This thesis explores human resource management (HRM) adoption by investigating the influence of multiple HRM actors’ social position, capital resource(s) exchange mechanism, dispositions, social classes, habitus, social expectation, and national and global environmental factors. The objectives of this thesis were achieved through systematically conducting three different studies for the thesis. The first study was carried out to gain insight into the influence of social position on HRM academics’ adoption. The major contribution of this study was a theorising model on HRM academics’ adoption. It shows which capital resource is very sought after and how it plays a role in developing HRM academics’ dispositions, which in turn provides them with the drive and motivation to adopt western HRM ideas and knowledge. The second study was carried out to gain insight into the mechanism and formation of capital resource(s) exchange that influences HRM practitioners to adopt western HRM ideas, knowledge, and practices. The main contribution of this study comprised empirical insights into the importance and role of social class (élite and emerging class); habitus and socialisation (primary and secondary socialisation) as developers and controllers of the mechanism of capital resource(s) exchange; and formation of social position. The third study investigated a gap between accepted (adopted) HRM ideas and knowledge, and actual HRM practices. The major contribution of this study was its theorising on the factors that influence this gap. It explored the influences of conflicting factors such as actors’ professional and occupational orientation and position, social position, and social expectation, which develop the gap. This thesis adopted a qualitative abductive research approach. It conducted qualitative indepth interviews with 19 HRM academics, 15 MBA-Alumni HRM practitioners, and 10 non-MBA-Alumni HRM practitioners. Qualitative observation in two business schools and five business organisations in multiple industries was carried out to enrich the data collection. This thesis contributes to the existing body of knowledge by providing insights into individual actors’ level HRM adoption, which is an underexplored area in Pakistan and similar developing countries. By employing theoretical and analytical tools based on Bourdieu’s theory of practices and social position, Rogers’s and Tarde’s theorising of adoption, and findings of empirical studies of macro institutions, cultural sensitive views, and institutional factors’ framework in the diffusion of HRM, this thesis explored, examined, and theorised HRM adoption at different individual actors’ level in business organisations and business schools in Pakistan. In that respect, this thesis theoretically contributes to Bourdieu’s theory and its unique use in international HRM, organisation studies, and management research. This thesis empirically contributes to the understanding of management and think tanks in business schools, business organisations, educators, HRM practitioners, and relevant government and regulatory bodies who can benefit from the findings of this research by understanding the different factors and social structures affecting western HRM’s effectiveness and its applications. It also suggests to these stakeholders the factors that affect individuals’ and employees’ adoption of western HRM and western management ideas, knowledge, and practices; any change in strategies, policies, and procedures; and problems in their implementation.

The doctoral thesis deals with the topic of specification and comparison of cultural dimensions of companies from different places of global community. Main focus is to answer a question, how the corporate culture and its cultural dimensions influence a shift of a company towards a knowledge-based economy. The identification of cultural dimensions was realized through the quantitative research VSM 94 in two German parent companies and their subsidiaries from the Czech Republic, India, Japan and USA. In case of one Czech subsidiary the research was extended with the qualitative research TCSD. Subsequently the identified cultural dimensions were compared with the desirable cultural dimensions of knowledge-based company. The results show that only cultural dimensions of low power distance and feminity correspond to the knowledge-based economy, long-term orientation is in the transition phase. The longest way to the knowledge-based economy was revealed by collectivism and uncertainty acceptance. Here can be found the greatest potential for corporate culture forming and human resources management. Based on the analysis of cultural dimensions, shared values, strength of corporate culture, cultural influence of parent company and impact of national culture were expressed proposals to shift the examined companies to the ideal state - knowledge-based company.

Este estudo se propôs a identificar os paradoxos existentes entre a intenção manifesta pelas empresas de preocupação com a saúde, bem-estar e qualidade de vida dos trabalhadores e a realidade praticada pelas mesmas através da gestão de Recursos Humanos. Os dados foram obtidos com pesquisa documental e tiveram como fonte os seguintes materiais que foram submetidos ao meu enfoque de pesquisa: publicações das melhores empresas para trabalhar de 2007, VII Congresso de stress da ISMA-BR/IX Fórum Internacional de Qualidade de Vida no trabalho, realizado em 2007 e resultados de pesquisas de dissertações da UFRGS publicadas no período de 31/12/01 à 15/05/07 envolvendo o tema saúde e trabalho. A técnica utilizada para análise dos dados foi o Discurso do Sujeito Coletivo – DSC (LEFÉVRE e LEFÉVRE, 2003) e a Análise de Conteúdo (BARDIN, 1979). Os pressupostos teóricos que fundamentaram o estudo foram constituídos por um conjunto bastante extenso e diversificado de autores, caracterizando a abrangência e interdisciplinaridade do estudo nas seguintes áreas: psicodinâmica do trabalho, psicologia social, sociologia do trabalho, sociologia da educação e administração de RH. Os resultados obtidos apontam para quinze paradoxos em relação à saúde do trabalhador nas práticas de gestão de RH, que em suma evidenciam que a questão da saúde no trabalho está subordinada à necessidade prioritária de produtividade das empresas. Assim entre a intenção e a prática há uma série de limitações, aqui identificadas como paradoxos, que fazem com que o discurso das empresas de preocupação com a saúde do trabalhador, longe de ser uma realidade, possa ser compreendido como mais uma prática de gestão que visa além de auxiliar na boa imagem da empresa, a submissão do trabalhador à organização. / The purpose of this study is to identify the paradox between company’s manifest intention in health concerning, well being and life quality of labors and the reality practiced through human resource management. The datum were obtained from document research and had wellspring of information the following materials how were submitted to my search: Best companies to work 2007, VII Stress Congress of ISMABR and IX International Forum of Life Quality at work, on 2007 and result of dissertation at UFRGS published between dec/31/2001 and mai/15/2007 involving health and work subject. The technique used to analysis the datum were the Discourse of Collective Subject – DSC (LEFÉVRE and LEFÉVRE, 2003) and the Content Analysis (BARDIN, 1979). The theoretical underpinting to base this study are constitute for one combined very extent and diversify of authors characteristic the range and interdisciplinary of study in the next field of study: work psychodynamics, social psychology, work sociology, education sociology and human resource management. The results indicate for fifteen paradox in respecting to health of labors in the practices of human resource management, so that summary evidence the question of health in the work it’s depend of need for priority of productive the company’s. Like this between intention and the practice have many limited, here identify how paradox, what do the speech of company’s health concerning of labor, far away to be reality, actually to understand how one more practice of management with objective apart from to aid in the good opinion company’s, the submissive of the labor to company’s.

Notable in strategic management research is a paradigm shift from industry/market factors as determinants of competitive strategy to a resource-based view. This study focuses on the extent to which firms in the reinsurance industry use resources for strategic positioning and differentiation. A qualitative case study approach has been adopted for this study. On the basis of open-ended questions, interviews were conducted with 6 executives of the 6 chosen non-life reinsurance companies. In addition to interviews, company annual reports were used. Results obtained point to similarities in broader categorisation of resources, namely human capital, financial resources, information systems and organisational culture. Despite similarities in the broader grouping of resources, uniqueness in resources and competitive advantage derived therefrom is in the attributes of each of the resources that a reinsurance firm own. The main driver for basing positioning and differentiation strategies is that resources are controllable and manipulative compared to industry factors. Though the results support the underlying principles of the resource-based view, it is notable that its prescriptive nature with regard to resource characteristics, does not hold for some of the resources such as human resources, which are not perfectly immobile. / Graduate School of Business Leadership / MBL

Future integrated systems will contain billions of transistors, composing tens to hundreds of IP cores. Modern computing platforms take advantage of this manufacturing technology advancement and are moving from Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoC) towards Many-Core architectures employing high numbers of processing cores. These hardware changes are also driven by application changes. The main characteristic of modern applications is the increased parallelism and the need for data storage and transfer. Resource management is a key technology for the successful use of such many-core platforms. The thread to core mapping can deal with the run-time dynamics of applications and platforms. Thus, the efficient resource management enables the efficient usage of the platform resources. maximizing platform utilization, minimizing interconnection network communication load and energy budget. In this thesis, we present a performance-aware resource management scheme for many- core architectures. Particular, the developed framework takes as input parallel applications and performs an application profiling. Based on that profile information, a thread to core mapping algorithm finds (i) the appropriate number of threads that this application will have in order to maximize the utilization of the system and (ii) the best mapping for maximizing the performance of the application under the selected number of threads. In order to validate the proposed algorithm, we used and extended the Sniper, state-of-art, many-core simulator. Last, we developed a discrete event simulator, on top of Sniper simulator, in order to test and validate multiple scenarios faster. The results show that the the proposed methodology, achieves on average a gain of 23% compared to a performance oriented mapping presented and each application completes its workload 18% faster on average.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a network of interconnected devices with sensing, monitoring and processing functionalities that work in a cooperative way to offer services. Smart buildings, self-driving cars, house monitoring and management, city electricity and pollution monitoring are some examples where IoT systems have been already deployed. Amongst different kinds of devices in IoT, cameras play a vital role, since they can capture rich and resourceful content. However, since multiple IoT devices share the same gateway, the data that is produced from high definition cameras congest the network and deplete the available computational resources resulting in Quality-of-Service degradation corresponding to the visual content. In this thesis, we present an edge-based resource management framework for serving video processing applications in an Internet-of-Things (IoT) environment. In order to support the computational demands of latency-sensitive video applications and utilize effectively the available network resources, we employ edge-based resource management policy. We evaluate our proposed framework with a face recognition use case.

The increasing recognition of the myriad ways that peace may be enacted, contested and manipulated in different places has highlighted the complexity of peace. Peace making is now understood as a process rather than an event, made and unmade in the material and non-material socio-spatial relationships that people find themselves in. In this research I employ a qualitative case study methodology to describe how peace is made and unmade on Lough Neagh, the United Kingdom’s largest freshwater lake and the main source of Northern Ireland’s domestic water supply. I examine the everyday social relations of the users of this lake and the meanings, both material and non-material, that people have about this large water body. I ask how these local everyday practices and opinions intersect with broader politics within NI. I add to the growing body of literature within geography that recognizes that peace is made in many different ways, at different scales and in different places. / 10000-01-01

Este estudo se propôs a identificar os paradoxos existentes entre a intenção manifesta pelas empresas de preocupação com a saúde, bem-estar e qualidade de vida dos trabalhadores e a realidade praticada pelas mesmas através da gestão de Recursos Humanos. Os dados foram obtidos com pesquisa documental e tiveram como fonte os seguintes materiais que foram submetidos ao meu enfoque de pesquisa: publicações das melhores empresas para trabalhar de 2007, VII Congresso de stress da ISMA-BR/IX Fórum Internacional de Qualidade de Vida no trabalho, realizado em 2007 e resultados de pesquisas de dissertações da UFRGS publicadas no período de 31/12/01 à 15/05/07 envolvendo o tema saúde e trabalho. A técnica utilizada para análise dos dados foi o Discurso do Sujeito Coletivo – DSC (LEFÉVRE e LEFÉVRE, 2003) e a Análise de Conteúdo (BARDIN, 1979). Os pressupostos teóricos que fundamentaram o estudo foram constituídos por um conjunto bastante extenso e diversificado de autores, caracterizando a abrangência e interdisciplinaridade do estudo nas seguintes áreas: psicodinâmica do trabalho, psicologia social, sociologia do trabalho, sociologia da educação e administração de RH. Os resultados obtidos apontam para quinze paradoxos em relação à saúde do trabalhador nas práticas de gestão de RH, que em suma evidenciam que a questão da saúde no trabalho está subordinada à necessidade prioritária de produtividade das empresas. Assim entre a intenção e a prática há uma série de limitações, aqui identificadas como paradoxos, que fazem com que o discurso das empresas de preocupação com a saúde do trabalhador, longe de ser uma realidade, possa ser compreendido como mais uma prática de gestão que visa além de auxiliar na boa imagem da empresa, a submissão do trabalhador à organização. / The purpose of this study is to identify the paradox between company’s manifest intention in health concerning, well being and life quality of labors and the reality practiced through human resource management. The datum were obtained from document research and had wellspring of information the following materials how were submitted to my search: Best companies to work 2007, VII Stress Congress of ISMABR and IX International Forum of Life Quality at work, on 2007 and result of dissertation at UFRGS published between dec/31/2001 and mai/15/2007 involving health and work subject. The technique used to analysis the datum were the Discourse of Collective Subject – DSC (LEFÉVRE and LEFÉVRE, 2003) and the Content Analysis (BARDIN, 1979). The theoretical underpinting to base this study are constitute for one combined very extent and diversify of authors characteristic the range and interdisciplinary of study in the next field of study: work psychodynamics, social psychology, work sociology, education sociology and human resource management. The results indicate for fifteen paradox in respecting to health of labors in the practices of human resource management, so that summary evidence the question of health in the work it’s depend of need for priority of productive the company’s. Like this between intention and the practice have many limited, here identify how paradox, what do the speech of company’s health concerning of labor, far away to be reality, actually to understand how one more practice of management with objective apart from to aid in the good opinion company’s, the submissive of the labor to company’s.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Agricultural Economics / Jeffrey M. Peterson / Water scarcity is already a critical issue in many regions across the world and in many places water supplies are likely to be further threatened by climate change (Bates et al., 2008). Climate change will affect water availability in these areas both directly and indirectly. The direct effects come about because increased temperature (accompanied by changes in wind, humidity, and solar radiation) may increase evaporative losses from surface water bodies, and also because reduced precipitation lowers the rate of water inflows. In the case of groundwater, these factors will reduce the rate of aquifer recharge (Bates et al., 2008). The indirect effects arise from the biophysical impacts of climate change on vegetation, which are induced from rising temperatures, changing precipitation regimes, and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. As a result of climate change, significant changes are expected in the hydrological cycle. This research is focused in how climate change can affect crop, land, and water allocation over time. The specific issue of this research comes from the following question: Is climate change likely to have a significant impact on the effectiveness of different water conservation policies in the High Plains aquifer region? This study is focused on the American High Plains, one of the most important water-scarce agricultural regions in North America. The study region for this research is a 31-county area overlying the Ogallala aquifer in western Kansas. This region encompasses approximately the western third of Kansas. Across these counties, the estimated remaining usable lifetime for aquifer water ranges from 50 to over 200 years (KGS), representing the range of water available in various parts of the aquifer. A Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) model (Howitt, 1995) was developed and calibrated to land- and water-use data in the thirty one county area for a base period of 2000-2008. The PMP simulation uses inputs of price conditions and the aquifer level in a given year to predict the acreages planted to each of the major crops and the water use by crop. Decision makers are assumed to maximize profits, given the limited availability of water and arable land. The major crops in the model include wheat, corn, sorghum, soybeans, and alfalfa; the vast majority of historical planted acreage in the case counties is comprised of these five crops. The model was run for each of the case regions after calibrating the PMP model to data from 2000-2008. Calibration ensures that the model predictions fall within a small tolerance of the base period observations. This step avoids the problem of over-specialization (where the model places all of the acreages under one or two of the most profitable crops), and gives realistic acres and water use figures with which to work. The results suggest that the effects of the use of water conservation policies such as water use restriction and permanent conversion to dryland crops have positive effects on the trends of the different variables studied. With the implementation of these two policies, lower levels of total water use and higher levels of saturated thickness result but with a consequence of lower levels of net returns. However, the positive effects are lower in almost all cases if the effects of climate change on the same policies are taken into consideration. The scenarios of higher levels of temperature and lower precipitation levels projected for the region imply a greater demand for water for irrigated crops that results in lower levels of saturated thickness and simultaneously lower levels of net returns.

Master of Science / School of Family Studies and Human Services / Karen S. Myers-Bowman / This study explores the link between resources and sexuality education within the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS). Six churches were involved in this study representing small, medium, and large congregations based on the full-time employed staff. Both church staff and volunteers were interviewed to learn the following: 1) What kind of sexuality education services does the church provide? 2) What are the sexuality education needs of the church membership? 3) What resources are necessary for providing sexuality education? 4) What are the barriers to providing sexuality education? The findings indicate that all churches were providing sexuality education; however, there were great variations. Each church also had unique resources and barriers for providing additional sexuality education for parishioners in various life stages. It was found that resources have a huge impact on the availability of sexuality education within a church setting. These resources were found to be tangible and intangible along with internal and external to the church.