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The concept of industry transferring work to academia is developed and studied using multiple cases at three different university research sites. Industry sometimes partners with academia specifically to have academia perform work with certain equipments or obtain knowledge for the purpose of process, product or knowledge development. The term "non-traditional" technology transfer is introduced to describe this activity. Case studies using research faculty and their students as well as industry partners were conducted at two Engineering Research Centers and an engineering department of a relatively smaller institution that has developed an engineering clinic approach to research. The literature drawn upon includes: historical perspectives of the academia-industry technology transfer arena (including the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980), trends, the relationship between academic capitalism and technology transfer and the role played by technology transfer in environmental research. Findings of this study indicate that industry has, in some cases, chosen to have their collaborative research team partners accomplish work for them. Access to resultant data is difficult to obtain and has implications for the concept of academic freedom. Advantages of the technology transfer process include the generation of value for each of the project partners, education of graduate and undergraduate students and benefits to the public good in terms of the environment; disadvantages are identified but considered uncertain. Technology transfer, including the non-traditional type defined herein, can be used as a tool to overcome the reality of today's austere university budget environment; the Bayh-Dole Act has served as an enabler of that approach.

Globalization and the new knowledge economy have far-reaching implications for higher education mainly in the economic, political, social and technological aspects of knowledge production. Higher education institutions are the main providers of both knowledge and knowledge workers. While research and teaching are the main processes for producing knowledge at colleges and universities (Clark, 1983), information technology has been an enabling infrastructure for globalization and the main vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge as well as for facilitating knowledge in becoming a commodity (Altbach, 2006; Altbach & Teichler, 2001; McBurnie, 2001). This has led to the penetration of higher education institutions by market forces and the business sector. The commercial value of these knowledge assets in the new knowledge economy has brought economic, political, and social implications for higher education institutions. Now, they seek to strategically manage their organizational knowledge (Metcalfe, 2006; Trow, 2001). Information technology has become embedded in higher education's knowledge production and has led to reorganization of conventional academic structures, faculty work, and teaching practices.This research addresses diverse fields of study such as organizational change, sociology of organizations, and political economy of organizations, and focuses on a single developing country. The structurational model of technology, the power-process perspective of technology, the theory of academic capitalism, and the framework for strategic management of intellectual capital were joined in this study to examine: (a) the intellectual capital created through instructional production and delivery of information technology enhanced courses and its strategic management; and (b) the impact of information technology on the organization of higher education and faculty's academic work with regard to instructional production and delivery.Findings show that information technology is not regarded as an opportunity to develop intellectual capital; thus, dependency on foreign technology is favored. An academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime is still incipient in developing countries; therefore, intellectual property policies and commercialization of intellectual assets are new to higher education institutions. The vast majority of these institutions are teaching-oriented; hence, the incorporation of information technology has re-structured their organization and in turn had an impact on managerial capacity, academic work and the academic profession.

This dissertation is a qualitative investigation into international postdoctoral employment in life science and engineering fields at universities in the United States and United Kingdom. Data were gathered through 49 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with international postdocs, faculty members who have supervised international postdocs from abroad at two universities in the US and two universities in the UK. The number of postdoctoral appointments has increased dramatically over the past decade, as has the share of these appointees who come from aboard. Yet few studies have investigated what is underlying this growing trend. By examining interactions between structure and agency at local, global and national levels, this study explored the roles that international postdocs play in academic production and the process by which they become mobile. Theory on globalization, higher education policy and models of academic production guide this study. Findings show that international postdocs are becoming scientific employees, rather than trainees, who are incorporated into capitalist modes of academic production as low-cost, high-yield scientific workers. Universities and individual faculty members seek international postdocs because of their contributions to research production; however, few postdocs have the opportunity to move into tenure-tracked faculty jobs. For international postdocs, becoming mobile is an individual process that is often constructed by individuals who negotiate home country academic policies in a global academic market. Mobility is a multi-stage process that begins with the potential to become mobile and is realized by actual mobility, which occurs through a transnational space produced by international journals that define global science.

As the locus of cotton production shifted toward the newer southwestern states over the first half of the nineteenth century, the city of New Orleans became increasingly important to the slave-plantation economy of the U.S. South. Moreover, because of its location near the base of the enormous Mississippi River system, the city also thrived on the export of agricultural commodities from western states farther upriver. Handling this wide-ranging commerce was the city's business community: bankers, factors, and wholesalers, among others. This globally oriented community represented an older and qualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation, merchant capitalism, which was based on the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode of production to which it was closely allied, the New Orleans merchant community faced increasing pressure during the antebellum decades even while its fortunes seemed otherwise secure. The city lost most of its market share in western grain products to railroads and other routes linked directly to northeastern urban centers, and its merchants' failure to maintain port infrastructure or create a viable manufacturing sector reflected their complacency and left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing industrially-based economy of the North. These and other weaknesses were fatally exposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. As a result of many changes to the regional and national political economy after northern victory in the war, the New Orleans merchant community was never able to recover its previous commercial dominance, and the former first-rank American city quickly became a site of notorious political corruption and endemic poverty. Much the same can be said of the postbellum southern economy in which it was embedded, where the practices of merchant capitalism nevertheless managed to persist by becoming dispersed throughout the agricultural interior in the form of "country stores." Under the sharecropping system that became prevalent in cotton production, rural merchants furnished seasonal credit to the small farming households that had replaced plantation slavery. Although these stores played different roles in Louisiana cotton and sugar parishes, the culture of merchant capitalism hampered economic development in the South for many decades to come.

The study of prostitution in early modern England is often informed by incorrect terminology. The modern historiographical use of the term “prostitute” is misleading, as the term did not appear until the sixteenth century, and the act of selling sex did not come to dominate understandings of whoredom until many years later. This thesis examines the etymological history of the term “prostitute” and its cognates, and their changing legal, economic, and cultural meanings. This thesis investigates the intersection of late medieval and early modern conceptions of illicit sex with the rise of commercial capitalism to track the conceptual development of transactional sex as a commodity. Despite the influence of commercial capitalism on aspects of sexual immorality and developing conceptions of difference between paid and unpaid illicit sex, the primary division remained between chaste and unchaste women throughout the whole of the early modern period.

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This study also showed how inter-connected the world is because the global financial crisis started in one part of the world but affected every country worldwide. The global financial crisis made it necessary to revisit the writings of the British economist John Maynard Keynes who is considered one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and one of the fathers of modern macroeconomics. He advocated an interventionist form of government policy, believing markets left to their own devices could be destructive, leading to cycles of recessions, depressions and booms. That is what the world witnessed during the global financial crisis. Keynes ideas helped rebuild economies after World War II, until the 1970s when his ideas were abandoned for freer market systems. What then happened was regulation began to weaken as the world economies started to recover. This scenario is likely to repeat itself even when the financial crisis is over. Market capitalism is still going to dominate the world economies because in as much as transaction will be regulated but the behaviour of finance institutions will be difficult to regulate. During the period under review, the South African financial sector and the mining industry felt the impact of the global financial crisis as shown in this study. Despite signs of a turnaround in economic activity in South Africa, financial systems are still vulnerable to risk and a renewed loss of confidence. The adverse feedback effects from the real economy, therefore, remain a concern and present new challenges for safeguarding the stability of the global financial system. The global economic crisis offers an opportunity for South Africa to act and provide long term solutions. Strict regulation should be applied not only to the financial sector but to smaller business entities as well. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2011.

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