Although the scholarship on organizational fields has prevalently focused on emerging, mature and disrupted fields, some social arenas cannot be classified in any of these categories. One such field is that of social entrepreneurship. Despite its progressive establishment and the development of shared norms, understandings, regulations and values governing all of its players, this field still presents unclear boundaries, multiple conceptions, and a high ambiguity in terms of legitimate roles, practices and organizational forms. How can this be the case? The work of some scholars shows that meso-level factors are required to explain the peculiarity of this field. This study builds on their findings and uses the social entrepreneurship field in England as setting to explore how institutional agents can favour the creation of a fragmented field and successfully operate in it. Influencing a fragmented field requires both the creation and the maintenance of a coalition of key stakeholders supporting the enactment of the desired institutional architecture over time. Therefore, this research explores what organizations do to maintain the support of multiple stakeholders in competitive settings and to use the advantages that this creates for sustaining the co-existence of their desired field's conception and institutional architecture with competing ones. Given the advantages that brokers have in such settings and in pursuing such a strategy, this work makes use of the well-developed literature on brokerage strategies, which focuses on tertius gaudens and tertius iungens strategic orientations, and connects it with that on institutional agency. By using as case studies four brokering agencies active in the social entrepreneurship field in England, this study discovers that combinations of gaudens and iungens strategic orientations, when used by institutional agents, can help them create and sustain over time their sub-field in face of competition. Furthermore, it explores how the co-existence of multiple organizations adopting complementary brokerage strategies as institutional ones, can lead to the creation of a permanently fragmented field. Together, these findings contribute to develop the literature on brokerage, on institutional agency - especially in relation to fragmented fields - and that on social entrepreneurship.

Cette thèse se propose d'étudier une activité et des organisations singulières, le brokerage et les sociétés d'intermédiation financière de type Prestataire de Service en Investissement - encore appelée récemment société de bourse - sur EURONEXT France. L'idée est d'éclairer, à partir des pratiques des acteurs qui y sont impliqués et leurs interactions avec leur environnement, le processus de formation de la stratégie entendu comme agir stratégique ou « strategizing » dans la perspective de la Strategy-as- Practice. Ce type d'organisation, inséré dans le système financier aujourd'hui très prégnant économiquement et socialement, nous semble particulièrement intéressant car au centre de développements en microstructure et en sociologie de la finance mais peu observé du point de vue du management stratégique. Il est soumis à des transformations importantes depuis deux décennies ayant pour conséquences, plus ou moins apparentes, des tensions internes voire des dérapages. / The aim is to contribute to the research agenda of “Strategy As Practice” taking a practice perspective and showing how practitioners are also engaged in the creation process or strategizing for their own professions and their institutional positions. After a long period of stability, the French stock exchange environment and its associated practices have, for over two decades now, co-evolved very quickly. One category of stock market professionals has been particularly impacted: the brokers, historically at the heart of the Stock Exchange. On French financial markets, the former agents de change have become brokerage companies with some disruptions of professions and an increasing place for others and their practices. If the usefulness of brokerage as an intermediation activity has been examined by finance, interesting developments in the sociology of finance have also enabled the social construction perspective but there is a lack of studies in the strategic management.

My research examines the importance of a particular form of cross-group brokerage in social networks wherein a person represents a bridge between his or her group and people belonging to a different group. Prior research on network brokerage and leadership emergence has failed to distinguish between brokerage in general and the kind of boundary-spanning between groups that is the focus of my research. Moreover, what we currently know about social network brokerage and leadership emergence comes either from highly abstracted laboratory-based work, or it comes research in relatively traditional work organizations with clear formal structures. It is unclear whether prior research from traditional organizational settings can be applied to nontraditional organizations in the so-called “creative industries,” which are the focus of my research. The core hypotheses my research examines are: (1) Do individuals whose friendship networks help them bridge between groups emerge as leaders in the eyes of others? And (2) Are people who are socially perceptive and socially skilled better at leveraging such boundary-spanning positions to win nominations of leadership from others? Data from the study come from interview and survey data from four different musical orchestras based in Korea.

Real estate brokerage has gradually progressed from growth to maturity since management regulations were executed. Since the government has ensured consumer rights by legislations, the confidence of consumers in real estate brokerage has been greatly enhanced. The success ratio of real estate cases has therefore increased. In addition, for the past two years, the economy has been recovering and the government has continued in its policy of subsidizing house loan interest. Real estate brokerage has therefore been highly prosperous for these two years. The internet has developed rapidly, and it is changing transaction modes in many industries with its low costs and capacity for rapid information transfer. It also puts industry leaders in a stronger position. The rules of the game have changed in industry. Corporations have to reevaluate business modes affected by the internet and consider the resultant changes. The character of real estate usually complicates transactions and thus influences the actions of buyers and sellers. The transaction therefore has many variables. Moreover the buyers are not aware of all of these variables. The brokers usually take advantage of the buyers¡¦ relative ignorance for their own professional gain. What is the brokers¡¦ advantage in this situation of information disparity? How do they utilize this advantage? In this study these questions will first be clarified and expounded. It will then be investigated whether the influence of the internet will lessen the need for professional intermediation or the brokers¡¦ information advantage. Finally comparisons will be made between the pre- and post-Internet world. Sinyi Realty Inc. is the only listed real estate company in Taiwan at present. According to Commonwealth Magazine market survey Sinyi Realty Inc. is the most trusted and best-known company in real estate brokerage. It even has the highest sales figures in the industry. In addition Sinyi Realty Inc. is the only real estate company ranking in the Taiwan Top 500. For these reasons it has been singled out as a case study for in-depth research in order to evaluate the possible influence of the Internet now and in the future. This study will begin with the analysis of Sinyi Realty Inc.¡¦s development background and competitive advantages followed by the internal and external changes arising from the Internet¡¦s influence. Finally the potential advantages, disadvantages risks, and opportunities will be studied and analyzed. It is hoped this study can act as a reference for real estate brokers as they formulate their development strategies in the Internet-influenced world of the future.

The real estate brokerage has the lowest barrier to enter in and withdraw from the industry of the real estate. The competition of the real estate brokerage is fierce; therefore the formulation of brokerage¡¦s marketing strategy will affect the speed of transaction. The transaction in metropolitan and non-metropolitan area affected by the orientation of product, execution of government authority, the habits or taboos of buying real estate, household income, transaction price, service pattern, and groups of purchasing real estate...etc, these make the implement of marketing strategy is somewhat different. The implement of marketing strategy of different real estate broker will also impact the management performance. ¡§Service¡¨, will be the guidance to formulate marketing strategy for the future development of real estate brokerage. This research explores the difference and similarity of marketing strategy of real estate brokerage in metropolitan and non-metropolitan area through the application of the marketing strategy from ¡§Good Morning Real Estate¡¨.

This dissertation introduces and illuminates the phenomenon of cultural brokerage-- the act of managing cross-cultural interactions in multicultural teams. Across four studies, I develop and test a theoretical model of cultural brokerage, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. I find that members of multicultural teams who have relatively more cross-cultural experience actively engage in cultural brokerage, even without being appointed to do so. Specifically, cultural insiders (those who have deep knowledge of the culture of the other members on the team) and cultural outsiders (those who have deep knowledge of multiple cultures other than the ones represented in the rest of the team) both engage in cultural brokerage, albeit in different ways. Insiders are more likely than outsiders to broker by directly resolving cultural issues; outsiders are more likely to broker by facilitating interactions. Both types of brokerage enhance team effectiveness. A key insight of this dissertation is that while cultural outsiders are generally perceived as being far less valuable than cultural insiders, they are actually equally effective in improving team performance, and even outperform insiders when it comes to enhancing certain aspects of team viability. This work contributes to the literatures on global teams, multicultural individuals, and creativity. In addition, it provides practical implications for effectively composing and managing multicultural teams.

Mobile Telecom Cloud (MTC) refers to cloud services provided by mobile telecommunication companies. Since mobile network operators support the last-mile Internet access to users, they have advantages over other cloud providers by providing users with better mobile connectivity and required quality of service (QoS). The dilemma in meeting higher QoS demands while saving cost poses a big challenge to MTC providers. We tackle this challenge by strategically placing users' data in distributed switching centres to minimize the total system cost and maximize users' satisfaction. We formulate and solve the optimization problems using linear programming (LP) based branch-and-bound and LP with rounding. Furthermore, we discuss MTC brokerage which allows MTC providers to act as a brokerage to broker third-party cloud providers' (TPC) cloud resources and integrate the resources reserved from TPC with those of their own MTC. We address the technical challenges of optimally allocating users' cloud requests to MTC and TPC data centres to meet users' QoS requirement with minimum cost. We also study the price range that can be profitable to a MTC brokerage. We then investigate the resource reservation problem with dynamic request changes. We evaluate our solution using real Google traces collected over a 29-day period from a Google cluster. We also address security provisioning in MTC. Mobile cloud allows users to offload computational intensive applications to a mobile phone's agent in the cloud, which could be implemented as a thin virtual machine (VM), also termed as phone clone. Due to shared hardware components among co-resident VMs, a VM is subject to covert channel attacks and may potentially leak information to other VMs located in the same physical host. We design SWAP: a security aware provisioning and migration scheme for phone clones. We evaluate our solution using the Reality Mining and the Nodobo dataset. Experimental results indicate that our algorithms are nearly optimal for phone clone allocation and are effective in maintaining low risk and minimizing the number of phone clone migrations. / Graduate / 0984

Recently, companies are adopting Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) to efficiently deliver enterprise services to users (or consumers) on their personalized devices. MCC is the facilitation of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, notebooks, and smart watches) to access virtualized services such as software applications, servers, storage, and network services over the Internet. With the advancement and diversity of the mobile landscape, there has been a growing trend in consumer attitude where a single user owns multiple mobile devices. This paradigm of supporting a single user or consumer to access multiple services from n-devices is referred to as the Ubiquitous Cloud Computing (UCC) or the Personal Cloud Computing. In the UCC era, consumers expect to have application and data consistency across their multiple devices and in real time. However, this expectation can be hindered by the intermittent loss of connectivity in wireless networks, user mobility, and peak load demands. Hence, this dissertation presents an architectural framework called, Cloud Services Brokerage for Mobile Ubiquitous Cloud Computing (CSB-UCC), which ensures soft real-time and reliable services consumption on multiple devices of users. The CSB-UCC acts as an application middleware broker that connects the n-devices of users to the multi-cloud services. The designed system determines the multi-cloud services based on the user's subscriptions and the n-devices are determined through device registration on the broker. The preliminary evaluations of the designed system shows that the following are achieved: 1) high scalability through the adoption of a distributed architecture of the brokerage service, 2) providing soft real-time application synchronization for consistent user experience through an enhanced mobile-to-cloud proximity-based access technique, 3) reliable error recovery from system failure through transactional services re-assignment to active nodes, and 4) transparent audit trail through access-level and context-centric provenance.

Public employment services are provided in all developed economies, justified on the basis of a public interest in efficient, effective operation of national labour markets. Although such countries adopt different approaches to delivering these services each offers what I refer to as ‘the three essential roles of a public employment service’. These are labour exchange services, providing job brokerage to labour market participants to enhance the efficiency of the labour market; an equity role, offering assistance to disadvantaged jobseekers to improve their prospects of employment; and a ‘compliance monitoring role’ which contributes to maintaining the integrity of the welfare system by detecting welfare abuse. Informed by a body of research on policies and practices in the OECD I construct a model of a notional public employment service incorporating these three essential roles that I call ‘an OECD model’. The Job Network, an early policy reform of a newly-elected Coalition government, appeared to replicate ‘the OECD model’, insofar as it performed brokerage, offered equity measures and conducted invigilation of welfare compliance. However, it differed from its predecessor, the CES, in two significant respects. First it was created by the bureaucracy as a new ‘market’ in which all employment services were purchased through a competitive tending process from private sector providers; in this, it was unique in the OECD. Second, rather than offering prescribed employment programs and services designed by public officials, private providers were free to determine the needs of clients (within broadly-defined service categories) and devise their own strategies to achieve contractually-defined ‘outcomes’ for which they would be paid. Services were focused particularly on disadvantaged jobseekers who were expected to receive personalised assistance tailored to overcome their complex or multiple barriers to employment. The purpose of my thesis is to discover whether the Job Network (in the period from its inception to the end of the second contract) was an OECD model, by which I mean whether its three roles were conceptualised, constructed and delivered in ways that enabled them to perform the same functions as the three essential roles of the OECD model. I see this question as involving two distinct, but interrelated issues. First, I am concerned to discover whether the three roles of the Job Network share the objectives and priorities of their counterparts in the OECD model, positing that these will shape the design of services. Second, informed by a body of literature which draws attention to a range of issues emerging from privatisation of public services, I consider the impacts that private delivery had on the design and implementation of its services. iv I approach this task from a qualitative perspective to explore assumptions and priorities underpinning the political construction of the issues deemed to require policy intervention and the responses to these as reflected in the design and implementation of services, noting the effects of practices on service recipients. I argue that, together, these are the determinants of the Job Network’s policy objectives and capacities. I take as my data the political discourse, bureaucratic texts, interview materials and texts of service recipients that I have gathered to investigate, in turn, each of the three roles of the Job Network using tools and techniques from the broader field of discourse analysis, selecting those most appropriate to the nature of the data. My analysis concludes that the Job Network’s three roles do not reflect those of the OECD model, first because they are predicated on different policy objectives and second, because privatisation of service delivery affected the design of its services and the priorities of service providers in ways that undermined its capacity to perform the ‘essential roles’. The evidence suggests that ideological-based assumptions and preferences of a conservative government steered the Job Network towards prioritising its role in compliance monitoring, positioning it as a tool of welfare reform rather delivering interventions to enhance efficiency or equity in the labour market such as those predicated of the OECD model.

Les plates-formes publiques d’accès aux contenus culturels sont aujourd’hui marginales au regard du développement mondial des plates-formes privées. Le modèle du courtage informationnel permet d’observer et de décrire ces plates-formes en analysant la fonction centrale d’intermédiation et son positionnement vis-à-vis de l’amont et de l’aval de la plateforme elle-même. L’analyse des services géoCulture permet de qualifier ces formes publiques de courtage informationnel et de les différencier des plates-formes privées. Remplissant des missions de service public, les plates-formes étudiées se caractérisent par une forte volonté de coopération entre les acteurs et d’éditorialisation des contenus. Leur développement reste cependant freiné par la poursuite d’objectifs divergents voire contradictoires. En particulier,l’objectif d’animer une communauté de contributeurs l’emporte sur l’objectif de développement des usages, alors que ce dernier reste la priorité absolue des plates-formes privées. / Public access platforms to cultural content are today marginal in comparison to the global development of private access platforms. The model of informational brokerage enables us to observe and describe these platforms by analysing the central function of intermediation and its positioning with the actors upstream and downstream the platform itself. The analysis of geoCulture services makes it possible to qualify these public forms of information brokerage and to differentiate them from private platforms. Fulfilling public service missions, the platforms studied are characterized by a strong desire for cooperation between the actors and the editorialization of content. However, their development remains restrained by the pursuit of divergent, perhaps even contradictory, goals. More precisely, the objective of moderating acommunity of contributors prevails on the development of usages, where as the latter remains the ultimate priority of private platforms.