The South African construction industry is experiencing challenging times, like its counterparts globally, which has led to the failure of known large contractors. While some studies have suggested different reasons for this, a stream of scholars argued that company leadership contributes significantly to the organisation's performance. Studies on leadership in construction have mainly been undertaken at project level, considering that construction organisations are project-based. This study examined the leadership of construction organisations and whether the traits, skills, role, style and strategic decisions of company leaders impacted on the long-term performance and sustainability of contracting firms in South Africa. The main question investigated in this study is: what combination of leadership traits, skills, style, role, and strategic decisions results in superior and sustainable construction organisation performance, when moderated by strategic decisions of CEO/company leadership? The study draws from theoretical perspectives, namely the ‘upper echelons' theory, strategic leadership theory, and the Full Range Leadership Model (FRLM), to develop a conceptual framework. A convergent mixed-method research design was used to advance the investigation. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with purposively selected construction company leaders of large contracting firms in the Western Cape, in positions of Group Chairman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or Managing Director in major building construction, civil engineering, or geo-technical companies of good repute. The survey instrument was pretested by construction company leaders before distribution to respondents and the Crobach Alpha test was used in testing the reliability of the study responses. The cidb provided the database of the construction leaders and a survey of contractors listed in Grades 7-9 of the cidb Register of Contractors was conducted. The responses of the samples on the survey question raised on their position also attests to this. At the end of the survey period between April and September 2020, 257 responses were received, representing 56.86% response rate. The data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics, including Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), to validate the hypothesis developed that construction company leaders positively impact organisational performance through their strategic decisions on project management, change, and innovation and investment. In addition, the study also tested the hypothesis that strategic decisions mediate the relationship between construction companies' leadership components, characteristics, and construction organisation performance. The findings of this study reveal that decisions on change and innovation have the most impact to prevent business failure, and for construction organisation performance. Whilst there are other internal and external factors that may contribute to a firm's business outcomes, the findings of the study explain that the attributes of construction business leaders and their strategic decisions play a significant role in construction company leadership and construction organisation's outcomes. The leadership of construction companies is expected to be exhibit transformational qualities, cast visions, channel new opportunities, and reposition their companies according to the current and future economic situations. The gap between expectations and performance must thus be filled by leadership through their strategic decisions that are premeditated and calculated towards the expectations and visions of the construction companies. The study thus contributes to knowledge in leadership and construction research by demonstrating how the multi-dimensions of company leadership impact construction business organisation performance. The integration of leadership personality traits, skills, style, role, and strategic decisions provides a better measure of how leadership impacts organisational performance. The leadership framework developed from the study's findings made explicit the leadership traits, skills, style and strategic roles that would assist construction company leaders to operate their organisations sustainably and devise effective succession plans. The components of the leadership framework include the strategic leadership roles that construction organisational leaders must play, using catalytic leadership skills, transformational and transactional leadership approaches and inherent leadership traits, which could be developed through education, career experiences, mentoring and training. The study is limited to South Africa, which has implications for the generalisability of results.

En av de vanligaste insatserna inom den sociala barnavården är familjehemsplaceringar av barn. Det är kommunen som har det övergripande ansvaret för placeringen. Det är vidare samhällets ansvar att enligt lag se till att den unga kommer ifrån en otrygg, bristfällig tillvaro och får god vård i familjehemmet. Socialnämnden beslutar om vården som antingen sker frivilligt med stöd av Socialtjänstlagen, eller med tvång med stöd av Lagen med särskilda bestämmelser om vård av unga. Syftet med uppsatsen är att förklara vad begreppet rättssäkerhet innebär, både utifrån en allmän definition och mer specifikt vid socialnämndens utredning och beslut om familjehemsplacering av barn och unga. Mitt intresse ligger i att undersöka vad barn och unga har för rättssäkerhet vid en sådan situation, jag koncentrerar mig dock på processen innan och fram till beslutet av en eventuell familjehemsplacering. Utifrån studiens syfte har jag använt mig av en kvalitativ metod i form av semistrukturerade intervjuer, för att få en djupare förståelse av intervjupersonernas personliga upplevelser. Jag har intervjuat tre socialsekreterare som arbetar med barn- och ungdomsutredningar i Skåne. Resultatet och analysen beskriver intervjupersonernas egna upplevelser av vad rättssäkerhet betyder för dem i förhållande till deras arbetsuppgifter. Resultatet visade bland annat att kunskap om de lagar som ligger till grund för utredning och beslut är en viktig del för att kunna utföra ett rättssäkert arbete. / One of the most common interventions in social services for children is a foster home placement. The municipality has overall responsibility for the placement. Furthermore, it is society's responsibility to legally ensure that the young are coming from an insecure, inadequate existence and given good care in the family home. Social Welfare Committee decides on the care, which is either voluntary under the Social Services Act, or enforced under the law of special provisions for the care of young people. The purpose of this paper is to explain what the term rule of law means, both from a general definition and more specifically at the social welfare committee and decisions on foster placement of children and young people. My interest lies in examining what children and young people have for legal certainty in this situation, I concentrate however on the process before and until the decision of a potential foster home placement. Based on the study's purpose, I used a qualitative approach in the form of semi-structured interviews, to gain a deeper understanding of the interviewees' personal experiences. I have interviewed three social workers that work with children and youth investigations in Skåne. The results and analysis describes the interviewees' own experiences of what rule of law means to them in relation to their duties. The results showed that knowledge of the laws that form the basis for investigation and decision is an important component in order to perform a proper safe work.

In the last five years, the world has experienced unexpected tragic events and natural disasters. However, international tourism is expected to grow continually and tourists are therefore becoming more concerned with safety and security during their international travel. This dissertation investigated individuals' risk perception of vacationing at two scenario international destinations, Australia and Japan. While ten dimensions of perceived risk in international leisure travel were identified in the literature and one additional dimension of "Communication Risk" was proposed for this study, only seven dimensions were found in this study: "Health Risk," "Value Risk," "Psychological Risk," "Social Risk," "Terrorism Risk," "Equipment Risk," and "Communication Risk." The other four dimensions — "Financial Risk," "Time Risk," "Satisfaction Risk," and "Political Instability Risk" — were either merged into other dimensions or did not appear as an independent dimension in this study. The "Communication Risk" which was proposed in this study was found to be a valid dimension of perceived risk in vacationing at international destinations. The relationships of perceived risk to other factors were also examined. Individuals' characteristics of novelty seeking were negatively related to their risk perception, as were individuals' proficiency of the destination's native language. Those who have experience visiting the destination tended to perceive less risk in vacationing at the destination; the more familiarity/expertise with the destination, the less risk was perceived. When an individual perceived a higher level of risk towards a destination, s/he was less likely to vacation at the destination. Individuals were more likely to choose a packaged tour than independent travel when they had a higher level of risk perception towards vacationing at a particular international destination. / Ph. D.

This doctoral thesis consists of three essays within the field of human technology interaction examined through the lens of behavioural and experimental economics. The three essays in this thesis represent three strands helping to reveal the issue of human-machine interaction from different angles. The first essay contributes to human-machine relations by addressing the problem associated with the problem of an individual experiencing a relative lack of resources that affects human judgment and decision-making in the financial domain. This chapter discusses how policy can leverage emerging technologies to design specific choice architecture that may support more risk-aware decision-making of vulnerable socioeconomic groups. Furthermore, it discusses how behavioural policy initiatives aimed at helping resource-deprived individuals conduct more optimal financial decision making might be effectively assisted by recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments and the associated ethical considerations. The primary focus of the second essay relates to individual decision making in a risky environment with algorithm help. By conducting an online experiment, it investigates how humans cognitively offload tasks to algorithms in a risky environment with different time constraints. Results demonstrate that the presence of an AI assistant is beneficial for decision making only when its accuracy is high. The third essay continues the investigation of human-technology inter- actions. The primary attention is paid to how information about the result of the action taken by a human affects the incentive behaviour, depending on the interacting partner. The main focus concerns how the information about the result (out- come) of the investment affects the reward and punishment behaviour of the participants that interact with Human and Algorithm agents. Specifically, I conduct an experiment investigating the interaction between out- come bias and human/algorithm responsibility.

Context: A software project’s success; involvinga larger group of individuals, relies on efficient teamcommunication. Part of efficient communication is avoidingmiscommunication, misunderstandings, and losingknowledge. These consequences of poor communication canlead to negative repercussions such as loss of time, money,and customer approval. Much effort has been put intocreating tools and systems to aid software engineers inretaining knowledge and decisions made during meetings,but many existing solutions require additional manualintervention on the part of software meeting participants.The objective of this thesis is to explore and develop a toolcalled Design Extractor (DE) which creates concisesummaries of design meetings from recorded voiceconversations. These summaries include both the designdecisions made during a meeting as well as the rationalebehind them. This thesis used readily available Pythonframeworks for machine learning to train two transformermodels based on DistilBert and Google’s BERT. Fine-tuningthese models with data sourcedfrom six different softwaredesign meetings found that the best base model wasDistilBert, which resulted in a fine-tuned model reporting anF1 score of 82.63%. This study created a simple Python tool,built upon many publicly available Python frameworks andthe fine-tuned transformer model, that takes in voicerecordings and outputs labeled sentence-label pairs that canbe used to quickly notate a design meeting. Short summariesare also provided by the tool through the use of pre-existingtext summarisation machine learning models such as BART.Design extractor therefore provides a simple quick way toreview longer meeting recordings in the context of softwareengineering decisions.

Many features of the making of major managerial decisions have been covered by research - complexity, politicality, innovations, and so forth. Yet one - to which all others may be subject - remains almost untouched by research. It is the effects of societal culture on the way managers from different nations make, and implement, such decisions. This study compares the effects of a New World Latin dominated culture with those of an Old World Anglo-Saxon dominated culture, namely in Brazil and England respectively. It arises from the proposition that decision making, as well as other managerial practices, must be shaped by the cultures of the societies of which senior executives are part, in ways of which they themselves may be unaware. Methodologically, in response to the criticisms of earlier research which often attributed managerial and organizational differences to culture without direct evidence for that, this study began by composing portrayals of both cultures. The purpose of the portraits was to enable predictions of culturally affected elements in decision making, prior to empirical investigation. Data was collected by interview on twenty Brazilian and twenty English decisions in sixteen Brazilian and seventeen English organizations, ranging through a variety of manufacturing and service industries as well as universities. The examination of the results confirmed most of the predicted cultural characteristics. Differences although small on each variable were remarkably consistent across all variables. Brazilian strategic decision making was found to be dominated by a clique around the chief executive, who make fast decisions in a process strongly based on the social relationships between the participants. This style of decision making leads, in Brazil, to very informal processes, with little or no delays and, relatively speaking, less search for information. English decisions were found to be more consultative with more interests being involved in different stages of the process. Decisions in this country were characterized by caution and conservatism with some tendency to postpone decisions. Methodologically, the value of the prior conceptualization and description of societal culture is demonstrated since this gives meaning to the extensive differences found in all aspects of decision making. Theoretically, an attempt is made to elucidate the interconnectedness of societal culture and managerial behaviour.

For decades curriculum materials have been used as a means to reform the manner in which mathematics is taught. In an attempt to better understand what impact curriculum materials have on the teaching and learning of mathematics, researchers have begun to analyze the process in which teachers transform curriculum materials into instruction. Given that many of these studies have been broad in nature, I sought to study the specific decisions that three teachers made when planning lesson on geometric transformation and their reasoning for those decisions. In this study I found that while the participants in this study ignored the curriculum material I gave them as well as their district adopted materials in planning instruction, they made a wide variety of decisions with regards to other curriculum. In an attempt to describe this variety of decisions I expanded the previous methods of describing curriculum use decisions adding a self-create category as well as differentiating between the different types of adaptations teachers make. I also found that although teachers used different curriculum materials, they made similar decisions in how they planned the mathematics content of geometric transformations that seem problematic.

Bakgrund: Hjärtstopp är ett allvarligt tillstånd som många gånger leder till döden. Alla patienter som dör på sjukhus avlider till följd av ett hjärtstopp, men alla hjärtstopp lämpar sig inte alltid av medicinska skäl för ett återupplivningsförsök. Det finns tillfällen då HLR och dess risker inte är fördelaktiga för patienten. Ett beslut om “ej HLR” innebär att en person inte ska erhålla hjärt-lungräddning om hen drabbas avhjärtstopp. Genom att belysa sjuksköterskors erfarenheter av “ej HLR”-beslut kan man få en större förståelse för sjuksköterskors arbetssituation samt förbättra vården för dessa patienter. Syfte: Att beskriva sjuksköterskors erfarenheter av “ej HLR”-beslut. Metod: En litteraturstudie baserad på tio kvalitativa studier. Databassökning genomfördes i Cinahl och PubMed, med tillägg av kompletterande sökningar. Analysen gjordes med hjälp av Fribergs femstegsmodell. Resultat: Analysen resulterade i två huvudkategorier och sex underkategorier. Huvudkategorierna var; “Sjuksköterskan i relation till läkare, patienter ochnärstående” och “Sjuksköterskors känslor och upplevda dilemman”. Konklusion: Litteraturstudien visar att “ej HLR”-beslut medför olika typer avsvårigheter för sjuksköterskor, som skulle kunna förbättras genom tydliga riktlinjer och en fungerande kommunikation mellan alla inblandade parter. Mer forskning behövs inom ämnet. / Background: Cardiac arrest is a severe condition that often leads to death. All patients who die at the hospital die as a result of a cardiac arrest, but all cardiacarrests are not suitable for resuscitation. There are times when cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and its risks are not advantageous for the patient. A do not resuscitate (DNR) order means that the patient should not receive CPR if they experience a cardiac arrest. By highlighting the difficulties that nurses may face associated with a DNR decision, a greater understanding of nurses’ work situation can be gained, and the care for these patients can be improved. Aim: The aim of this literature study is to describe nurses’ experiences of DNR decisions. Methods: A literature study based on ten qualitative studies. Database search was conducted in Cinahl and PubMed, with the addition of supplementary searches. The analysis was performed according to Friberg’s five-step model. Results: The analysis resulted in two main categories and six subcategories. The main categories were; “The nurse in relation to physician, patient and family” and “Nurses emotions and perceived dilemmas”. Conclusion: This literature study shows that DNR-decisions result in various types of difficulties for nurses, which could be improved by clear guidelines and effective communication between all parties involved. More research is needed in this area.

Title: “The influence of managers personal preferences on sport sponsorship in small-medium sized businesses - A qualitative case study of the effect on brand equity” Date: 2023-05-23Level: Bachelor Thesis in International MarketingAuthors: Emma Salqvist & Hanna Hedin Supervisor: Olga Rauhut Kompaniets Examiner: Fawzi Halila Aim: This study aims to provide an analysis of how the managers’ personal preferences on sport sponsorship has an impact on the sponsoring company’s brand equity in small-medium sized companies. Methodology: The study has a qualitative research method with a deductive approach. A conceptual model was made based on a theoretical framework of findings from previous studies. Three main themes were highlighted, including brand equity, sport sponsorships in brand strategy and managerial aspects of sport sponsorship. Empirical material was collected through six semi-structured interviews with managers in a decision making role within sport sponsorship decisions. Further the results were thematically analyzed. Findings: In small-medium sized companies, sport sponsorship is often driven by managers’ personal objectives which conflicts with brand strategy. When personal objectives dominate the sponsorship decisions, the effect on brand equity tends to be limited in comparison to strategic decisions. Keywords – Sport Sponsorship, Brand Strategy, Brand Equity, Managers’ roll, Biased Decisions, Sponsorship Objectives Paper type – Bachelor thesis

The purpose of this study is to establish the psychometric five-dimension model proposed by Berrone, Cruz, & Gomez-Mejia (2012) with the objective of investigating the effect of SEW (Socioemotional Welath) in strategic choices made by family firms towards M&A decisions, specifically selling decisions. Studying SEW among different family firms and its implications on their M&A decisions will contribute to literature on SEW and M&A's involving family firms.