This thesis increases the understanding of networking and especially the role of third parties in the network infrastructure. That networking is an important activity that plays a central role for companies’ success is common sense in today’s highly changing environment. However, the role of third parties operating within the networking infrastructure has only been research sparingly. As the author’s literature review showed even though we have knowledge about the network process and attributes of the different actors there is still a lack of theories to explaining them. For instance, it is still unknown how the third party can successfully bridge structural holes and how its specific characteristics influence the network. Furthermore, it is unclear how this is affecting the people and consequently the companies involved in the network. The empirical focus of this thesis is on the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands and the empirical study consists of a qualitative case study. Data is collected through documents, participant observations and qualitative interviews in the Netherlands. The research shows that the third party has succeeded in provide a business and social platform that facilitate the process of combination and exchange of intellectual capital and this creates business opportunities for the members of the network. The study contributes to the research about the third party in the network infrastructure by identifying three success processes how the third party can contribute to the business network and this are: firstly, in combining and exchanging knowledge through a well-developed network structure. Secondly, through creating anticipation and motivation between the members for sharing of knowledge and thirdly, when bridging the gap between different actors with various kinds of knowledge. The thesis also provides suggestions for how the third party can improve their work to create and deepen relationship within networking. As the thesis demonstrates the role of the third party in a network and as more business is done within networks and with the help of a third party, it also has practical implications. In particular, the study is beneficial for the Swedish Chamber of Commerce, but also for other third party organizations that aim to improve their role in the networking process.

Information Technology (IT) evolution in the recent decades has been able to grow the mobility of the end-user. A contributing factor has impacted and improved the smartphone area. This, in turn, has changed end-users’ expectations and experiences in the recent years in terms of available services, which have made mobile applications (apps) to find their place in daily life. In line with the significant growth of smartphones, as the iPhone and Android phones, is also the development of mobile applications exploded. Mobile use has - with this - fundamentally changed and much of what customers used to do on the computer, they do now on their mobile. It makes of course requires that third-parties have a mobile presence and correct utilization, this new arena enormous business opportunities. Hence, as mobile devices become a more visible business tool, it becomes important for organizations to develop applications to meet customer needs and stay competitive. Third-party development is relevantly in the core of software development nowadays. The introduction of smartphones and tablet devices, the associated products, and services in the form of apps has significantly changed software developments practices for developers. The aim of this research formulated to study the development process and practices associated with third-parties and their effects on dealing with various mobile platforms and boundary resources (SKDs and APIs). Qualitative study and exploratory design are extensively conducted for data collection and analysis. Primary data is gathered based on experiences, opinions, and insights from the experts in the subject, and secondary data is gathered from literature, which constantly supports the primary data and ensures the research credibility. The main contribution and results of this study are the factors and development process that third-party developers take into consideration when developing apps for iOS and Android such as ecosystem, programing language, platform, programing model, tools, development process model, supply chain, and submission apps. The success of the digital ecosystems and platform knowledge adopted by Apple and Google has gained a lot of attention from developers in the last years concerning mobile application development. This, in turn, was the key factor of their success at the smartphones market and the portal for developers from all the world.

Competition amongst companies in the global market has resulted in increased production of goods and services. Enterprises are now faced with the challenges of shipments of raw materials, spare parts from vendors, and the finished goods to consumers. Logistics companies are springing up to tackle transportation and other logistics problems. There are various logistics companies such as logistics intermediaries, carriers and third party logistics service providers in the market which are in one way or the other competing and at the same time cooperating within the supply chain in order to fulfill their assignments to their customers. Third party logistics service providers are experiencing rapid growth because of the advanced demand of services such as the desire to reduce lead time, inventory management, outsourcing, and a host of other functions. Not much has been written on the logistics firms. Besides, most studies on logistics firms and the third-party logistics providers focus more on such aspects like their skills, services, and their relationships with their customers. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the logistics service providers’ roles within the logistics firms’ supply chain by identifying how the expected roles are performed. In the frame of reference, the author searched several books and articles that are relevant within the scope of the thesis topic. Both qualitative and explorative data collection methods are used in the thesis and these involve conducting interviews, and reading the accounts of other people concerning the thesis topic. The conclusion shows that logistics service providers are able to perform their roles through vertical and horizontal cooperation with other firms and with other logistics firms respectively. Besides, logistics firms do live up to their roles. Carriers and the logistics intermediary now perform more roles than what people think they do, because networks connection and the urge to remain competitive make them to take up value-added services. Third-party logistics service providers add values for their customers through their value-added services in various ways such as time and place utility including tracking and tracing the goods to ensure that they are delivered.

<p>Online Social Network (OSN) services such as Facebook and Google+ are fun and useful. Hundreds of millions of users rely on these services and third-party applications to process and share personal data such as friends lists, photos, and geographic location histories. The primary drawback of today's popular OSNs is that users must fully trust a centralized service provider to properly handle their data.</p><p>This dissertation explores the feasibility of building feature-rich, privacy-preserving OSNs by shifting the bases for trust away from centralized service providers and third-party application developers and toward infrastructure providers and OSN users themselves.</p><p>We propose limiting the trust users place in service providers through two decentralized OSNs: Vis-a-Vis and Confidant. In Vis-a-Vis, privacy-sensitive data is only accessed by user-controlled code executing on ``infrastructure as a service" platforms such as EC2. In Confidant this data may only be accessed by code running on desktop PCs controlled by a user's close friends. To reduce</p><p>the risks posed by third-party OSN applications, we also developed a Multi-User Taint Tracker (MUTT). MUTT is a secure ``platform as a service" that ensures that third-party applications adhere to access policies defined by service providers and users. </p><p>Vis-a-Vis is a decentralized framework for location-based OSN services based on the</p><p>privacy-preserving notion of a Virtual Individual Server (VIS). A VIS is a personal virtual machine running within a paid compute utility. In Vis-a-Vis, a person stores her data on her own VIS, which arbitrates access to that data by others. VISs self-organize into overlay networks corresponding to social groups with whom their owners wish to share location information. Vis-a-Vis uses distributed location trees to provide efficient and scalable operations for creating, joining, leaving, searching, and publishing location data to these groups.</p><p>Confidant is a decentralized OSN platform designed to support a scalable application framework for OSN data without compromising users' privacy. Confidant replicates a user's data on servers controlled by her friends. Because data is stored on trusted servers, Confidant allows application code to run directly on these storage servers. To manage access-control policies under weakly-consistent replication, Confidant eliminates write conflicts through a lightweight cloud-based state manager and through a simple mechanism for updating the bindings between access policies and replicated data.</p><p>For securing risks from third-party OSN applications, this thesis proposes a Multi-User Taint Tracker (MUTT) -- a secure ``platform as a service'' designed to ensure that third-party applications adhere to access policies defined by service providers and users. Mutt's design is informed by a careful analysis of 170 Facebook apps, which allows us to characterize the requirements and risks posed by several classes of apps. Our MUTT prototype has been integrated into the AppScale cloud system, and experiments show that the additional data-confidentiality guarantees of running an app on MUTT come at a reasonable performance cost.</p> / Dissertation

This study explores resolution mechanisms for all types of medical malpractice cases with a special focus on the patients and their families¡¦ subjective experiences in such disputes, as well as the relevant factors that influence the process of decision-making and the relevant results. The previous studies on patients¡¦ actions to medical disputes in the literature assumed that patients and their families took certain actions due to monetary reasons or discriminated status under a restricted medical system. Most studies simply state the variables that led the patients and their families to certain resolution mechanism. Nevertheless, not many researchers have explored the micro experiences of meaning construction during the process to resolve malpractice cases. Neither did they study how the patients interpret the cultural and structural variables, which might result in different dispute resolution mechanism being used. Therefore, this study attempts to develop a tentative approach to integrate macro and micro analyses and take the advantage of the procedure of grounded theory to explore the dynamic process in the resolution of disputes over medical malpractice. In-depth interviews were applied in the study involving 16 patients and their family members, 13 third party groups and two physicians for a total of 31 people. Among the 16 patients and their family members, there were 14 cases of medical treatment dispute. It was found that the core concept of ¡§admitting a mistake was made¡¨ is the main goal of patients and their family members when dealing with the dispute. If the injury is not critical, normally the physician will admit his/her mistake in the beginning of the dispute. If the injury is critical, since the patients and their family members not having professional knowledge regarding medical injury and their social economical status as well as lower mobilization capabilities than physicians, they do not get an apology or the truth regarding the medical injury. They only receive compensation at most. There are two key causes of providing compensation: (a) crisscrossed interpersonal connection between patient, physician and the third party, such as a civil representative, who plays the role of coordinator; (b) after litigation, usually the court prosecutor or the judge will mediate between the patient and physician, so that compensation can be made. No direct judgment is made. Yet the patients and their family members are not satisfied because they do not receive a response from the involved physician regarding their request about ¡§admitting mistake was made¡¨ which is terminated since their is no money for further litigation, pressure from the civil representative or other objections of the family members. Furthermore, the interview of the third party and the involved physician show that public hospitals are more afraid of irrational acts from patients and their family members or the intervention of the civil representative when dealing with medical disputes. Even if there is no medical negligence, they still submit to the requests of the patients and their family members.

The study aims to analyze the causes and treatments of spousal violence in Taiwan, to explore how Taiwanese people, abused women, and anti-spousal violence workers consider the causes of spousal violence and how they cope with it. Approaches are taken from the viewpoints of social system theory, resource theory and social control theory, and discourse analysis is made on quantitative and qualitative bases. The purpose is to manifest the causes of spousal violence, different tackling methods adopted by abused women from different family and cultural backgrounds, as well as the discrepancies of the third role played by anti-spousal violence workers. The study combines both macro- and micro-level approaches, integrating empirical research and grounded theory research as the methodology to account for the effects of resource variables and social bond variables on spousal violence in Taiwan, and also to probe into the dynamic process and coping modes from the angles of victims and the third role. The source of this study is ¡§Taiwan Social Change Survey¡¨Data , which was conducted by Institute of Sociology Academia Sinica in 2001. Quantitative analysis is based on the data collected, while qualitative analysis is made with in-depth interviews with 10 abused women and 18 anti-spousal violence workers. According to the empirical research of ¡§Taiwan Social Change Survey¡¨Data¡]2001¡^ , when samples of wives and husbands are analyzed respectively, traditional substantive resources are found to have significant differences to the understanding of spousal conflict treatments. As to non-substantive resources, the lower the level of domestic life satisfaction, the more probable marital violence will happen. On the husband side of social control model, it is discovered that the rarer the husband deals with his neighbors, the more likely he will commit violence. Furthermore, applying theories to the interviews with abused women, we found that in the original family, structural factors such as ethnic background, history of spousal violence; interactive factors such as ill communication, discrepancy in money values and attitudes towards child raising; individual factors such as the husband with patriarchal ideology, are all contributive to spousal violence. Thus, it is shown that both substantive resources (i.e. money and wealth) and non-substantive resources (i.e. level of marriage satisfaction and gender role attitude) are significantly correlated related to conjugal power. Then, inspecting the impact cultural context has on spousal violence, the study divides the abused victims¡¦ reaction modes into patriarchism, ritualism, equalitarianism, and idealism, based on family values and resources on father/son axis and husband/wife axis. The results indicate that as one possesses more resources and stronger connections with the society, one receives greater conjugal power, and is more likely to suggest or demand a more equal authoritative structure in marriage. On top of that, the interviews with anti-spousal violence workers show that the third role offers different treatments depending on to what degree and on what aspect it intervenes in spousal conflicts. Only by integrating educational, social, police, judicial, and medical units can we provide women in Taiwan with an effective anti-spousal violence strategy.

The theme of the thesis is ¡§The Research and Discussion of the Promotion of the Local Employment Policy of R.O.C.¡¨ It is divided into five chapters. The first chapter, Introduction, is started with the unemployment problems caused by the worse and worse situations of politics and the economic environment and the related solutions of the government. Chapter Two, the Backgrounds and the Models of the Promotion of the Local Employment Policy of R.O.C., discusses a series of policies of re-establishment of employment, everlasting employment construction and multiple-employment development, etc. Chapter Three, The Evaluation of the Domestic promotion of local employment policy and related methods, evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of the local employment policy from the points of view of social efficiency and the efficiency of employment. Chapter Four, The Research and Discussion of the Experiences of the Promotion of Local Employment Policies of Foreign Countries, discusses the points which deserve our analyzing and learning, taking reference from the related academic theories and practical policies of USA, EU, Korea, etc. Chapter Five, Conclusion, claims the new thinking of combining the Third Party NGO of Multiple-Employment Development Policy and the benefits caused by the Policy of ¡§Deep Cultivation Localization¡¨ To reduce the rate of unemployment is the purpose of domestic promotion of the local employment policy. Although there appear many disadvantages during the process of practicing of the policy, generally speaking, multiple employment development policy has the advantages of reducing the rate of unemployment, the re-distribution of income, the balance between cities and countries, activating the re-building of the community life and the promoting of local economic development, etc. It is so-called Deep Cultivation Localization which presents the characters and the needs of the communities

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<p>The objective of the thesis is to study the Sri Lankan negotiation process during 2000-2006 sponsored by the Norwegian facilitation and further to analyse the major constraints hin-dering a final solution.</p><p>The stated purpose is analysed by studying both primary and secondary materials such as official documents, research and newspaper articles. One of the major findings of the thesis is that the Norwegian facilitation has not been very effective mainly due to both domestic and international political developments in recent years. In the case of domestic politics, the Sri Lankan political arena has a tradition of political crisis which is mainly a result of the two major Sinhalese parties fighting for power. These parties have been blocking any sus-tainable solution for Tamil demands while focusing on their political power.</p><p>Furthermore, international attitudes towards the warring parties are found to have had a huge impact on the Sri Lankan peace process during the studied period. Since one of the major constraints in the negotiation process appears to be that the Government of Sri Lanka seems to have adopted the international “realpolitik” on its domestic issue in the name of the war on terror. This political strategy may further inflate the already existing na-tionalism among the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority and thus may intensify the conflict.</p>

This research involves a legal impact study of the State College Nuisance Property Ordinance and an assessment of State College Rental Property Managers in the role of place manager/intimate handler of offender. The impact of the Ordinance was assessed by employing an interrupted time series design which examined five years of pre-ordinance violations against five years of post-ordinance violations. The assessment of State College Rental Property Managers in the role of place manager/intimate handlers of offenders was assessed through a mail survey. The survey contained items that measured the level to which State College Rental Property Managers have assumed this role. This level was then regressed against the offenses covered under the Ordinance in order to determine if this role has an impact on reducing and/or deterring offenses in rental units. The data suggest that the Ordinance was successful in reducing violations in nuisance rental units. In addition, the analyses of the survey revealed that a higher level of place manager/intimate handler of offender was positively correlated with criminal and ordinance violations. / Dr. Randy L. Martin Dr. Kathleen J. Hanrahan Dr. Jennifer J. Roberts Dr. John A. Lewis