From a Critical Social Theory (CST) perspective this research critiques assumptions that the internet brings about consumer empowerment through increased product information. and opportunities to communicate and share knowledge with companies and other consumers. It demonstrates that this assumption derives from the technologically determinist school of Information Systems (IS) thinkingt,:ý w hich is 9 rounded in the myth that technology pet- se brings huge benefits, including wealth and empowerment. Illustrating that information systems development traditionally lacks a sense of "audience" failing to provide what the users want, it suggests that this phenomenon merits more sophisticated consideration of not only the technology, but also of eCommerce providers and users. The research demonstrates that complex phenomena such as that under study here require a multi-method approach to explore the range of voices or relevant perspectives of the stakeholders. A lens for reviewing the power relations governing the construction and use of consumer knowledge is developed and applied. The knowledge construction lens is used to review the synthesized findings from the multi-method assessment to reveal how congruence is connected to extant power relations, and positions those findings in the context of information provider / user relationships. Drawing on both theories of hermeneutics and serniotics the phenomenon is initially explored from the perspective of both companies and customers through questionnaires and reviews of commercial websites. This phase of the research sets the scene for a series of twenty-two in depth interviews with individual consumers to explore their experiences of using the internet in commercial activity. The research concludes that vast incongruity in the needs and values of customers and companies exists. Consumer empowerment remains a myth. Ingrained company / customer power relations distort communication and prevent 'true' empowerment. In the shadow of company power. customer inertia and feelings of powerlessness remain strong. Ultimately this serves companies well as increased buyer power continues to be regarded as a threat to competitive advantage.

This thesis investigates visual, spatial and temporal qualities of video based reconstruction with respect to telepresence. State of the art was improved and validated through a new parallelisation of an established algorithm; a tool that allows visio-spatial impact of algorithm and camera arrangement to be visualised; and a set of experiments to derive requirements and investigate outcomes. The motivation is to support the exchange of appearance and attention between moving humans through video based reconstruction. A previous research project showed moving humans could faithfully convey attention in virtual environments and appearance through video-conferencing, suggesting that it may be possible to combine the two. Video based 3D reconstruction of humans appeared to be able to achieve both, but it was uncertain whether this could be achieved at sufficient quality. Research began by justifying the approach and setting the requirements. A literature survey and initial experiments indicated that the visual hull provided a form suitable for modeling humans. However, evidence of visual and temporal qualities necessary to support gaze was not found. A state of the art visual hull reconstruction algorithm was parallelised to run on a modern multi-core processor, enabling human reconstruction on a single computer, thus providing stable visual and temporal qualities. A parallelisation scheme theoretically better suited for execution on a single multi-core processor than distributed over a network is proposed. Importantly, the way in which the problem is parallelised has been optimised to reflect the various stages of the process rather than the need to minimise data communication across a network. A utility application has been developed providing a framework for rapidly testing algorithms, validating requirements, and as a platform for conducting experiments. This underpinned a collaborative experiment that showed for the first time that eye gaze could be conveyed to accuracies sufficient for human social interaction. To facilitate the analysis, the utility allowed the impact of camera placement on spatial and visual quality to be investigated.

In this digital technology era, e-commerce (EC) has revolutionised the way people engage in business activities. Users now enjoy tremendous advantages, such as buying and selling between multiple parties at different levels of business through computers and smart devices, regardless of their geographical locations, thereby being provided with better choices and prices. However, EC brings its own challenges and users face unknown risks when moving to the digital market. Some countries have been quicker in providing the necessary requirements for the expansion of EC and helped in addressing users’ worries about trust and fraud. Others have been slow in adopting EC, and both customers and business are missing considerable opportunities. In general, EC is well adopted and used in the advanced countries but struggles to take off in developing countries. Saudi Arabia (SA) is one such country. This study has developed a theoretical framework appropriate to the implementation of Business to Customer (B2C) EC in Saudi Arabia, after reviewing the literature on B2C EC, and testing several factors pertinent to the Saudi Arabian context. The researcher has adopted a novel approach by securing the perceptions of Saudi nationals living in Saudi Arabia and those living in the UK with a view to appreciating the differences and learning from the experience of these two communities. Additionally, the researcher conducted a survey of a sample of Saudi companies to understand their views and aspirations in adopting B2C EC. Data was collected using mixed methods and embracing both quantitative and qualitative research methods. The data was collected in Saudi Arabia via a questionnaire survey of 606 Saudi nationals, and in the UK from 169 questionnaires and interviews with 25 companies. The questionnaire responses were analysed quantitatively by descriptive and statistical methods (percentages and t-test for two independent samples), and the findings were validated by the interview data. From the results, the theoretical framework was developed, thus allowing for an understanding of Saudi customers’ attitudes towards online shopping in the two different environments of B2C EC (SA as a developing country and the UK as a developed country) to be gained. The influence of different environmental variables upon customer choice is seen as significant variations occurred in the two different environments. The framework is potentially useful for policy-makers, the commercial sector, and the government in SA. Hence, the research contributes to knowledge about the key differences in customer behaviour toward B2C EC in SA. The study signifies the first of its kind and thus lays the ground for further research in the area.

SMEs have been recognised as important actors of commercial activity most specifically since the second half of the 20th century. Although understanding its customer potential has been named a top priority among many sectors, there is a limited body of knowledge regarding the buying behaviour of SME’s. Many studies and industry practices frame the context within corporate or individual buying behaviour, however few researchers mention SME’s. When mentioned they tend to tie with elitist attributes and consider them as small versions of big enterprises. Studies and industry practices are conformist and assume that SME’s buying behaviour consists of nothing but -ignoring impulsive tendencies- ‘normative' or ‘conservative’ typologies. However, the lack of application makes this dichotomy untested. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; therefore, other possible (unknown) typologies may affect stakeholders that behave with this incomplete knowledge set. Behavioural researchers can suffer from moving further in the wrong direction and can lose the base of the study. Marketers can suffer from not acknowledging the SME segment in full, so they cannot technically address its needs in a navigated way, and can lose money. SMEs themselves can suffer from being unaware about their buying practices, and therefore do not question their approach that may jeopardise their business. After an extensive literature review, this study led to the adoption of Wilson’s Cube, a model that rejects the distinction between individual and business customers. The cube comes with a positive correlation (which led to a combined hypothesis) among x (Purchase Significance: Exceptional – Routine), y (Need Driver: Professional – Leisure) and z (Buying Attitude: Aversion – Enjoyment) axes. Quantitative research was conducted with 270 participants for 12 products/services. The tested (and validated with 10 SMEs) hypothesis proved that SMEs also buy within the leisure-routine axes of the cube, particularly some tangible products, e.g. popular technology and vehicle, and when they do, they spend more (enjoyment axis) like individual consumers. Supporting this, even in economic crisis scenario, SMEs compromise less for the same group of products. In the end, according to contextualised framework, ’non-normative’ presence is about 70% and the current practice based on their miscategorisation is not supported. To scrutinise the prevalence of this abnormal presence, a risk impact map was derived from the percentage breakdown of responses and risk factors. By converting the calculated figures to a cumulative distribution, a risk score (16%-20%) was introduced for Turkey, as well as a risk grade, BBB, which is only a grade higher than the high-risk area. Knowing that SMEs are 50% player in Turkey’s €500B GDP, whereas its 40% refers to import, the impacted economic value can be estimated with up to ten billions of euros. Following the final framework that consists of buying behaviour typologies in Turkey, a proposal was suggested to researchers, marketers to SMEs, as well as SMEs themselves, in terms of strategic improvements within a timeline view.

The central aim of this thesis is to address the research question: In what ways are digital media affecting the dissemination of jazz in Britain? Within this are four sub-questions: 1. Has the changing position of jazz in British culture since 1980 affected its audience? 2. Has digital media had the same impact on the dissemination of jazz as it has on mainstream popular music? 3. How is digital technology affecting jazz scenes in the UK? 4. Is there an ‘online community’ of jazz enthusiasts in Britain? The term ‘digital media’ suggests that geographical boundaries are irrelevant, but basing this project in the UK provides a focus for the research, both in terms of jazz as an established cultural form in Britain and in order to investigate British jazz audiences. Theoretical approaches from several disciplines are drawn upon, including cultural studies, new media studies, ethnomusicology, popular music studies and jazz studies. Research methods include surveys of audiences at selected jazz festivals in Britain using questionnaires along with interviews with the festival directors, online surveys, and interviews with jazz enthusiasts. The broad findings indicate that while jazz is one of many types of music available to contemporary audiences who may also listen to other genres, there are fans of particular styles choosing to attend certain live events – increasingly making use of digital media to find information and facilitate their decisions. Sites such as YouTube are popular with jazz audiences, and there are independent jazz record labels that use digital media effectively, unlike, according to some respondents, certain jazz musicians. Audiences (which include a significant proportion of musicians) are now using social networking sites to create online groups with shared musical interests, but this activity has not prevented jazz being essentially a music of live performance – and indeed may be helping to keep it live.

No description available.

Current surround systems are being developed to include height channels to provide the listener with a 3D listening experience. It is not well understood the impact the height channels will have on the listening experience and aspects associated with multichannel reproduction like localisation and envelopment or if there are any new subjective attributes concerned with 3D surround systems. Therefore in this research subjective factors like localisation and envelopment were investigated and then descriptive analysis was used. In terms of localisation it was found that for sources panned in the median plane localisation accuracy was not improved with higher order ambisonics. However for sources in the frontal plane higher order ambisonics improves localisation accuracy for elevated sound sources. It was also found that for a simulation of a number of 2D and 3D surround systems, using a decorrelated noise signal to simulate a diffuse soundfield, there was no improvement in envelopment with the addition of height. On the other hand height was found to improve the perception of envelopment with the use of 3D recorded sound scenes, although for an applause sample which had similar properties to that of the decorrelated noise sample there was no significant difference between 2D and 3D systems. Five attribute scales emerged from the descriptive analysis of which it was found that there were significant differences between 2D and 3D systems using the attribute scale size for both ambisonics and VBAP rendered systems. Also 3D higher order ambisonics significantly enhances the perception of presence. A final principal component analysis found that there were 2 factors which characterised the ambisonic rendered systems and 3 factors which characterised the VBAP rendered sound scenes. This suggests that the derived scales need to be used with a wider number of sound scenes in order to fully validate them.

This study sets out to develop a framework for implementing social computing (SC) tools in higher education (HE) to enhance both the teaching and learning processes, with a particular focus on HE institutions in the Gulf States. Among other things, it reviews and addresses the known problems of HE in the Gulf States, discusses available SC platforms, and identifies the most appropriate of these based on the extant literature about user acceptance of technology. SC platforms are quickly emerging as important new technologies that can support a variety of businesses. Many publications on SC discuss its definition and its associated tools, but while studies of this kind are an important part of the development of any new trend or technology, additional research is also necessary to determine the proper use of these phenomena in particular contexts, and as yet, no clear study exists that discusses the proper use of SC tools in HE. The research in this study contributes to the fields of technology acceptance and SC research. It also demonstrates that the unified model of technology acceptance (UTAUT) can serve as theoretical basis for implementing SC in HE. It employs a multi-methodological approach at all of its stages, including data collection and analysis. Questionnaires, interviews, observations, focus groups, and evaluations were all conducted in order to obtain the data on which the study was based. The final analysis of this data was used to develop a new conceptual framework for implementing SC in HE. The research findings are validated through the development and implementation of a new system prototype for using SC in HE. This study recommends that stakeholders of HE in the Gulf States deploy SC technologies in HE to enhance generated outcomes by modernizing, supporting, and simplifying the teaching process while keeping students more engaged with customisable content. Online collaboration is also highlighted for its potential to enhance student learning and to transform education into a more user-centred process. In its summation, this study also includes a model for ensuring that research objectives are achieved and that defined knowledge gaps are covered.

BIM (Building Information Modeling) is a new radically different emerging approach to design, construction and facilities management. BIM promises to better facilitate the building development, construction and building operation. In this thesis the domain of small architectural practices is considered and how BIM can be implemented to address the problems both of operational and product efficiency and effectiveness. Research has indicated that guidance on how small architectural practices should implement BIM is lacking (Jung et al 2010). This lack of guidance is one of the reasons why small architectural practices are disinclined to adopt BIM. There is a growing need for more knowledge on how BIM technology and processes can be and should be adopted and what happens when BIM technologies and processes are implemented and used in the practice of architecture. The aim of this thesis is to develop a BIM implementation strategy framework for small architectural practices. To identify of the problems and issues of BIM implementation in a small architectural practice, a two years of case study using action research was undertaken. This involved instigating, participating and observing the implementation of BIM within a small architectural practice. Both the internal and external benefits to the architectural practice were considered. The findings of this BIM implementation research were then recorded and reviewed providing a structured approach to BIM implementation. From this process of review and reflection a revised improved framework and suggested methods for BIM adoption was developed and documented. At each stage of the BIM implementation recommendations are made. The research was undertaken as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University of Salford, John McCall Architects (a small architectural practice) and the researcher and author of this thesis. Though being actively involved in the BIM implementation it was possible to understand the issues and document the actions that were taken as part of the BIM adoption. The major limitation of this research is the focus on a single company as the source of evidence and research. This enhanced BIM implementation framework and the suggested working methods represents the primary contribution to knowledge made by this thesis. This framework should be of value to other small architectural practices embarking on BIM implementation.

The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector often encounters difficulties in attaining satisfactory project performance. The secondary data in this research (literature review) clearly shows that an inability to pre-identify problems leads to projects becoming ‘risky’. This can be due to a lack of meeting certain project targets, i.e., a lack of predicting ‘accurate’ project time and costs, a failure to raise the project’s quality issues and failures in predicting a project’s return on investment. In addition, it has been shown that a major lack of anticipating problems within a construction project can occur because of a lack of providing accurate data/information and a lack of team collaboration between project stakeholders. Much research has been conducted in order to anticipate construction project problems and to attempt to offer technological solutions, including information maturity models. However, in spite of all this, research projects still run into risks. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate a conceptual framework to support construction project managers in order to enhance project performance. This conceptual framework brings together three main entities: Integrated Collaborative Technologies, Team Collaboration and Proactive Behaviour. These three notable entities are used to support project managers’ strategies in order to successfully fulfil the project. In order for this to be achieved the researcher has met the following objectives: an investigation as to how proactive behaviour impacts on the progress of construction projects, an investigation into how team collaboration relates to proactive behaviour and an investigation into how team collaboration and integrated collaborative technologies can support proactive behaviour. The research design includes primary mixed data analysis and secondary data analysis from the literature review. In order to gather data, semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire have been undertaken by the researcher. The proposed conceptual framework was tested by asking professional experts whether the proposed framework was applicable within a construction project environment. The research shows that there is a relationship between integrated collaborative technologies and team collaboration, and team collaboration and proactive behaviour, and hence these factors impact on project performance. Moreover it has been proved that, in order to achieve a successful outcome, a project requires stakeholders to learn how to collaborate with the support of integrated collaborative technologies. Throughout this ‘iterative process’ construction project managers can enhance their proactive behaviour at an individual level and thus can enhance their ability to pre-identify construction related problems. Arguably, this behavioural change will impact positively on project performance indicators.