aspiration models by incorporating decision maker cognition as a salient contingency. Overall, my research adds to knowledge on environment-inclusive, ABV-based, and cognition-oriented aspiration determination models with increased explanatory power.