The entrepreneurship dynamism of a country is the center of Schumpeter’s creativedestruction process and virtuous circle, in which new and innovative companies enteringthe market drive the obsolete and less productive ones out of the market. As aconsequence of this process, the market is improved and it incentivizes the creation ofinnovative solutions to solve problems. The study focuses on the pivotal function of theentries in this process. To better understand the creation of new ventures process the study investigates how thecontextual factors impact the entrepreneur’s decision of starting a new business, focusingon two business environments: Sweden and Brazil. Through interviews with Swedish andBrazilian entrepreneurs we analyze how entrepreneurs perceive the contextual factors andhow it impacted their new venture creation process. Through the literature we find that the business environment is composed by seven majorfactors that, with an extended framework based on literature review, we consider as:economic wealth, government policies and procedures, legal & administrative, society’sculture; network and knowledge; financial assistance; and non-financial assistance. Analyzing the empirical material about the business environments we find that Swedishand Brazilian entrepreneurs feel the influence of the different contextual factors inbusiness creation but do not always understand their causes. Our findings show that theseven contextual factors do not have the same level of influence in Sweden and Braziland often depend on the environment. However, for entrepreneurs in both two contextualfactors have a pivotal impact: network and financial assistance. This study contributes to the theory by providing a more detailed extended framework tostudy the influence of contextual factors on the process of starting a new business.Furthermore, this research also contributes by providing empirical evidence of Swedishand Brazilian entrepreneurs’ perceptions of their business environment and the influenceof the contextual factors.

The primary aim of this study has been to investigate contextual factors that affect the adolescent’s (especially the young girl’s) risk with regard to HIV/AIDS infection and the implications thereof for education. Initially it was important to conduct an orientational background analysis to provide the necessary background material. The investigation revealed that the number of people living with HIV/AIDS continues to increase and that life expectancy in South Africa may drop dramatically. A further fact that became apparent is that more girls are living with HIV/AIDS than their male counterparts. The important role of the school as an institution serving society and its important role in the prevention of HIV/AIDS infection emerged very clearly in this study. The fact that the school should address the contextual factors that increase the risk of the young girl with regard to HIV/AIDS infection gave rise to the formulation of the primary research problem: Which contextual factors affect the adolescent’s (especially the young girl’s) risk to become HIV/AIDS infected and what are the possible implications for education? Chapter 2 presented a study of the influence of parenting styles and the possible ways in which these might predispose the adolescent (especially the young girl) to HIV/AIDS infection. Other aspects of the family in contemporary society such as its vulnerability and deterioration were investigated with regard to the possible predisposing of girls to become HIV/AIDS infected. The focus in this chapter also included gender inequalities, perceptions of traditional gender roles, and physiological factors that might increase the risk of the young girl with regard to HIV/AIDS infection. In Chapter 3 the socio-economical situation of women and young girls and the manner in which this increases their risk to HIV/AIDS infection was investigated. It became apparent that socio-economic factors such as poverty, violence against women, sexual behaviour and prostitution, as well as conflict and displacement increase the young girl’s risk with regard to HIV/AIDS infection. In Chapter 4 several implications that the adolescent’s (and especially the young girl’s) risk with regard to HIV/AIDS infection poses to education were discussed. This chapter also focused on challenges for the educational manager and educators with regard to effective management of schools that may be severely affected by HIV/AIDS. This chapter is concluded with a suggested framework for developing and implementing an HIV/AIDS policy for schools in an effort to prevent HIV/AIDS infection. Chapter 5 concludes this study with a reflection upon the findings of the study and a presentation of specific recommendations that may contribute towards reducing the risk of the adolescent (especially the young girl) with regard to HIV/AIDS infection. / Dissertation (MEd (Curriculum Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Curriculum Studies / unrestricted

This thesis will discuss the results of a two-year 90 game study to consider the role violence and aggression plays in competitive minor hockey and its role as a mechanism for injury. The second objective of this thesis was to determine the contextual factors that lead to injury on the ice. Using a mixed methods approach, the study followed three minor hockey teams from the Ottawa-Gatineau region over two sporting seasons. The study found that players are not being injured due to aggressive or violent play but rather players are being hurt within the rules of the game. The contextual factors that were shown to lead to injury included: (1) body-checking, (2) time of the game, (3) player’s body mass, (4) position played and (5) legal plays. Injuries were also broken down by anatomical site (head/neck, upper body and lower body); the upper body was affected by injury most.

Numerous occupation-based models and several authors have mentioned the importance for occupational therapists of taking into account the effect of, in particular, the individual environment on people‘s participation in occupations, during their assessments and treatment. Recent developments within the profession, relating to the terms 'occupational deprivation,' 'occupational justice,' and 'occupational apartheid' have further urged therapists to also consider the structural environment, its effects and ways of countering those effects; not only for individuals, but for entire communities, and not only for people living with disabilities, but for all people. In addition, the development of the World Health Organisation‘s international classification of functioning, disability and health has given health care providers a useful tool for considering various aspects of the environment and their possible health consequences; though the interaction between the various factors and their effect on participation isn‘t clearly described. Several experiences in communities of people living in poverty, both during my under-graduate studies and during my community service year, led me to consider the effect of environmental factors on the creative participation of people. Though the Vona du Toit Model of Creative Ability did acknowledge the possible effect of the environment on individuals‘ creative capacity, it failed in providing an explanation for what I was seeing. Du Toit had suggested that the effects of the environment on people should be thoroughly tested and other authors seemed to agree. Thus, this autoethnographic research study aimed to explore how internal and external factors impacted on the creative participation of people living in an inner city slum. Drawing from the experiences of a purposive, illustrative and opportunistic sample, and through passive- and participant observations, I took a glimpse into the sub-culture within, and the perceived impact of the environment on people‘s creative participation, making no claims on generalisation. The results of this study indicate that occupational therapists have underestimated the effect of the environment in terms of the range of factors that have an effect on people‘s creative participation, the complexity of the interplay between the structural- and individual environment and the importance of the perceived environment. / Dissertation (MOccTher)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Occupational Therapy / unrestricted

Background The Middle East is a region that consists of 17 countries: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Cyprus, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia (Pariona, 2020). Due to the persistent presence of old social and cultural structures, inequality remains a problem within the region. Every day, females in the region are faced with discrimination in various forms - something which becomes evident in the existing statistics, which show that only 28 percent of all females in the MENA region are economically active (Hattab, 2012).    However, it has been possible to identify improvements within the development of society as well as in the work to counteract inequality. Hence, it becomes increasingly important to gain a greater understanding of the region as a whole as well as gain knowledge regarding the existing challenges that female entrepreneurs experience.    Purpose The purpose of this research is to gain an understanding of the different challenges that female entrepreneurs face when launching, managing, and developing a business in the Middle East region.    Method This research is a qualitative study in which an abductive approach has been used. Therefore, the conclusions will be drawn from the empirical findings in combination with the results in the existing literature. Furthermore, in order to obtain high-quality and truthful data, a case-study with a semi-structured interview technique was used. All six interviews were later analysed by all researchers individually as well as jointly in order to ensure that no important information was lost.    Conclusion Based on the empirical findings in combination with the existing literature, three contextual factors were identified as the main challenges of female entrepreneurs when operating in the Middle East region. The following contextual challenges were identified: 1) Lack of Finance, 2) Lack of Support, and 3) Discrimination.

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This degree project aims to investigate how teachers negotiate their teaching practices and what determines their choice of working methods when it comes to teaching vocabulary. Since we are interested in teachers’ thoughts and opinions regarding vocabulary teaching, a selection of English teachers were interviewed. Our theoretical background is rooted in Nation’s (2001) theories on what it means to know a word, Schmitt’s (2000, 2007) theories on how vocabulary is acquired and on Lundahl’s (2012, 2014) perspectives on traditions in the English classroom. Additionally we used research articles for our analysis of the results. The results from our findings indicate that vocabulary is being taught in both a revised traditional- and a non-traditional way. Our results also show that education and contextual factors influence how teachers teach vocabulary. From our results, we can conclude that our informants teach vocabulary for communicative purposes, but that there is a considerable difference in their approach to vocabulary learning. In addition, we can also conclude that the informants all expressed the need for further professional development in English, and that there is a need for more research on how contextual factors affect teachers in their work.

Background: Individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders are unemployed or underemployed at staggering rates. Employment for this population is impacted by many factors, including contextual issues. This review was conducted to enhance understanding of contextual factors influencing employment procurement for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. Methodology: The Arksey and O’Malley scoping review framework was utilized to examine five databases and sources of grey literature regarding the contextual factors influencing employment procurement for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. Articles were analyzed using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health criteria for Contextual Factors, including both Environmental and Personal Factors. Results: The findings from 41 articles indicate that Contextual Factors, Environmental Factors and Personal Factors influence employment procurement by creating both barriers and facilitators to obtaining employment for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. Conclusion: A focus on contextual factors that impact individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders may provide further insight into the facilitators and barriers influencing employment outcomes. Further research should aim to understand the strength of relationships and to expand the use and application of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health’s biopsychosocial framework. This research can aid in promoting the employment outcomes for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Critical success factors (CSFs) are those things that must be done correctly for a project to be successful; however, CSFs are not sufficient by themselves to guarantee success. CSFs, as identified in the literature, vary from study to study. In addition, previous studies have not typically included contextual details for the projects studied. As a result, it is difficult to know how the particulars of a project impact (or not) CSFs. Researchers have suggested that CSFs can be affected by contextual details. Knowledge about the effect of contextual factors on CSFs would allow organizational leaders and project managers to more effectively use resources to achieve project success. Enterprise system implementation projects have exhibited high failure rates. Both Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Electronic Health Record (EHR) system implementations have proven to be challenging for organizations. For enterprise system implementation projects, a variety of contextual factors may be important. Examples of contextual factors include the number of software modules implemented, the number of sites undergoing implementation, the geographic dispersion of the sites, the number of people in the organization, and the percentage of personnel in the organization whose daily tasks are disrupted by the new enterprise system. This research was designed to shed light on the role of contextual factors on CSFs for enterprise system implementation projects. A survey was created to evaluate the effects of contextual factors on CSF ratings. The survey included questions related to 17 CSFs, 14 of the CSFs included in the study have been well-cited in the project management literature. Three additional CSFs were also included in the study to capture important elements of change management, which more recent studies have shown to be relevant to enterprise system implementations. The survey included questions related to eight contextual variables for ERP projects and 11 contextual variables for EHR system projects. The research focused on small to medium-size organizations, which have been less studied than larger organizations. The target respondents for the survey were enterprise system (ERP or EHR) project managers from software companies or consulting firms and government project managers whose implementation projects were within six months of completion. Data were collected on 17 ERP projects and 26 EHR system implementation projects in 43 different organizations. The survey data and subsequent analyses provided evidence that EHR system implementation projects are impacted by contextual factors. The results for the ERP implementations are not conclusive. The results suggest that contextual factors should be taken into consideration when determining how best to manage enterprise system implementations. In addition, the results of this research did not support previous research findings, which indicated that similar CSFs exist for ERP and EHR system projects. CSFs were found to vary substantially in a number of key areas, especially with respect to training. The User Training and Support CSF for the ERP projects included in this study was rated less important than prior research results suggest (Finney & Corbett, 2007). One of two CSFs included in the survey to capture change management requirements, Early Adopter/Super-user, was found to be an important CSF for the ERP projects included in this study. The EHR system projects were found to be affected by contextual factors, with nine different instances of significant relationships identified between individual CSFs and one or more contextual factor. Eight of the 17 CSFs for the EHR system implementation projects in this study were affected by contextual factors. Contextual factors impacted the ERP and EHR system implementations quite differently, suggesting that more research is needed to better understand the phenomenon leading to these differences. The findings from this research can be used by organizational leaders and project managers to more effectively achieve project success. These results provide project managers and organizational leaders in small and medium-size organizations with a much deeper and relevant understanding of the factors that are most important to manage in successfully implementing either ERP or EHR system projects. As this study focused on small and medium-size organizations and both ERP and EHR system implementation projects, the findings are relevant across a wide range of organizations. As smaller organizations have not typically been the focus of CSF research, this study makes an important contribution to the understanding of CSFs for both ERP and EHR system implementation projects. More generally, this research also expands the broader body of knowledge on the identification of CSFs, as this study has provided empirical evidence for the important role played by contextual factors. Every project is carried out within a broader organizational setting. This broader organizational setting appears, based on the results of this study, to have a strong effect on the importance of CSFs for each specific project and as such, may explain some of the seemingly contradictory findings related to CSFs in the existing literature. While further research is needed to understand the means by which contextual factors impact CSFs, this study has provided a significant contribution in validating the relationship between contextual factors and CSFs for a broad range of enterprise system projects in a wide range of industries. / Graduation date: 2012

Benefits of implementing Supply Chain Integration (SCI) are acknowledged in existing integration literature. Integration extending beyond functional silos and firm boundaries is expected to provide value for customers in terms of higher quality, improved service level, and reduced costs.In addition, internal integration allows business functions to align around a single company goal. This type of integration promotes value creation while decreasing redundancies and costs. Yet, regardless of the significant advances in research and practice, many organizations still experience difficulties not only to integrate activities with supply chain partners, but they also struggle to integrate activities within an organization, for example, through implementation of a sales and operations planning (S&OP) process. To tackle these challenges, organizations may need to reconsider why and how they integrate both internally and externally. However, the previous integration research provides only limited guidelines for how to carry out such evaluations. Many organizations experience difficulties in addressing the complexity related to integration and evaluation of activities internally and with SC partners. The lack of concrete guidelines for evaluation of SCI in theory is seen as one of the reasons for the still sporadic examples of successful SCI in practice. Thus, the overall purpose of this research is to increase understanding of external and internal integration in supply chains. To address the purpose, three studies (1-3) have been conducted. The study 1 highlighted the current status and several SCI challenges in academic literature and in practice. One of the major challenges relates to the absence of a systematic comprehensive approach for evaluation of internal and external integration. To contribute to closing of this gap, study 2 was conducted to develop a context based framework for evaluation of external integration. Finally, the subsequent study 3 aimed to develop a framework for evaluation of the S&OP process. Concerning the SCI challenges, this research contributes to previous integration literature by confirming some existing challenges but also by identifying additional challenges. Related to challenges of external integration, a set of contextual factors are identified which were observed to challenge the establishment of an appropriate level of external integration with SC partners. As a result a misfit occurs between the contextual factors and applied level of external integration. Additionally, reasons for the misfits were identified and discussed. Associated with the challenges of S&OP process, this thesis adds to existing fragmented literature on the S&OP process evaluation challenges by synthesizing and extending the existing knowledge. A framework has been developed which is founded on two key areas of process performance – S&OP process effectiveness and efficiency, and on various maturity levels of the process. Although several challenges were found for each maturity level, some challenges were observed occurring across more levels. Moreover, in this research, a context based framework for evaluation of external integration is proposed. The framework extends the previous SCI frameworks. It is founded on contextual factors which were considered by the studied cases when integrating with their SC partners. Furthermore, the factors were observed to promote establishment of an appropriate level of external integration. Each level consists of identified external integration activities. The thesis further contributes to the S&OP performance research by addressing the lack of process oriented frameworks for evaluation of the process performance. The proposed framework of measuring the S&OP process performance considers the five major steps of the process and their outputs as well as the output of the entire process. To reflect the process performance measures, the framework structures and defines effectiveness and efficiency measures and their relation to the process performance. The framework also conforms to the majority of the criteria for designing of appropriate performance measures. Finally, the major results of the thesis are synthesized and a framework is suggested of external integration and its effect on S&OP process performance. The framework considers the identified contextual factors, appropriate levels of external integration, and the S&OP performance measures the integration can have effect on. The thesis also discusses, alongside with the theoretical contributions, how the developed frameworks can support managers in evaluating their supply chain integration practices. Additionally, several opportunities for future research are outlined.