Much of the research in project management focuses on developing better scheduling techniques in order to generate successful engineering and construction projects. However, with the advent of globalisation, project management is not only a domestic endeavour. Better scheduling techniques are not necessarily sufficient to ensure the successful completion of projects. Working with people with different cultural backgrounds and managing in foreign cultural areas is very common today. Cultural differences can actually affect project success and specifically the success of projects of a technological nature. Five typical Chinese cultural behaviours are identified and discussed in terms of philosophy of life, the "face" issue, personal relationships, communication and conflict solving. The effects of these cultural behaviours on communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, contract process and project team-building are researched through a designed survey questionnaire. Although the questionnaire is designed based on the Chinese culture, South African project managers have also been asked to participate in order to illustrate the cultural differences, where applicable. Researchers and practitioners still find it difficult to define what constitutes cultural differences and how to mitigate the influence of cultural differences on engineering projects. Data analysis and survey results for cultural effects on international engineering team performance are presented in this thesis and a method to mitigate the effect of cultural difference is conceptualised. This thesis contributes to the knowledge of managing engineering and construction projects in multicultural environments specifically in the international context. Moreover, a conceptual model has been developed and evaluated to indicate and explore the relationships between cultural differences, Chinese behaviours, project activities, project management processes and mitigation methods, from the South African and Chinese perspectives. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Graduate School of Technology Management (GSTM) / unrestricted

Imagine one Brit, one Dutch, two North Americans, one Spaniard and three Swedes setting up a joint international research project. Their areas of expertise vary: sociology, labour law and organisational theory. The scene is taking place in a hotel conference room in Uppsala. The North Americans are tired from the long trip and the jet-lag. The Spaniard arrived later than everybody, including himself, expected, due to another strike of air traffic controllers. The Dutch had to come alone. His colleague had too much work at home to be able to free himself for the four days the meeting lasts. The same goes for the Brit. As for the Swedes, all three were able to make some place in their agendas. Abundance characterises international projects in particular and human collaboration in general; that is, the immense variety of practices, behaviours and incidents that inundate life and are difficult to foresee when defining a goal, designing a plan or organising a cooperation. This leads to vagueness, because to include such a variety, the words used to describe the international project and the models/plans used to structure it must remain open and flexible. Based on an ethnography of the above described group, this dissertation  illuminates how, with the help of linguistic resources, the group deals with vagueness, copes with abundance and organises an international collaboration. Within this framework, cultural differences and cultural stereotypes cease being a source of misunderstanding and conflict. Instead, they become linguistic resources to cope with vagueness and abundance. Constructive interaction and successful cooperation lie in a delicate equilibrium: Levelling Vagueness. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2002

The purposes of this study was to develop a teaching program about International project-based learning through WebQuest and explore the effectiveness of the teaching program on students' English learning motivation and intercultural awareness. The participants were second-year junior high school students¡]14 boys and 12 girls included¡^, The experiment lasted 5 months (25 classes included). The teaching effects were analyzed both with qualative and quantative methods. The results of this study are summarized as follows: 1. Applying WebQuest in teaching can help students' finish their tasks and know more about the world. 2. The results showed that the teaching program was effective on improving participants' intrinsic learning motivation. 3. The results showed that the teaching program was not effective on improving participants' intercultural awareness. However, their culture acceptance is promoted and they are more involved in world issues. 4. The participants reported high percentage of satisfaction with the WebQuest in English learning. They became more interested in learning English with technology and hope to continue this curriculum.

Economic instabilities in our country over the past few decades and improvement in communication technologies, have encouraged Turkish construction firms to utilize business opportunities in foreign countries. However, working abroad brings with it certain risks and problems. The aim of this thesis were to define and clarify problematic factors during the design stages in international design projects (IDP), to collect relevant suggested solutions and to try and determine the sources of these factors. The survey starts with general problems and/or factors which affect international projects and continues to examine whether these problems are the same as those faced in the architectural field. Also, the place of the Turkish construction industry in the world market, the reasons for the increase in international projects and the problems which might be faced while executing IDP have formed the scope of this thesis. To this end informal interviews were carried out with managers and design professionals of architectural firms, based in Ankara, which were involved in international projects, in order to determine types of problems encountered in execution of IDPs. The first questionnaire was based on insight gained from these interviews. Thereafter, the results of the first questionnaire formed the basis of the second questionnaire, which was delivered more extensively. According to the research carried out in this study, the major effective factors in execution of IDPs could be listed as, cultural differences, communication within the project team, information technologies, standards and regulations, client and local authorities and economical situation of target country.

Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2002.

This diploma thesis focuses on processes in project management based on international standard IPMA Comptence Baseline (ICB). Its main goal is to create process models of chosen technical competences of the ICB. The models were built in a program called Bizagi Modeler in accordance with an international standard Business Process Model and Notation. Results of this thesis are represented by the process models for each of the chosen technical competences and by an overall model that put all the created competences together. It helps to show connections between the competences as well as to understand the application of competences within the project cycle. Crucial steps of chosen competences are also applied to a model project for better understanding of a real application. Created process models may serve as a user guide for project managers who manage projects according to the ICB.

This case study examined how contextual factors influenced the adaptation of on-line courses created in the United States as they were re-purposed for use in Malawi. The investigation starts and ends within Year Two of a five year project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The grant brings together an instructional technology program at a large research university in the southeastern United States and a newly established national university in Malawi, Africa. A total of 24 people participated in the study. Of these, nine were directly involved in the adaptation process, five of whom were students from Malawi. Six other Malawian students took part in a formative review of the instructional products. Three professors of instructional technology were also directly involved in the adaptation process. The participants involved in the adaptation process did their work over the course of one semester. They took pre-existing web-based courses created for an on-line master's degree program in instructional technology and adapted them for use in Malawi by accounting for various contextual elements. Data included project documents, student-created materials including personal journal reflections, interviews with students and faculty at both institutions, field notes, and personal observations by the researcher. Data analysis procedures followed protocols established for descriptive, qualitative methodologies. The findings emphasize the importance of a needs assessment and context analysis as developed by people who are native to a particular culture. Instructional designers who are made aware of contextual factors through such documents become more sensitive to cultural issues related to teaching and learning. Negotiation among team members to come to a workable consensus is also important, as project goals inevitably evolve. Another interesting outcome of this study was the fact that not one context, but two, affect adaptation. Whereas the Malawian context impacted content and delivery mechanisms of the courses, the U.S. context influenced the process and procedure for design. / Ph. D.

Background International cooperation became a wide-spread way of exchanging experience and ideas between organizations of the non-profit sector all over the world. The exchange of new ideas and experience on the international level can very often contain cases of policy transfer, which beyond all doubts can influence the participants of international cooperation. Aim The aim of the presented Master's thesis consists of the investigation and analysis of international project on violence prevention between Swedish and Ukrainian NGOs, assessing and verifying the representation in the project the particular case of policy transfer. Method In order to collect the empirical data, mixed qualitative methods were used in this thesis, which included the concept of triangulation used for the data collection. Result The conduction of the presented qualitative research gave an opportunity to uncover and examine the different roles played by Ukrainian and Swedish NGOs in the welfare systems of their respective countries. It also became possible to observe an occurrence of a particular form of cooperation between the two NGOs in the international cooperation project, which can be related to a particular type of policy transfer. Conclusions Due to the fact that the project analysed in this study is still ongoing, it is still too early to derive any final conclusion about its achievements and formulate an evaluation concerning the nature of the policy transfer process. So far the author of the presented thesis can see that the project on its current stage has an occurrence of lesson-drawing policy transfer.

Ce travail doctoral s’intéresse aux choix du mode d’entrée des PME de service d’ingénierie souhaitant s’implanter sur les marchés émergents. Le contexte est à un double titre : un pays d’économie en transition, la Russie, et une PME du type Born Global de services à forte intensité de connaissances (SFIC), secteur parapétrolier. Notre recherche porte sur la détermination des facteurs qui permettent de franchir avec succès les barrières à l’entrée dans ce contexte. Nous avons procédé à la collecte des données empiriques primaires sur le terrain en conduisant une analyse qualitative exploratoire longitudinale d’étude de cas unique sur la période 2006-2013. L’étude de cas a été privilégiée afin de valider nos propositions de recherche issues des travaux scientifiques identifiés tel que les théories concernant les modes d’entrée, les PME Born Global, l’internationalisation des activités de services aux entreprises, les réseaux relationnels. Les résultats obtenus montrent que les PME SFIC du type Born Global se développe à l’international en suivant leurs clientèles, en s’appuyant sur le marketing relationnel et sur leur réseau comme un outil d’accès à une information fiable dans une espace volatile, à la différenciation de l’offre et à la rapidité de réaction pour exploiter une stratégie de niche. La nature d’activité des SFIC nécessite pour convaincre les clients, d’exploiter les capacités rhétoriques du personnel en contact, faire attention à l’image projetée et de gérer les relations et les interactions avec les clients centraux. Nos résultats font apparaître l’importance de l’étape pré-export pour la réussite du projet d’implantation dans ce contexte de marché. / This research work focuses on the entry mode choices that best fit the needs of SMEs of engineering services which set up their business into emerging markets. The context is twofold: a country with transition economy, Russia, and the so-called « Born Global » SME of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS), operating in the oilfield sector. Our study tries to identify factors that may help successfully overcome the entry barriers in this particular context. To conduct this research, we used an empirical approach of primary data collected directly from the field. Our exploratory qualitative analysis has been carried out longitudinally and involves data collection of single case study over the period 2006-2013. The method of single case study was privileged in order to validate our research proposals that emerged from the theoretical background related to the works about: entry mode, « Born Global » SME, the internationalization of professional business service, networks. Our descriptive results indicate that « Born Global » KIBS firms attempt to set up their business by following their clients, through relationship marketing and networks approach as a tool to get an access to reliable information in the turbulent environment, reinforced by the offer differentiation, reactivity and a niche strategy. The work and the outcomes of KIBS cannot be immediately evaluated, which require to convince customers through the management of rhetorical skills of contact persons, image production and interactions with central clients. Moreover, our results show the importance of pre-export phase to perform better the set up project in the context of emerging market.