A seleção de fornecedores é uma decisão-chave nos processos de aquisição e de compra. Tanto a escolha de critérios como a avaliação das possíveis alternativas são etapas fundamentais neste processo de decisão. Nas últimas décadas, as instituições de ensino superior privado do Brasil vêm sofrendo grandes desafios na tentativa de institucionalizar práticas administrativas aplicadas no mercado empresarial com o objetivo principal de aperfeiçoar seus processos de trabalho e reduzir riscos e custos operacionais, aumentando assim sua produtividade e qualidade dos serviços prestados. Estas iniciativas visam manter as instituições autossustentáveis e competitivas em um mercado agressivo em constante expansão. Desta forma, um olhar crítico e profissionalizado para seus processos de negócios tem sido uma das soluções encontradas a fim de atingirem suas metas organizacionais. Neste contexto, este trabalho propõe a formalização do processo decisório na seleção de fornecedores através de sua sistematização utilizando os mapas cognitivos para estruturação e identificação de critérios que efetivamente apresentam valor na seleção de parceiros para o tomador de decisão dos departamentos de Controladoria e Suprimentos e Administração do Patrimônio. O trabalho também propõe a posterior priorização destes critérios para a seleção de potenciais fornecedores através da utilização do método multicritério Analytic Hierarchy Process. / Supplier selection is a key decision in the procurement and purchasing processes. Both the choice of criteria and the evaluation of possible alternatives are critical steps in this decision-making. One of the great challenges of private higher education institutions (PHEI) in Brazil in recent decades has been the attempt to institutionalize administrative practices applied in the business market with the primary goal of optimizing their business processes and achieve reduced risks and operational costs, thereby increasing their productivity and the quality of services. These initiatives aim to maintain self-sustaining and competitive institutions in an aggressive market which is constantly expanding. Therefore, a critical and professionalized look at their business processes has been one of the solutions in order for them to achieve their organizational goals. In this context, this paper proposes to formalize the decision-making process in the selection of suppliers through their systematization using cognitive maps to structure and identify the criteria that effectively present value during the partner selection of the decision-maker\'s procurement and purchasing department. The paper also proposes the subsequent prioritization of these criteria for evaluation and selection of potential suppliers through the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process multi-criteria method.

A seleção de fornecedores é uma decisão-chave nos processos de aquisição e de compra. Tanto a escolha de critérios como a avaliação das possíveis alternativas são etapas fundamentais neste processo de decisão. Nas últimas décadas, as instituições de ensino superior privado do Brasil vêm sofrendo grandes desafios na tentativa de institucionalizar práticas administrativas aplicadas no mercado empresarial com o objetivo principal de aperfeiçoar seus processos de trabalho e reduzir riscos e custos operacionais, aumentando assim sua produtividade e qualidade dos serviços prestados. Estas iniciativas visam manter as instituições autossustentáveis e competitivas em um mercado agressivo em constante expansão. Desta forma, um olhar crítico e profissionalizado para seus processos de negócios tem sido uma das soluções encontradas a fim de atingirem suas metas organizacionais. Neste contexto, este trabalho propõe a formalização do processo decisório na seleção de fornecedores através de sua sistematização utilizando os mapas cognitivos para estruturação e identificação de critérios que efetivamente apresentam valor na seleção de parceiros para o tomador de decisão dos departamentos de Controladoria e Suprimentos e Administração do Patrimônio. O trabalho também propõe a posterior priorização destes critérios para a seleção de potenciais fornecedores através da utilização do método multicritério Analytic Hierarchy Process. / Supplier selection is a key decision in the procurement and purchasing processes. Both the choice of criteria and the evaluation of possible alternatives are critical steps in this decision-making. One of the great challenges of private higher education institutions (PHEI) in Brazil in recent decades has been the attempt to institutionalize administrative practices applied in the business market with the primary goal of optimizing their business processes and achieve reduced risks and operational costs, thereby increasing their productivity and the quality of services. These initiatives aim to maintain self-sustaining and competitive institutions in an aggressive market which is constantly expanding. Therefore, a critical and professionalized look at their business processes has been one of the solutions in order for them to achieve their organizational goals. In this context, this paper proposes to formalize the decision-making process in the selection of suppliers through their systematization using cognitive maps to structure and identify the criteria that effectively present value during the partner selection of the decision-maker\'s procurement and purchasing department. The paper also proposes the subsequent prioritization of these criteria for evaluation and selection of potential suppliers through the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process multi-criteria method.

The implementation of a new motor vehicle block exemption began in 2002, and affected the car dealer industry in Sweden. Before this new regulation, a general agent distributing cars to dealers had the ability to restrict car dealers’ behavior much more. Nowadays, dealers have the right to sell different brands from the same showroom, even if there are strict rules about how the different brands should be presented. The new block exemption have also given car dealers possibilities to establish in other places within EU were selective distribution is applied. As the environment changed (by the block exemption), dealers faced new information that required interpretation. In this thesis we have focused on industrial wisdom; a reasonable and consistent, yet subjective, sense-making of reality in an industry. This sense-making is a way to understand and justify company behavior; resulting assumptions are considered so basic that they remain unquestioned by industry participants. However, interpretations depend on who makes them; different persons interpret things in different ways. In the light of the car dealer industry and the motor vehicle block exemption 1400/2002, this thesis investigated if change due to institutional pressure can affect industrial wisdom. Further, what does this process look like. To fulfill our purpose we conducted a qualitative research by interviewing 19 Chief Executive Officers from the car dealer industry in Sweden. The sample was designed by a maximum variation sampling technique, in which we as researchers used our own judgment to pick cases that were extra informative. Before we conducted the interviews, we reviewed literature to gain a general understanding of the industry and relevant issues. From our research we know that industrial wisdom can change due to a shift in institutional pressure and we observed that the car dealer industrial wisdom was changing. There are some new perceptions and aspects of wisdom, which suggest that the industry has moved away from previous equilibrium. Nevertheless, perceptions are diverse in a number of areas and thoughts have not been translated into action, which leaves much potential for further change. Naturally, this is a slow and difficult process since cognitive maps are embedded in a mindset that relies on previous experience and automatic interpretations. If wisdom changes more depends a great deal on if/how dealers (continue to) act. This thesis resulted in a model (The Loop of Wisdom) that explains how a change in institutional pressure affects industrial wisdom. New information enters the company, gets interpreted, acted upon and feeds back out to the environment, which affect other companies and the industry as a whole.

Being completely lost in an unfamiliar environment can be inconvenient, stressful and, at times, even dangerous. Maps are the traditional tools used for guidance but many people find maps difficult to use. In recent years, new tools like outdoor Augmented Reality (AR) have become available which allow virtual navigation cues to be directly overlaid on the real world, potentially overcoming the limitations of maps. However, it has been hypothesized that lower effort invested in processing navigation guidance may lead to diminished spatial knowledge (SK) thereby making users of such navigation tools far more vulnerable to getting lost should the tools fail for any reason. This thesis explores the research question of how AR and maps compare as tools for pedestrian navigation guidance as well as for SK acquisition and if there is a potential for AR tools be developed that would balance the two. We present a series of studies to better understand the consequences of using AR in a pedestrian navigation tool. The first two studies compared time-on-task performance and user preferences for AR and Map navigation interfaces on an outdoor navigation task. The results were not aligned with expectations, which led us to build a controlled testing environment for comparing AR and map navigation. Using this simulated setting, our third study verified the assumption that AR can indeed result in more efficient navigation performance and it supported the hypothesis that this would come at the cost of weaker SK. In our fourth study, we used a dual task design to compare the relative cognitive resources required by map and AR interfaces. The quantitative data collected indicated that users could potentially accept additional workload designed to improve SK without incurring significantly more effort. Our fifth and final study explored an interface with additional AR cues that could potentially balance navigation guidance with SK acquisition. The contributions of this thesis include insights into performance issues relating to AR, a classification of user types based on navigation tool usage behavior, a testbed for simulating perfect AR tracking in a virtual setting, objective measures for determining route knowledge, the capacity that pedestrian navigation tool users may have for performing additional tasks, and guidelines that would be helpful in the design of pedestrian navigation tools.

Existing computational cognitive models of spatial memory often neglect difficulties posed by the real world, such as sensory noise, uncertainty, and high spatial complexity. On the other hand, robotics is unconcerned with understanding biological cognition. This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach towards developing cognitively plausible spatial memory models able to function in realistic environments, despite sensory noise and spatial complexity. We hypothesized that Bayesian localization and error correction accounts for how brains might maintain accurate location estimates, despite sensory errors. We argued that these mechanisms are psychologically plausible (producing human-like behaviour) as well as neurally plausible (implementable in brains). To support our hypotheses, we reported modelling results of neural recordings from rats (acquired outside this PhD), constituting the first evidence for Bayesian inference in neurons representing spatial location, as well as modelling human behaviour data. In addition to dealing with uncertainty, spatial representations have to be stored and used efficiently in realistic environments, by using structured representations such as hierarchies (which facilitate efficient retrieval and route planning). Evidence suggests that human spatial memories are structured hierarchically, but the process responsible for these structures has not been known. We investigated features influencing them using data from experiments in real-world and virtual reality environments, and proposed a computational model able to predict them in advance (based on clustering in psychological space). We have extended a general cognitive architecture, LIDA (Learning Intelligent Distribution Agent), by these probabilistic models of how brains might estimate, correct, and structure representations of spatial locations. We demonstrated the ability of the resulting model to deal with the challenges of realistic environments by running it in high-fidelity robotic simulations, modelled after participants' actual cities. Our results show that the model can deal with noise, uncertainty and complexity, and that it can reproduce the spatial accuracies of human participants.

No description available.

Syftet med denna studie är att bidra med kunskap om rektors föreställningar av det pedagogiska ledarskapet i relation till lärares lärande, att bidra med svar på hur rektor ser på sitt ansvar för lärares lärande. Sex rektorer har intervjuats med hjälp av metoden föreställningskarta och det empiriska materialet består av utsagor som kodats och kategoriserats till teman. Resultatbeskrivningen är empirinära och som läsare får du möta rektors föreställningar genom deras utsagor. En deskriptiv berättelse har vävts samman med hjälp av rektorernas utsagor för att på så sätt beskriva rektorers gemensamma föreställning om att leda lärares lärande. Det empiriska materialet visar att rektors föreställning om det pedagogiska ledarskapet i relation till lärares lärande handlar om att kartlägga för lärande, att organisera för lärande, att leda lärande samt om lärande. Dessa delar står i relation till varandra och bildar tillsammans en helhet, ett system för lärande. Utgångspunkt för lärandet är skolans nuläge och lärares erfarenheter och kunskaper ligger till grund för det gemensamma sökandet efter ett önskat läge. Systemteori och lärande organisationsperspektivet används därför för att förstå och tolka resultatet. Analysen visar att rektors pedagogiska ledarskap i relation till lärares lärande kan beskrivas som ett lärandeinriktat ledarskap / The purpose of this study is to contribute knowledge about principals´ conceptions of their pedagogical leadership in relation to teachers´ learning, to seek the answer to how principals look at their responsibility when it comes to teachers´ learning. Six principals have been interviewed using the cognitive maps as the interview method and the empirical material consist of statements that have been coded and categorized into themes. The description of the results is empirical and as a reader you meet the principals´ conceptions through their statements. A descriptive story has been put together by the statements to describe the principals´ collective conception of teachers´ learning. The empirical material shows that the principals´ conception of the pedagogical leadership in relation to teachers´ learning is about mapping for learning, organizing for learning, to lead learning and learning. These parts are in relation to each other and together they form a whole, a system for learning. The starting point for learning is the current state of the organization and the teachers´ experiences and knowledge is the foundation for the common search for next practice.  Systems theory and the learning organizational perspective have been used to understand and interpret the results. The analysis shows that the principals´ leadership in relation to the teachers´ learning can be described as a learning-based leadership.

No description available.

Syftet med studien är att undersöka några rektorers föreställningar om hur de bedriver sitt pedagogiska ledarskap. I förlängningen hoppas jag också kunna bidra till den generella kunskapsbildningen inom detta, ur ett skolutvecklingsperspektiv, viktiga område. Studien utgår från en socialkonstruktivistisk kunskapsteori där rektors pedagogiska ledarskap tolkas som något som är socialt konstruerat. I den empiriska fasen har intervjuer med sju åländska rektorer hållits, detta med hjälp av föreställningskartan (cognitive map) som intervjumetod. Studien utgår från följande två frågeställningar: hur beskriver rektorerna att de utövar sitt pedagogiska ledarskap samt vilka prioriteringar gör rektorerna inom ramen för det pedagogiska ledarskapet? I analysen av rektorernas utsagor har både en induktiv samt två deduktiva analysverktyg använts. I den induktiva processen har materialet katalogiserats utifrån sitt eget innehåll i syfte att se vilka områden och teman som växer fram. I de deduktiva processerna har rektorernas utsagor katalogiserats utifrån färdiga kategorier. I den första används meningsbärande ord som verktyg vilka baseras på Rektor och styrkedjans (SOU 2015:22) beskrivningar av vad rektors pedagogiska ledarskap består av och i den andra används Transformation in Action Framework (Keamy, 2016) som analysmodell. Resultatet visar att flera likheter finns mellan rektorernas föreställningar om hur de utövar sitt pedagogiska ledarskap och gängse forskning och teoribildning. De åländska rektorerna uppger att en stor del av det pedagogiska arbetet utgörs av dynamiska samarbeten och interaktioner med andra personer i skolverksamheten. De använder sig av direkta arbetsmodeller som lektionsbesök, medarbetarsamtal och ledningsgrupper och mer indirekta arbetsformer som har med exempelvis organisering och strukturer att göra. Studiens resultat uppvisar också flera konkreta exempel på hur rektorerna leder arbetet med lärarnas undervisning och elevernas lärande, detta exempelvis genom att rektor själv håller i övningar för lärarna och genom att rektor på ett systematiskt sätt samlar in underlag från lärares lektioner vilket sedan används till att utveckla skolan och undervisningen som helhet. Det visar sig också att rektorerna till viss del gör olika prioriteringar inom ramen för det pedagogiska ledarskapet. / The purpose of the study is to examine some principals' conceptions of how they conduct their pedagogical leadership. In the long run I also hope to contribute to the general knowledge formation within this, from a school development perspective, important area. The study is based on a social constructivist theory, in which the principal's pedagogical leadership is understood and interpreted as something socially constructed. In the empirical phase, interviews with seven Ålandic principals have been held, using the cognitive map as an interview method. The study is based on the following two questions: How do the principals describe how they practice their pedagogical leadership and what priorities do the principals make within the framework of pedagogical leadership? In the analysis of the principals' statements, one inductive and two deductive analysis tools have been used. In the inductive process, the material has been cataloged based on its own content in order to see which areas and themes are emerging. In the deductive processes, the principals' statements have been cataloged based on pre-existing categories. In the first category, meaning-bearing words are used as tools based on the report Rektor och styrkedjan (SOU 2015: 22) descriptions of what constitutes the principal's pedagogical leadership. In the second category, Transformation in Action Framework (Keamy, 2016) is used as an analysis model. The result shows that there are several similarities between the principals' perceptions of how they practice their pedagogical leadership, collective research, and theory formation. The Ålandic principals state that a large part of the pedagogical work consists of dynamic collaborations and interactions with other people in the school environment. They use direct working models such as lesson visits, employee interviews and management groups, and more indirect methods related to, for example, organization and structures. The result of the study also shows several concrete examples of how the principals lead the teachers' teaching work, and the pupils' learning. This by, for example, the principal holding exercises for the teachers, and by collecting data from teachers' lessons in a systematic way, which is then used to developing the school and teaching as a whole. It also turns out that the principals to some extent make different priorities within the framework of pedagogical leadership.

La proximité constitue l’une des préoccupations stratégiques actuelles majeures de la distribution alimentaire. Cette recherche porte sur les raisons de la réhabilitation des formats de proximité et s’intéresse aux représentations de la proximité d’un magasin par les distributeurs et par les consommateurs. Il ressort des analyses qualitatives et quantitatives menées auprès des distributeurs et des consommateurs que cette distance spatiale, temporelle, fonctionnelle et social qui unit un magasin et ses clients est multidimensionnelle. Sept dimensions ont été identifiées : la proximité d’accès, la proximité fonctionnelle, la proximité de processus, la proximité relationnelle, la proximité identitaire, la proximité d’intégration et la proximité d’assortiment. Certains points de convergence et divergence apparaissent dans les représentations de la proximité d’un magasin par les distributeurs et les consommateurs. Plus généralement, tous deux perçoivent les aspects symboliques et fonctionnels du magasin de proximité. Les représentations de la proximité d’un magasin du point de vue des distributeurs sont plus complètes et positives ; les consommateurs se concentrent davantage sur les aspects fonctionnels et utilitaires du magasin de proximité. Le test des hypothèses du modèle théorique (PLS) nous amènent finalement à identifier les antécédents de la proximité perçue d’un magasin (positionnement perçu et localisation géographique) et ses conséquences (intentions d’achat futures, évaluation positive et attachement). Nos résultats démontrent que la localisation géographique ne suffit pas à créer une relation entre client et le magasin. Le distributeur ne doit pas se contenter d’être géographiquement près de son client pour être proche de lui ; il doit dépasser la vision géographique de la proximité pour valoriser d’autres aspects fonctionnels et symboliques / Getting close to the consumer is one major concern in retailing. This research tries to understand the rehabilitation of small food stores in the French retailing context and explores the notion of closeness in all in its dimensions from a retailer as well as a consumer perspective. The research involves data collection from both retail companies and consumers. The qualitative and quantitative analysis show that creating closeness with the customer can be defined as the management of the spatial, temporal, functional and social distance that links a store to its customers. Seven dimensions can be identified: the access closeness, the functional closeness, the process closeness, the relational closeness, the identity closeness, the integration closeness and the assortment closeness. Some convergence or difference points between the retailers and the consumers perceptions can be describe. In general, managers and consumers both establish a dichotomy between practical and symbolic aspects of closeness. We can observe that managers see the relationship between the store and its clients in a more positive and global way whereas consumers are more rational and focus on practical elements. The tests of the hypothesis show us that the retailer image and the geographical location of the store have both a positive effect on perceived closeness to a store. Also, perceived closeness to a store increases consumer’s loyalty to the store. Our results demonstrate that location of the store is not enough to create a close relationship between the customer and the store; the closeness between a customer and a store is not only based on a spatial distance but also on a temporal, functional and social distance. Being close to its consumers not only means being close to them geographically. The consumer prefers a broader vision of closeness including practical and symbolic aspects