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The study reported in this thesis aimed to provide an ontology of professional activities in the software industry that require and enable the acquisition of experience and that, in turn, is the basis for tacit knowledge creation. The rationale behind the creation of such an ontology was based on the need to externalise this tacit knowledge and then record such externalisations so that these can be shared and disseminated across organisations through electronic records management. The research problem here is to conciliate highly theoretical principles associated with tacit knowledge and the ill-defined and quasi-colloquial concept of experience into a tool that can be used by more technical and explicit knowledge minded practitioners of electronic records management. The ontology produced and proposed here provides exactly such a bridge, by identifying what aspects of professional and personal experience should be captured and organising these aspects into an explicit classification that can be used to capture the tacit knowledge and codify it into explicit knowledge. Since such ontologies are always closely related to actual contexts of practice, the researcher decided to choose her own national context of China, where she had worked before and had good guarantees of industrial access. This study used a multiple case-study Straussian Grounded Theory inductive approach. Data collection was conducted through semi-structured interviews in order to get direct interaction with practitioners in the field and capture individuals opinions and perceptions, as well as interpret individuals understandings associated with these processes. The interviews were conducted in three different and representative types of company (SMEs, State Owned and Large Private) in an attempt to capture a rich variety of possible contexts in the SW sector in a Chinese context. Data analysis was conducted according to coding the procedures advocated by Grounded Theory, namely: open, axial and selective coding. Data collection and analysis was conducted until the emergent theory reached theoretical saturation. The theory generated identified 218 different codes out of 797 representative quotations. These codes were grouped and organised into a category hierarchy that includes 6 main categories and 31 sub-categories, which are, in turn, represented in the ontology proposed. This emergent theory indicates in a very concise manner that experienced SW development practitioners in China should be able to understand the nature and value of experience in the SW industry, effectively communicate with other stake holders in the SW development process, be able and motivated to actively engage with continuous professional development, be able to share knowledge with peers and the profession at large, effectively work on projects and exhibit a sound professional attitude both internally to their own company and externally to customers, partners and even competitors. This basic theory was then further analysed by applying selective coding. This resulted in a main theory centred on Working in Projects, which was clearly identified as the core activity in the SW Industry reflecting its design and development nature. Directly related with the core category, three other significant categories were identified as enablers: Communication, Knowledge Sharing and Individual Development. Additionally, Understanding the Nature of Experience in the SW Industry and Professional Attitude were identified as drivers for the entire process of reflection, experience acquisition and tacit knowledge construction by the individual practitioners. Finally, as an integral part of any inductive process of research, the final stage in this study was to position the emerged theory in the body of knowledge. This resulted in the understanding that the theory presented in this study bridges two extremely large bodies of literature: employability skills and competencies. Both of these bodies of literature put their emphasis in explicit knowledge concerning skills and competencies that are defined so that they can be measured and assessed. The focus of the theory proposed in this thesis on experience and resulting acquisition of tacit knowledge allows a natural link between the employability skills and competencies in the SW industry that was hitherto lacking in the body of knowledge. The ontology proposed is of interest to academics in the areas of knowledge management, electronic records management and information systems. The same ontology may be of interest to human resources practitioners to select and develop experienced personnel as well as knowledge and information professionals in organisations.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / The term "security" has always been vague in terms of its definition. After the end of the Cold War, however, this vagueness increased as new paradigms emerged. Those studying security need a better understanding of the term "security" to deal with complex issues within the broadly understood discipline of security studies. This thesis describes the uncertain nature of security by analyzing: (1) various definitions of security and some of the terms directly related to it in different contexts; and (2) the empirical meaning of security by examining threats as indicators of "insecurity," based on the different characters of threats, and levels of analysis from the field of international relations. The thesis argues that regardless of the vague meaning of the term "security," empirically its parameters are quite certain and definable by the specification of threats as indicators of insecurity. This clarification of the meaning of security studies, in turn, makes it easier for scholars and policy-makers to deal with this increasingly important sphere of human life. / Captain, Polish Army

This thesis investigates the management of social capital processes as they are accomplished-understood, experienced and shaped-by owner-managers. The aim of the thesis is to develop a deeper understanding of the management of social capital processes, to achieve a greater congruence between real-life perspectives and experiences and social capital literature. The thesis argues that social capital is situational, and in the economic situation the theory has been bounded by rational choice framing assumptions. The research problem is that claims for the universality of the economic way of looking at life, and for looking at social capital processes are over-stated. Predicated on this insight the research investigates economic notions of rationality, and low and non-rationality, as well as their inter-dependence in the management of social capital processes. The research follows a qualitative approach for data collection, with flexible pre-coding to guide the research where to look, while retaining an inductive openness to emergent data. The research population is drawn from SME owner-managers in the service and retail sectors, who were researched over two years using semi-structured interviews, observation, and by researcher participant observation. The thesis presents a number of contributions to knowledge. First, the thesis offers an in-depth, single source review explicating the meaning of the economic form of social capital, with reference to its intellectual antecedents, conceptual debates and key theoretical authors. The second (emergent research) contribution is to identify the significance of ethics and autodidactic reading for managing social capital processes. The third (theoretical) contribution argues for an expanded social capital perspective, beyond the prevailing and over-confident rational framing assumptions, and also for a new holistic ontological understanding. The fourth contribution is to identify a number of generic processes which can guide the management of social capital processes.

Orientador: Armen Mamigonian / Resumo: A geografia tem, nas últmimas décadas, agrupado ao seu conhecimento uma série de novos temas e abandonado outros. Os estudos referentes aos transportes, muito valorizados no passado, são um exemplo dos que vêm perdendo importância. / Abstract: In the last decades, geography a great deal of knowledge in some areas and, at the ame time, discarded others. Studies about transportation used to be highly appraised in the past, but now, they seem to be disregarded. / Doutor

In my work, I deal with the specifics of the business environment of Egypt with the possibility of doing business for Czech subjects there. The aim of this thesis is to describe the specifics of Egypt's business environment, identify promising sectors for Czech exporters and process useful information of companies and individuals who operate in this market. The second part deals with the evaluation of research experience of Czech companies operating in Egypt.

The active use of macroeconomic policies to smooth economic fluctuations and, as a consequence, the stance that policymakers should adopt over the business cycle, remain controversial issues in the economic literature. In the light of the dramatic experience of the early 1930s’ Great Depression, Keynes (1936) argued that the market mechanism could not be relied upon to spontaneously recover from a slump, and advocated counter-cyclical public spending and monetary policy to stimulate demand. Albeit the Keynesian doctrine had largely influenced policymaking during the two decades following World War II, it began to be seriously challenged in several directions since the start of the 1970s. The introduction of rational expectations within macroeconomic models implied that aggregate demand management could not stabilize the economy’s responses to shocks (see in particular Sargent and Wallace (1975)). According to this view, in fact, rational agents foresee the effects of the implemented policies, and wage and price expectations are revised upwards accordingly. Therefore, real wages and money balances remain constant and so does output. Within such a conceptual framework, only unexpected policy interventions would have some short-run effects upon the economy. The "real business cycle (RBC) theory", pioneered by Kydland and Prescott (1982), offered an alternative explanation on the nature of fluctuations in economic activity, viewed as reflecting the efficient responses of optimizing agents to exogenous sources of fluctuations, outside the direct control of policymakers. The normative implication was that there should be no role for economic policy activism: fiscal and monetary policy should be acyclical. The latest generation of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models builds on rigorous foundations in intertemporal optimizing behavior by consumers and firms inherited from the RBC literature, but incorporates some frictions in the adjustment of nominal and real quantities in response to macroeconomic shocks (see Woodford (2003)). In such a framework, not only policy "surprises" may have an impact on the economic activity, but also the way policymakers "systematically" respond to exogenous sources of fluctuation plays a fundamental role in affecting the economic activity, thereby rekindling interest in the use of counter-cyclical stabilization policies to fine tune the business cycle. Yet, despite impressive advances in the economic theory and econometric techniques, there are no definitive answers on the systematic stance policymakers should follow, and on the effects of macroeconomic policies upon the economy. Against this background, the present thesis attempts to inspect the interrelations between macroeconomic policies and the economic activity from novel angles. Three contributions are proposed. In the first Chapter, I show that relying on the information actually available to policymakers when budgetary decisions are taken is of fundamental importance for the assessment of the cyclical stance of governments. In the second, I explore whether the effectiveness of fiscal shocks in spurring the economic activity has declined since the beginning of the 1970s. In the third, the impact of systematic monetary policies over U.S. industrial sectors is investigated. In the existing literature, empirical assessments of the historical stance of policymakers over the economic cycle have been mainly drawn from the estimation of "reduced-form" policy reaction functions (see in particular Taylor (1993) and Galì and Perotti (2003)). Such rules typically relate a policy instrument (a reference short-term interest rate or an indicator of discretionary fiscal policy) to a set of explanatory variables (notably inflation, the output gap and the debt-GDP ratio, as long as fiscal policy is concerned). Although these policy rules can be seen as simple approximations of what derived from an explicit optimization problem solved by social planners (see Kollmann (2007)), they received considerable attention since they proved to track the behavior of central banks and fiscal policymakers relatively well. Typically, revised data, i.e. observations available to the econometrician when the study is carried out, are used in the estimation of such policy reaction functions. However, data available in "real-time" to policymakers may end up to be remarkably different from what it is observed ex-post. Orphanides (2001), in an innovative and thought-provoking paper on the U.S. monetary policy, challenged the way policy evaluation was conducted that far by showing that unrealistic assumptions about the timeliness of data availability may yield misleading descriptions of historical policy. In the spirit of Orphanides (2001), in the first Chapter of this thesis I reconsider how the intentional cyclical stance of fiscal authorities should be assessed. Importantly, in the framework of fiscal policy rules, not only variables such as potential output and the output gap are subject to measurement errors, but also the main discretionary "operating instrument" in the hands of governments: the structural budget balance, i.e. the headline government balance net of the effects due to automatic stabilizers. In fact, the actual realization of planned fiscal measures may depend on several factors (such as the growth rate of GDP, the implementation lags that often follow the adoption of many policy measures, and others more) outside the direct and full control of fiscal authorities. Hence, there might be sizeable differences between discretionary fiscal measures as planned in the past and what it is observed ex-post. To be noted, this does not apply to monetary policy since central bankers can control their operating interest rates with great accuracy. When the historical behavior of fiscal authorities is analyzed from a real-time perspective, it emerges that the intentional stance has been counter-cyclical, especially during expansions, in the main OECD countries throughout the last thirteen years. This is at odds with findings based on revised data, generally pointing to pro-cyclicality (see for example Gavin and Perotti (1997)). It is shown that empirical correlations among revision errors and other second-order moments allow to predict the size and the sign of the bias incurred in estimating the intentional stance of the policy when revised data are (mistakenly) used. It addition, formal tests, based on a refinement of Hansen (1999), do not reject the hypothesis that the intentional reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle is characterized by two regimes: one counter-cyclical, when output is above its potential level, and the other acyclical, in the opposite case. On the contrary, the use of revised data does not allow to identify any threshold effect. The second and third Chapters of this thesis are devoted to the exploration of the impact of fiscal and monetary policies upon the economy. Over the last years, two approaches have been mainly followed by practitioners for the estimation of the effects of macroeconomic policies on the real activity. On the one hand, calibrated and estimated DSGE models allow to trace out the economy’s responses to policy disturbances within an analytical framework derived from solid microeconomic foundations. On the other, vector autoregressive (VAR) models continue to be largely used since they have proved to fit macro data particularly well, albeit they cannot fully serve to inspect structural interrelations among economic variables. Yet, the typical DSGE and VAR models are designed to handle a limited number of variables and are not suitable to address economic questions potentially involving a large amount of information. In a DSGE framework, in fact, identifying aggregate shocks and their propagation mechanism under a plausible set of theoretical restrictions becomes a thorny issue when many variables are considered. As for VARs, estimation problems may arise when models are specified in a large number of indicators (although latest contributions suggest that large-scale Bayesian VARs perform surprisingly well in forecasting. See in particular Banbura, Giannone and Reichlin (2007)). As a consequence, the growing popularity of factor models as effective econometric tools allowing to summarize in a parsimonious and flexible manner large amounts of information may be explained not only by their usefulness in deriving business cycle indicators and forecasting (see for example Reichlin (2002) and D’Agostino and Giannone (2006)), but also, due to recent developments, by their ability in evaluating the response of economic systems to identified structural shocks (see Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). Parallelly, some attempts have been made to combine the rigor of DSGE models and the tractability of VAR ones, with the advantages of factor analysis (see Boivin and Giannoni (2006) and Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005)). The second Chapter of this thesis, based on a joint work with Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, presents an original study combining factor and VAR analysis in an encompassing framework, to investigate how "unexpected" and "unsystematic" variations in taxes and government spending feed through the economy in the home country and abroad. The domestic impact of fiscal shocks in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. and cross-border fiscal spillovers from Germany to seven European economies is analyzed. In addition, the time evolution of domestic and cross-border tax and spending multipliers is explored. In fact, the way fiscal policy impacts on domestic and foreign economies depends on several factors, possibly changing over time. In particular, the presence of excess capacity, accommodating monetary policy, distortionary taxation and liquidity constrained consumers, plays a prominent role in affecting how fiscal policies stimulate the economic activity in the home country. The impact on foreign output crucially depends on the importance of trade links, on real exchange rates and, in a monetary union, on the sensitiveness of foreign economies to the common interest rate. It is well documented that the last thirty years have witnessed frequent changes in the economic environment. For instance, in most OECD countries, the monetary policy stance became less accommodating in the 1980s compared to the 1970s, and more accommodating again in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Moreover, financial markets have been heavily deregulated. Hence, fiscal policy might have lost (or gained) power as a stimulating tool in the hands of policymakers. Importantly, the issue of cross-border transmission of fiscal policy decisions is of the utmost relevance in the framework of the European Monetary Union and this explains why the debate on fiscal policy coordination has received so much attention since the adoption of the single currency (see Ahearne, Sapir and Véron (2006) and European Commission (2006)). It is found that over the period 1971 to 2004 tax shocks have generally been more effective in spurring domestic output than government spending shocks. Interestingly, the inclusion of common factors representing global economic phenomena yields to smaller multipliers reconciling, at least for the U.K., the evidence from large-scale macroeconomic models, generally finding feeble multipliers (see e.g. European Commission’s QUEST model), with the one from a prototypical structural VAR pointing to stronger effects of fiscal policy. When the estimation is performed recursively over samples of seventeen years of data, it emerges that GDP multipliers have dropped drastically from early 1990s on, especially in Germany (tax shocks) and in the U.S. (both tax and government spending shocks). Moreover, the conduct of fiscal policy seems to have become less erratic, as documented by a lower variance of fiscal shocks over time, and this might contribute to explain why business cycles have shown less volatility in the countries under examination. Expansionary fiscal policies in Germany do not generally have beggar-thy-neighbor effects on other European countries. In particular, our results suggest that tax multipliers have been positive but vanishing for neighboring countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria), weak and mostly not significant for more remote ones (the U.K. and Spain). Cross-border government spending multipliers are found to be monotonically weak for all the subsamples considered. Overall these findings suggest that fiscal "surprises", in the form of unexpected reductions in taxation and expansions in government consumption and investment, have become progressively less successful in stimulating the economic activity at the domestic level, indicating that, in the framework of the European Monetary Union, policymakers can only marginally rely on this discretionary instrument as a substitute for national monetary policies. The objective of the third chapter is to inspect the role of monetary policy in the U.S. business cycle. In particular, the effects of "systematic" monetary policies upon several industrial sectors is investigated. The focus is on the systematic, or endogenous, component of monetary policy (i.e. the one which is related to the economic activity in a stable and predictable way), for three main reasons. First, endogenous monetary policies are likely to have sizeable real effects, if agents’ expectations are not perfectly rational and if there are some nominal and real frictions in a market. Second, as widely documented, the variability of the monetary instrument and of the main macro variables is only marginally explained by monetary "shocks", defined as unexpected and exogenous variations in monetary conditions. Third, monetary shocks can be simply interpreted as measurement errors (see Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (1998)). Hence, the systematic component of monetary policy is likely to have played a fundamental role in affecting business cycle fluctuations. The strategy to isolate the impact of systematic policies relies on a counterfactual experiment, within a (calibrated or estimated) macroeconomic model. As a first step, a macroeconomic shock to which monetary policy is likely to respond should be selected, and its effects upon the economy simulated. Then, the impact of such shock should be evaluated under a “policy-inactive” scenario, assuming that the central bank does not respond to it. Finally, by comparing the responses of the variables of interest under these two scenarios, some evidence on the sensitivity of the economic system to the endogenous component of the policy can be drawn (see Bernanke, Gertler and Watson (1997)). Such kind of exercise is first proposed within a stylized DSGE model, where the analytical solution of the model can be derived. However, as argued, large-scale multi-sector DSGE models can be solved only numerically, thus implying that the proposed experiment cannot be carried out. Moreover, the estimation of DSGE models becomes a thorny issue when many variables are incorporated (see Canova and Sala (2007)). For these arguments, a less “structural”, but more tractable, approach is followed, where a minimal amount of identifying restrictions is imposed. In particular, a factor model econometric approach is adopted (see in particular Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). In this framework, I develop a technique to perform the counterfactual experiment needed to assess the impact of systematic monetary policies. It is found that 2 and 3-digit SIC U.S. industries are characterized by very heterogeneous degrees of sensitivity to the endogenous component of the policy. Notably, the industries showing the strongest sensitivities are the ones producing durable goods and metallic materials. Non-durable good producers, food, textile and lumber producing industries are the least affected. In addition, it is highlighted that industrial sectors adjusting prices relatively infrequently are the most "vulnerable" ones. In fact, firms in this group are likely to increase quantities, rather than prices, following a shock positively hitting the economy. Finally, it emerges that sectors characterized by a higher recourse to external sources to finance investments, and sectors investing relatively more in new plants and machineries, are the most affected by endogenous monetary actions.

Because of the transportation network achieves little by little. It cuts down the distances between cities and countries. Automobiles are indispensable to our lives now. The development of industries after Taiwan became a member of WTO. Many country industries of automobile join the WTO by a lot of ways. Abolish the import¡¦s limitation of automobiles. Many brands join the WTO one after another, and it is too difficult to compete with other industries. The main goal to the research is to provide the marketing strategy and experience in Taiwan to the industries. Then we can discover that the loyalty of brand, the service system and the process are the key point of sell except the 4Ps¡]Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement¡^. The marketing scope sell amounts are 500,000 per year. It can not be called economy scope, but the domestic product achieves dozens of investor, and the import investors are the same. Now the automobile markets in Taiwan are well-developed. There are a lot of competitors, and how the industry to decide marketing strategy in limited resources is a key point to succeed. The research will focus on how to match the marketing strategy, resources and design a suitable marketing strategy. Double cards effect makes the expense index depression in 2006. The consumption marketing shows that the index is decreased substantially. The entire markets are declined seriously and the other industries and spread by the index, too. Most of the profit are declined even there are some deficits. The double cards effect fluctuate the economy, and our companies are affected by the amount of automobiles, but the market share rates above 32 percents. When we participated in the strategies of designation we discovered that: 1. Change the organization of company. 2. Marketing¡]after selling¡^strategy. 3. The competitive advantage of difference. 4. The influence on marketing strategy to selling amount. The following are the key points of analyzing the result: 1. To choose the circuit location. 2. To combine the sales and services. 3. To service flow innovation. 4. The vehicle owner holds it grasping rate. 5. To increase the technique and build the service center. Pay much attention to our brand, and ally our brand with other industries. Lead our brand to the top world of automobiles

The knowledge of early employment experiences has evolved over the last decade in countries such as Australia and Great Britain. In Sweden, this type of research is still unusual and the aim of this study was to break new ground by highlighting some areas that could be of extra interest in the Swedish early employment research to come. A focus in the study was to give an overview of what job sectors school students work in; and the amount of jobs aquired through school-organized work placement, private social networks or personal marketing of own merits. In addition to this, a multi variate analysis was carried out to find patterns in the picture of early employment experiences among students at upper secondary school. The findings of the study has relevance for ways of conducting career counselling and therefore the general aim of this study is to point out the importance of developing the practises of vocational psychology. A survey among 74 teenaged school students with economics as their main subject has been carried out in a mid-size Swedish city May 2012. 62 school students answered. The survey showed that 94% of the students had part-time jobs. Most common was to have 1-3 employers during the three years at upper secondary school. Most students worked in the job-sectors retail (29%), catering (23%), and care of the elderly (14%). An interesting finding was that no Swedish students seemed to work with delivery. This is surprising since this job-sector is big among school students in both Australia and Great Britain. Another interesting find was ways of aquiring a job. Not surprisingly most jobs were aquired through private social networks (59%), but some job-sectors stood out as pathways to a job for those students without the right social networks. In catering 48% of the jobs were aquired through marketing of own merits, and in the care of the elderly job-sector 78% of the jobs were aquired this way. The study indicates that early work experiences in Sweden in major parts reflect the research carried out in Austalia and Great Britain. But some research areas differ. A more close look at early work experiences among teenaged school students in Sweden is therefore necessary to develop vocational psychology and to incorporate learning outside school into school practices. An aspect that has been observed sofar is the way in which social background steers both the experience of early employment and career choice.

The purpose of this work is indicating System Dynamics Approach to be an appropriate tool for analysis of policies suggested for local sectors. Local sectors are very important for stability of the country&rsquo / s economy as well as welfare of the local community. Therefore, feasible and effective policies should be created and implemented in order to contribute to the local sectoral development. But before any policy implementation, policy analysis is required on to evaluate whether effectiveness and feasibility would be ensured in alternative policies. In this study, firstly the issues of Local Sectoral Dynamics and Policies are examined and specifically, the situation in Alanya Tourism Sector is studied. Afterwards, in accordance with policy analysis steps, problems of Alanya Tourism Sector are detailed and alternative policies that would aid in solution of the problem are idenfined. For evaluation of alternative policies, Dynamics of Alanya Tourism Sector are modeled by System Dynamics approach and the &lsquo / Formal Model&rsquo / is implemented in Stella 9.0.1. The model is simulated for all policy alternatives and the policy outcomes of each alternative are forecasted. Finally the performance of each policy are evaluated using the previously established criteria and combined policies having more superior outcomes than the present ones are created.