Zugl.: Kassel, University, Diss., 2005. / Download lizenzpflichtig.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2001--Heidelberg.

Zugl.: Kassel, Univ., Diss., 2005. / Auch im Internet unter der Adresse www.upress.uni-kassel.de verfügbar

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Organisational culture plays an important role in the success of the adoption of technology and the development of the organisation; therefore, it is very important to understand how organisational culture impacts the process of implementing technology, either positively or negatively. The aim of this study is to explore the role of organisational culture in digital government implementation in Omani public sector organisations. This study used mixed methods as a research methodology. In the qualitative phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted with top and middle management and at operational levels in the Omani public sector organisations. In the quantitative phase, a survey was distributed to employees within the public sector organisations to build on the findings of the first stage and develop an understanding of the relationship between organisational culture and implementation of digital government in Oman. This study found that there is a relationship between organisational culture and digital government implementation. It was found that the type of organisational culture has some impact on the digital government implementation as it was found that the organisations with the clan culture type had low levels of implementation of digital government whereas, organisations with the hierarchy culture type had high levels of implementation. Moreover, the study found that middle managers in public sector organisations in Oman had a critical impact on the digital government implementation.

The Sultanate of Oman’s health system has developed rapidly since 1970, with the discovery of oil as well as the strong central government of Sultan Qaboos bin Said. However, despite its investment and dedication to improving the health care available to its citizens, Oman has just begun to address concerns linked to cultural beliefs and social perceptions, including mental health and reproductive health. This study examines how the government has addressed mental and reproductive health, the realities on the ground, and the ways in which cultural perceptions and recent social change influence these health challenges. This study is based on semi-structured interviews with Omani health professionals that have been used to identify hurdles as well as opportunities that exist to strengthen the quality of care in these newly emerging fields in the Omani public health system.

This thesis investigates the relationship between oil revenue and macroeconomic policies and performance in Oman. The thesis contains five empirical chapters along with introduction, literature review and conclusion. The first empirical chapter looks into the dynamic relationship between oil revenue, government spending and economic activities. The results indicate oil revenue has immediate and significant impact on both the country s GDP and the government expenditure. The government expenditure also has significant impact on the GDP. The second empirical chapter examines the validity of the Wagner s Law and the Keynesian hypothesis in regards to the relationship between the government spending and economic performance. The chapter uses both aggregated and disaggregated government expenditure where the data are divided into recurrent and capital investment. The findings show that there is a long run-relationship between the government spending and the GDP for the period covered. The causality analysis suggests that public investment causes economic growth, but the recurrent expenditure is insignificant. The third empirical chapter investigates the impact of government spending on economic performance where the government spending was decomposed into health, education and militaryexpenditure. The results of these components of the government expenditure and along with an index of openness have long-run relationship with GDP. The short-run coefficient on military spending is insignificant and that of health is negative and significant. However, the long-run coefficients are all positive and significant, except that of military. The fourth empirical chapter analyses the relationship between government expenditure and oil revenue in Oman. The disaggregated government expenditure of health, education and military are used for the analysis in order to see the response of each component to oil revenue changes. The results show that, although all the components responded positively to a positive oils revenue shock, it is the military component that has recorded highest response with more persistence. The fifth chapter investigates the relationship between the current account and the fiscal deficits in Oman. The chapter uses a threshold cointegration technique that is capable of capturing non-linearity and asymmetric adjustment between the series. The estimated results show that there is a long-run relationship between the current account and fiscal deficits in Oman and that adjustment between the series is asymmetric. It is found that upward adjustment is much faster than downward adjustment.

With oil reserves dwindling, efforts to create a diversified, post-oil economy in Oman have focused on building the human capital of citizens and promoting a new entrepreneurial ‘work culture’ among Omani employees and entrepreneurs. In a context in which state-provided jobs represent both an exchange of labor for a salary and a means of securing a citizen’s rightful share of the nation’s oil revenues, issues of productivity and workforce development are most often framed in terms of the ‘mindset’ of individual citizens. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with experts and professionals in Oman’s thriving citizen labor industry—the industry of human resource specialists, consultants, career coaches, entrepreneurship trainers, and the organizations which support and sponsor them—this dissertation explores how utopian investments in Omani human capital have shaped the distributive governance of the Omani state, the production of persons, and the making of ‘an economy.’ In an environment in which economic ‘growth’ is driven by state-guided subsidy rather than market mechanisms, this dissertation describes how economic and managerial expertise is employed to create 'an economy’ in ways that are largely unaccompanied by the production of markets. By doing so, this dissertation highlights how seemingly neoliberal interventions aimed at ‘rolling back’ the state and cultivating entrepreneurial ‘mindsets’ have counterintuitively produced subjects who understand their personal and social ‘development’ as pieces of a larger system of distributive rights and obligations that is as much social and political as it is economic. Ultimately, by demonstrating how subsidy-driven investments in Oman’s citizen workforce reproduce distributive arrangements, this dissertation complicates the assumption that ‘development’ is an antidote to Oman’s natural resource dependence.

Uplift of the Al Hajar Mountains in Oman has been related to either Late Cretaceous ophiolite obduction or the Neogene Zagros collision. To test these hypotheses, the cooling of the central Al Hajar Mountains is constrained by 10 apatite (U-Th)/He (AHe), 15 fission track (AFT), and four zircon (U-Th)/He (ZHe) sample ages. These data show differential cooling between the two major structural culminations of the mountains. In the 3km high Jabal Akhdar culmination AHe single-grain ages range between 392 Ma and 101 Ma (2 sigma errors), AFT ages range from 518 Ma to 324 Ma, and ZHe single-grain ages range from 62 +/- 3Ma to 39 +/- 2 Ma. In the 2 km high Saih Hatat culmination AHe ages range from 26 +/- 4 to 12 +/- 4 Ma, AFT ages from 73 +/- 19Ma to 57 +/- 8 Ma, and ZHe single-grain ages from 81 +/- 4 Ma to 58 +/- 3 Ma. Thermal modeling demonstrates that cooling associated with uplift and erosion initiated at 40 Ma, indicating that uplift occurred 30 Myr after ophiolite obduction and at least 10 Myr before the Zagros collision. Therefore, this uplift cannot be related to either event. We propose that crustal thickening supporting the topography of the Al Hajar Mountains was caused by a slowdown of Makran subduction and that north Oman took up the residual fraction of N-S convergence between Arabia and Eurasia.

This study aims to examine the degree of influence that societal and organizational cultures, as specified by the GLOBE project, have on employment equity in the Omani public sector. Therefore, a theoretical framework has been built and developed in two main areas, which are culture and employment equity. In addition, the methodology of the study has been designed to use both quantitative and qualitative research approaches for triangulation. Quantitative data was collected from a sample of 290 Omani civil servants representing several public organizations, while qualitative data was collected in a single case study of Oman’s Royal Court Affairs (RCA) organization, 12 general managers from which were interviewed. The independent variables were dimensions of societal and organizational culture, and the dependent variables were employment equity in general, which includes seven critical success factors behind employment equity. The analysis for the quantitative data was carried out using SPSS software, while interviews were analysed manually due to the small number of participants. The results of the study confirm that societal and organizational cultures have significant influence on employment equity (EE). However, not all cultural dimensions have the same direction or degree of influence on employment equity. In fact, some of these dimensions have no significant correlation with EE. Also, the study found that there were no differences between managers’ and employees’ responses with regard to 34 cultural dimensions out of 36. The two dimensions in which the results differed between these groups were Human Orientation and Future Orientation for organizational culture value. Additionally, the results show that participants believe that there is a real need for higher EE in the Omani public sector as there were clear differences between current practices of EE and how it should be. Moreover, there were significant positive correlations between all seven critical success factors behind effective EE. This result indicates that these factors are interacting between each other in a positive way. Also, a suggested framework was developed to show how government and other organizations could positively use and benefit from the influences of cultural dimensions to enhance EE among employees. Researchers also could benefit from such a framework as well as the overall findings of this thesis by using them as a starting point for further research to fill the observed knowledge gap in this area.