Higher education institutions in the United States have come under increased scrutiny due to increasing demands for accountability in the use of public funds and increasing visibility (Altbach, Berdahl, and Gumport, 1999; Trow, 1974). Colleges and universities must continually prove their credibility and legitimacy to their stakeholders, including government officials (Lawrence & Sharma, 2002), donors, students, and sponsors. The proving process may involve engagement in legitimacy-seeking behaviors designed to show efficiency, access, and quality in terms defined mostly by external perceptions. The decision to concentrate organizational resources on activities designed to influence the opinions of external agents has the potential to lead organizations away from their core values and historic missions. The case study that follows documents the restructuring of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) and the drivers that led university administrators to pursue change. The case was developed based on a series of interviews with key informants associated with or affected by the restructuring process. Explanations for the restructuring and the underlying university goal of becoming a top 30 institution, included cost-savings and efficiency via a "fiscal rationalization"; the framing of programs in terms of their entrepreneurialism, innovativeness, and revenue generating capacity; and an emphasis on the economic development benefits of university programs. Even though Virginia Tech administrators were not expressly responding to external demands for restructuring, there was evidence to suggest that a need to construct a more business-like model for university structure and operations had entered the collective conscience of Virginia Tech's leadership. I document the rhetoric and actions that I believe influenced university administrators in their decision to restructure. I also draw attention to administrators' use of language that I believe exemplified the commodification of the university's human and intellectual capital. Theoretically, I believe that the constructs from resource dependency theory and neoinstitutional theory have relevance to the interpretation of this case. Specifically, the construction of legitimacy-seeking behaviors, the imperative to decrease reliance on external organizations (i.e., the state), and the institutionalization of acceptable management behaviors are aligned closely with the propositions of one or both of these theories. The lack of theoretical distinctiveness between these two organizational perspectives indicated a need for further research and limits the ability to anticipate the potential outcomes for Virginia Tech and the broader field of higher education. / Ph. D.

This research examines the percentage of imported foods sold in stores at three levels of the food retail hierarchy—small-sized retail food stores, known locally as colmados; medium-sized food retail stores, or super-colmados; and the large supermarkets, or supermercados —in the Dominican Republic. It also considers variations in sources of imported foods for the three types of stores. Data were collected during fieldwork conducted in Verónâ a small town located in the province of La Altagracia on the eastern end of the Dominican Republic—over a three-week period from August 15 to September 9, 2009. A stratified random sample was selected along the primary highway in Verón consisting of 15 stores. At these stores, the principal investigator collected inventory data and conducted interviews with storeowners and employees. The findings suggest that food import dependency increases as the level in the food retail hierarchy, or store size, increases. / Master of Science

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Food and City Project is about investigating the role of the food cycle and the food dependencies from the periphery that appear in contemporary city centers. Food as a multidimensional network can have a significant impact spatially, by mapping the food miles that the food is traveling, in terms of values when there is knowledge about the value of the product that is consumed. Also, socially by highlighting important social issues such as inequalities, public health or diet issues, and environmentally,  through climate change or resource depletion. Therefore, food can create new geographies by changing relations between cities with different scales and their food provisioning systems.  The case study of this project is Athens, in Greece which is 0% food self-sufficient and that makes it dependent on the region of Attica or other regions which shifts the problem to the city-region scale. To be more specific, the food cycle in this project includes the investigation of the networks-flows and provides solutions for new production scapes, new consumption spaces, distribution flows, and waste management, at the regional, municipal, and local levels. Elaionas, an area only 2 km away from the Acropolis hill, an almost deprived and partially abandoned area with some cores of residential and industrial units but with many significant elements and potentialities, is being transformed into a new production site. Taking back his historical character as agricultural land but enhanced with different qualities (multi-scale production sites that perform as public spaces, circularity of the system) and involvements of different actors, becomes a complementary centrality of the periurban which acts internally but also has an external impact on the city.

Many nation-states have their potential for growth hindered by the involvement of developed nations. These low-income nation-states are primarily located on the continent of Africa. There are three parts to this phenomenon of neocolonialism which is the process of continuing involvement of developed nations in developing nations that creates a negative growth in those nations. The research I've conducted is in three parts. The first consists of analyzing the social construction of neocolonialism, how the phenomenon occurs, and where it stems from. The second part is to show how this involvement is damaging to the developing nations. I will use examples such as the multinational corporation profit recycling, the life of foreign aid, and unwise economic deals. As it turns out the phenomena brings on the hindrance of developing in the low-income nation. The last part of my research is to come up with an economic improvement plan. For instance, rather than country A trading money (or some monetary value) for a resource in country B, "A" would build a school, hospital, or infrastructure in "B" to improve the conditions in the low-income nation. It is hypothesized that will leave room for growth in both nations without creating harmful economic repercussions because money would be taken out of the equation.

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Background: Software testing is a crucial part of the system's development life-cycle, which pays off in detecting flaws and defects, alternatively leading to high-quality products. Generally, software testing is performed manually by a human operator or automatically. While many test cases are written and executed, the testing process checks if all the requirements are covered, and the system exhibits the expected behavior. A great portion of the cost and time of the software development is spent on testing; therefore, considering the type of the software, test optimization is needed and presented as a solution in cost efficiency and time-saving. Aim: This thesis aims to propose and evaluate the improved sOrTES+ tool for test optimization purposes, consisting of selection, prioritization, and scheduling of the test cases integrated into a dynamic user interface. Method: In this thesis, test optimization is addressed in two aspects, low-level requirements and high-level requirements. Our solution analyzes these requirements to detect the dependencies between test cases. Thus, we propose sOrTES+, a tool that uses three different scheduling techniques: Greedy, Greedy DO(direct output), and Greedy TO(total output) for test optimization. The mentioned techniques are integrated into a dynamic user interface that allows testers to manage their projects, see useful information about test cases and requirements, store the executed test cases while scheduling the remaining ones for execution, and also switch between the mentioned scheduling techniques regarding the project requirements. Finally, we demonstrated its applicability and compared our tool with existing testing techniques used by our industrial partner, Alstom company, evaluating the efficiency in terms of requirement coverage and troubleshooting time. Results: Our comparison shows that our solution improves the requirement coverage, increasing it by 26.4% while decreasing the troubleshooting time by 6%. Conclusion: Based on our results, we conclude that our proposed tool, sOrTES+, can be used for test optimization and it performs more efficiently than the existing methods used by industrial partner Alstom company.

Yes / As a global strategic reserve resource, rare earth has been widely used in important industries, such as military equipment and biomedicine. However, through existing analyses based on the total volume of rare earth trade, the competition and dependency behind the trade cannot be revealed. In this paper, based on the principle of trade preference and import similarity, we construct dependency and competition networks and use complex network analysis to study the evolution of the global rare earth trade network from 2002 to 2018. The main conclusions are as follows: the global rare earth trade follows the Pareto principle, and the trade network shows a scale-free distribution. China has become the largest country in both import and export of rare earth trade in the world since 2017. In the dependency network, China has become the most dependent country since 2006. The result of community division shows that China has separated from the American community and formed new communities with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. The United States of America has formed a super-strong community with European and Asian countries. In the competition network, the distribution of competition intensity follows a scale-free distribution. Most countries are faced with low-intensity competition, but competing countries are relatively numerous. The competition related to China has increased significantly. The competition source of the United States of America has shifted from Mexico to China. China, the USA, and Japan have been the cores of the competition network. / This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Foundation (Grant No. 22YJC910014), the Social Sciences Planning Youth Project of Anhui Province (Grant No. AHSKQ2022D138), and the Innovation Development Research Project of Anhui Province (Grant No. 2021CX053).