I examine firm governance characteristics for a sample of companies disclosing material weaknesses under section 404 of SOX to examine what factors impact the likelihood that a company will disclose those material weaknesses prior to their first section 404 report (under section 302 reporting requirements). I find companies that were audited by industry leading auditors, that have higher quality audit committees, that have shorter auditor/client relationships, that recently restated their financial statements or have been the subject of an SEC AAER, or that have experienced poor financial performance are more likely to discover and disclose weaknesses in their controls under section 302. I find moderate evidence of a positive relationship between company's that have a CFO with financial accounting background and disclosure prior to the SOX 404 report and a negative relationship between a company's institutional ownership concentration and the probability that they disclose weaknesses in their controls prior to the SOX 404 report. In sensitivity tests, I find a positive relationship between a company's institutional ownership concentration and the probability that they disclose significant deficiencies in their controls prior to the SOX 404 report suggesting systematic misclassification of control problems as significant deficiencies rather than material weaknesses in high institutional ownership concentration settings.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att analysera Gunnar Sjöbloms modell om programrealisering utifrån ett fall, Östersjömiljardprojektet, samt att följa upp modellen med aspekten om Multi-level governance. Detta görs med hjälp av tre frågeställningar. För att uppfylla syftet har jag med hjälp av en textanalys bearbetat material hämtat från Rikslex, Riksdagens arkiv, i form av propositioner, motioner, betänkande, och protokoll. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten har tagits ifrån Gunnar Sjöbloms modell som bygger på partistrategi i ett flerpartisystem. Partiernas främsta mål är att uppnå programrealisering. För att åstadkomma detta krävs inflytande på tre arenor: väljararenan, den interna arenan och den parlamentariska arenan.Östersjömiljardprojektet var ett förslag i sysselsättningspropositionen 1995 som byggde på att en miljard kronor skulle ingå i en fond avsatt för att främja svensk export inom områdena livsmedel, energi, ömsesidigt kunskapsutbyte, stärkt infrastruktur samt samarbete för att miljöskydd runt Östersjön. De områden som ingår i projektet är nordvästra Ryssland, Estland, Lettland, Litauen samt Polen. Resultatet visar att Sjöbloms modell är hållbar för det valda fallet. För att avgöra om det är ett fall av multi-level governance krävs ytterligare forskning på vilka påtryckningar utanför den politiska arenan som var betydande för beslutet.

Canada is a predominantly urbanized and urbanizing country, with consistent expansion in recent decades in its major cities‘ populations and geographic size. Major cities have been advancing claims for, or have already been granted by their provincial governments, greater autonomy in the responsibilities assigned to them under provincial legislation. Urban municipalities‘ legislative frameworks are gradually becoming more permissive, making urban governments and governance structures a highly relevant topic, particularly given the trend of amalgamation that occurred in some major cities in the 1990s which significantly altered municipal governance structures. The Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), amalgamated in 1996, has commenced a mandatory Governance and District Boundary Review Process to be completed by the end of 2010. The thesis develops a necessarily flexible set of criteria of good democratic governance for the municipal level through consulting the literature on urban governance in Canada and the trends that characterize the experience and consequences of municipal restructuring, particularly amalgamation. A case study of the HRM‘s unique context and governance structure challenges results in the following reform recommendations: should the HRM seek greater effectiveness in decision making and clearer lines of accountability, regional council should be significantly reduced in size, community councils should be granted greater formal authority to set rates and make decisions beyond land-use issues, and the formal executive power of the office of the mayor should be significantly strengthened.

A new approach to oceans and coastal governance – influenced by ecosystem-based management and resilience thinking, by spatial approaches to management and by decentralized or participatory governance – a policy of integrated management was defined in the years following the Oceans Act (1986). The motivation for this study arose from the resistance of project partners in the Coastal CURA (a five-year, SSHRC-funded, multi-partner research project designed to support coastal community engagement in resource governance) to the thinking and practice of government-supported “integrated management”. In response, I developed a conceptual framework for examining integrated management from a critical, community-based perspective, drawing on political ecology, geography and policy studies. I apply this framework to a study of policy discourses in the Canadian Maritime Provinces to examine: i) their role in framing what options, participants, and knowledges are included in fisheries and coastal policy, regulation and institutions; ii) how power relationships are enacted and how access to resources are altered through integrated management approaches to coastal resource governance; iii) community resistance through alternative discourses and models. Within this study, I use governmentality and critical policy analysis as tools for analyzing the retreat of the state on the one hand (through decentralized and participatory governance), and the application of new technologies of governance on the other, and for examining the effects these movements have on coastal citizens. By naturalising the state as the appropriate scale and competent party for managing coastal problems, coastal communities are framed out of governing the commons. However, this study demonstrates how counter-discourses can re-imagine communities, and their practices and knowledges, in a discursive policy struggle. This thesis situates these puzzles in three case studies, one of regional policy discourses and two community case studies in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Basin and Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick.

This dissertation examines the failure to achieve a final agreement for the Free Trade Area of the Americas(FTAA)at the 2005 Mar del Plata Summit of the Americas. The predominant explanation for this outcome highlights the economic asymmetries and the lack of economic interdependence between the participating states. In view of these structural impediments, based on original field interviews and extensive document analysis, the author goes a step further and argues that these factors were exacerbated by an ideological shift that took place during the decade that the FTAA was negotiated. Specifically, it is argued that the emerging consensus in the hemisphere that was in place at the launching of the FTAA negotiations in 1994 centered on the desirability of economic liberalization; this began to unravel in view of growing political challenges to neo-liberalism in many of the Americas’ social formations. This particular political challenge of economic liberalization emerged against the background of the failure of neo-liberal reforms to achieve their promised results, and the resultant socio-economic polarization. In many social formations, this polarization led to crises of authority, which sometimes opened the political arena to social forces that articulated, to different degrees, alternatives to neo-liberalism. In two countries of import for the FTAA, Venezuela and Brazil, governments were elected which challenged the United States’ leadership within the FTAA negotiations, based on a discourse of state sovereignty. In broader terms, the growing de-legitimization of neo-liberalism in the Americas engendered crises of authority in certain countries, notably in Venezuela and Brazil. This in turn brought forth political dynamics that constrained the United States’ hegemony in the hemisphere, which would have been consolidated by the FTAA. As such, this dissertation draws upon a Gramscian analysis to examine the manner in which crises of authority, rooted in the social formations of the hemisphere, came to be manifested within the institutional framework of the FTAA. Consequently, this work further demonstrates that global governance structures are not only mechanisms through which hegemony is disseminated and counter-hegemony is absorbed, but that they can serve as spaces where hegemony can be confronted and counter-hegemony articulated. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-01-24 10:01:37.746

This thesis investigates the following research questions: (1) What is open source project governance and how can it be conceptualized? (2) What is the relationship between the dimensions of OSS governance and the specific purposes that governance is hypothesized to serve in open source projects? (3) How do the major configurations of governance dimensions affect the performance of open source projects? Two studies were conducted to answer these questions: an exploratory qualitative study and a survey study. In the qualitative study, we clearly defined, developed, and validated the various dimensions of OSS governance. This allowed for the identification of a limited number of configurations of governance dimensions that most frequently occur in open source projects. We found that a patterning in governance dimensions takes place because dimensions are in fact interdependent. Therefore, only a fraction of the theoretically conceivable configurations of governance dimensions appear to be viable and were observed among a range of open source projects. This provided us with a preliminary understanding of how these dimensions configure to create three distinct configurations of project governance which were labeled as follows: Open Communities, Managed Communities, and Defined Communities. In the quantitative survey, we first validated these configurations of governance using cluster analysis and then tested the relationships between these configurations (clusters) and the specific purposes that governance is hypothesized to serve in open source projects, namely solve collective action dilemmas, solve coordination problems, and create a climate for project excellence, while assessing their influence on the performance of projects. The results confirmed the presence of three main governance configurations (clusters) and also showed that open source projects that adopt a Defined Community approach to governance were the most successful. In these types of projects, the combination of a tightly managed software development process with a decentralized community management structure was found to create a balance between anarchy and control that allows these projects to benefit from one of the virtues of open source development, the open contribution and participation of a wide variety of talented developers, while avoiding the pitfalls of an uncontrolled and scattered development process. / Thesis (Ph.D, Management) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-11 16:00:02.186

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No description available.

This thesis argues that the stakeholder paradox (Goodpaster, 1991) has hindered the achievement of meaningful consultation processes because it perpetuates a management-centered discourse of stakeholder engagement aimed at producing stakeholder consent and legitimating organizational action. In order to advance beyond the use of stakeholder consultation as a sophisticated public relations tool, and instrument of organizational power and persuasion, it must be treated as a series of activities (discussion, deliberation and decision making) linked together through the common modality of negotiative communication. / An analysis of practice guidelines, protocols and key informant interviews using a critical organizational communication approach evaluates the extent to which contemporary instances of consultation practice account for the specificity of stakeholder context, address power and capacity gaps between consulting organizations, and enables all stakeholders to engage in a negotiative dialogue that has a direct influence upon the decision-making process of a project. This thesis argues that operationalizing tenets of a critical communication framework within consultation practice has the potential to produce the conditions for conducting a meaningful consultation with community stakeholders.

<p>This study is based on an investigation into the way RCL members participate in the deliberation of their School Governing Bodies. The study was conducted in two primary schools in the Western Cape town of Vredenburg. The research participants were members of the Representative Council of Learners from these schools. Focus group discussions as well as in depth interviews were used to explore the RCL members' views on the nature of their participation during SGB deliberations. the main fining of this study is that, due to external as well as in-school factors, a huge gap exists between normative RCL policy exp[ectations and the actual manifestation policy in the real world of the RCL members' schools. the findings of the study reveal a lack of participative capacities among these RCL members, which, in combination with a non participative culture at their homes, the community and the school, leads to learners being excluded from democratic processes.</p>