PhD Scholarship

This research project is devoted to a comprehensive review of literature relevant to shed light on the M-Government in less developed countries, its importance, and finally the factors that affect the UAE citizens and residents’ acceptance of M-Government.

The purpose of this research is to examine the interrelationships between perceived city Image (PCI), customer satisfaction (CS) and customer loyalty (CL) in a non-western context to develop and test a conceptual model of the antecedents and consequences of PCI in the tourism sector. The conceptual framework consists of the following constructs: Local attractions; Cultural attractions; Local quality of life; Services; Facilities; Information; customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. The importance of the proposed model will be theoretically discussed and justified. Using a sample of tourists that visit Al-Ain, the model will be then tested and validated. This study is probably the first to provide an integrative perspective of PCI in a non-western context. It will gives valuable information, which hopefully will help decision makers to improve the image of Al-Ain as a tourist destination.

Innovation and quality are complementing but contradicting institutional logics. From a theoretical point of view, quality logics focus on confirmation to specifications and continuous improvement towards certain standards while innovation logics focus on creating new specifications, new standards and new ways of approaching the problem. Each of them needs certain logic that institutionalize the public managers’ attitudes, perceptions and beliefs. Because these logics are different; there is a possibility the outcome is competing or coupling logics in the governmental units. Competing logics can lead to unintended consequences whereas coupling logics can lead to effective frameworks. Example of that is the ambidextrous framework that can combine between efficiency and effectiveness by coupling and mixing logics of each in a unique way that could improve organizational performance. This research is a novel by creating a new quality but innovative public organization management logic. To best of our knowledge, this logic based framework has not been developed in the literature. This has different implications. The UAE leaders can promote certain logic which creates the atmosphere and formulating the institutional pressures for creating innovative and high quality public organizational units. Also, public management curriculums could be improved by integrating the logic in the mind of new public leaders to assure the sustainability of innovativeness and quality of the public firms in the UAE. This research adopts the pragmatic research philosophy using neo-institutionalization theory to identify, abstract and operationalize the different logics. The positivist research, using objective axiology, to examine the integration of the logic in different scenarios so that the optimal mix of logic can be found. This research is planned to finish within two years. Both UAE and University of Kent in the UK are collaborating in this research.

The concepts of Entrepreneurship has gained a lot of interest and attraction from researchers, policy makers and practitioners during the last two decades, to develop a better understanding of how they can be used to increase organisations productivity efficiently and effectively. Unlike other business schools students in Europe and USA, United Arab Emirates (UAE) higher education Business and Economics students often appears to be on the disadvantage side of the complete adoption and diffusion of this very important concept as a result of: their culture, the nature of UAE higher education Business and Economics schools and faculties, as well as the lack of training provided to them regarding entrepreneurship. In the light of that, the current global economic crises, the fact that entrepreneurial graduates can create a great change in the business environment, the arguments of entrepreneurship researchers that developed and developing economies requires more entrepreneurs that are willing to innovate and create new ventures to facilitate economic growth (Packham et. al., 2010), and keeping into consideration that the UAE government is working very hard to encourage UAE higher education institutions to develop able and talented graduates that have a wide variety of entrepreneurial and innovation skills that can be used in starting their own businesses, it is extremely important to investigate the influence of teaching entrepreneurship on Business and Economics degree courses in UAE and the impact of this teaching on students’ attitudes towards starting a small business enterprise (SBE) or their own businesses. By reviewing the literature, it is noticed that although there is a large number of studies that had been conducted on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, only very few studies were conducted to investigate its direct or indirect influence on students’ attitudes towards starting a new business.

This research project incorporates the efforts of seven scholars and funds available from four research grants to explore the less researched areas of strategic planning and performance management in the travel, hotel and hospitality sectors.