The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the processes of the psychological contract during organisational socialisation. Research on psychological contract tends to focus more on the content and breach of the contract. Very little is known about the formative stages of the contract. Very little attention has also been given to investigating the psychological contract together with organisational socialisation. Linking the two research areas would further our understanding of both the dynamic nature of the psychological contract. This is achieved by investigating the temporal changes of the psychological contract of new employees, pre-entry up to six months post entry into employment. The research also investigates the psychological contract from the employer`s perspective. It utilises Weick`s (1995) sensemaking properties as a methodological framework to better understand these processes. Consistent with the research aim and objectives and social constructionism, a qualitative methodology was adopted. The research used in-depth semi structured interviews to collect data supplemented with sitting in during recruitment interviews in one of the organisations, and data were analysed using template analysis. Periodic interviews were carried out every four to six months post entry. The research consists of two organisations, where each provided two groups for analysis. The findings show that after entry into the organisation, the psychological contract changes in a variety of ways influenced by socialisation into the organisation. A model based on the findings is presented and discussed in the discussion chapter. The research also makes a contribution (methodology) by adopting the sensemaking framework.

Transactional memory (TM) aims to bring the benefits of ACID transactions to the volatile world of program synchronization. Architectural trends are making software transactions more appealing, as more programmers struggle with the problems of locks as they exploit multi-core processors. This thesis applies TM, which until recently has been restricted to small benchmarks, to a large, real-life system: the Linux operating system kernel. I describe TxLinux, a version of Linux, which is the first OS to use transactional memory for synchronization. TxLinux runs on MetaTM, a simulator co-designed with TxLinux, which models an x86-based Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) system. The TxLinux/MetaTM effort yields a characterization of real-life OS transactions, exposes previously unconsidered complications (including interaction with interrupts and stack memory) and allows sensitivity studies of various TM microarchitectural parameters. It also provides a flexible platform for future OS, TM and architecture research. Next, I examine ways to increase concurrency by investigating the factors that inhibit concurrency in existing TM models and systems. These include avoidable implementation limitations, overly restrictive serialization models, and inexpressive APIs. After examining the nature of each limitation, I propose a solution for each one. I postulate that the conventional wisdom that every transaction is "for itself" and primarily relates to other transactions by conflicting with them, is a pervasive misperception. This thesis aims to demonstrate that there are other ways of thinking about the relation of one transaction to another. I present three different transaction models to show how (i) co-existence, (ii) cooperation, and (iii) coordination, can each solve important problems facing TM programmers today. Co-existence of multiple transactions on the same processor is enabled using the suspended transactions model. This model, used by TxLinux, can reduce aborts and removes transaction length limitations imposed by interrupts. Cooperation of transactions that access the same data, using the dependence-aware transactions model, can transparently turn transaction aborts into commits. Drawing on serializability theory and notions of spheres of control (which predate ACID transactions), this model is able to accept more execution schedules than any existing TM design. Lastly, the coordination of multiple transactions in the coordinated sibling transactions model, provides programmers a simple and unified way of expressing intratransaction parallelism. This helps move transactions beyond being a drop-in replacement for locks (SLE-style) to instead helping programmers find more parallel work within their programs (both in speculative and non-speculative forms). All three models aim at increasing concurrency, while shifting complexity away from the programmer and into the TM system. I evaluate all three models, using either the MetaTM HTM, or one of the several software (STM) systems this thesis also develops. / text

The business climate of today demands high flexibility and quick responsiveness from suppliers. It has become essential for organizations to have effective leaders in all hierarchal levels, which understand and are able to work under these conditions. As the market requirements have changed, a new paradigm of leadership has evolved (Bryman, 1992). This paradigm puts more focus on charisma and how to motivate followers, which is the essential part of transformational leadership. According to Burns (1978), transformational leadership is a process between leader and follower rather than exchanges. This leads to the question of what effective leadership is and if it can be measured in some way. One method is the use of the Multifactor leadership questionnaire, the MLQ-test, developed by Bass 1985 from the full range model. The conducted research for this thesis is done at PaperPak Sweden AB, a manufacturer of disposable incontinence products located in Aneby, Småland. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate if any differences and/or similarities in leadership can be found between or within the hierarchical levels. The intent with the report is also to investigate those variances and if they are positive or negative for an organization. A theoretical framework focusing on leadership has been collected, to enable the fulfillment of the thesis purpose. This framework will act as support for the analysis of the quantitative investigation, based on the MLQ-test. From this analysis, the authors have made conclusions and recommendations. The degree of transformational, transactional and laissez- faire leadership has been measured for the three leadership levels top, middle and low management. It could be argued that the top management should show the highest degree of transformational leadership, and low management the least, due to their positions and work tasks. The result of the analysis supported that theory to a large extent. However, lower management showed a significantly higher degree of transformational leadership than middle management. One explanation could be that middle management lives in a more stressful situation, working between top and low management, compared to the other two, which is supported by Grout (1994). Since the theoretical findings mean that leadership can be learnt and developed, the authors suggest that organizations always have to follow up and try to develop their leaders and managers towards higher degrees of transformational leadership. Finally the authors suggest that further studies of the MLQ-test should investigate the possibilities to include measurements of the technical side of leadership, since the test currently does not take those factors into consideration.

Aim:  Optimize the usage of transactional emails, going beyond their communicative nature and combining it with marketing purposes. The project has been developed in collaboration with Incomedia, Italian software developer and vendor. Objective: Understand how Incomedia can exploit the benefits of transactional emails in a marketing perspective in order to increase the sales of its software. Limitation: The specificity of the topic, strictly related to Incomedia’s activities, products and consumers. Limits of time and variables tested with the A/B experiment. Theory/Methodology : It helped us to leverage the potential of transactional emails through the improvement of one particular element, the price discount offers. Due to the particularity of the software “medium-price” level, we have choose to do an A/B test experiment of the new transactional email by presenting the discount in two different ways: monetary and percentage terms. Result: The new transactional email, with the price discount, drove us to satisfactory results. The price discount expressed in percentage was better perceived and accepted by consumers; thanks to this, Incomedia during the experiment could highly increase its sales.

Transactional sex is associated with high-risk HIV transmission behaviours. Published prevalence rates of this behaviour are varying and the sensitive nature of this behaviour may inhibit self-report disclosure. A two-phase study, involving qualitative analysis of focus group discussions on transactional sex, and a subsequent survey employing different self-report methods amongst a population of female tertiary education level students (N=305) was undertaken. The Unmatched Count Technique (UCT) and the Self-Administered Questionnaire (SAQ) in both computer and paper modes were compared in terms of disclosure levels yielded and socially desirable response scores. Base rates of transactional sex as yielded by the UCT were comparable to those of published research. No statistically significant results were obtained for differences in disclosure levels of transactional sex between the UCT and the SAQ. Performance of the UCT was mixed, demonstrating that the reliability and validity of findings obtained by the UCT are contingent on many factors, and further research regarding this is required. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.

Checkpointing support allows program execution to roll-back to an earlier program point, discarding any modifications made since that point. Existing software-based checkpointing methods are mainly libraries that snapshot all of working-memory, and hence have prohibitive overhead for many potential applications. In this thesis we present a light-weight, fine-grain checkpointing framework implemented entirely in software through compiler transformations and optimizations. A programmer can specify arbitrary checkpoint regions via a simple API, and the compiler automatically transforms the code to implement the checkpoint at the granularity of individual stores, optimizing to remove redundancy. We explore three application areas for this support. First, we investigate its application to debugging, in particular by providing the ability to rewind to an arbitrarily-placed point in a buggy program’s execution. A study using BugBench applications shows that our compiler-based approach is more than 100X less overhead than full-process checkpointing. Second, we demonstrate that compiler-based checkpointing support can be leveraged to free the programmer from manually implementing and maintaining software rollback mechanisms when coding a backtracking algorithm, with runtime overhead of only 15% compared to the manual implementation. Finally, we utilize the efficient software-only checkpointing to support overlapping execution with delinquent loads through the demonstrations both control-speculation and data-speculation transformations. We further propose a theoretical speculative timing model and confirm its prediction effectiveness with real-machine workload.

Checkpointing support allows program execution to roll-back to an earlier program point, discarding any modifications made since that point. Existing software-based checkpointing methods are mainly libraries that snapshot all of working-memory, and hence have prohibitive overhead for many potential applications. In this thesis we present a light-weight, fine-grain checkpointing framework implemented entirely in software through compiler transformations and optimizations. A programmer can specify arbitrary checkpoint regions via a simple API, and the compiler automatically transforms the code to implement the checkpoint at the granularity of individual stores, optimizing to remove redundancy. We explore three application areas for this support. First, we investigate its application to debugging, in particular by providing the ability to rewind to an arbitrarily-placed point in a buggy program’s execution. A study using BugBench applications shows that our compiler-based approach is more than 100X less overhead than full-process checkpointing. Second, we demonstrate that compiler-based checkpointing support can be leveraged to free the programmer from manually implementing and maintaining software rollback mechanisms when coding a backtracking algorithm, with runtime overhead of only 15% compared to the manual implementation. Finally, we utilize the efficient software-only checkpointing to support overlapping execution with delinquent loads through the demonstrations both control-speculation and data-speculation transformations. We further propose a theoretical speculative timing model and confirm its prediction effectiveness with real-machine workload.

Software Transactional Memory (STM) helps programmers write correct concurrent code by allowing them to identify atomic sections rather than focusing on the mechanics of concurrency control. Given code with atomic sections, the compiler and STM runtime can work together to ensure proper controlled access to shared memory. STM runtimes use either lazy or eager version management. Lazy versioning buffers transaction updates, whereas eager versioning applies updates in-place. The current set of primitives suit lazy versioning since memory needs to be accessed through the runtime. We present a new set of runtime primitives that better suit eager versioned STM. We propose a novel extension to the compiler/runtime interface, consisting of memory reservations and memory releases. These extensions enable optimizations specific to eager versioned runtimes. A memory reservation allows a transaction to perform instrumentation-free access on a memory address. A release allows a read-only address to be modified by another transaction. Together, these reduce the instrumentation overhead required to support STM and improve concurrency between readers and writers. We have implemented these primitives and evaluated its performance on the STAMP benchmarks. Our results show strong performance and scalability improvements to eager versioned algorithms.

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Svenska banker har genomgått flera finanskriser som resulterat i olika konsekvenser, bland annat kreditförluster. Intresset för varför en del banker drabbades mer medan andra drabbades mindre påverkade valet av problemområde. Många studier har gjorts beträffande kreditbeslut vid nya krediter, dock verkade området kring kredituppföljningen, det sekundära kreditbeslutet, vara relativt outforskat. Förhoppningen var att kunna bidra med kunskap som dels kunde vara användbar för kreditgivare, genom att dra lärdom av bra exempel, och dels vara brukbar för låntagarna. En annan önskan var att ge inspiration till ytterligare studier i ett relativt outforskat område. En noggrann kredituppföljning är också betydelsefull för samhället i stort. Syftet var att få en bättre bild av hur kredituppföljningsprocessen utförs i praktiken i svenska banker. Genom kvalitativa intervjuer har kredituppföljningen studerats hos sex banker i västra Sverige; Handelsbanken, Länsförsäkringar Bank, Swedbank, SEB samt två Fristående Sparbanker. Intervjupersonerna var personer med gedigen erfarenhet från utlåningsprocessen gentemot företag. Den empiriska undersökningen visade en stor överensstämmelse kring hur kredit-uppföljningen utförs i de banker som ingått i studien. Uppföljningsprocessen genomförs utifrån volym och någon form av riskklassificering. I beslutsunderlaget ingår såväl formella som informella delar, med andra ord både kvantitativ och kvalitativ information. Studien visade att både transaktions- och relationsutlåning är delar av det sekundära kreditbeslutet. En skillnad var hur stor betydelse de mjuka delarna har i kredituppföljningen. Min tolkning är att organisationskulturen har betydelse / Swedish banks have underwent several financial crises that have resulted in different type of consequences, amongst other things, credit losses. The interest for why some banks were hit more than others, influenced the choice of the problem area. Many studies have been made regarding lender decisions on new loans, however, the area related to the credit monitoring, i. e. the secondary lender decision, seems to be relatively unexplored. The aim was to contribute with knowledge that partly could be useful for creditors, through learnings from good examples, as well as partly be useful for the borrowers. Another expectation was to inspire to further studies of an area that has not been investigated deeply so far. A throught credit monitoring is also important for the society as much. The purpose was to get a better picture of how the credit monitoring processes are performed in practise in Swedish banks. Through qualitative interviews, the credit monitoring processes have been studied att six banks in the west part of Sweden. The banks are; Handelsbanken, Länsförsäkringar Bank, Swedbank, SEB and two independent banks. The respondents were persons with a solid and senior experience from lending processes towards companies. The empirical study showed a high degree of consistency in how the credit monitoring are performed at the Swedish banks that were a part of the investigation. The monitoring process are carried out based on volume and some type of risk assessment. The decision material contains formal as well as informal information or in other words: both quantitative as well qualitative information. The study showed that both transactional as well as relationship lending are parts of the secondary lender decision. One difference that was noticed, was how big importance the soft factors have in the credit monitoring process. My interpretation is that the organizational culture has an influence on this.