The senior female international managerial career move: a qualitative study in a European context

Research investigating the position of women in management has, largely, been confined within national boundaries. Over the last fifteen years, empirical studies of women in international management have been undertaken, predominantly in North America. In this research field, many questions remain unanswered or have been only partially addressed. The particular focus of this study is on the senior female international managerial career move in Europe — a relatively unexplored area. Fifty senior female expatriate managers were interviewed, representing a wide range of industry and service sectors. The study, for the first time, assesses an exclusively senior sample of female managers who have made at least one international career move. This study of senior females in international management makes a theoretical contribution, not only to the analysis of gender and international human resource management, but also to wider debates within the contemporary women in management and career theory literatures. The aims of the study were to develop an understanding of the senior female international career move in a European context in order to more fully understand both the covert and overt barriers that may limit women’s international career opportunities. The results of the study show that the senior international career move has largely been developed along a linear male model of career progression, a development which, taken together with gender disparity both in organisations and family responsibilities, frequently prevents women employees from reaching senior managerial positions. The study proposes a model of the senior female international managerial career move, thereby contributing primarily to the international human resource management literature. The implications of the study for research literatures in women in management and career theory are also explored and a future research agenda developed.

Phase estimation receiver for full-field detection: a novel receiver structure for electronic dispersion compensation of metropolitan area networks

The development of ultra high speed (~20 Gsamples/s) analogue to digital converters (ADCs), and the delayed deployment of 40 Gbit/s transmission due to the economic downturn, has stimulated the investigation of digital signal processing (DSP) techniques for compensation of optical transmission impairments. In the future, DSP will offer an entire suite of tools to compensate for optical impairments and facilitate the use of advanced modulation formats. Chromatic dispersion is a very significant impairment for high speed optical transmission. This thesis investigates a novel electronic method of dispersion compensation which allows for cost-effective accurate detection of the amplitude and phase of the optical field into the radio frequency domain. The first electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) schemes accessed only the amplitude information using square law detection and achieved an increase in transmission distances. This thesis presents a method by using a frequency sensitive filter to estimate the phase of the received optical field and, in conjunction with the amplitude information, the entire field can be digitised using ADCs. This allows DSP technologies to take the next step in optical communications without requiring complex coherent detection. This is of particular of interest in metropolitan area networks. The full-field receiver investigated requires only an additional asymmetrical Mach-Zehnder interferometer and balanced photodiode to achieve a 50% increase in EDC reach compared to amplitude only detection.

Burst-mode electronic dispersion compensation in long reach PONs

Long reach passive optical networks (LR-PONs), which integrate fibre-to-the-home with metro networks, have been the subject of intensive research in recent years and are considered one of the most promising candidates for the next generation of optical access networks. Such systems ideally have reaches greater than 100km and bit rates of at least 10Gb/s per wavelength in the downstream and upstream directions. Due to the limited equipment sharing that is possible in access networks, the laser transmitters in the terminal units, which are usually the most expensive components, must be as cheap as possible. However, the requirement for low cost is generally incompatible with the need for a transmitter chirp characteristic that is optimised for such long reaches at 10Gb/s, and hence dispersion compensation is required. In this thesis electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) techniques are employed to increase the chromatic dispersion tolerance and to enhance the system performance at the expense of moderate additional implementation complexity. In order to use such EDC in LR-PON architectures, a number of challenges associated with the burst-mode nature of the upstream link need to be overcome. In particular, the EDC must be made adaptive from one burst to the next (burst-mode EDC, or BM-EDC) in time scales on the order of tens to hundreds of nanoseconds. Burst-mode operation of EDC has received little attention to date. The main objective of this thesis is to demonstrate the feasibility of such a concept and to identify the key BM-EDC design parameters required for applications in a 10Gb/s burst-mode link. This is achieved through a combination of simulations and transmission experiments utilising off-line data processing. The research shows that burst-to-burst adaptation can in principle be implemented efficiently, opening the possibility of low overhead, adaptive EDC-enabled burst-mode systems.