Business Theses
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This collection is made up of doctoral and master theses by research, which have been received in accordance with university regulations.
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- PublicationCollaboration through education? : transnational competence and trade unions' cross-border commitmentA lot has been written about cross-border labour action, and trade union education has been acknowledged several times as an important factor to improving it. However, neither has been researched much about trade union education, nor its potentials and suitability for enhancing sustainable transborder collective action. Therefore, the thesis investigates the extent to which trade union education in Ireland, Germany and at European level fosters labour representatives’ abilities to teamwork across borders. The concept of Transnational Competence (TC) serves as a means to assess how far workers and their representatives are facilitated to act beyond national borders. Since the original framework is insufficient for critical-emancipatory trade union education, TC is extended by a sixth competence, called transformative. Overall, the thesis aims to make a contribution to the labour revitalisation literature in particular and the general debate about the future of Social Europe. The study builds on a ‘most different’ case design and strives for a holistic approach to analysis. The holistic approach is applied through a three-dimensional comparative analysis which takes a cross-national, multi-level and multi-sectoral view and includes the human elements of mind, body, heart and soul. The findings of the thesis are the result of an extensive literature review and extended fieldwork. During 6 months at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) in Brussels, 3 months in Germany and the remaining time in Dublin, 47 interviews were conducted. Additional data was collected through document analysis, (non)-participant observations as well as two non-representative surveys. Innovative is the attempt to connect the structural, organisational and individual level of analysis with the view to transformative changes at all three levels. The particular focus lies on the individual since this level of analysis has been underexplored. The thesis shows that trade union education at European level as well as in Germany and in Ireland is hardly designed to facilitate workers and their agents in transforming themselves, their organisations and the wider economic, political and social structures. Transnational educational activities at EU level and in Germany address all six transnational competences, albeit to varying degrees and qualities. With the exception of one union, educational programmes in Ireland do not have any real transnational intent. Thus, despite their embeddedness in different national institutions and sectoral conditions, trade unions in Germany and Ireland are ‘united in diversity’ concerning their low engagement in transnational trade union education – even though German trade unions are a little further than their Irish comrades. The thesis identifies opportunities how trade union education at European and national level can be improved.
769 - PublicationDrivers of occupational human capital: identifying and developing research productivity in the globalized business school IndustryThis thesis looks at the antecedents of research productivity in business schools as part of a wider conversation on the development of occupational human capital in knowledge-intensive industries. Building upon the social capital and sociology of science literatures, the present study seeks to advance this conversation in two ways. First, it focuses on the consequences of academic researchers’ early-career and mid-career choices by exploring the interplay between organizational scripts and individual proactive behaviors, such as collaboration and mobility. Second, it introduces globalization-related factors into the conversation by exploring the roles of stratification and language in a multi-country context. The multi-level consensus between the drivers of individual performance which are explored in this thesis contributes to research on human capital-based competitive advantage in knowledge-intensive contexts.Chapter 1 provides an introduction to this thesis. Then Chapter 2 builds a multi-level model of research productivity as part of the micro-foundations of the human capital research stream. Three empirical chapters (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) then test this model using three distinct faculty samples. The first sample consists of 500 academics employed in 25 top research-intensive business schools in the US. The second consists of 360 academics employed in 20 top research-intensive business schools in Europe. Finally, the third sample consists of 348 academics employed in 20 European business schools which come top in the Financial Times Global MBA and Masters in Management rankings. The archival data for these academics were collected from ISI Web of Science, individual resumes, and relevant databases.The findings of this thesis indicate that mid-career proactive behavior can mitigate the negative consequences of early-career choices and support the development of individual research productivity. The findings also offer insights into the development of occupational human capital in an increasingly heterogeneous cohort of academics. They demonstrate that the absence of a fine-grained global stratification of the business school industry undermines the ability of academics with non-elite PhDs to engage in international mobility and reinforces social closure. Linguistic capital has a direct impact on productivity and also influences the value extracted from collaboration. The findings have practical implications for the development, selection, motivation, and retention of researchers. They may also inform the career decisions of individual researchers.
795 - PublicationCreating or Destroying Value through Mergers and Acquisitions: A Marketing PerspectiveThe world has witnessed a major wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) through the1990s and up to 2007.A majority of these M&A deals are horizontal, involving thepurchase of another company in the same industry. Such acquisitions imply amotivation to increase revenues by expanding market scope and/or market share, and/orby adding new products to the portfolio. They also suggest a pursuit of cost efficienciesin various aspects of operations. Whether these benefits are actually realised is anempirical question that has attracted research in several disciplines, includingeconomics, finance and accounting. By now, there is a large body of research evidenceto indicate that M&As have a poor record of success, with the main beneficiaries beingthe sellers who reap a one-off gain from the premium paid to acquire their firm.The objective of this dissertation was to examine post-merger performance from amarketing perspective, a topic that has not been explored thus far. This study followeda multi-stage approach; in the first stage an exploratory case study was conducted toidentify the parameters of the research problem and to develop a set of hypotheses.Following this, a quantitative study of a sample of M&A transactions was carried out totest these hypotheses.The exploratory case study was based on Tata Motors, an Indian company whichacquired Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motors. This case investigation based onboth primary data collected through in-depth interview and a wide spectrum ofsecondary sources, showed that the acquisition had a significantly positive impact onTata Motors‘ marketing performance, with sales volume and revenue growingsignificantly in the post-acquisition years. However, these sales increases came at ahigh cost; the company invested a huge amount in new product development andmarketing communications, with the result that profit performance was negativelyaffected in the three years post-merger. Profit margins increased, however, in theseventh year 2014, suggesting that the reduction post-merger may have been atemporary effect.The quantitative study was based on a sample of forty-five M&A deals involvingninety US companies.This longitudinal study examined performance over six years,three before the merger, and three years after the merger. Four analytical tools wereused:a paired sample t-test, an analysis of effect size, an analysis of covariance(ANCOVA), and regression analysis, to examine post-merger performance. The resultsof both raw data and log-transformed data analyses showed that sales revenue increased significantly in the post-merger years compared to the pre-merger years. Moreover, the combined companies reduced their marketing and selling costs in proportion to sales revenue. However, there was a significant reduction in profit as measured by return onsales (ROS).Combining the findings from both the qualitative and quantitative studies, weconcluded that post-merger marketing performance improved, i.e. sales revenue andcost of marketing and selling, but that this did not follow through into improved returnon sales. These findings need to be validated over a longer time frame, and with largersamples drawn from a range of countries and industries.
3946 - PublicationProfessionalism in a changing tax environment : the impact of general anti-avoidance legislation on the accounting professionTackling tax avoidance has become a priority for tax authorities. The accounting profession has been subject to significant criticism for its role in the promotion and facilitation of what may be regarded as aggressive tax avoidance. In response to this increasing issue of public concern, tax authorities have sought to tackle tax avoidance through the introduction of general anti-avoidance rules and supplementary provisions. These regulatory changes may be regarded as an attempt by tax authorities to disrupt the existing work practices of the accounting profession.In this context, the escalating disruptive work practices are explored, identifying how a tax authority built up layers of disruptive work, at times crossing into categories of traditional creation and maintenance work, in its attempts to tackle aggressive tax avoidance.These disruptive work practices were represented in changes to the general anti-avoidance tax regime. As a result, the accounting profession was impacted both directly and indirectly, where provisions introduced placed new reporting obligations on tax advisers and on taxpayers. The accounting profession’s response is explored, beginning with defiance (where changes were not aimed at it directly), moving to a combination of defiance and compromise (where it faced new reporting obligations) and finally public acquiescence and private avoidance and defiance (where it faced a Supreme Court decision strengthening the tax authority’s powers). The public and private response of the accounting profession are examined, by analysing public documentary evidence, together with interview and focus group data, enabling an in-depth understanding of the accounting profession’s response to regulatory changes to be explored.When faced with disruptive work, tax accountants are seen to engage in a range of different maintenance work practices in an attempt to rebuff changes to their day-to-day work practices and advice given to clients. Once again, the complexity of real life, provides an opportunity to identify institutional work practices crossing traditional categories, with creation work practices identified in tax accountants’ attempts to maintain their status quo.The influence of clients, and society more generally, on both the response of the accounting profession to changes in the general anti-avoidance tax regime and the resulting impact on work practices is identified throughout the study, with the concept of client-led professionalism emerging from the findings.
657 - PublicationOne-Class Time Series ClassificationThis thesis contributes to the state of the art of time series classification and machine learning by investigating three novel data-driven representations for time series in the context of one-class classification. The one-class assumption is useful for all classification problems where only data of a single class is available for training a classifier, or those where it is not known if novel classes may appear at prediction time or what they could look like. Notable examples that can benefit from our research are: anomaly or novelty detection, fault detection, identity authentication, etc. The common thread of our research is to represent time series as feature-vectors then used for classification. The features we extract are: (1) features constructed using dissimilarity measures; (2) features constructed using an evolutionary algorithm; (3) latent features constructed using neural networks. The proposed representations are thoroughly investigated in a variety of one-class classification experiments involving numerous benchmark methods, the 85 data-sets of the UCR/UEA archive and a data-set provided by ICON plc. The key difference between one-class classification and binary or multi-class classification is in the amount of effort needed to gather training data. Binary and multi-class classifiers require exhaustively labelled training data. This can be difficult for problems where all but the samples of one class are scarcely available and ill-defined, e.g. anomaly detection. Or again, gathering labelled data can simply be impossible due to the cost of expert labour required to construct an appropriate data-set. Conversely, one-class classifiers are trained using only samples from a single class. We present a subject authentication problem through accelerometer data as a case study that motivates our research on one-class time series classification. We argue that it is not realistic to assume we can gather labelled training data that represent well both the subject of interest and a fixed population of "others". Hence, the need to learn a classifier using data related to the subject of interest only. We demonstrate that, with respect to the use of raw time series, feature-based representations allow substantial and compelling savings in terms of storage and computational requirements, facilitate the interpretability of the solutions found, and enable visualisation of time series data-sets. We find that these advantages come at the cost of a slight loss in terms of classification performance with respect to a 1-nearest neighbour classifier on raw data. However, by examining data-sets one by one we detail how our representations can outperform raw time series. Furthermore, for some applications, e.g. embedded systems, storage and computational requirements may be more important than a slight loss in classification performance.
309 - PublicationEssays on sustainable finance across asset classes : empirical evidence from China and USThis thesis contributes to the growing body of literature on sustainable finance by investigating the financial implications of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks and opportunities from the perspective of investors and companies. Utilising novel data from the United States (US) and China, I empirically examine how ESG factors are priced in different financial assets, including options, equities, and bonds, throughout the four main chapters. The first main chapter investigates the upside potential and downside risk of responsible investing that incorporate ESG factors into the investment process and decision-making. By using the option market measures of 46 US financial services companies, I find that financial services companies with highly-rated responsible processes are associated with higher upside potential and lower downside risk; however, I do not observe the same effect for investors who are simply Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) members. The second chapter examines the return on investment (ROI) in human resource management (HRM) practices using an economics-based approach. In particular, I attempt to answer whether a firm's investment in HRM activities reduces the cost of bond issuance. Using a sample of 172 Chinese nonfinancial companies, I find that firms with superior employee relations management are associated with approximately 18.79 basis points lower bond issuance spreads, equivalent to an annual saving of RMB 15.25 million (or USD 2.39 million). Furthermore, the estimated ROI in HRM through the channel of financing cost savings is about 1.24% per annum. Next, I empirically investigate the relationship between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and stock market performance, particularly through the mechanisms of consumer and employee preferences. By using a sample of 629 Chinese nonfinancial companies, I find that firms with superior carbon risk management are associated with higher risk-adjusted returns when there is high consumer demand (i.e., in consumer goods sectors), but an insignificant effect is observed when consumer demand is low (i.e., in non-consumer sectors). Furthermore, I find that employee demand also mediates the corporate environmental and financial performance relationship. The findings suggest that for sectors in which the customer's preference does not play a denominate role in affecting returns (i.e., non-consumer firms), the employee's power is essential in influencing the level of expected returns. The mediating effect of employee preference is particularly significant for firms with more human capital. Finally, the fourth empirical chapter evaluates the financial performance of impact investors who invest with dual objectives in China. I specifically examine whether environmental impact investing adds value to financial institutions by drawing new inferences from their performance in stock returns. The results indicate that financial companies that proactively incorporate environmental impacts in their due diligence and financing decision-making show higher stock returns than firms that poorly manage their indirect environmental impacts. In other words, institutional investors that pursue impact financing show better stock return performance than those that do not.
12 - PublicationEmpirical Analysis of Asset Pricing Models, Prospect Theory and Covid-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Hong Kong Stock MarketCovid-19 causes hundreds of deaths globally meanwhile it brings higher volatility on Hong Kong Stock Market which is the financial center of Asia. It attracts to investigate whether Asset Pricing Models, Prospect Theory and Covid-19 Pandemic can clearly illustrate variations in stocks returns on the market via a set of regression analysis. The empirical findings demonstrate that Hong Kong Stock Market experiences large fluctuations during the pandemic; Hang Seng Index positively relates to constructed portfolios; Government interventions such as Lockdown and Traveling Restrictions bring higher returns on the index; Crude Oil is another factor that affects the stock market negatively; Stocks with the highest previous monthly returns tend to have higher returns in the current month; Asset Pricing Models can provide assistance on assessing whether market efficiency exists in Hong Kong Stock Market.
142 - PublicationEssays on portfolio optimization and estimation riskThis thesis is a collection of essays that study the issue of estimation risk in portfolio optimization. Each essay investigates the usage of a probability estimator or optimization approach which addresses estimation risks in portfolio selection under lower-partial moments and stochastic dominance. The three approaches use option-implied data, robust optimization, and sparse multivariate copula models, respectively. The considered empirical applications show robust evidence of enhanced portfolio performance in an out-of-sample setting. The first essay uses an eclectic financial modelling approach to equity sector rotation using sector Exchange Traded Funds. The approach combines stochastic dominance ordering with the use of option-implied probabilities and copulas. We find that the performance of the monthly reweighted long-only portfolio can be improved using an option-implied probability distribution. We further find that option-implied probabilities estimated using the Heston pricing model provide the best portfolio performance. The portfolio outperforms the S&P 500 index, an equally-weighted portfolio and strategies based on historical time series, even after accounting for transaction costs. The superior performance is more pronounced during bad economic times proxied by bear market and high volatility states. No significant performance gains are evident for portfolios formed when we account for non-linear dependence (R-Vine copula) relative to traditional linear dependence (Gaussian copula). The second essay provides an empirical analysis of the out-of-sample performance of robust portfolios, where uncertainty exists in the underlying probability distribution. This study proposes an alternative specification of the uncertainty set allowing for joint uncertainty in both probability and threshold levels for three portfolio selection approaches (expected shortfall, semi-variance and the Omega ratio). There are two cases considered where the uncertainty sets are dependent or independent. The empirical results show that joint uncertainty with dependent sets yields superior results to other portfolios. Furthermore, portfolios constructed using joint uncertainty also have the additional benefit of significant protection against market crashes for portfolios. Robust portfolios have a different correlation with common risk factors compared to non-robust portfolios. In particular, joint uncertainty with dependent sets yields portfolios with significant exposure to the momentum factor, that is, betting on stocks that were past winners. The performance of the robust Omega ratio portfolios can be attributed to the combination of value and momentum factors. The third essay studies the use of high-dimensional Regular-vine copula models in estimating asset interdependence for portfolios with varying sizes. For a large portfolio, the copula parameters outnumber the assets and observations, giving rise to estimation errors. This estimation risk leads to suboptimal portfolio selection and consequently poor out-of-sample performance. In this context, sparse vine models, in which independence pair-copulas prevail, provide significantly improved results for large portfolios across various performance measures. The improvement of portfolio performance is more pronounced in low market volatility periods. The truncated vine copulas, a sub-class of sparse copulas, yield more stable weights for large portfolios and significantly reduce transaction costs.
357 - PublicationEvolution of auditor-client negotiations from the initial audit tender to subsequent audit cycles: A qualitative study of (non)cooperativenessAudit firm-client negotiations commence with the audit tender, continue in subsequent audit cycles, and often persist after rotation via consulting services. However, we do not understand how past negotiation behaviour, or anticipated future interactions, shape current audit negotiations. I interview 31 audit committee chairs, auditors and company managers (triads) and interrogate data from their public and private documents to understand the evolution of triad negotiations from the initial audit tender to subsequent annual audit cycles. Employing McGinn and Keros’ (2002) negotiation framework, four key findings emerge. First, audit committee members become more cooperative in negotiations with auditors and company managers to acquire information and work effectively. Second, auditors are always cooperative to maintain positive relationships with audit committee members and company managers and protect their commercial interests. Third, company managers become more cooperative as they demonstrate their ability to negotiate effectively with auditors to audit committee members. However, there is a limit to their cooperativeness. Company managers are more concerned with meeting analysts’ earnings targets than maintaining the auditor relationship. My findings suggest that parties’ initial negotiation behaviour does not necessarily set a precedent for their counterparties’ subsequent behaviour. However, auditors’ anticipation of future consulting contracts encourages them to cooperate currently, although it may not always be appropriate to do so. Fourth, I uncover four new negotiation types and refine McGinn and Keros’ (2002) conceptualisation of negotiations. This research is the first to study the evolution of auditor-client negotiations from the initial audit tender to subsequent audit cycles. My findings provide insights into how auditors’ balance their professional-commercial interests in client interactions, how audit committee members engage in and oversee audit and accounting negotiations, and company managers’ negotiation behaviour. Ultimately, my findings have implications for audit quality and address concerns at the heart of recent UK audit reviews and parliamentary inquires.
8 - PublicationEssays in Environmental and AI FinanceEntitled "Essays in Environmental and AI Finance," this dissertation consists of three self-contained essays. The first essay avails of capital market price signals to assess the presence and magnitude of economic incentives for clean innovation relative to dirty innovation. Second essay examines the utility and ethics of incorporating national culture profiling in bank-level machine-learning informed alert models relating to financial malfeasance. And the third essay tests state-of-the-art model-agnostic explainable AI (XAI) methods to uncover algorithmic injustice in the bank lending space. Essay 1 that seeks to bring new insights to the corporate environmental – financial performance debates examines how Tobin's Q is linked to 'clean' and 'dirty' innovation and innovation efficiency at the firm level. While clean innovation relates to patented technologies in areas such as renewable energy generation and electric cars, dirty innovation relates to fossil-based energy generation and combustion engines. A global patent data set covering over 15,000 firms across 12 countries helps uncover strong and robust evidence that the stock market recognizes the value of clean innovation and innovation efficiency and accords higher valuations to those firms that engage in successful clean research and development activities. The results are substantively invariant across innovation measurement, model specifications, estimators adopted, select sub-samples of firms and the United States and European patent offices. Essay 2 examines the utility and ethics of incorporating national culture profiling in bank-level machine-learning informed alert models relating to financial malfeasance. On a globally significant financial institution, binary classifier type alert models are used to establish the utility of dimensions of national culture in formulating anti-money laundering predictions. For corporate (individual) accounts, Hofstede individuality (individuality, and national-level corruption perception and financial secrecy) scores of the country in which a customer is resident, or from which a wire is sent/received, are of paramount importance. When combined with extensive account and transaction data against an even proprietary institutional algorithm, national culture traits markedly enhance the models' predictive performances. Against a global standard, ethical implications of ascribing values to dimensions of national culture are examined. We posit an ethical framework for the use of national profiling in anti-fraud alert models. Essay 3 provides evidence of the validity of Shapley model-agnostic explainable AI methods’ on real-world datasets. This work contributes initial evidence on the usefulness of Global Shapley Value and Shapley-Lorenz methods, with respect to racial discrimination in lending. Using 157,269 loan applications from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data set in New York during 2017, it is confirmed that the methods reveal evidence of racial discrimination inherent in the predictions of a transparent logistic regression model. Thus explainable AI can enable financial institutions to select an opaque creditworthiness model which blends out-of-sample performance with ethical considerations.
288 - PublicationInfluence of Prior Employers and Capital within Entrepreneurial EcosystemsEntrepreneurship is both sticky (persistent) and spiky (unevenly located) which presents a problem of how to support new venture creation and scaling in regions which do not exhibit high levels of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is important because it results in regional development through innovation, employment and economic growth. The entrepreneurial ecosystem literature offers an approach to enhance entrepreneurship within regions by emphasising interactions between elements categorised as financial, institutional, knowledge and social capital. This dissertation investigates the influence of different types of prior employers of high-tech entrepreneurs on knowledge capital in entrepreneurial ecosystems in Ireland, the development of knowledge capital in an entrepreneurial ecosystem of high-growth firms in Dublin, and the influence of different types of capital across entrepreneurial ecosystems throughout the United States. It finds that universities, multinationals, venture capital, hubs and start-ups are all important sources of knowledge capital for high-tech entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Universities located within each region of Ireland are the most important prior employer despite university spinoffs comprising a small portion of all high-tech entrepreneurial firms in Ireland. In Dublin, as knowledge capital was recycled across multinational high-growth firms through employment mobility the region became a more connected and resilient structure. Across the United States, institutional capital was shown to interact with financial capital. In entrepreneurial ecosystems with low levels of institutional capital, entrepreneurship was influenced by financial capital in neighbouring ecosystems, but this was not evident in ecosystems with high levels of institutional capital. This contributes to the knowledge of the entrepreneurial literature by showing which prior employers are important in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, how knowledge capital derived from prior employment develops resilience and structure in the ecosystem, and how interactions between types of capital affect the relationship on entrepreneurship within the ecosystem.
452 - PublicationThe struggle for healthcare under the European Union’s new economic governance regime. Trade union and grassroots mobilisations in response to healthcare commodification in Italy and Romania (2008 – 2022)In the last decades, and especially after the 2008 economic and financial crisis, EU countries’ healthcare systems have undergone dramatic changes. Most notably, austerity measures and privatisation processes have been furthered at the EU, national and local scales (Stan and Erne, 2021). My research addresses two aspects that have been under-studied so far: the role of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) interventions and that of trade union and grassroots mobilisations in shaping these transformations (2008-2022). The research does so by studying NEG interventions in the healthcare sector and countervailing mobilisations in two EU countries, Italy and Romania, with different healthcare systems, different positions in the EU and different activist landscapes. My research thus answers the following research questions: How have NEG interventions impacted the Italian and Romanian healthcare systems? How have Italian and Romanian unions and grassroots mobilisations responded to NEG interventions and their implementation in their respective healthcare sectors? First, through policy analysis, I show how NEG interventions led to similar measures in the two countries: freezes or cuts to healthcare workers’ wages, decrease of staffing levels, restriction of union prerogatives, decrease in the number of hospital beds, promotion of private healthcare insurances, increase or introduction of co-payments to access public healthcare services and increased involvement of private actors in the delivery of the latter. Second, through protest event analysis, I show that trade unions and grassroots mobilisations opposed, at times successfully, the implementation of NEG interventions; that they did so primarily by challenging national policymaking; and that mobilisations politicising the attack to healthcare labour and those politicising the attack to users’ access to healthcare services were usually organised separately from one another. Through the observation of healthcare mobilisations and interviews with activists and trade union officials, I then explained collective actors’ choices in terms of the scale of their mobilisations and the issues politicised, as well as what contributed to the successes and failures of healthcare collective action across the two countries and over time. In conclusion, in this thesis, I show that the transformations of the Italian and Romanian healthcare systems were shaped by a conflict between NEG interventions favouring capital accumulation and countervailing collective action, and I provide explanations regarding the scale at which mobilisations occurred, the issues they politicised, as well as what contributed to their uneven success.
2 - PublicationProtest in response to the commodification of healthcare in the era of the European Union’s new economic governance regimeIn response to the 2008 financial crisis, the EU established a new economic governance (NEG) regime, which allowed the European Commission and Council to intervene to the financing and organisation of national healthcare services; as healthcare represents the single largest area of welfare state expenditure and service delivery. This thesis therefore addresses the following questions: 1) How have NEG policy prescriptions impacted the level of commodification of services and labour in Ireland and Madrid’s public health systems? 2) Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, how have unions and social movement organisations active in these health systems politicised changes in public service provision and employment conditions? 3) How can we understand the choices of union and user groups organising in the sites of study regarding the scale at which they politicised policy changes related to the NEG regime and the scope of their demands? In turn, through a contextualised semantic content analysis of NEG policy prescriptions issued to the Spain and Ireland, this thesis first shows that EU executives have harnessed the NEG regime to promote the commodification of healthcare services and labour. Second, going beyond existing studies of NEG interventions in healthcare, the thesis then outlines the measures that the Irish and the Spanish central governments and the regional government of Madrid have adopted in line with these prescriptions and analyses their impact on healthcare services and labour. I show that the governments’ implementation of NEG prescriptions has institutionalised the underfunding of the health systems under study and promoted the corporatisation and privatisation of service delivery. Third, through a comprehensive protest event analysis of counter-mobilisations involving unions and user groups in the two health systems from September 2008 to March 2020, this thesis shows that the implementation of healthcare-related NEG prescriptions altered the movement landscape in each site of study – prompting trade unions and user groups to organise at higher scales and to broaden the scope of their demands. My study, however, also shows that resistance to commodification is a project and building powerful counter-movements takes time. Although the NEG regime was established relatively recently, this thesis shows that unions and user groups organising in the health systems have begun the work of constructing the oppositional networks necessary to challenge corporate and political leaders at the EU scale. My research on movement landscapes within these health systems will thus also serve future research by helping scholars to contextualise and understand counter-movements that may emerge in the forthcoming post-pandemic era of the NEG regime.
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