The use of social networking websites by employers without adequate strategies can lead to misuse of job applicant's information or discriminatory hiring practices. The purpose of this multiple case study was to identify strategies that some human resource professionals in the southeastern United States implemented to maximize the use of social networking websites in the hiring process. Signaling theory was used as the conceptual framework for this study. Semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 8 purposefully selected human resource professionals who used social networking websites for at least 3 years to screen and select job applicants. Documentation of participating organizations was also reviewed to assess the guidance employees received for using social networking websites to inform hiring decisions. Two other sources of data included field notes and observations of participants during interviews. Interview transcripts and supporting documents were coded using a priori and emergent codes focused on identifying themes among strategies hiring managers used. A few of the themes that emerged from the thematic analysis of the interview data were professional social media, personal social media, and legal concerns. The results of this study may contribute to positive social change by providing human resource professionals and hiring managers with more knowledge for optimizing the use of social networking websites for cybervetting and hiring job candidates.

Health-related absenteeism could significantly affect organizational productivity because of the additional resources needed to compensate for the missing worker's absence. Work productivity is critical for business sustainability as companies continue to create a lean workforce and decrease operating cost. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies that organizational leaders at a university in the southeastern United States used to successfully decrease occurrences of health-related employee absenteeism. The conceptual framework for this study was the theory of planned behavior. A purposive sample of 10 management, 5 faculty, and 5 staff members participated in structured interviews. Secondary data sources included field observations of the university's health and wellness facilities and a review of the university's healthcare plan and wellness program offerings used to reduce absenteeism. Thematic analysis, coding, and member checking led to the identification of 2 major themes. First, a need existed at this university for specific policy and procedures regarding health-related absenteeism. Second, emphasis was needed on the role of workplace health programs in decreasing health related absenteeism. The findings indicated that by integrating supportive management practices, effective absenteeism policies, and health management programs into their organizational culture, leaders at this university could develop specific strategies to decrease health-related absenteeism. Social change implications include changing perceptions of health related absenteeism to help leaders and employees at this and other similar environments become more aware of their current health status, reduce health risks, maintain a healthy lifestyle, and perform better at work.

State-owned enterprise (SOE) failures continue to burden the government of Ghana. During the 5-year period ending in 2012, the profits from these equity investments dropped by 80%. This study was an exploratory case study of how top-down, board-directed governance structure impact the control and ethical structure of special projects. Sixteen participants, comprised of managers, technicians, and board members, were recruited from 4 separate special projects in northern, central, and southern Ghana. Agency theory formed the conceptual framework for this study. Data collected from the face-to-face interviews and supporting documents were processed and analyzed to discern emergent themes. Through methodological triangulation, 5 main themes emerged including board influence on management and operations, operational and financial controls, ethical values, quality assurance, and motivation. The implications for positive social change include helping to reduce poverty within the local communities of Ghana through the creation of competitive projects that can sustain a productive workforce.

Employees may not give quality performance as the result of inadequately designed and poorly applied motivation programs. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies faith-based organizational leaders use to motivate employees to achieve sustainable organizational leadership. The population of the study was 11 leaders of a faith-based organization in western Birmingham, Alabama. The conceptual framework was the expectancy theory of motivation in which leadership styles and motivational strategies were explored. Data collection process involved semistructured face-to-face interviews, a focus group interview, and one policy and training manual. Data analysis process included mapping and coding by highlighting commonalities in phrases, descriptions, reactions, and common themes. Data saturation was achieved when responses were repetitive and no new insights emerged from data collected. The 3 themes that emerged from the research were lead by example, motivational strategies and leadership styles, and the effectiveness of motivational strategies. The findings of this research revealed inadequacies in leaders training employees and some inconsistencies in leaders communicating the overall vision to employees. Recommendations for leaders training employees of the faith-based organization are to develop written policies, purchase adequate training equipment, share the overall vision, and provide professional training for leaders from experts in the field of leadership. The implications for positive social change are for leaders to motivate young people who are members to volunteer to serve in the faith-based organization and for leaders to provide training that is useful and extends to business practices outside of the faith-based organization.

Registered nurse (RN) turnover is a significant threat to organizational performance and profitability. Nurse turnover impacts business practices by disrupting staffing and patient care. The inability of health care leaders to retain RNs in their organizations results in problems such as increased personnel costs and productivity loss. Grounded by Burns's transformational leadership theory, the purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies health care leaders used to improve RN retention. Health care leaders from Brooklyn, New York who implemented RN retention strategies in their organization comprised the population for the study. Data were collected through face-to-face semistructured interviews with 4 health care leaders and the review of hospital human resource documents. Data were analyzed using methodological triangulation, thematic analysis, and open-coding to identify patterns and themes. Three main themes emerged from the data analysis: supportive leadership improved RN retention, fostering teamwork improved RN retention, and effective communication improved RN retention. The application of the findings from this study may contribute to social change because health care leaders may use these strategies to improve RN retention and positively influence the productivity of the hospital workforce. Increasing the productivity of the workforce may lead to RN engagement and commitment, which may result in improved organizational growth, increased profitability, and quality medical care for individuals of the surrounding communities.

Problems like social inequality and shrinking biodiversity seem ever more unwieldy. Scholars are called upon to study how grand challenges like these develop and how organisations respond to them. Scholars and practitioners alike tend to focus on the received and ostensibly objective facts of these challenges, obfuscating the role actors play in socially constructing the very problems they purport to solve. Inspired by calls to better understand the nature of grand challenges and a growing body of research on how actors employ social-symbolic work (SSW) to shape the meaning of complex, contestable phenomena, I ask, how do actors engage in SSW as they grapple with grand challenges, and in doing so, how does SSW shape the tractability of these challenges? I conducted an in-depth, longitudinal ethnographic study of SSW in a state-run conservation agency as actors responded to two interlinked but separate challenges: an acute biodiversity crisis (rhino poaching) in its iconic Kruger National Park, and the slow-burning inequality problem affecting three million people near the park's boundary. Unlike existing studies of SSW that commonly focus on one form of work targeting one social-symbolic object, I find that bundles of SSW targeting imbricated social-symbolic objects - place, identity and temporality - gave challenges meaning. SSW also developed and maintained two distinct ontologies of nature that were compatible with problem framings and solutions, lending legitimacy to actors' novel practices. SSW had a strategic, deliberate outcome, rendering grand challenges into actionable objects accompanied by prescribed sets of solutions that were soon taken for granted. SSW also had an unintended outcome. It reduced grand challenges' tractability. As SSW shaped ontological assumptions and affective repertoires, and suppressed the detection of paradox, actors were dissuaded from finding novel solutions to grand challenges, a critical feature of successful efforts to make them tractable. I contribute to the grand challenges literature by explicating the role of SSW in the construction of not just the challenge itself, but also its tractability. I contribute to the SSW literature by providing an empirical case of actors aligning parallel bundles of work in a single organisation, and I show how this alignment undermines strategic coherence. Finally, whereas much extant work on SSW assumes its explicit, conscious, and purposive character, I point to the subtle, subliminal ways in which work shapes, and is shaped by, actors' moral and emotional dispositions.

The study primarily examined the macroeconomic and institutional factors constraining the flow of foreign private investment flows into Zimbabwe's manufacturing sector. The study further explored the benefits that accrue from private capital as a source of financing for Zimbabwe's manufacturing sector. Quantitative analysis was used to determine the macroeconomic and governance factors that have a significant impact on the flow on private capital into Zimbabwe. Using the Johansen cointegration trace and maximum eingen value test indicate the presence of a significant long-run relationship between foreign capital inflows and the predictor variables. The results indicated the presence of 5 integrating equations for the trace test and 3 cointegrating equations for the maximum eingen value test. The normalized coefficients, foreign private investment flows are significantly and positively impacted by infrastructure development, economic growth rate, and inflation (macroeconomic factors) and further by business freedom and government effectiveness (governance factors). GDP per capita was found to have a negative impact on foreign investment flows. Analysis of questionnaire data revealed that foreign private financing appeals highly to manufacturing companies but access to this source of funding is constrained by funding mismatches, high credit risk levels within the local manufacturing industry, a longer time lag, sanctions imposed on the country and high production costs. In terms of the benefits of foreign private capital over the traditional sources of funding, the study found that private capital improves company operations (capacity utilisation, export market penetration and productivity), improves technology usage, and boosts the target company's corporate image.

Those that come up with commercially viable ideas are often not the best suited to implement them. This can lead to allocational inefficacy in the deployment of good ideas. The transfer or licensing of patents is a means of commercializing ideas. However, in the current patent market, the idea seller and the idea buyer often don't match which results in the proliferation of adverse selection. This thesis examines the existing patent market and finds many examples of opacity. Pitfalls abound for both sellers and buyers which result in inefficiencies when attempting to find the best fit for seller and buyer. Improvements in allocating ideas to the best implementers would help inventors and companies alike. Brilliant ideas are frequently generated from universities. This thesis presents a means to commercialize these ideas by issuing licenses on the blockchain in an innovative marketplace for ideas. This commercialization of ideas generates funds that support the institution that originally conceived the ideas and indirectly supports foundational research. The marketplace for ideas is based on sealed bid auctions which ensure that the company that values the idea the most is allocated the license. An optional Harberger Tax system is included to generate constant revenue for the universities from the licensed ideas. This mechanism decreases information asymmetries, increases market liquidity and provides representative license pricing. Smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain are used to eliminate auction corruption through trustless sealed bid auctions. Smart contracts also automate license issuance, payments and act as a public ledger of license ownership and provenance. A full front-end web application is presented to interface with the marketplace for all users.

The purpose of this study is to examine the situation of milk supply as it occurred in the past as well as the present day market situation. The early efforts of milk organizations to deal with surplus milk and their methods have been compared with methods which are in use and which are proposed for use to regulate the present market.

Africa is short of power. Over the past decade, renewable energy auctions have emerged as an effective mechanism to competitively procure utility-scale private power projects. This thesis sought to analyse successful renewable energy auctions in sub-Saharan Africa and identify the elements contributing to efficient price and effective project realisation outcomes through comparative case studies in South Africa, Zambia and Namibia. The analysis of empirical data was deepened with reference to existing literature and theory on those elements that contribute to success in Independent Power Projects (IPPs), combined with that on renewable energy auction design and implementation. Project success is defined, from the host country perspective, as competitive project prices and timely project realisation. The literature on contributing elements to IPP success has focused mainly on country and project level factors and the literature on auction design and implementation on programme level factors. An integrated analytical framework that combines these bodies of literature has shown that the introduction of renewable energy auctions provides an essential programmatic element which connects existing country level factors (for example the investment climate, sector regulation, etc.) and project levels factors (for example, project finance and contracts) and is crucial in achieving superior project realisation and price outcomes. Auction price outcomes were mainly determined by factors that act as auction signals, barriers and incentives primarily geared towards increasing competition in the procurement process and lowering projects' cost of capital. These factors include setting and dividing auction volumes prudently over multiple rounds; building and maintaining bidders' trust in the auctioning authority and auction process; limiting auction participation to credible bidders; and ensuring that the contract being bid for is acceptable to lenders and backed by a secure revenue stream. The case studies showed that project realisation is determined by bidder quality, project preparation levels, investor commitment, constraints (revenue stream and political economy) and post-award support. These are influenced by factors from all three levels – country, project and programme – that act as auction signals, barriers, incentives and support measures. Finally, the case studies highlighted the pervasive influence of political economy elements – not included in the analytical framework - as determinative for longer-term auction outcomes