There is a growing need to better understand environmental decision making in the context of climate change and limited renewable resources. This dissertation deepens our understanding of such decision making by focusing on strategic green decisions, which can be defined as the individual and collaborative green decisions within or between organizations that help organizations improve their operating position, adapt to changes in their external institutional environments, and simultaneously generate environmental benefits. The particular focus is on decisions related to energy in the North American context. The research draws on and contributes to organizational theory with the aim of better understanding those factors that motivate and/or facilitate green decisions by organizations, especially social economy organizations—an area of only limited research to date. Two complementary empirical studies address the overarching research goal. The first study focuses on understanding the nature and extent of the association between organizational attributes and those factors that motivate and/or facilitate a green energy decision. Insights are based on a bi-national survey of 212 organizations that voluntarily began to purchase green electricity between 1999 and 2008. Findings indicate that important influences are similar across organizational types. Survey results highlight the importance of organizational culture and internal champions—both individually and in combination—in making the initial decision to purchase green electricity, despite its relatively higher price. These two factors, as well as strategic benefits, emerge as the dominant explanations for why organizations expand their green energy purchases. The relative importance and particular roles of these factors vary across organizational and decision types. The second empirical study extends our understanding of how organizations adapt to external changes while maintaining the capacity to innovate in order to address their core objectives. The focus is on the residential energy services market, and is based on 12 interviews with the executive directors of non-profit environmental service organizations (ESOs) that are part of a national network called Green Communities Canada. These organizations survived a funding shock by creating new services and diversifying funding sources with actions that collectively can be referred to as ‘green collaborative entrepreneurship’; collaborative because it was facilitated by strategic partnerships with businesses and local governments, as well as the cross-national social capital network connecting the ESOs. The important motivating factors of green collaborative entrepreneurship were the green values and objectives that drive these organizations. The facilitating factors of green collaborative entrepreneurship included human capital, social capital and strategic partnerships, which acted as dynamic capabilities because of their flexibility to help increase the level of entrepreneurship when necessary for organizational survival, and yet, scale-up and deliver core programs during stable funding periods. The dissertation provides important insights into broad questions related to green decisions, especially for organizations that are affected by political policy cycles. The findings highlight that organizations are able to be more environmentally sustainable while also improving their own strategic performance by making green decisions that either provide the capacity to adapt to exogenous change for survival, or to create endogenous change for competitive advantage. The research contributes to our understanding of societal transitions to sustainable development by highlighting two green decisions that are occurring in the social economy. The dissertation contributes to organizational theory and in particular the traditional corporate literature by including multiple organizational types. Sustainability researchers should focus on green decisions that both enhance organizational stability and ecological sustainability if they wish to better understand creative green solutions from organizations.

From different points of view, including Resource-Based Theory, Resource-Advantage Theory, and Structure Conduct Performance, the research was firstly discussed if the iron and steel enterprises would have different competitive advantages with different strategy segmentations. In addition, how investors make investment decision and how management level distribute resource into which financial indicator in order to strengthen competitive advantage were discussed as well. The research was collected financial data (from year 2004 to 2008) of 40 domestic iron and steel companies which are listed in public stock market (including OTC) as sample pool. The sample pool was segmented into four groups, such as products, value chain of upstream to downstream, and top-to-down consolidated strategic groups. Competitive advantage was classified by average of equity return ratios of shareholders, and financial ratios were applied to analyze the source of competitive advantage in iron and steel industry. Firstly, started to analyze financial ratios of each group by description statistic method and implemented factor analysis to figure out common factors. Furthermore, from investors point of view, to clarify how those factors to be reflected on operating performance by applying multiple regression analysis. Moreover, from business operating level¡¦s eyes, to distinguish enterprises with competitive advantage from each strategic group. The result was shown that each strategic group has different sources of competitive advantage. Therefore, recommendations of the research are listed: I. Investors should invest in enterprises with better current ratio, quick ratio, and guarantee of multiplied interest. II. Aggressive investors should invest in enterprises that have stainless steel products and consolidated business from upstream, mid-stream, to downstream. III. Conservative investors should invest in enterprises that have plate steel products and consolidated business from upstream, mid-stream, to downstream. IV. In order to create resources of competitive advantage, management level of each strategic group should increase financial signals as first priority: 1. Plate steel and downstream enterprises: value-added of unit salary and percentage of employee bonus out of profit. 2. Bar iron, stainless enterprises with consolidation of upstream to mid-stream and top-to ¡Vdown conformity: current ratio, quick ratio and guarantee of multiplied interest. 3. Alloy steel enterprises: ratio of debt out of net assets, percentage of loan, stock and account receivable out of net assets ratio, and net assets out of assets ratio.

With advances in information technology, various cloud computing related research and development has become a hot trend. Except the vast amount of studies and reports appearing in local magazines and newspapers, government agencies have also set up corresponding R & D projects. However, most of these studies focus on the infrastructure or platform level of the cloud. For example, the projects for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) include the Cloud Computing Center for Mobile Application at Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), the Cloud Service and Technology Center at Information Industry Institute (III) and the already launched ¡§hiCloud¡¨ at Chunghwa Telecom Corporation. In the business side, there is TCloud Computing that does the development of both "Infrastructure" and "Platform as a Service" (PaaS). As to Software as a Service (SaaS) related research, III has gathered 10 domestic companies to participate the co-operation plans for education cloud, manufacture cloud, ¡K and practice cloud, a total of nine cloud services. However, they are all in the early stages without much success stories or usages. The study of this thesis is angled toward business needs, from the point of resource-based analysis to see how a firm will be affected if introduction of SaaS to business. In particular, we will study this subject from four dimensions, which are the competitiveness of enterprises, IT outsourcing strategy, cost structure analysis and data security technology, to identify the possible critical factors for the introduction for cloud computing services. As most people are perceived, cloud computing has a comparative advantage of cost saving over traditional approach.

Recently years, TFT-LCD industry has become the major development policy in Taiwan, and the scale of investment of the TFT-LCD¡¦s industry has become more and more in Taiwan, Japan and Korea. The Profit of the TFT-LCD monitor and television industry has been compressed very seriously to injure the chance and cost advantage of the second-string companies to run above business. Hence, this research is focused on a case of a TFT-LCD company termed ¡§A company¡¨ owns two old generation factories, and uses the strategy theories of scenario analysis, competition advantage, five forces analysis, resource-based view, value chain and so on and strategy tools of strategy map and balanced scorecard to analyze and find out the transformation strategy of the case of the ¡§A company¡¨ to build up the best competition advantage. To realize the competition status of outside and internal environment of TFT-LCD industry, and the resources base of the case of ¡§A company¡¨ in Taiwan, and the development situation using scenario analysis in order to define the direction of the operation strategy of the case of ¡§A company¡¨ that owns two third generation factories. The result is using strategy development tools of strategy map, balanced scorecard, key performance indicator management to develop the execution plan and performance measure indicators of the transformation strategy.

LCD panel industry is one of the most promising industries in the world. Taiwanese LCD panel makers have performed quite well in the past few years. On the controversy, the BLU has been viewed as a low entry barrier industry with many suppliers and its profit margin seems to have been squeezed due mainly to its position between big giant LCD panel makers and limited key materials suppliers. However, BLU is one of Taiwan's few competitive industries in the global market because of its high self-sufficient rate and leading technologies over their Korean and Japanese competitors. Sometimes, Taiwan¡¦s BLU industry is even performing better than other component industries within the LCD industry supply chain. It's worth examining the competitive advantages for Taiwan BLU industry by analyzing "Company R", one of the leaders in Taiwan BLU industry. We start our research by highlighting the key characteristics of the LCD industry and the dynamics of the BLU supply chain. After analyzing the marketing, technology, and management requirements for the BLU industry, we have concluded the key success factors of the BLU industry. Then with a brief introduction of ¡§Company R¡¨, we have identified the company's competitive advantages and potential long-term strategies by analyzing the company¡¦s unique positioning and resources, and comparing those with the above-mentioned key success factors of the BLU industry. According to our study, demand for BLU should continue to grow with increasing demand for LCD TVs, in longer term. The major issue for LCD panel industry will be "demand and supply" relationship, while for BLU industry is the "volume" and its "competitive advantages" for each company. The technology development for BLU will continue. BLU is not just a so-called ¡§assembling business¡¨, and its industry entry barrier is much higher than before. Besides, the cluster effect and vertical integration are inevitable for LCD panel makers. To be successful in BLU industry, a company not only needs to focus on these key success factors, but also needs to keep developing and improving its core competencies relative to its competitors.

The objective of this study is to investigate the determinants of the export behavior of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Turkey. In SMEs, key decision makers play important roles / therefore, studying the impact of managerial characteristics is of paramount importance for understanding the determinants of SME export behavior. Particularly, possible relations between CEO age, tenure, level of education, international experience and foreign language skills and the export performance of SMEs will be examined. While doing this, two distinct theories, namely, upper echelons perspective and resource-based view of the firm (RBV) will be integrated. Furthermore, the study will focus on the role of the human capital as a strategic resource that may enhance the SME export performance. The relations between international experience and foreign language skills of the human capital and SME export performance will be analyzed from upper echelons perspective and RBV point of view. Overall, this study attempts to illustrate that CEOs and human resources are valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable resources for SMEs, and that studying their attributes in SME internationalization context is crucial to understanding the determinants of expert activities of SMEs. As a result, this study expects to reveal important implications for those who aim at increasing the export performance of SMEs. Practitioners may benefit from the findings by addressing which managerial and human capital characteristics influence SME export behavior and in which directions, so that they can better match the characteristics of CEOs and human capital with SMEs in order to attain higher export performance.

<p>Free and Open Source Software has not only increased researchers’ interest about community-driven software development, but lately, interest from commercial actors increased as well. In addition, some scientists have claimed that Open Source Software has entered a new phase: OSS 2.0. Even so, a coherent way of analyzing commercial Open Source ventures is still missing.</p><p>Commercial Open Source firms’ strategies are often described using the term “business models”. However, these models often lack stringent structures and have been used primarily to describe the firms’ offerings and methods to earn revenue.</p><p>Through the adaptation of an existing, firmly theoretically-based analytical business model framework, this thesis suggests a new analysis model for studying for-profit Open Source companies. In addition, the framework is generically constructed, ensuring its usability for other industries as well. The model consists of three elements: <em>market positions, operational platform</em> and <em>offering</em>.</p><p>This particular study concerned four software product vendors, all of which base their products on Open Source Software. When analyzing their business, insights were made about how these firms operated. The result show that there are certain key elements and factors that determine if a company has a sustainable business or not. From the analysis framework, three elements were refined. The main <em>Open Source Software project</em> connects the market positions and the operational platform; and from the offering, the <em>product and service</em> and the<em> revenue model</em> were very important.</p><p>The study identified eight key factors which influenced the elements: <em>brand</em> for the product, the company and the Open Source Software project; <em>community</em>, that is the sum of the non-paying users and developers connected to Open Source Software projects; <em>resources</em>, which are community-based resources such as development and testing; <em>legitimacy,</em> the perceived legitimacy regarding licenses and the revenue models; <em>control,</em> i.e. the control the firm has of the software; <em>ability to charge</em>, or how the company can charge for its services; <em>customers</em>, the paying users; and finally <em>volume</em>, which is the number of paying customers.</p><p>The findings also indicate that companies interested in working with the open-source community have to be able to balance the demands from both their customers and the community in order to benefit and gain competitive advantage.</p> / Report code: LiU-TEK-LIC 2008:26.

Standard measures used in animal welfare assessments include animal-based measures obtained by observing animals, resource-based measures obtained by observing facilities, and management-based measures obtained by interviewing farmers and checking records. Animal welfare assessments are composed of a variety of measures and can be very different from each other. The objectives of the research presented in this thesis were to investigate inter-observer reliability of three swine welfare assessment programs (ACA™, PQA Plus®, and Welfare Quality®), and to determine the concordance of rankings across the 3 assessments. All assessments and all types of measures were found to be highly reliable. Moderate concordance was found for the rankings of farms across all three assessments. The lowest ranked farms were correlated, indicating that all assessments identified the farms with the lowest levels of animal welfare. Results of this study can be used to identify the best measures and revise current on-farm animal welfare assessments. / Canadian Swine Research and Development Cluster, a Growing Canadian Agri-Innovation Program – Canadian Agri-Science Cluster Initiative of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC); and the Ontario Pork Council

<p>When it comes to education, the legacy of apartheid in South Africa has had major implications for the higher education system. The White population group long dominated the nrolment of students in higher education institutions, although they were, and still are, one of the minority population groups in the country. The under-preparedness of black students means that they require structures to prepare and assist them within the higher education environment. In order to assist these disadvantaged students, higher education institutions have established certain Academic Support Programmes. One such programme is the Career Preparation Programme (CPP) being offered at the University of the Free State. This study attempts to measure the success rate of the Career Preparation Programme and to time to completion of graduates.</p>

The corporate political activity field has focused on the study of political capabilities that allow firms to influence governments and regulators. Building on previous studies, this thesis examines a set of capabilities that allow host firms to adapt to rather than influence political environments. Specifically, this set of adaptive political capabilities can be used by firms to confront host country political contexts in emerging economies that share two characteristics: authoritarian regimes and weak institutions. The findings of this thesis show that host firms can develop and use adaptive political capabilities rather than political capabilities to start and sustain their operations in this type of political contexts. This entails attuning firm processes, structures, and practices to local norms and political behaviors, rather than attempting to shape the host country political environment in its own likeness. Our results suggest host firms can develop adaptive political capabilities to enhance their strategic repertoire when starting or sustaining operations in emerging economies with such characteristics. Our contribution is that by using mixed methods, we provide and test several exploratory propositions that support the conceptualization of a framework to guide the development of adaptive political capabilities by host firms and we make explicit a taxonomy of corporate adaptive political strategies that can enable firms to envision how they can adapt to host political contexts.