Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Sveriges lantbruksuniv., 2009. / Härtill 3 uppsatser.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-66).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-214).

This thesis sets out a journey which culminates in the development of an analytical framework, the "Organisational Creativity Appraisal" which is intended to assist organisations in evaluating their ability to support and develop creativity. This framework is derived from the common thread of the thesis, which is drawn from a range of research and consultancy projects, and the resulting published work, spanning an eight year period, centring on the role of knowledge and creativity in the strategy and performance of organisations. The literature of strategy, learning and creativity increasingly recognises that organisational context is critical to the formation of strategy, to the content of the strategy and to its successful implementation. The thesis explores the ways in which learning and creativity, the basis of knowledge-based strategy, are influenced by organisational context or social architecture. The research explores the ways in which managers can gain greater understanding of the social architectures of their organisations so as to assist in supporting their strategic development. The central core of the thesis is the nine published papers upon which it is based but it also derives from the broader perspective of my published work in the form of both articles and books. The thesis further draws upon my own experience as a leader and manager in the context of university business schools and as a consultant, researcher and developer in the context of a range of international private and public sector organisations. The work is based upon a premise that theory should inform practice and that practice should inform theory. The "Organisational Creativity Appraisal" framework is informed by both theory and practice and is intended to assist in management practice. There is no assumption that management research can arrive at prescriptions for managerial and organisational behaviour. On the other hand management research can usefully inform management and organisational behaviour, as long as it is employed in a critically reflective manner. The "Organisational Creativity Appraisal" presented in this work should be regarded as the framework in its present form which is likely to develop further as my research progresses in the future.

User-friendly systems of human factors (HF) analysis are not presently available to the managers of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It is therefore difficult for such professionals to assess the safety culture within their own workplaces without the assistance of externally sourced experts. Large companies have implemented methods of HF analysis with a significant degree of success using HF experts. The aim of this research project was to confirm that SMEs could also benefit from these methods using in-house personnel with a specially-created HF assessment tool. Human error is often cited as the cause of accidents and incidents. A system of HF analysis was created as part of this research project to allow the technique to be implemented by non-experts within SMEs to identify human-related risks and thereby to assist in improving safety culture and safety performance by implementing measures to minimise those risks through HF methods. This research project found that potential collaboration partners that were initially keen to take part soon withdrew from the research project after realising what was involved in terms of required resources. For those companies that participated, the workforce was surveyed to determine the workplace safety culture. Some positive results were obtained but the overriding findings of this research project were that, of the majority of SMEs that were keen to collaborate, they did not actually want to change their safety culture; rather, they were content to continue to implement safety by enforcement of rules & regulations (antecedents) with little scope for implementation of behaviour-based safety systems of control. Although most companies approached knew of the potential benefits it was clear that they had no desire to allocate the resources necessary to achieve those benefits.

The analysis of the interdependence between international equity markets has been a key issue in international finance as it has important practical implications for asset allocations, risk management, and economic policy. The objective of this thesis is to re-examine the interdependence amongst international equity markets at the industry sector level. In particular, the thesis investigates time varying, long run and short run dynamic relationships between industry sectors of the United States of America and three leading emerging markets/countries: Brazil, Malaysia, and South Africa between January, 2000 and December, 2009. The thesis advances previous studies on international industry sector relationships in three specific aspects. Firstly, it examines a large number of heterogeneous industry sectors from the global economy. Secondly, existing empirical studies in this area need to be updated to include the recent turbulent global economic and financial crisis period. Thirdly, the thesis offers a deeper analysis into the intra-industry sector interdependence than previously presented. Such analysis has important implications for international diversification strategies. A crucial empirical contribution of the study is by applying liner and non liner econometric time series techniques for the evaluation for long run global relationships and causality linkages, including testing for asymmetric causality relations both in linear and nonlinear settings. This thesis also represents [to the best of my knowledge] the first study that extensively considers time-varying relationships amongst international industry sectors by examining time varying correlations and beta stability, as well as time varying cointegration and causality relationships. Another empirical motivation of this thesis is the need to extend existing empirical studies on industry sectors by examining the impact of the recent economic and financial crisis period. Specifically, the thesis investigates the shifts in cross correlations and the dynamic causality linkages between the US and emerging markets' industry sectors before and during the 2007-2009 economic and financial crisis. The initial exploratory analysis of the return cross-correlations indicate that, though small or in a moderate range, the existence of co-movements amongst international industry sectors as all correlations coefficients are positive and significant at the one per cent level. The results for long run relationships provided by linear (without seasonal dummies) and nonlinear cointegration tests show no significant evidence of cointegration relations between the US and the emerging markets industrial sectors. Similarly, the results of the dynamic causality linkages, between the US and emerging markets industrial sectors indicate, there exist some significant short-run causal linkages (linear and nonlinear) between these markets' industry sectors, weak linkages. Overall, the results of time varying analysis indicate unstable relationships between the returns of US and the emerging economies' industry sectors over the sample period. The empirical results of crisis suggest increased cross correlations and causality relationships among the industry sectors of US and the emerging markets under study during the crisis of the sample period than pre-crisis period of the same sample. In summary, the empirical results of the research indicate relatively weak interdependence between the US and the emerging markets industry sectors, which suggest potential diversification benefits for US investors in diversifying their portfolio investment across industrial sectors of the emerging markets.

Mičánová, K. Crisis management in the hotel business. Diploma thesis. Brno, 2015. The diploma thesis deals with the crisis management applied in the hotel business. The main objective of this thesis is to formulate recommendations for the area of crisis management for the selected hotel. The external environment is analyzed trought PEST analysis and Porter's five forces model. Analysis of company resources is the starting point for assessment of the interal environment. According to these analysis are determined weaknesses and threats that could potentially cause a crisis situation. For these crisis situations are proposed recommendations to eliminate them.

Derivatives markets, in particular futures markets, play an important role in the organization of production in commodity markets. While commodity markets for agricultural and natural resources like live cattle, soybean, oil, gas and minerals are well established, commodity markets for marine resources are very new. Located in Bergen (Norway), Fish Pool is a new derivatives market, where futures contracts written on fresh farmed salmon are traded in large quantities since 2006, continuing a strong upwards trend. Markets for forwards and futures on fresh salmon help companies which use fresh salmon in their production, for example, food processing companies, to hedge their price risk and plan ahead, by fixing the price in advance. In the same way, they help producers, i.e. salmon farmers, to reduce their selling price risk. In fact, according to Fish Pool News Archive released on 20/03/2012, not only consumers, processors and producers, but also speculative investors at Fish Pool play a more and more important role, which in consequence urges the issue of finding appropriate, theoretical well-founded and sound pricing formulas for the futures contracts traded there, as well as examining its effects on participants. In this PhD thesis, we first discuss the valuation of futures on fresh farmed salmon as traded on the Fish Pool exchange and then explore how information reflected in the prices of futures contracts can be used to compute fair prices, i.e., arbitrage free prices, for lease and ownership of fish farms. Specifically, in the first chapter, we give a general background of the study and introduce the estimation methods adopted in the thesis, i.e., Kalman filter combined with the maximum likelihood estimation. In Chapter 2, we connect the popular Schwartz (1997) multi-factor approach, which features a stochastic convenience yield for the salmon spot price, with the classical literature on fish farming and aquaculture. We follow first principles, starting by modeling the aggregate salmon farming production process and modeling the demand using a Cobb-Douglas utility function for a representative consumer. In Chapter 3, we extend the Schwartz (1997) two-factor model by adding a seasonality feature to the mean-level of convenience yield. All models are estimated by means of Kalman filter, using a rich data set of contracts with different maturities traded at Fish Pool. The estimates are also discussed in the context of other commodity markets, specifically live cattle which acts as a substitute. Our results show that the framework presented is able to produce an excellent fit to the actual term structure of salmon futures. A comparison with live cattle futures traded within the same period reveals subtle differences, for example within the level of the convenience yield, the speed of mean reversion of the convenience yield and the convenience yield risk premium. In Chapter 4, we consider the optimal harvesting problem for a fish farmer. We take account of the existence of Fish Pool, which determines risk premia and other relevant variables, that influence the fish farmer in his decision. We assess the optimal strategy, harvesting time and value against two alternative setups. The first alternative involves simple strategies which lack managerial flexibility, the second alternative allows for managerial flexibility and risk aversion as modeled by a constant relative risk aversion utility function, but without access to the salmon futures market. In both cases, the loss in project value can be very significant, and in the second case is only negligible for extremely low levels of risk aversion. In consequence, for a risk-averse fish farmer, the presence of a salmon futures market, as well as managerial flexibility, are highly important.