Thesis (D.R.E.)--Temple Baptist Seminary, 1998. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-61).

Thesis (D. Phil. Communication Management)--University of Pretoria, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-233).

In response to competitive and economic pressures, an increasing number of manufacturing firms are adding services to their traditional product offerings. However, companies are confronted with an arduous undertaking, and find it difficult to servitize successfully and profitably. This thesis investigates the transformation that traditional manufacturers undergo to become providers of integrated products and services, a phenomenon known as servitization. Servitization is considered a strategic re-direction of the manufacturing organisation and a major challenge for senior management. The purpose of this study is to provide better understanding of the change that occurs when a manufacturer attempts servitization. The study adopts a qualitative theory building approach to investigate an under-researched phenomenon and a major managerial challenge. It follows a strategy of engaged scholarship to understand a complex organisational problem. The research utilised multiple case studies, action research, and focus groups to tackle a problem with significance to industry. The findings reveal the nature of servitization as a complex transformative change which exposes the manufacturing company to its environment in new ways, and closely interlinks the organisation with a network of stakeholders through new dependencies. The transformation of traditional manufacturers towards servitized organisations is multi-dimensional and goes through eleven dimensions of transformation across the organisation and its network. In addition, thirty nine forces of change were found to influence the outcome of servitization, and were categorised into three sets of change drivers for servitization. The results of the study led to the formation of a model for transformation towards a servitized organisation for use by industry practitioners to roadmap and facilitate their organisation‟s shift towards services. The model represents a novel approach to managing servitization. This research has addressed a literature gap and met an industrial need, and has made a significant contribution to knowledge about the change that traditional manufacturers experience to become servitized organisations.

This thesis is about how systems thinking might contribute to the successful management of change (MOC). The motivation is the increasing importance of MOC in an environment where competition and internationalisation of markets are ever intensifying: organisations either "change or die", yet MOC suffers adversely with unacceptably high failure rates. A critique of MOC literature shows that current MOe methodology is characterised by reductionist approaches with a diversity of confusing and contradictory suggestions and recipes. This is seen to be impoverished where different types of organisational change are interacting. All these suggest that MOC methodology itself needs to be improved and a systemic approach is more appropriate. In search of methodological underpinnings for proposing a systemic approach to MOC, literature on systems thinking is reviewed, indicating that systems approaches, especially critical systems thinking, are potentially powerful to inform the development of MOC. Nevertheless, important questions are raised about applying systems ideas to MOC. Further research is needed. And this has been done by triangulating data, theory and method to develop a fuller understanding of systems perspectives and their relevance to MOC. By combining MOC and systems thinking together in a theoretically informed way, a systemic MOC framework is suggested and revised. This framework is seen to provide a characterisation of MOC by identifying the conceptual components, a coherent theoretical structure by specifying and ordering the relationships between these components, and a way of helping understand and manage the diversity in organisational change systemically. This framework is theoretically underpinned and applied to a case study where different types of organisational change and their interactions are surfaced. The outcomes firmly support the view that MOe is characterised by different types of organisational change and their interactions, for which systemic approaches are more appropriate; thus the systemic MOC framework developed is seen to be useful in helping understand and manage organisational change more effectively. The findings are critiqued within the study, and from this come out the conclusions, and recommendations for future research.

The aim of this study is to examine the role of teacher as agent for change in the school environment after the provision of in-service teacher training. Ministry of Education provides in-service teacher training in collaboration with the International English Language Education Association (INGED- Turkish acronym- for short) in order to keep English language teachers up to date and adapt to the changing nature of the modern world. To what extent in-service teacher training enables teachers perform as leaders, whether they act as agents for change and more importantly whether teachers contribute to school improvement are the areas that this study conducts a research on. Qualitative research method was employed in this study. Data were collected through interviews in two phases in the city of &Ccedil / anakkale. Phase 1 took place during the Ministry of National Education in-service teacher training seminar, Phase 2 was after six months of the seminar. Sample in the first phase was v made up of 19 course participants, in the second phase the sample contained both 19 course participants and their 38 peers and 10 principals. Findings revealed that some teachers who work in a more democratic school environment were enabled with their change agentry roles as their principals created a flexible institutional culture. However, teachers who work in more rigid and centralized work environment were not given the freedom for applying the ideas that they were encouraged through in-service teacher training. This shows that on the one hand even one shot in-service teacher education contributes to teacher development in building change agents by raising teacher awareness on her subject knowledge and role but on the other hand to practice leadership and change agent role very much depends on the school culture.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Bethel Seminary, St. Paul, MN, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 182-186).

Thesis (D.R.E.)--Temple Baptist Seminary, 1998. / Abstract. This is an electronic reproduction of TREN, #010-0059. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-61).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Bethel Seminary, St. Paul, MN, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 182-186).

The thesis aims at change-point estimation in gradual change models. Methods avail- able in literature are reviewed and modified for point-of-stabilisation (PoSt) context, present e.g. in drug continuous manufacturing. We describe in detail the estimation in the linear PoSt model and we extend the methods to quadratic and Emax model. We describe construction of confidence intervals for the change-point, discuss their interpre- tation and show how they can be used in practice. We also address the situation when the assumption of homoscedasticity is not fulfilled. Next, we run simulations to calculate the coverage of confidence intervals for the change-point in discussed models using asymp- totic results and bootstrap with different parameter combinations. We also inspect the simulated distribution of derived estimators with finite sample. In the last chapter, we discuss the situation when the model for the data is incorrectly specified and we calculate the coverage of confidence intervals using simulations. 1

Thesis (D.Min.)--Asbury Theological Seminary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-210).