Architectural competitions are no longer simply professional praxis for architects and a recurrent exercise for students at schools of architecture. The competition has also turned into a field of research, and this book is part of an effort constituting the architectural competition as a field for studies with scholarly claims. The first doctoral dissertations on competitions were presented in the 1990s in Europe. Another clear manifestation of research interest is the growth and spread of scholarly conferences on architectural competitions.   The contributions to the book show in a convincing way that the architectural competition is an interesting and rewarding object for research. The competition processes bear rich empirical findings to which one may refer for knowledge about architecture as professional practice, as educational subject and research platform. The architectural competition illustrates processes of change in society that are technical and organizational as well as social; it shows up constructive dilemmas, the borderline of rationality and the relative, creative insecurity of knowledge production in architectural projects. / <p>QC 20130610</p>

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Résumé indisponible. / Résumé indisponible.

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The tourism industry has undergone consolidation through vertical and horizontal integration. Despite this consolidation integrated companies require support from outside of the integrated value chain. Non-integrated supporters are conflicted as the integrated companies requiring support are often direct competitors. The research methodology used to gather the required data was a qualitative research design. The 23 face-to-face interviews were conducted in South Africa, Germany and The United States of America at senior management level in non-integrated tourism organisations. Interviews were focused on the identification of factors which would cause or mitigate conflict, enhance trust and cooperation and would result in support of the integrated company. The questionnaire was designed and piloted by the researcher and the areas of importance identified through the literature were channel management, price, power, trust and cooperation. Twelve factors were identified which would minimise conflict, enhance trust and cooperation and result in support when consistently displayed. It became evident was required by companies outside of the integrated value chain was the improvement of existing competitive positions, strong relationships with the integrated company along with openness in negotiations and communications. Lastly, the integrated company was expected to behave in an ethical manner with reputation and the quality of the experiences offered being important factors when deciding if support would be given. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.

The main objective of this study is to examine the behavior of sellers in a sealed offer market in three distinct environments. The dissertation examines the mechanism to determine its competitive characteristics when sellers are unable to engage in overt communication. Next, the market setting is changed in order to consider the ability of sellers to form stable and effective cartels when the subjects are given the opportunity to conspire. Finally, the consequences of antitrust enforcement is considered. First, by reducing the number of communication episodes between sellers and second, by separately introducing random monetary penalties whenever the observed winning offer was greater than sellers cost. A secondary but significant contribution of this research was the use of prison inmates as subjects in economic experiments. Therefore, the financially motivated behavior of student subjects could be contrasted with prisoner subjects in a laboratory environment. This contrast proves extremely interesting when an antitrust environment, using randomly imposed monetary penalties, was introduced. The results of my research indicate, given equal constant cost suppliers, the sealed offer auction mechanism has the potential to generate very competitive behavior by sellers when communication between subjects is prohibited. However, in an identical environment, when conspiratorial opportunities exist prior to every auction, one observes very stable and effective cartels. These first two conclusions are insensitive to the subject pool under consideration (i.e., student versus prisoner subjects). When the frequency of communication is reduced (i.e., as a result of antitrust enforcement) the market is still conducive to effective collusion. However, in comparison to the experiments where subjects were allowed to communicate prior to every auction, the cartel in this environment were more unstable and less effective at extracting monopoly profit from the market. Finally, when antitrust enforcement is introduced by imposing random monetary penalties whenever the observed winning offer is greater than seller cost, the behavior of sellers is extremely sensitive to the expected returns from collusion as well as the dispersion of these returns. Also, the cartels collusive behavior indicated that students were risk averse, responded more to changes in the severity of the penalty specification (the penalty amount) while the prisoner cartels were risk takers, being more sensitive to changes in the certainty of the penalty specification (the detection level).

The following investigation develops a critique of Competitive Ballroom Dancing as a social phenomenon from an anthropological perspective and that of a non-dancer. In order to do this the thesis is concerned with interrelating dance with anthropology. The concepts of how people express themselves and communicate in society provide the study with the scope to explore certain issues. The first aspect shows how a person would prepare to be a dancer in competition, this involves, among other things, learning to dance, finding a suitable partner and the overall appearance of the dancer. Secondly looking at competition, which involves sport and dance, judgement and perception of how the dancers and spectators view it. The embodied content of the competitive dancer is seen as an important issue, since it can affect how the dancers dance and how the dance is perceived, despite the fact that competitive ballroom dancing is such a highly formal, structured and rule-governed form of dance. Ritual and performance theories integrating emic and etic tendencies are juxtaposed with what appears to happen in this form of dance. In addition various types of altered state of mind are examined, in view of comments made by dancers about how they feel when dancing. Furthermore this thesis explores an understanding of how important this form of dancing is to its participants and how the activity can be a life-long pursuit whether as a dancer or subsequently as a spectator. It also illustrates the extent to which younger people enjoy an activity where there is great emphasis on being fit and how they have come to link it with sport.

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This thesis is a descriptive study investigating the perceptions of 380 debaters and 95 judges at seven collegiate debate tournaments. The study examined debater/ judge agreement in terms of win/loss, speaker ratings and criteria important in the debate decision. A Kappa index and Pearson product-moment correlation were used to analyze the data.The findings indicated that debaters and judges do not tend to perceive the debate decision, speaker ratings or important criteria similarly.