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The defence and security industry is an extremely dynamic environment, influenced by policy and world events. Whilst it often needs to respond to rapid change, there is a dichotomy in that capital programs take years to come to fruition. Many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are involved in both of these short and long-term aspects of acquisition, thus creating strategic challenges. Though there has been much research around ambidexterity and SMEs, there has been very little in the fluid domain of defence and security supply-side SMEs. This study aims to investigate this gap in research. The investigation collected primary qualitative data through the use of semi-structured interviews, with research participants constituting the leadership functions of eighteen businesses that deliver either directly to the defence and security governmental departments, or into the supply chain. Findings indicate that within a shrinking defence sector, successful SMEs are operating in an ambidextrous fashion, often utilising the industrial partners of the industry trade organisations. Also, outside that of grand strategic change, Government policy has a limited impact on the SMEs in this sector. With scarce resources, the leadership of businesses see the competing needs of resource and finances as a major tension point. These two competing needs can be defined as exploration and exploitation respectively, and can be situated within an ambidextrous construct. Critically, successful businesses operate in a ambidextrous zone where there is constant iterative adjustment between both exploration and exploitation. This thesis advances the thought leadership in SME strategy, particularly around the key indigenous industry of defence and security, thereby adjusting the understanding of the definition of ambidexterity. This study contributes to the current literature, through the development of an alternative and responsive conceptual dynamic model of a growing business, theorising that ambidexterity functions change as SMEs grow, are constantly evolving, and are adjusted by both internal and external influences. The study concludes with recommendations for practice.

The state-corporate crime research has been marked by an orthodoxy that fetishizes immediately perceptible events or actions, at the expense of understanding the more substantive social processes of state-corporate criminality. This orthodoxy has been changing as scholars from the Marxist tradition are increasingly transcending the empiricist perceptions by giving more attention to relations and processes that cause state-corporate events and imbue them with concrete meaning. This is evidenced in the UK by the work of Penny Green, Tony Word, Steve Tombs, David Whyte and Kristian Lasslett. Unlike the criteria-based approaches, Green's and Ward's process-driven approach recognises that it is not enough for an activity to be objectively illegitimate in order to be criminal, it must also be subjected to judgement. In the case of state-corporate crime, the civil society configurations are one social institution capable of inscribing deviancy labels on illegitimate activities through censure. One powerful means of censure is a longstanding resistance practice of 'direct action'. This thesis explores how different resistance movements have employed direct action to censure state-corporate conduct as deviant. Yet, to effectively stigmatise state-corporate conduct, it must have illegitimate properties. In the examination of illegitimacy in statecorporate conduct, it is argued, Tombs' and Whyte's concepts "state-corporate symbiosis" and "regimes of permission" are used to tease out the criminogenic potential latent in routine statecorporate practices. Additionally, Lasslett's use of the Marxist dialectical tradition informs us that state-corporate practices are constitutive of much broader relations and processes, constitutive of capitalism. The state-corporate activities that have socially harmful and/or criminal outcome are integral to the function of "social metabolism" and the very existence of the state system as well as organised capital. In this way, state-corporate crime is not an aberration caused by a unique collusion, but by routine and systemic practices. This thesis applies this conceptual insight and a Marxist dialectical method to a multiple-case study, examining two disparate case studies - Case 1 censure of the UK-Israel arms trade and a drone company; Case 2 censure of the biotechnology industry and a biotech-seed company. In so doing, the study advances the view that state-corporate crime, as a phenomenon, comes into being through a dynamic, dialectical process.

The publications submitted for this PhD by Published Work represent the product of a decade long programme of research on the nature of the defence innovation system and the organisations, institutions and relationships that underpin defence technological innovation. This has been informed by the systems of innovation approach as well as broader academic perspectives on the nature of innovation and as such the publications are located in the field of innovation studies and in particular the sub-community of scholars that concern themselves with defence technological innovation. In the thesis, I contend that – taken together – the publications make three contributions to knowledge. First, the publications contribute to our understanding of what I term the “defence innovation system”. This illuminates an important corner ignored by most scholars of innovation systems and one that has received too little attention given the role that defence R&D and procurement has played as a stimulus to many significant technological innovations as well as its many implications for international security and society. The defence innovation system has often resisted analysis not least because of the limitations of publicly available information. My publications show recognition of the importance of this topic and shed light on the dynamics of defence technological innovation. Second, the publications contribute to our understanding of the organisations and relationships that underpin the defence innovation system and their response to changes in their operating environment since the end of the Cold War. My focus on organisation-level case studies of defence firms and government defence research establishments is in contrast to most of the academic work in this field that has been preoccupied with national or industry level structure and trends. A recurring theme in my publications, explicitly and implicitly, has been the co-evolutionary character of change in the defence innovation system and the changing relationship between government and defence industrial firms. Third, I examine changes in the boundaries of the system by introducing a transnational dimension to the analysis of defence technological innovation and in doing so my publications have drawn attention to the need to examine transnational linkages between nationally-located systems.