This thesis investigates the evolutionary process of risk management practices associated with the implementation of enterprise risk management (ERM) across the finance sector. Despite the increasing number of ERM adoptions in the finance industry in recent years, ERM was still at an early stage of development and further research is recommended. The literature review identifies a gap in the ERM literature, prompting the development of a theoretical framework to investigate key organisational factors critical to effective implementation of the strategic framework. A strategic ERM Alignment Framework was developed to address key shortcomings of existing ERM practices in the industry and to provide practical guidance to academics and practitioners. The research was conducted as a two-stage empirical study in the finance sector, employing sequential mixed methods of data collection and analysis: a series of 35 semi-structured qualitative interviews with senior enterprise risk managers representing a variety of financial organisations, followed by a quantitative questionnaire survey of 115 finance industry professionals. The literature supports the industry view of continuous internal and external pressures towards ERM implementation across financial organisations. The research findings confirm that ERM is perceived to have slowly transformed from a process of compliance to a strategic tool and become a source of value creation and competitive advantage. The study also shows that aligning ERM with core organisational strategies and enterprise risk culture have been the underlying factors driving a strategic ERM framework sustainable over time. Inadequate senior management support for ERM and an insufficiently dynamic enterprise risk culture are identified as the greatest challenges to ERM sustainability. Major benefits of ERM are revealed as well informed risk-adjusted decision making and a strategic enterprise-wide view of key risks. The main contribution to knowledge of this research is the development of a strategic ERM Alignment Framework for the finance sector and practical guidelines for its effective implementation. Specifically, this research offers academics and finance industry practitioners a better understanding of organisational factors critical to the implementation of a strategic ERM Alignment Framework, supported by empirical evidence. Key limitation of the research was identified as the complexity of the ERM Alignment Framework that can be mitigated by undertaking future research to simplify the framework following its practical application. The researcher recommends that future research should focus on intangible elements and qualities of ERM that are important to the Alignment Framework, such as developing a strong and consistent enterprise risk culture, or investigating how the framework can add value to the organisation.

Some sociologists have suggested that focusing on individual behaviour change to reduce emissions detracts attention from larger structural issues. The first part of this thesis draws on mixed methods (1 interview study and 3 experimental studies) to look at the relationship between views on individual and structural levels of climate change mitigation. Interviewees mostly suggested individual behaviour change as a means for addressing climate change. The subsequent experimental studies investigate to what extent support for structural level change is minimised by focusing attention on individual behaviour change, but no such evidence emerged. However, there are other unexpected outcomes: for example, participants judge recycling to be one of the most impactful behaviours, illustrating that people's judgements of effective climate change mitigation may need revising. The second part of the thesis relates to suggestions that lack of personal experience of climate change partly explains people's inaction. Drawing on fieldwork consisting of 77 interviews conducted in California on people's experience of drought, I firstly explore how people experience the drought itself; such as what changes they note and how drought perceptions are influenced by location. Secondly, I discuss whether and why people tend to think that drought and climate change are related or not. Importantly, people mostly interpret the drought according to their pre-existing climate change beliefs, so that if they already believed climate change was happening then the drought is treated as further evidence, whereas those who were sceptical of climate change usually see the drought as part of a natural cycle. In conjunction these studies expand the existing literature on views towards climate change mitigation and the role that personal experience plays in understandings of climate change.

Thesis (MBus) -- Auckland University of Technology, 2005. / Also held in print (55 leaves, 30 cm.) in Wellesley Theses Collection (T 338.951 CHE)

Thesis (M.M.S.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, Sociologiska institutionen, 1989. / Added t.p. with thesis statement and abstract in English inserted. Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-147).

The pace and intensity of educational reform over the past quarter of a century has seen wholesale changes to the nature and organisation of schooling and mounting demands placed on school leaders (Chapman and Gunter, 2009) with increasingly burdensome workloads blamed for problems relating to the recruitment and retention of headteachers (Whitaker, 2003). Since 2002, and largely in response to these concerns, successive governments have invested in national programmes to strengthen the potential of a previously fragmented section of the school workforce whose skills and knowledge are particularly well-placed to improve capacity and reduce the workload of headteachers in the areas of administration and finance: the School Business Manager (SBM). A decade on there is thought to be approximately 13,000 SBM posts across the country (Summerson, 2009) forming an integral part of the school workforce. So how has the role developed in that time? What influence are SBMs having in the schools in which they operate? What kind of work does the SBM role encompass in a modern day educational setting? This thesis focuses on the emergence of SBMs in English schools, specifically drawing upon the composition of the role; the areas of school in which they are impacting and; the facilitators and barriers to the development of successful models of school business management. The research strategy employs a multi-perspective, case study design to explore the sphere of activity of the SBM in a range of schools of different types and phases. A mixed-methods approach was adopted to collect documentary, survey and interview evidence from a number of sources and school stakeholders. The findings identify significant diversity in terms of the responsibilities undertaken by SBMs, the areas of educational provision the role can incorporate and the type of impact they are able to make within, between and beyond schools. The evidence also highlights the varying degrees of leadership and management being exercised by SBMs in different settings while underlining the cultural and contextual factors that can facilitate and inhibit the success of school business management models. What emerges is a role that can be of meaningful, tangible and sustainable benefit to schools but one that is still to be fully accepted, appreciated and understood in some quarters of the school system. To conclude, a heuristic of different approaches to school business management is presented to provide a speculative consideration of some of the key characteristics of school business management models across different school types. This working model is put forward as a means of stimulating further reflection on the implications of the findings.

Sustainability in the business context seeks to create long-term value by seizing the opportunities and overcoming the challenges of simultaneously addressing the organization’s economic, environmental and social responsibilities. Several sustainability models and frameworks have been put forward over the past three decades, aiming at helping organizations embed sustainability at the core of their businesses. Their relevancy and applicability are significant, particularly for the manufacturing sector and the overall value chain, even though service organizations are equally important stakeholders in this process. The raising interest to promote sustainability-focused practices, processes and policies in organizations in the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) region, particularly across the service sector, have contributed to define the goal of this research, namely: to establish the main drivers and challenges faced by local service organizations to embed sustainability at the core of their business strategy and practice, in order to develop an innovative multi-dimensional sustainability framework specifically adapted to the service sector in the GCC countries’ socio-cultural and economic environment. For this purpose, a research path was followed which included: comparative critical analysis of the leading organizational sustainability frameworks and maturity models; an empirical evaluation of their relevancy in the particular context of GCC countries; and primary research to confirm the perceived applied research gap and to evaluate the feasibility and relevancy of putting forward a sector specific framework. The outcome of this research is an innovative multi-dimensional sustainability framework for service sector organizations in the GCC region, which will provide stronger guidance on how to select and implement the most relevant sustainability aspects within the local service sector businesses, thus allowing them to develop better sustainability-focused policies and practices in the workplace. This framework will also contribute to academic community by opening new views on how sustainability is perceived and what adjustments are needed for it to work in the service sector in the context of GCC countries. This framework can later on be extended to other countries of the MENA region, where existing sustainability models and frameworks would not be fit for purpose. The framework hereby proposed was validated by combining the quantitative research and qualitative data collection and analysis using a combined positivist and interpretive case study strategy based on carefully selected cases across the service sector in the GCC countries. The measurable success of this framework will be the time it will take to reach a significant number of service sector organizations in the GCC countries that achieve the ideal balance between their social, economic and environmental dimensions with few constraints, thus becoming potential leaders of change for a more sustainable and inclusive successful future.

Organisations today are investing in the efficient management of their talented workforce, known as talent management (TM) in order to bear fruitful outcomes in terms of corporate sustainability. Some businesses choose to include all employees in their TM strategy-inclusive TM-whilst others only include the highest-performing employees-exclusive TM. It has been suggested that no matter which TM strategy they implement, contextual factors such as culture seem to drive the degree of their application. Thus, the rationale for this research is in determining the cultural factors that trigger the exercise of TM.This study's aim is to analyse the extent to which TM strategies are impacted by national and organisational culture. In addition, it seeks the critical exploration of TM in the context of key human resource practices (HRPs); the critical investigation of TM's application; the critical examination of national and organisational culture; and finally, the degree to which both types of culture affect TM's application. This study follows a conceptual framework which sets national culture as the independent variable, organisational culture as the mediating variable, and TM as the dependent variable. The body of theory overviewed is relevant to TM's concepts and its interrelation to both human resource management (HRM) and human resource development (HRD). Predominant national and organisational cultural frameworks are also overviewed. This research's sample includes six case studies from northern, central and southern Greece and adopts a mixed-methods approach using primary data collected through questionnaires and interviews, and analysed through SPSS and thematic analysis. Among the key findings is that national culture indirectly drives the adoption of specific TM modes through the development of certain corporate cultures. Additional findings shed light on the contemporary conception of 'talent' and 'TM,' as well as on the association between national and corporate culture. This study significantly contributes to knowledge by bringing in evidence from the business environment while also discussing implications for practitioners regarding the parameters that influence both their decisions and actions.

Statistinių apklausos tyrimo duomenų apdorojimui naudota SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) programinė įranga. Siekiant parengti Alytaus apskrities savivaldybių kultūrinių projektų ir programų efektyvaus įgyvendinimo modelį, svarbu išanalizuoti kultūros sektoriaus apskrities būklę, ištirti skirtingų kultūros sektoriaus objektų kultūros darbuotojų nuomonę apie kultūros sektoriaus situaciją, bei esamas problemas, vykdomą projektinę veiklą. Kultūrinių projektų ir programų įgyvendinimo įvertinimas ir žinojimas įgalina nustatyti priemones, kurios leistų gerinti Alytaus apskrities teikiamas kultūros paslaugas ir tuo pačiu numatyti konkrečius žingsnius kultūros sektoriaus plėtrai. / Research methods – in the final work used theoretical methods: scientific literature‘s and documents analysis, comparison, inductions, deduction, synthesis, generalization methods. It is analyzing and caparisoning Lithuanian author’s opinions and approaches with foreign authors. There are used and empirical methods: qualitative and quantitative data analysis, statistical data analysis, data filing. Data of Questionnaire‘s survey was processing with SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) software. The culture is very important for democracy state and society. The person, society, all civilization can show themselves only through the national culture. We can be interesting for other foreign countries with our authenticity cultural and traditions. It is very important to develop our cultural, to keep identity especially in rural areas. Objects of rural cultural sector like library, cultural centre, museum, theater and other are realizing cultural projects and programmes in Alytaus district. The case is, that implementation of cultural projects or programmes depends on cultural experts’ qualification, motivation to do the original cultural project, sponsorship from the cultural foundations, cooperation between different cultural objects, rural communities, and with other public organizations. There are internal and external factors which can influence implementation of cultural projects and programmes in Alytaus district. The point is that, the implementation model of... [to full text]

Thesis (D.B.A.) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 2001. / A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Business Adminiistration, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 2001. Includes bibliographical references.