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Accelerated clean electricity innovation is essential if global climate change targets are to be met by 2050. National innovation policy strategies are identified as key in delivering this, requiring policy makers to develop new approaches to technology funding and market development. At present, the role of politics in the emergence and implementation of innovation policy is not well understood by the innovation systems literature. There is therefore a gap in knowledge in relation to how national institutions shape the development of clean electricity innovation systems and how publicly funded organisations can be designed to accelerate innovation within them. This thesis addresses this gap by analysing how national institutions have affected the design of two publicly funded organisations for accelerated clean electricity innovation- the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) in the UK and Advanced Research Projects Agency- Energy (ARPA-E) in the US. The thesis opens with a paper that refines a layered institutional framework, demonstrating the effect of multiple institutions on the development of the UK's clean electricity innovation system 2000- 2018. The second paper builds on this system overview to introduce the case study of the ETI. The ETI's operation is analysed through a refined framework of ten principles for accelerated innovation organisation design, which explore how the formation and operation of an organisation is affected by the broader institutional conditions introduced in paper one. Paper three further develops the ten principles via a comparative case study of the ETI and ARPA-E. The impact of different national institutional contexts on organisation design is discussed and generalisable approaches for accelerated innovation explored. This thesis offers two main theoretical contributions. Firstly, the refinement of a layered institutional framework for application to a sectoral innovation system, which brings new insights to understanding the role of institutions in shaping innovation system development. Secondly, the refinement and further development of ten principles for accelerated innovation organisation design, which contributes a theoretical link between national institutional conditions and how publicly funded organisations can be designed within this to implement innovation policy. This research also makes three key theoretical contributions. It consists of the first in-depth analysis of the role of institutions in the development of the UK clean electricity innovation system from 2000- 2018. It also provides the first academic analysis of the operation of the ETI, UK since the organisation ceased operation in 2017, adding a detailed study of a public-private partnership in a European setting to the growing literature on innovation organisation design. Finally, the thesis provides the first comparison of the operation of the ETI and ARPA-E, US, providing an international case study of two long-lived accelerated innovation organisations while taking into account the broader national innovation systems in which they have been developed. The policy contributions of the thesis include new insights into the need for policy makers to pay greater attention to institutional context when designing and implementing innovation policy and public organisations for accelerating low carbon innovation. More prescriptive recommendations are also made in relation to the way in which UK policy makers can learn from US clean energy innovation system development.

This thesis explores the gendered symbolism of women's music lessons in English fiction, 1870-1914. I consider canonical and non-canonical fiction in the context of a wider discourse about music, gender and society. Traditionally, women's music lessons were a marker of upper- and middle-class respectability. Musical ‘accomplishment' was a means to differentiate women in the ‘marriage market', and the music lesson itself was seen to encode a dynamic of obedient submission to male authority as a ‘rehearsal' for married life. However, as the market for musical goods and services burgeoned, musical training also offered women the potential of an independent career. Close reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jessie Fothergill's The First Violin (1877), I discuss four young women who negotiate their marital and vocational choices through their interactions with powerful music teachers. Through the lens of the music lessons in Emma Marshall's Alma (1888) and Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann (1893), I consider the issues of class, respectability and social emulation, paying particular attention to the relationship between aesthetic taste and moral values. I continue by considering George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) alongside Elizabeth Godfrey's Cornish Diamonds (1895), texts in which female pupils exhibit genuine power, eventually eclipsing both their music teachers and the artist-suitors for whom they once modelled. My final chapter discusses three texts which problematize the power of women's musical performance through depicting female music pupils as ‘New Women' in conflict with the people around them: Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1895), D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser (1912) and Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street (1913). I conclude by looking forward to representations of women's music lessons in the modernist period and beyond, with a reading of Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Wind Blows' (1920) as well as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1956).

This thesis seeks to address the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) research problem of how to establish the level of audio and video quality that end users require to successfully perform tasks via networked desktop videoconferencing. There are currently no established HCI methods of assessing the perceived quality of audio and video delivered in desktop videoconferencing. The transport of real-time speech and video information across new digital networks causes novel and different degradations, problems and issues to those common in the traditional telecommunications areas (telephone and television). Traditional assessment methods involve the use of very short test samples, are traditionally conducted outside a task-based environment, and focus on whether a degradation is noticed or not. But these methods cannot help establish what audio-visual quality is required by users to perform tasks successfully with the minimum of user cost, in interactive conferencing environments. This thesis addresses this research gap by investigating and developing a battery of assessment methods for networked videoconferencing, suitable for use in both field trials and laboratory-based studies. The development and use of these new methods helps identify the most critical variables (and levels of these variables) that affect perceived quality, and means by which network designers and HCI practitioners can address these problems are suggested. The output of the thesis therefore contributes both methodological (i.e. new rating scales and data-gathering methods) and substantive (i.e. explicit knowledge about quality requirements for certain tasks) knowledge to the HCI and networking research communities on the subjective quality requirements of real-time interaction in networked videoconferencing environments. Exploratory research is carried out through an interleaved series of field trials and controlled studies, advancing substantive and methodological knowledge in an incremental fashion. Initial studies use the ITU-recommended assessment methods, but these are found to be unsuitable for assessing networked speech and video quality for a number of reasons. Therefore later studies investigate and establish a novel polar rating scale, which can be used both as a static rating scale and as a dynamic continuous slider. These and further developments of the methods in future lab- based and real conferencing environments will enable subjective quality requirements and guidelines for different videoconferencing tasks to be established.

This study examines the disclosure of ratios in published financial statements by UK companies. It reviews the extent to which ratios are disclosed and interpreted in annual corporate reports, considers whether disclosure is consistent over time and examines the relationship between company characteristics such as accounting performance and financial strength, and the disclosure of different accounting ratios.