Grit, the concept consisting of perseverance and passion towards a desired long-term goal, has been spotlighted as a key psychological resource that is predictive of positive life outcomes including academic achievement, professional success and subjective well-being. Despite its popularity within and outside of academia, much more needs to be researched before we can understand its properties and sociological utility. This dissertation explores the potential location of grit within various sociological discourses, including literature on agency, stratification, and perceived meritocracy. In addition, I explore the relationship between social status, subjective agency, the social valuation of grit, and grit cross-culturally to place grit within proper cultural and structural contexts. In Chapter 2, I propose the psychological notion of grit as a potentially useful variable in sociological analysis and explore its potential for contributing to addressing sociological concerns including human agency and stratification. Grit could work as a “behavioral engine” transforming subjective beliefs about agency (e.g., sense of control) to agentic practices that potentially produce better life outcomes. In Chapter 3, using new cross-cultural data collected from South Korea and the United States, I test the current measure of grit, the Grit-S scale, that is developed and predominantly tested in the United States, in two different countries, South Korea and the United States. I find in both countries grit is better understood as the concept consisting of two separate dimensions, perseverance and passion, rather than a global concept. In addition, I find the perseverance facet of grit, but not the passion facet, shows the distinctive utility in explaining subjective well-being beyond subjective agency (i.e., sense of control) in both countries. In Chapter 4, I analyze novel cross-cultural data collected from four nations (France, South Korea, Turkey and the United States) and find an indirect linkage between a person’s socioeconomic status and the level of grit through positive associations with the sense of control. That is, people with a higher socioeconomic status tend to hold stronger beliefs about one’s agency, and those who are strong believers in one’s control over life outcomes, in turn, are more likely to develop grit in these four countries. In Chapter 5, using the same cross-cultural data used in Chapter 3, I investigate the social valuation of grit and whether and how the valuation of grit is associated with individual development of grit in South Korea and the United States. In both countries, grit is valued as a desirable virtue that leads to success in life. However, there is within-society variance: people from lower social statuses tend to value grit as a virtue that leads to success more than those from higher statuses in both country samples. In addition, I find people with a higher sense of control are more likely to value grit as a virtue, and valuing grit is positively associated with the individual development of perseverance in both countries.

The diploma thesis deals with theoretical implications and design recommendations for a reduction of asymmetric information in order processing. In reference to a logistical aspect the order processing process is detailed analysed, in order to detect theoretical implications for an application to the order processing process within the principalagent- theory. In context with the functional organisation, argumentations for an existence of asymmetric information have been shown. On closer examination of specific areas such as, mental designs, routines of organisational members, the relevancy of the dimension time and the importance of IT, asymmetric information has been identified, which can cause different costs and operational reactivity. Design recommendations for situational reduction of asymmetric information within order processing have been developed. It has resulted, that on a theoretical level it is possible to minimize asymmetric informations and disadvantages through a process-like logistic concept, through the implementation of organisational learning and through alternative organisational concepts. In reference to the IT one exemplary design concept has been introduced in order to reduce asymmetric information and operational reactivity. (author's abstract) / Series: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Transportwirtschaft und Logistik - Logistik

This dissertation examines the relation of Kant’s theory of free will to that of K.L. Reinhold. I argue that Reinhold’s theory addresses several problems raised in the reception of Kant’s practical philosophy, particularly the problem of accounting for free immoral acts. Focusing on Reinhold’s account of free will as a condition for the conceivability of the moral law shows that the historical focus on Reinhold’s break from Kant’s own account and his alleged reliance on facts of consciousness obscures Reinhold’s decidedly ‘Kantian’ argument. This approach provides a new foundation for free will and demonstrates the significance of Reinhold’s practical philosophy as an attempted corrective to Kant. Chapter 1 examines the influence of Rehberg, Ulrich, and Schmid on Kant’s and Reinhold’s respective theories of free will. Chapter 2 investigates the epistemic foundation of Reinhold’s theory of free will and, contrary to the dominant view in scholarship, argues that his account is not based merely on facts of consciousness. Chapter 3 illuminates a tension between the phenomenology of moral agency and Kant’s account of free agency. It is argued that while Kant talks about overcoming inclinations and adopting maxims by virtue of their lawful form, which would seemingly have to take place at the phenomenal level and be available to consciousness, Kant’s account of free agency is restricted to the noumenal, which precludes availability to consciousness. Reinhold’s theory of free will avoids this tension by positing consciousness of possible courses of action as a necessary condition for self-determination to one such action. Chapter 4 discusses the relation of Reinhold’s theory of free will to Kant’s Religion, a text that Reinhold uses as a basis for his charge that Kant’s theory is either “unintelligible” or “untenable.” I argue that although Reinhold fundamentally misunderstands Kant’s doctrine of supreme maxim adoption, Reinhold is correct in his assertion that Kant is committed to the thesis that the free spontaneity of the power of choice is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Chapter 5 explicates the Kant-Reinhold Controversy to argue that given Kant’s own commitment to the conditions for moral responsibility, Reinhold was ultimately correct that free will ought to be defined as choosing for or against the moral law.

The study explores the motivations and experiences of young single women migrating to work in the garment and footwear industries in Vietnam and the impact of migration on their lives and future prospects. The key issues investigated were the impact on the young women's working lives, their material and emotional well-being, agency and empowerment and personal life trajectories. Based on a questionnaire survey and interviews with young women factory workers in Hanoi, the research found that young women are motivated by the desire for a stable income and the lack of alternative employment options in rural areas, which are constrained by gendered patterns of vocational training and labour market opportunities. Migration into factory work brings young women increased incomes and opportunities for empowerment through a broadening of their horizons. As a result of migration young women gain confidence and increased capacity to achieve their personal life goals, and as such, are empowered by the experience. Their marriage opportunities, however, are limited by factory employment and this places young women at odds with the expectations of their families and rural tradition. How women negotiate this divergence from traditional work and marriage expectations in Vietnam has mixed implications for young women's well-being and empowerment, and calls for a reconsideration of the nature of women's empowerment as represented in gender and development discourse.

The interaction between optimal contractual design and macroeconomic aspects of economic systems is a sensitive issue for contemporary economics, in particular within the framework of the incentive theory. Information problems are crucial for incentives. Typically, in the credit markets lender-borrower interactions are affected by incentive problems and financial intermediation can be helpful. This work deals with financial markets, contracts and asymmetric information, with particular attention on how incentives and competition model the structure of the credit markets when the entrepreneur can simultaneously contract with more than one lender. In these cases we examine the implications of strategic competition on contracts among loans suppliers. Dealing with economies affected by information incompleteness or imperfection, competition on contracts delivers externalities among the players in the credit markets that can be responsible for inefficient outcomes. The issue of whether there could be any welfare-enhancing role of policy intervention, to improve on market outcomes is also analyzed.

Thesis (M.A. (Social Work))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

Agency theory, proposed by previous studies such as Guidry, Leone, and Rock (1999) and Arya and Huey-Lian (2004), suggests that bonus and other accounting-metric-based compensation can motivate managers to perform well in the short horizon while equity-based compensation, such as restricted shares and stock options, can serve the purpose of aligning the long run interests of shareholders and managers. The empirical evidence, for example Jensen and Murphy (1990), Kaplan (1994), Hall and Liebman (1998), Murphy (1999), Zhou (2000), and Chowdhury and Wang (2009), confirms that incentive compensation is popular in many countries. However, recent studies suggest that the relation between performance and incentive compensation is weak. Shaw and Zhang (2010) find that CEO bonus compensation is less sensitive to poor earnings performance than it is to good earnings performance. Fahlenbrach and Stulz (2011) study the relation between bank performance during the 2008 bank crisis and the bonus and equity-based compensation of bank CEOs. They find that banks with CEOs whose incentives were better aligned with the interests of shareholders performed worse than other banks. This study examines whether ownership structure can explain the differences among compensation structures of chief executive officers (CEOs). In particular, we examine the compensation structure of three distinct groups: family-controlled, institution-controlled, and widely-held firms. We distinguish these three kinds of firms to represent different levels of market imperfection. Compared with family-controlled and institution-controlled firms, widely held firms have dispersed ownership. The most significant weakness of a widely-held ownership structure is the lack of shareholder monitoring due to the unmatched benefit and cost of monitoring for small shareholders. In contrast, a holder of a large block of shares will have the same monitoring costs but the benefits to this shareholder from monitoring management and reducing agency costs would be substantial and larger than the costs of monitoring. Thus the presence of a large shareholder will reduce the agency costs. In addition, large shareholders may be willing to spend time and effort continuously to collect more information on management performance or to estimate the firms investment projects. This behaviour will reduce the problems that arise from information asymmetry and will decrease the waste of free cash flows by managers. Both family-controlled firms and institution-controlled firms have large shareholders. However, whether or not the control shareholders are playing an active monitoring role is still an important issue. From the viewpoint of aligning the interests of managers and shareholders, the family-controlled group is superior to the institution-controlled group. First, institutions are more flexible in moving their ownership from one firm to another depending on performance. If the costs of monitoring are high in comparison to the costs of rebalancing portfolios, institutions will choose to rebalance instead of monitoring. In contrast, a family that controls a firm does not have this flexibility. Second, family-controlled firms generally assign influential positions to family members whose focus is in line with that of the family group. Even though a non family member may be appointed as the manager, the level of monitoring is significant given the high ownership concentration by the family. However, the level of monitoring by a family may not necessarily translate into a reduction of agency costs for minority shareholders. Indeed, previous studies suggest that significant family ownership may lead to agency costs of its own. The family may divert company resources for its own benefit despite the presence of a manager who may or may not be a family member. Essentially, the family and the manager can collude to spend on perks and personal benefits at the expense of minority shareholders. Chourou (2010) suggests that excessive compensation of chief executive officers at some family owned Canadian corporations may be viewed as expropriation of minority rights. Overall, the main objective of this study is to examine whether block-holder monitoring is a substitute to the incentive components of compensation. We propose that as we move from widely-held to institution-controlled the level of monitoring may or may not increase. However, as we move further into higher control, as may be suggested by family ownership, the level of monitoring will increase but this monitoring may not necessarily reduce agency costs. The results show that the institution-controlled firms pay significantly less bonus compensation per dollar of assets than widely-held firms but the differences in equity based compensation are not significant. In addition, the family-controlled corporations offer the lowest performance-based compensation, bonus per dollar of assets, in comparison to the institution-controlled and the widely-held groups. These results indicate that the family-controlled Canadian corporations rely more on monitoring managers than paying them incentive payments in the form of bonus payments. In addition, our results indicate that the institutions which control corporations may be monitoring the managers of these corporations but this monitoring does not significantly reduce the need for the long-term incentive components of compensation. This result suggests that institutions may monitor the short-term performance effectively but they may prefer rebalancing their portfolio rather than monitoring long term performance.

There is a crisis in mathematics education (National Research Council, 1989). This crisis has caused stakeholders to question the purpose of mathematics education. Teaching mathematics for social justice is a pedagogy that uses mathematics as a tool to expose students to issues concerning power, resource inequities, and disparate opportunities between different social groups to illicit social and political action (Gutstein, 2006). This study uses action research to explore the effects of incorporating social justice issues in mathematics with affluent, middle school students. Findings indicate that integrating social justice issues into mathematics affected some students’ cognitive and affective domains and in some cases led to empowerment and action. The study also found that students’ perception of responsibility, their age and personal connections along with the amount of teacher direction may have affected students’ development of social agency. These findings help to inform teachers’ practices and contribute to literature on critical mathematics.

There is a crisis in mathematics education (National Research Council, 1989). This crisis has caused stakeholders to question the purpose of mathematics education. Teaching mathematics for social justice is a pedagogy that uses mathematics as a tool to expose students to issues concerning power, resource inequities, and disparate opportunities between different social groups to illicit social and political action (Gutstein, 2006). This study uses action research to explore the effects of incorporating social justice issues in mathematics with affluent, middle school students. Findings indicate that integrating social justice issues into mathematics affected some students’ cognitive and affective domains and in some cases led to empowerment and action. The study also found that students’ perception of responsibility, their age and personal connections along with the amount of teacher direction may have affected students’ development of social agency. These findings help to inform teachers’ practices and contribute to literature on critical mathematics.

Aquesta tesi esta composada per tres assaigs. Cadascún dels assaigs presenta investigació empírica original i independent analitzant els impactes de les connexions politiques sobre l’economia. Els articles fan una contribució significativa a aquesta literatura empírica, al mateix temps que subratllen les limitacions i desafiaments amb els que actualment s’enfronten els investigadors d’aquest camp. La recerca que aquí es presenta aplica desenvolupaments als metodes de recerca empirica que milloren la fiabilitat dels resultats. En el segon capitol s’estima l’impacte d’un aconteixement sorpresa a nivell polític sobre els retorns financers del mercat espanyol. Això inclou els impactes específics en determinats sectors i empreses que estan connectades políticament. En els últims dies de la campanya electoral per les eleccions generals espanyoles de l’any 2004, atacs terroristes van causar la mort de 191 persones que viatjaven en tren a la capital del país, Madrid. Quatre dies mes tard, el partit a l’oposició va guanyar les eleccions generals, en contra de totes les prediccions i enquestes que s’havien fet anteriorment a l’acció terrorista. Aquest canvi d’expectatives presenta una oportunitat única per aplicar tècniques d’event study per contrastar hipòtesis de política econòmica. L’anàlisi mostra que les hipòtesis de captura de polítics per empreses, junt amb problemes d’agència en empreses privatitzades i amb dispersió accionarial, no són rebutjades per les dades. En el tercer capítol, intento superar algunes de les limitacions de la recerca empírica en aquest camp, i exploro l’impacte de les connexions polítiques a les empreses en el rendiment empresarial. Ho faig fent servint les dos principals tècniques empíriques que es fan servir més comunment a la literatura economica: anàlisi centrat en establir les reaccions dels mercats financers a esdeveniments d’índole política; i anàlisi economètric de l’impacte de les connexions polítiques en el rendiment contable de les empreses. Els resultats de l’anàlisi indiquen que en els primers anys dels segle XXI, les connexions polítiques podrien haver tingut un impact negatiu sobre el rendiment de les empreses espanyoles. Tot i que els resultats basats en les reaccions dels mercats financers no són concloents, l’anàlisi economètric sobre mesures contables mostra una relació negativa i estadísticament significativa entre connexions polítiques i beneficis empresarials. Els resultats son consistents quan s’utilitzen diferents variables per mesurar el nivell de connexions polítiques, i també sota diverses especificacions economètriques que incloen regressions amb mètodes de variables instrumentals. Finalment, el capítol 4 considera l’influencia del sector privat en les decisions preses des de l’administració pública. Això contrasta amb l’anàlisi presentat en els dos capítols anteriors i a la majoria de recerca empírica en aquest camp, on el que es considera es generalment l’impacte de les connexions polítiques sobre els resultats econòmics empresarials. L’anàlisi està basat en dades del Regne Unit sobre la concessió de subsidis a empreses per dur a terme recerca i desenvolupament. L’agència responsable de la concessió de subsidis al Regne Unit, la Technology Strategy Board, s’encarrega en primer lloc d’identificar àrees de prioritat tecnològica. Un cop aquestes arees són aprovades i dotades de recursos pel Govern, l’agència s’encarrega de convocar concursos i seleccionar les propostes guanyadores. Els resultats de l’anàlisi suggereixen que el programa de subsidis, tot i ser efectiu en corretgir alguns errors de mercat, està esbiaixat en la distribució dels subsidis cap a aquelles empreses que estan directament connectades amb l’agència. / This thesis is composed by three essays, each presenting independent and original empirical research on the impacts of political connections on the economy. This research makes a significant contribution to such empirical literature. It also highlights the limitations and challenges that are currently faced by researchers in this field and applies developments to the empirical methods which improve the reliability of results. In Chapter 2 I estimate the impact of a surprise political event on the financial returns of the Spanish markets, including the specific impacts on selected sectors and politically connected companies. In the last days of the electoral campaign for the 2004 general election in Spain, on Thursday March 11th 2004, a series of simultaneous terror attacks caused the death of 191 persons in commuting trains in the capital Madrid. Four days later, the opposition party won the election, against all predictions that were made prior to the terror attacks. This change in expectations presents us with a unique opportunity to take advantage of event study techniques to test some politico-economic hypotheses. The analysis shows that such hypothesis of capture of politicians by firms, in itself and combined with agency problems in privatized firms with dispersed shareholdings, is not rejected by the data. In Chapter 3, I undertake to overcome some of the constraints in the empirical literature by exploring the impact of political connections on firm performance by employing the two main empirical approaches that have been applied to ascertain the impact of connections on the performance of firms: analysis of financial markets reactions to political events; and econometric analysis of the impact of political connections on accounting-type measures of firm performance. The results of the analysis indicate that in Spain, in the first years of the 21st century, political connections may have had a negative impact on firms’ profits. Even though results from the financial markets-based analysis are inconclusive, the econometric analysis of accounting-based measures of performance shows a negative and highly statistically significant negative impact of political connections on firm’s performance. The results hold regardless of the particular variable or measure that is used to proxy for political connectedness, and under different considerations of the degree of connections that is considered. The results also hold when controlling for the potential endogeneity that may exist - whereas connections to politicians might result in better (worse) business performance, also changes in business performance might lead to higher (lower) connections. Finally, Chapter 4 considers the influence of the private sector on decisions taken by the public sector. This is in contrast with chapters 2 and 3, and most of the empirical literature on political connections, which consider the impacts of politicians on the economic outcomes of the private sector. The analysis is based on UK data where as in most countries R&D grants are conceded in a beauty contest process. The Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the UK agency responsible for offering such grants, jointly with its funding Government Department, identifies technology and research priority areas, after which specific competitions are run and winning projects selected. The results suggest that whilst the R&D cooperative programme is to an extent effective in targeting the market failures it aims to address, its allocation of grants across the private sector is biased towards connected businesses, after controlling for company and sector specific factors.