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Performance in retail operations is about delivering service to customers efficiently and effectively. In a competitive world, there is a constant pressure to improve performance. Retailers are not alone in believing that it is not possible to manage performance without trying to measure it. Supplied with indications of performance, retail managers will be influenced and their behaviours will change in pursuit of improvement. Whilst much academic attention has been devoted to performance "management", most of it is focused on measuring performance rather than how performance information is actually used. Comparatively little is known about how retail operations managers draw on performance information and then what they do with it. This study uses a qualitative methodology to explore retail store manager perceptions of performance management. The approach is careful not to assume that this population relies upon corporate systems and measures. It is possible that store managers have their own informal measures. Critical Incident Technique is adopted as a protocol to interview twelve store managers from a single retail organisation. This generates fifty-one examples of strong and weak performance, and captures how store managers first became aware of the situation and the actions or decisions that they took in response. The findings are evaluated using thematic content analysis to provide insight to performance management from the perspective of these front-line managers. In this study, financial performance indicators and particularly sales, dominate the corporate measurement system. The limited corporate use of more qualitative measures has weak influence on performance management in the view of store level respondents. There is a frustration that the corporate system provides only a partial view of the realities of managing retail operations. The study finds that there are useful non-corporate sources of performance information. Staff disposition is seen as linked to productivity, availability, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and financial performance. There is potentially a cyclical effect that can be positive or negatively directed. The store manager in turn, can affect staff disposition. This has particular implications during periods of poor performance.

Dispersal is an important process in the ecology and evolution of organisms, affecting species’ population dynamics, gene flow, and range size. Around two thirds of common and widespread British macro-moths have declined in abundance over the last 40 years, and dispersal ability may be important in determining whether or not species persist in this changing environment. However, knowledge of dispersal ability in macro-moths is lacking because dispersal is difficult to measure directly in nocturnal flying insects. This thesis investigated the dispersal abilities of British noctuid moths to examine how dispersal ability is related to adult flight morphology and species’ population trends. Noctuid moths are an important taxon to study because of their role in many ecosystem processes (e.g. as pollinators, pests and prey), hence their focus in this study. I developed a novel tethered flight mill technique to quantify the dispersal ability of a range of British noctuid moths (size range 12 – 27 mm forewing length). I demonstrated that this technique provided measures of flight performance in the lab (measures of flight speed and distance flown overnight) that reflected species’ dispersal abilities reported in the wild. I revealed that adult forewing length was a good predictor of inter-specific differences in flight performance among 32 noctuid moth species. I also found high levels of intra-specific variation in flight performance, and both adult flight morphology and resource-related variables (amount of food consumed by individuals prior to flight, mass loss by adults during flight) contributed to this variation. Analysis of Rothamsted Insect Survey data and National Moth Recording Scheme data of changes in moth abundance and distribution patterns in the UK over the past 4 decades provided some evidence that dispersal ability (measures of adult forewing length) contributed to species’ population trends. The analysis indicated that species with intermediate dispersal ability may be declining more than those of either high or low dispersal ability. I conclude that the new tethered flight technique demonstrated in this thesis provides opportunities for multi-species and cross-taxon comparisons of dispersal ability. The utility of wing length as a proxy for dispersal ability may facilitate the inclusion of dispersal information into analyses for a wide range of insects. Dispersal has some effect on moth distribution and abundance changes but other factors such as habitat availability and responses to changing climate are likely to play a role.