This dissertation examines the emergence and implementation of a new intermediary mechanism of farmland tenancy in Japan with a focus on farmers’ perspectives. Japan’s government introduced the Farmland Bank (FB) program in 2014 in an attempt to avoid further farmland abandonment and revitalize the farming industry. By design, the program gives more power to prefectural authorities to accommodate new actors and resources in tenancy arrangements even without farmland owners’ consent so as to expedite farmland aggregation and generate better economies of scale. This is a major turning point since the postwar agrarian reform where owners have been given a primary decision-making role in private farmland use. The research draws on semi-structured interviews with farmers, government officials and experts, which were conducted intermittently between 2016 and 2018. By taking a multi-level governance approach, the study shows a change in the farmland governance model from the centralized control of individual property to the decentralized, multi-level coordination for collective tenancy arrangements, to which farmers actively contributed along with the interlocking institutional transitions of farming families and villages. With the decline in the life security function of farmland, they have increasingly disengaged from farming and allowed for political and conceptual shifts of farmland from owner-oriented to user-driven and from family property to the commons of the society. The study finds that despite a massive budget injection, the FB program has only marginally facilitated farmland aggregation. Yet, the case study of two communities reveals that the program has been driving a ‘soft’ coercion of farmers’ land-use practices via economic rationality. Moreover, it has disconnected owners from farmland but failed to enshrine tenants’ commitment to long-term farmland management. Complementary attention to subjective, intangible and cultural aspects of farmland would help to avoid possible one-time profit seeking land-use.

Recent decades have seen a shift in Scotland in terms of the provision of housing and housing-related services from the public sector to the private sector. In statistical terms, the proportion of Scottish households in the private rented sector has doubled during the past ten years. This thesis unpacks anthropologically the private rented sector as a locally-found concept in Edinburgh, largely through the medium of ‘property management', another locally-found concept. Key questions concern how the private rented sector in Edinburgh is ‘managed' at the vernacular level, how the ethics of property management take shape in Edinburgh in the context of this ongoing shift from the public to the private sectors, and how the property relations within the sector relate to existing debates in economic anthropology. The primary ethnographic material, based upon fieldwork in 2014 and 2015, is of an Edinburgh letting agency as archetypal property managers, though other material either was produced in conjunction with Shelter Scotland or stemmed from the tracing of further connections within the field. Engaging with the broader anthropology of ethics, a core conclusion is that processes of property management rest ultimately upon practices of ethics that take place at the ‘ordinary' level. A parallel aim is to consider how anthropologists might produce ethnography of an economic ‘sector', such as the private rented sector. Borrowing from Actor-Network Theory, I propose occupying a range of different vantage points in a given economic sector within a socially defined locale, such as the city, by following the connections encountered in the field, and then by allowing actors to perform both the social and the economic by tracing their associations through the production of the ethnographic text.

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Diss. Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2006.

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Univ., Diss.--Saarbrücken, 2004. / Literaturverz. S. 373 - 385.

abstract: Nowadays, Computing is so pervasive that it has become indeed the 5th utility (after water, electricity, gas, telephony) as Leonard Kleinrock once envisioned. Evolved from utility computing, cloud computing has emerged as a computing infrastructure that enables rapid delivery of computing resources as a utility in a dynamically scalable, virtualized manner. However, the current industrial cloud computing implementations promote segregation among different cloud providers, which leads to user lockdown because of prohibitive migration cost. On the other hand, Service-Orented Computing (SOC) including service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web Services (WS) promote standardization and openness with its enabling standards and communication protocols. This thesis proposes a Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Architecture by combining the best attributes of the two paradigms to promote an open, interoperable environment for cloud computing development. Mutil-tenancy SaaS applicantions built on top of SOCCA have more flexibility and are not locked down by a certain platform. Tenants residing on a multi-tenant application appear to be the sole owner of the application and not aware of the existence of others. A multi-tenant SaaS application accommodates each tenant’s unique requirements by allowing tenant-level customization. A complex SaaS application that supports hundreds, even thousands of tenants could have hundreds of customization points with each of them providing multiple options, and this could result in a huge number of ways to customize the application. This dissertation also proposes innovative customization approaches, which studies similar tenants’ customization choices and each individual users behaviors, then provides guided semi-automated customization process for the future tenants. A semi-automated customization process could enable tenants to quickly implement the customization that best suits their business needs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2016

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(農学) / 甲第20716号 / 農博第2245号 / 新制||農||1053(附属図書館) / 学位論文||H29||N5082(農学部図書室) / 京都大学大学院農学研究科生物資源経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 福井 清一, 教授 伊藤 順一, 教授 梅津 千恵子 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Agricultural Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

This Master's Thesis compares technologies used in the architecture of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems to evaluate the benefits and advantages of emerging technologies. The emerging technologies, Cloud Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Multi-Tenancy, could significantly alter the current ERP space and become a primary part of ERP Systems of the future. A survey was sent to industry professionals to obtain feedback on their company's ERP Systems and to collect their comments on these new technologies. The survey results and related analysis show that Emerging Cloud ERP Systems outperform Traditional Legacy ERP Systems in all important characteristics - Accessibility, Business Cost, Implementation Time, Mobility, Scalability, Upgradability, and Usability. Cloud Systems were also found to have a shorter implementation time and a larger proportion of Cloud Systems were on the most recent version of software. Furthermore, industry professionals identified Cloud Computing, SaaS and Mobility as the emerging technologies of the coming decade. This thesis demonstrates that there are significant benefits for companies to use ERP Systems that use the emerging technologies and that the shift to Cloud ERP Systems has begun.

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