Thesis (M.S. in Business Administration)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2009. / Thesis Advisor(s): Summers, Don ; San Miguel, Joseph. "December 2009." Description based on title screen as viewed on January 27, 2010. Author(s) subject terms: PPP, public-private partnership, defense contracting, defense contracting, finance, Singapore, U.S., UK, Australia, off-balance sheet Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-61). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ed.S.)--University of Wisconsin -- La Crosse, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-55)

Thesis (D. Min.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 2003. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 220-228).

The purpose of this study was to understand the nature of Korean bilingual children’s out-of-school literacy practices. Four Korean-English speaking bilingual children and their parents were participants in this qualitative multi-case study. The children were between seven and nine years old and attended public schools. The families lived in and around a large city in the Southwestern of the United States. In the city, there was a well-established Korean community. Data collection was conducted through multiple methods. The duration of the study was approximately four and a half months per child, staggered across eight months of data collection. Parents were interviewed twice regarding literacy activities with their child, the focal child’s experience of schooling, their perspectives of family’s language use, and their expectations for the child. Participant observation was also conducted at each child’s home to examine her/his literacy activities and interactions with family members. The children and parents were also informally interviewed throughout the data collection. Children’s writing, drawing, and crafts were collected. The children and family members were also invited to participate in a video project in which they video-recorded and took pictures of their activities for two months. Data were analyzed through constant comparative approach, activitysetting analyses, and grounded theory approach. The findings suggest that the focal children engaged in parent-guided literacy activities and self-chosen literacy activities. The parents provided extensive support for children’s academic achievement and learning to read and write in Korean. These activities were derived from parents’ experiences, beliefs, parenting practices familiar to Korean parents, and expectations for their children’s future. Children’s self-chosen literacy activities varied widely. The children drew on various resources from their social and cultural worlds to participate in an imaginative world and imagined future. Therefore, Korean bilingual children’s literacy activities situated in the current moment and space were always globally connected to other times and spaces. / text

This thesis examines geometric aspects of the outer automorphism group of a finitely generate free group. Using recent advances made in understanding mapping class groups as our primary motivation, we refine methods to understand the structure of Out(F_n) via its action on free factors of F_n. Our investigation has a number of applications: First, we give a natural notion of projection between free factors, extending a construction of Bestvina-Feighn. Second, we provide a new method to produce fully irreducible automorphisms of F_n using combinations of automorphism supported on free factors. Finally, we use these results to give a general construction of quasi-isometric embeddings from right-angled Artin groups into Out(F_n). / text

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

Since the 1980s, pre-registration nurse education has undergone dramatic changes that have led to the creation of a new course - Project 2000 - and its delivery within the Higher Education sector. Very little written during this period has addressed the issue of nurse learner wastage/persistence. The literature on nurse learner wastage/persistence prior to this period has tended to be largely atheoretical in nature. One of the chief objectives of this study was to produce a much more complex picture of wastage/persistence. This involved the building of a theoretical framework designed to explore one aspect of voluntary wastage - the interaction between integration and wastage/persistence, and which could capture the complexity of the phenomenon by taking into account the interaction between the individual and the institution within the process of wastage/persistence. This study draws on Tinto's (1975) Student Integration Model, which identified the learners' integration into an institution to be one of the critical factors in understanding the wastage/persistence of learners, as well as on some of the studies within the area of nurse learner wastage/persistence which have examined the role of a learner's identity in the wastage/persistence process. Accordingly, this study defined integration in terms of how well a learner has adopted the identity/ies afforded to them by the institution. Finally, drawing inspiration from Foucault (1988, 1990,1991), this study re-conceptualised identity in terms of the concept of subjectivity and defined integration in terms of how well the learner was able to subscribe to the discourses (and the subject positions that these made available) that constituted the given institution. A multiple case study was carried out that focused on leavers and stayers in the first year of a Project 2000 course in three particular cohorts within a particular institution. A modified version of discourse analysis, referred to as MODA (Meaning Orientated Discourse Analysis), was used. Two major discourses were identified which offered the learner a number of contradictory subject positions regarding what it means to be a learner and a nurse - the 'autonomous' and the 'apprentice' discourse. It was found that stayers were those most able to manage these contradictory subject positions offered by these discourses. This meant that they were more playful in their discursive reading patterns than leavers. This playfulness implied they were not only doing a lot more with these discourses, but that that the nature of what they were doing enabled them to accept and embrace the contradictory notions of what it means to be a learner and a nurse existing in the institution. The stayers' management of discourses was a reflection of the high level of integration that they had achieved within a institution that is riddled with two incommensurable discourses which offer competing definitions of what it means to be a nurse and a learner.

Despite the amount of literature on the antecedents and outcomes of IT outsourcing, the vast majority of this research has focused on factors at the firm level. Environmental factors such as industry and country characteristics have received little attention. Environmental factors should be taken into account in IT outsourcing research because firms are open systems and their behaviors are significantly influenced by material-resource and institutional environments. Moreover, previous research at the firm level has not evaluated the effectiveness of IT outsourcing and insourcing in terms of how they create value for firms. To address the paucity of macro-level research in IT outsourcing as well as to augment our knowledge at the firm level, this thesis investigates IT outsourcing issues at three levels, namely, at the firm, industry, and country level. More specifically, I expand firm-level research by jointly examining the impacts of IT outsourcing and insourcing on IT-enabled organizational capabilities and firm performance (Essay #1). I also investigate the roles of industry-level factors such as munificence, dynamism, concentration, and capital intensity (Essay #2) and country-level variables such as the maturity of the IT-related legal system, generalized trust, uncertainty avoidance, Internet penetration, and the maturity of the IT outsourcing market of a country (Essay #3) in the diffusion of IT outsourcing practice.

For an organisation that outsources its purchasing function to a specialist purchasing organisation the benefits are mostly relate to the peace of mind the organisation has in knowing that there is sufficient focus and attention being given to the purchasing function along with the relevant procedures and controls to ensure that the purchasing function is being done to ensure maximum benefit for the organisation. The result of the additional attention along with the other advantages such as the buying power of the OPSP is that there are significant savings to be achieved through outsourced purchasing. There are also issues of concern that need to be taken into consideration when outsourcing the purchasing function. These include issues such as organisational inertia, co-ordination difficulties and lack of plant specific knowledge within the specialist purchasing organisation. The impact of these can however be overcome through co-operation and the commitment of both parties to the long term success of the relationship. The results achieved by organisations outsourcing their purchasing have been varied, and it is the factors that have an impact on the success of the venture that are of interest. The most significant of these factors were found to be the availability of information from the organisation, the expertise and buying power of the outsourced purchasing service provider (OPSP) and the flexibility and support from the end-users and management of the organisation. In order to maximise the benefits that can be achieved through outsourcing, the organisation needs to ensure that the information required by the OPSP in order to effectively purchase for the organisation is available. This includes information such as complete and correct specifications on all commodities, annual usages and price histories. The organisation must also ensure that the OPSP it selects has the buying power and purchasing expertise required to ensure maximum benefit. Additionally the organisation must ensure that all staff involved and effected by the purchasing function are made aware of the potential problems and more importantly the benefits for the organisation so that the staff support the process. Should these steps be taken the organisation would stand to reap more benefits out of outsourced purchasing. The percentage saving on the cost of stock commodities over the first 3 months that purchasing was outsourced was taken as an indication of the success of outsourced purchasing and was measured for 3 organisations, PG Bison, Dunlop Industrial Products and Assmang. PG Bison achieved the highest percentage saving (10.7%), followed by Dunlop Industrial Products (7.4%) and Assmang (3.7%). All 3 of the above organisations were analysed to determine the presence of the factors influencing the success of outsourced purchasing and it was found that PG Bison had the most in its favour and it would therefore be expected to get the most benefits out of outsourcing its purchasing, which in reality it appeared to have done. Based on the results of the analysis Assmang would have been expected to achieve better results than Dunlop, which in practice was not the case. The percentage saving achieved by Dunlop was well above that of Assmang. The rating scale developed therefore failed to accurately predict the extent to which each client would benefit from outsourced purchasing. There could be a number of reasons for this. The use of the percentage savings on stock commodities as a measure of the success of outsourced purchasing can be debated, but it is the only factor which can be accurately measured and it is a direct result of a number of the advantages of outsourcing identified. It is most probable that the discrepancy in the analysis arises in the process used to calculate the outsourcing rating for each of the organisations. The process used to determine the impact that each of the factors identified has on the savings could be further refined in a number of ways. The distribution of the questionnaire could be increased to include more staff from the organisations concerned. The analysis could be expanded to include other organisations and the results analysed to identify common factors and varying factors in an attempt to identify how variations in factors impact on the savings achieved. / Thesis (MBA)-University of Natal, 2003.

Thesis (M App Sci) -- University of South Australia, 1991