With a triple-bottom-line lens on sustainability, this study examines the effects of culture on companies' economic, social, and environmental sustainability practices. Drawing on institutional theory and project GLOBE, we delineate cultural practices dimensions that consistently predict sustainability practices related to each of the three domains. Based on a sample of 1924 companies in 36 countries and nine cultural clusters, we find that future orientation, gender egalitarianism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance practices positively, and performance orientation practices negatively, predict corporate sustainability practices. Further, our findings suggest that these effects might vary according to the country vis-à-vis cluster level of analysis.

国立情報学研究所で電子化したコンテンツを使用している。

Currently, water utilities are facing monetary crises to maintain and expand services to meet the current as well as the future demands. Standard practice in pipeline infrastructure asset management is to collect data and predict the condition of pipelines using models and tools. Water utilities want to be proactive in fixing or replacing the pipes as fixing-when-it-fails ideology leads to increased cost and can affect environmental quality and societal health. There is a number of modeling techniques available for assessing the condition of the pipelines, but there is a massive shortage of methods to check the reliability of the results obtained using different modeling techniques. It is mainly because of the limited data one utility collects and absence of piloting of these models at various water utilities. In general, water utilities feel confident about their in-house condition prediction and failure models but are willing to utilize a reliable methodology which can overcome the issues related to the validation of the results. This paper presents the methodology that can enhance the reliability of model results for water pipeline performance analysis which can be used to parallel the output of the real system with confidence. The proposed methodology was checked using the dataset of two large water utilities and was found that it can potentially help water utilities gain confidence in their analyses results by statistically signifying the results. / Master of Science

This master’s thesis deals with establishment of parameters of the PPI filter material using methods of image analysis. The first part is aimed at general methods used in practice, an overview of splitting into filter clasification and characterization of the PPI filter material. The second part represents an introduction to problems of machine vision. There are outlined basic methods of image processing. Last parts of the thesis study the method using detection of bright light levels. The measurement and interpretation of results is performed with the PPI material - types 10/6 and 10/12. For image processing is used the MATLAB program, version 7.0.1.