AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OFBrett Lacey, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice, presented on March 26, 2021, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: LEGALIZATION EFFECTS ON ILLEGAL MULTI-STATE CANNABIS DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Christopher W. Mullins Although a broad and detailed history of illegal cannabis trafficking networks exist, it remains a relatively understudied group in the current legal context. Prior research has been limited in three crucial aspects: it has been geographically limited to single states or jurisdictions, studies have been limited to examining one role while mentioning others only peripherally, and the majority of earlier similar studies were conducted from the 1980s through 2000s. It is unclear whether these findings represent current black market actors in the cannabis industry. This study will attempt to address these temporal, legal, and geographical gaps in empirical research through conducting in depth semi-structured interviews with 36 active illicit cannabis traffickers from California, Colorado, Illinois, and Oregon. Overall, it addresses how illegal cannabis distribution networks operate across varying roles, their decision making processes regarding legality, the processes involved in shipping or mailing cannabis, and the corresponding monetary system involved with conducting transactions without physical interaction. Overall findings mirrored prior research in that the black market of cannabis will persist and continue to flourish in the current legalization context. However, findings also indicated that black market actors are highly adept to adapting to policy, possess considerable business acumen, and detailed an entire system of trafficking and associated monetary system rarely mentioned previously. To theoretically contextualize this research, this study utilized institutional anomie theory, organizational adaptation theory, and rational choice theory.

Much of the past research and policy analysis on issues of western water has focused on inter-basin river agreements, large infrastructure that captures and distributes water, and conflict between agricultural and urban water demands. My dissertation asks a set of different questions: How is water governed and managed within communities of Utah? How are the organizations that manage water responding to changes in population, water availability, and water quality policy? The answers to these questions are essential for understanding the ways in which changes to water quantity and quality will be addressed in the present and coming years. To better understand the ways in which local water management organizations, including irrigation groups and municipalities, manage water in Utah, I conducted three major types of research activities. First, in 2013, I attended 18 meetings of local water management organizations and conducted 18 interviews of organization representatives that managed water within the Heber and Cache Valleys of northern Utah. In 2014, I built upon the knowledge learned in the 2013 observations and interviews, and conducted an online survey of stormwater managers throughout the state of Utah. To build upon survey responses, I then conducted 30 follow-up interviews of stormwater managers that represented municipal stormwater programs. This research was funded with a combination of support from the National Science Foundation’s iUTAH EPSCoR project (iutahepscor.org) and funds from the Utah Storm Water Advisory Committee, a group that represents municipal stormwater programs at the state level. My findings suggest that local water management organizations are already responding to growth and expansion in urban land use, rising uncertainties in water supplies, and shifting responsibilities for stormwater governance and management toward local governments. To cope with these changes, organizations are using a combination of strategies, including working with private consultants and collaborating with one another. With increasing pressures from environmental change and added responsibilities through decentralized water policies, it is expected that these adaptive strategies will persist or even spread to other local water management organizations yet to take on these behaviors.

Ce travail se concentre sur l'idée que la rationalité organisationnelle est limitée: les décideurs recherchent des solutions offrant un minimum de satisfaction et pensent d’une manière qui est typique pour l'homme. La thèse explore cette interaction entre le processus de recherche organisationnelle et la cognition des décideurs et démontre que certains biais (distorsions) dans les aspects caractéristiques de notre pensée peuvent être des instruments de stratégie comportementale.Comme le point de départ, je complète le premier primitif de la rationalité limitée, i.e. la génération et l'évaluation d’alternatives, avec des éléments intégrés de la cognition humaine, tels que la pensée intuitive, spécifiquement l’heuristique d’affect, et des représentations mentales imparfaites. À l'aide de modèles de calcul, j’étudie les effets des biais correspondants à ces éléments de la cognition humaine (préférences affectives et erreurs systématiques dans les représentations mentales) dans le temps lorsque des organisations s'adaptent à des environnements complexes. Cela me permet d'identifier les cycles de vie des éléments de la cognition humaine et de montrer que les organisations devraient gérer (plutôt que d'éliminer) certains biais. Enfin, je fais des propositions et je teste empiriquement un sous-ensemble de mes prédictions.En conclusion, ce travail vise à faire progresser la théorie émergente de la stratégie comportementale en considérant conjointement différents primitifs de la rationalité limitée et en les intégrant aux connaissances existantes en sciences organisationnelles. Une question générale qui motive ce travail est la façon dont les organisations peuvent gérer les nombreuses limites de la rationalité humaine. / This work centers on the tenet that organizational rationality is bounded: decision makers search, satisfice, and think in the way that is typical (in its integrity) only of humans. The dissertation explores this interplay between search and decision maker’s cognition and demonstrates how biases in characteristic aspects of our thinking can be instruments of behavioral strategy.As a starting point, I take search, sequential generation and evaluation of alternatives, as the first primitive of bounded rationality and complement it with integral elements of human cognition, such as automatic, intuitive thinking, specifically affect heuristic, and imperfect mental representations of reality. With the help of computational models, I track the effects of the corresponding biases (systematic affective preferences and systematic errors in mental representations) over time as organizations adapt to complex environments. This allows me to identify life cycles of the elements of human cognition and show that organizations should manage (rather than eliminate) some biases over time. Finally, I derive predictions and empirically test a subset of my propositions.In conclusion, this work aims to advance the emerging theory of behavioral strategy by jointly considering different primitives of bounded rationality and integrating them with the existing knowledge in organization sciences. A broad question that motivates this work is how organizations can manage the many bounds to human rationality.

This dissertation introduces the model of opportunistic adaptation to explain new venture growth. In established firms processes of change and adaptation usually imply a transition from one steady-state strategy to another and a problem oriented perspective as firms change in response to potential threats to their current positions. However, in the context of new ventures, adaptation is less about moving from one existent strategy to another and more about the entrepreneur’s effort to reach a steady state for the first time by continuously experimenting and combining resources in creative and innovative ways. The model of opportunistic adaptation rests on three key assumptions: 1.) new venture growth results from actions grounded in an opportunistic (proactive) logic; 2.) entrepreneurial cognition is viewed as an antecedent to all organizational actions leading to growth; 3.) the relationship between entrepreneurial cognition and action is influenced by industry and firm level attributes. The model is tested using quantitative and qualitative data on new ventures founded between 1996 and 2006 in technology intensive industries. The results provide partial support for the notion of opportunistic adaptation as a process in which entrepreneurial cognition, firm and industry related factors are closely intertwined. The results of the dissertation suggest that some aspects of entrepreneurial cognition, such as entrepreneurial schema focus have a more direct effect on actions related to new venture growth than others whose effect is strongly moderated by contextual influences such as industry growth and social network heterogeneity. This dissertation also finds that not all types of organizational actions associated with an opportunity logic lead to new venture growth. Of the three action types included in the model (fast, diverse and frequent) only action diversity was found to have a positive impact on new venture growth. Theoretical implications of the study results for both the literature on new venture growth and the literature on organizational adaptation, as well as practical implications are discussed.

Impacts from climate change already pose major challenges for organizations and industrial systems, and vulnerabilities are expected to increase in the future, particularly in vulnerable sectors and locations. Findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that climate change related vulnerabilities of organizations and industries, but also of settlement and society as a whole, are mainly related to changes in the intensity and/or frequency of extreme weather, rather than to gradual climate change impacts. Organization researchers and managers, however, have not yet systematically considered the organizational implications of changes in trends of weather extremes, such as changes to the intensity and/or frequency of storms, floods, and droughts. While companies in the reinsurance industry (e.g., Munich Re, Swiss Re) have begun to undertake research into changes in trends of extremes, most current debates on climate change and corporate response are mainly focused on adaptation – that is, longer-term adjustments that organizations can take in response to policy and legislative changes and the observed gradual warming trend. The question of how organizations can cope with more frequent and/or intense weather extremes has largely remained outside of these debates. The thesis advances the notion that the resilience concept which originated in disciplines such as ecology and engineering may provide insights into dealing with new types of environmental change arising from changes in patterns of weather extremes. It emphasizes that organizational adaptation and resilience potentials are context-specific and related to the characteristics of particular climate change impacts. While organizations may be able to undergo steady adaptations to gradual climate change (such as gradual increases in mean temperatures), they might not be able to handle disruptions that go beyond this gradual trend and are related to changes in extremes. Included in this thesis are five papers that seek to provide a foundation for understanding, assessing and evaluating organizational responses to more frequent and/or intense weather extremes. The first paper serves as an introduction to the thesis, assesses the literatures on organizational adaptation and resilience, and proposes an initial model that draws together the different streams of literature on climate change, adaptation and resilience. The second paper extends on the themes of the first paper and provides a discussion of the concepts of adaptation and resilience, as well as their applicability to different types of climate change impacts. The third paper serves as a method paper and discusses assessment methods and pathway to study organizational resilience. The key difficulties identified in this paper are the uncertainties about future climate change outcomes across temporal and spatial scales and a lack of insight into what leads to organizational resilience, or which variables should be measured in a given study. The fourth paper is an empirical study about the 2009 Victorian Bushfires. While individual extreme events cannot be directly linked to climate change impacts, this study highlights that part of the problem in drawing out the resilience of organizations to an unprecedented and ‘more-severe-than-expected’ extreme event is that a range of contingent variables across organizational and societal and ecological levels are potentially relevant. The last paper discusses the potential inability of organization to adjust to changes in climate and weather, and implications in terms of a necessity of a geographical shift of organizational and industrial activities. The thesis highlights gaps in our understanding of organizational challenges and suggests avenues for future research.

If we understand development as an emergent property of a complex system, then effective development assistance needs to adapt and evolve in-context. This thesis explores how learning and adaptation practices might help aid organizations apply complexity thinking to improve their effectiveness. Based on a new framework of organizational practices, this study uses a mixed methods approach to assess the extent to which 12 small and medium international aid organizations in Haiti learn and adapt. The study supports the assumption that learning and adaptation contribute to effectiveness, and finds that organizations vary significantly in their learning and adaptation practices. It finds that development organizations employ more learning practices than humanitarian assistance organizations, and that organizations are generally better at collecting information and adopting learning attitudes, than they are at establishing the structures and processes they need to be truly adaptive. The research also finds that the barriers that make learning and adaptation more difficult for organizations are largely structural and related to aid system dynamics, while organizations benefit from enablers that are largely attributed to individual agency. This thesis argues for the important role that aid organizations can, and must play in making aid more effective – at the project, organization, and aid system levels. However, the aid system itself does not encourage learning. International aid organizations will therefore need to actively engage in learning if they are to play an effective role in development, and be a meaningful part of the system-level aid effectiveness dialogue.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study investigated how civil society organizations (CSOs) adapted to shifts in their external environment that threatened their survival. Specifically, the study considered how CSOs in Turkey were responding to growing authoritarianism and citizens’ demands for a voice and openness. Moreover, the study sought to explain why organizational responses varied across organizations operating in the same field and the challenges CSO leaders confronted as they implemented changes in response to this environment. These pressures, both authoritarian regimes and citizens’ demands for a voice in these organizations, reflect the democratic crisis in many countries and the overall distrust in institutions. In this respect, considering the consequences of both of these pressures for the legitimacy of CSOs simultaneously is both timely and necessary. This study blended theoretical insights from neo-institutional theory and resource dependency theory as well as strategic management literature and civil society literature to fill this theoretical gap. I argue that competing external pressures created conflicting logics by providing different stipulations about how CSOs had to be managed and that CSOs developed differentiated strategies by adopting some features of each logic. I grouped these responses into two main categories: survival and mission-related responses. I demonstrated that competing institutional logics pass through the organizational field and then they are filtered by the following organizational attributes: organizational form, stance toward government, risk tolerance and organizational capacity. Tensions and paradoxical situations resulting from selected practices created various management challenges for CSO leaders. These findings offer new perspectives to the literature on civil society under authoritarian regimes by pointing out the link between outside threats confronting CSOs and significant organizational management issues, thus illustrating how political regimes constrain CSOs’ capacity to contribute to democratic processes and perform internal democracy through soft and hard repression tools. / 2022-12-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of environmental factors on business strategies for U.S. apparel manufacturing companies. Three research objectives were established to achieve this study purpose: (a) to explore the business environment of the U.S. apparel manufacturing industry from 1970 to 2005, (b) to investigate the business strategies for selected major U.S. apparel manufacturing companies in response to the environment from 1970 to 2005, and (c) to determine if patterns or themes are found in changes of the business strategies for the selected U.S. apparel manufacturing companies. Two theories were used as a framework for this study: organizational interpretation process (e.g., Daft & Weick, 1984; Milliken, 1990) and organizational adaptation theory (e.g., Miles & Snow, 1978; Zeithaml & Zeithaml, 1984). Qualitative analysis was conducted for data analysis. Part 1 of data analysis was the in-depth exploration of the business environment for the apparel manufacturing industry in terms of globalization, technology, and consumer; and apparel firms' business strategies that have been implemented in response to these environments, from 1970 to 2005. Part 2 of data analysis was the case studies of two sample apparel companies (i.e., Nike, Inc., VF Corporation). The business strategies of the two companies in response to their business environments from 1970 to 2005 were investigated. The in-depth exploration of general business strategies of the U.S. apparel industry and the case studies of two sample companies' specific business strategies revealed that U.S. apparel manufacturing companies have gone through the process that was proposed in the model of the study; they have been significantly affected by the environmental changes and have made changes to their business strategies in order to survive. These changes did vary between the two companies in the case study and were related to the original organization of the companies showing a variation in interpretation of the information. / Master of Science

Darbe atlikta teorinė adaptacijos samprata ir socialinių pedagogų adaptacijos profesinėje veikloje lemiančių veiksnių analizė.Iškelta hipotezė, jog sėkmingą socialinio pedagogo adaptaciją profesinėje veikloje lemia pradedančiojo sėkminga psichosocialinė, profesinė bei organizacinė adaptacija.Anketinės apklausos metodu buvo atlikti du tyrimai: kiekybinis ir kokybinis tyrimas. Atliekant kiekybinį tyrimą, siekta išsiaiškinti organizacinius, profesinius, psichosocialinius veiksnius lemiančius socialinių pedagogų adaptaciją profesinėje veikloje. Atliekant kokybinį tyrimą, siekta išsiaiškinti socialinio pedagogo veiklos sėkmes ir nesėkmes profesinės adaptacijos laikotarpiu. Kiekybiniu tyrimu atlikta statistinė (aprašomoji dažnių, vidurkių) duomenų analizė, o kokybiniame tyrime duomenys apdoroti, taikant turinio (content) analizės metodą. / The theoretical concept of the adaptation and the analysis of the determining factors of the social educators‘ adaptation in the professional activity are carried out in the work. The raised hypothesis that successful adaptation of a social educator in the professional activity leads the beginner‘s successful psychosocial, professional and organizational adaptation. Questionnaire survey method was used to carry out two tests: a qualitative and quantitative research. The quantitative research was used to find out the organizational, professional, psychosocial factors influencing social educators‘ adaptation in the professional activity. Performing the qualitative study it was used to find out the social pedagogues‘ successes and failures of the activity in the period of the professional adaptation. Using the quantitative research the statistical (descriptive frequencies, averages) data analysis is done and data are processed using the method of the content (content) analysis in the qualitative research.

Abstract Background: The fast development of technological systems has caused variouschallenges in the business management world, both from an employee and organizationalperspective. Despite the potential for exponential growth in information technology, thereis limited research in IT implementation literature. Adaptability in the workplace has beengreatly affected as humans are resistant to change. From an organizational perspective, theadoption/implementation of technological systems can be affected by the cost ofinvestment, resistance to change and the difficulties of integrating new technologies withexisting systems and processes. Purpose: The establishment of a framework that explains the process of IT adoption.Moreover, an investigation of how organizations and managers can efficiently manage theprocess of successful technology adoption and employee adaptation in an organization. Method: The qualitative study is grounded in an epistemological interpretivism paradigm.Through the usage of semi structured interviews and the Gioia coding analysis method, anexpert interview study was conducted. Conclusion: The research culminates in the creation of a loop model that explains the stepsof a successful IT adoption. The study identifies major challenges related to technologicalchange such as employee resistance and communication. It also highlights the importanceof managers and their respective characteristics required to address such challenges, which2are communication skills, expertise in the field and effective leadership. The studydevelops on the value creation opportunities of IT adoption.