2000年政黨輪替，台灣政局進入一個政治新紀元，台灣政府體制呈現「分裂政府」的狀態，行政、立法兩院的衝突與對立，導致政策推動受到嚴重的影響；在2004年第六屆立法委員選舉後，民進黨在立法院因席次未過半而無法控制國會，因此行政機關所面對的是更為複雜的互動環境，其結果必須動用更多的人力、資源來處理與國會之間的關係，也就是說當立法權膨漲或行政、立法互動不夠順暢時，國會聯絡機制受到高度的重視與強化。 縱觀民主國家政治發展可發現，國會聯絡就是引導行政與立法機關合作的重要途徑，此種聯繫管道如能通暢，無疑是維繫行政、立法有效溝通與合作的重要憑藉，並且能有效降低行政與立法機關在互動過程中所造成的衝突，而國會聯絡人就是此機制中的關鍵性角色，而本研究主要探討我國文建會國會聯絡組織運作之策略與互動過程中的角色及所發揮的功能。 基於以上的認知，本論文的發現如下： 一、當行政權與立法權分屬不同政黨所掌控，呈現分立政府狀態時，國會聯絡機制之策略運用，在互動過程中發揮重大的功能。 二、首長對國會運作之影響，可能是正面，也可能是負面，其差異乃在於首長是否願意將所握有的資源，運作於國會關係上，及加強國會行動的能力。 三、文建會國會聯絡工作以「服務案件」份量最多，且困難度最高。 四、國會聯絡人為國會與行政單位第一線接觸的尖兵，負責訊息傳達、意見溝通及議題協調。 五、好的國會聯絡人有助於國會運作，聯絡人必須具備的特質包括專業與熱誠、溝通與協調能力、熟悉政治運作與技巧、良好的國會人脈、長官授權與肯定。 / The aftermath of the 2000 Presidential election left the ROC fragmented among several political parties. The increasing political conflict between the Executive Yuan and the Legislative Yuan has aggravated the administration process of government policies. The legislative elections in year 2004 created an even difficult situation when the Pan-Blue Coalition has gained the absolute majority over the Pan-Green Coalition, resulting in much of govenment-sponsored bills being deadlocked. Executive divisions are faced with increasingly complicated political environment, which requires greater manpower and resources to reconcile with the legislative branch. This situation, occurring when legislative branch overpowers or when inter-branch relations hampered, then calls for a strengthening of congressional liaison functions. In contemporary democratic systems, the congressional liaison is an important strategic intermediary between executive and legislative branches. A successful practice of the liaison function is expected to improve the communications and collaborations and to mitigate potential conflicts between executive and legislative branches. Congressional liaisons become the keys to the success of the function. The purpose of this study is thus to investigate the role of congressional liaison at the Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) in inter-branch politics. Major conclusions of this thesis are summarized as follows: 1.In a divided party government, strategic operations of congressional liaison provide great contributions to the interactions between executive and legislative branches. 2.Strengthened public relations with the congress improves the administrative efficiency and helps achieving policy goals of executive divisions. 3.Service-type tasks have become the major load of congressional liaison offices at the CCA and have shown to suffer the greatest complications. 4.The congressional liaison office, being on the front line of executive-legislative branch relations, is responsible for information delivery, opinion exchanges and reconciliation of issues with the legislative institution. 5.A competent congressional liaison will successfully assist the congressional operations and is expected to have the following characteristics: being professional and enthusiastic, having great communication and coordination skills, being familiar with political operations, having extensive connections in congress, and being authorized and endorsed by superiors.

6 pp. / Training and pruning newly-planted deciduous fruit trees is one of the most important steps in developing trees with a strong framework (scaffold branches). Trees with a good framework of branches can support heavy crops without limb breakage and will help to bring the young tree into production at an early age. Selection and arrangement of these branches determines the type of development and growth in later years. The goal of pruning and training is to balance vegetative and fruiting wood growth.

Container terminals use intelligent freight technologies (e.g., EDI, RFID and GPS) to exchange data with their partners, to locate containers and equipment within the terminal, and to automate tasks. This thesis illustrated, via two examples, how this data may be used to optimize operations at the terminal.The first part uses information on announced volumes to allocate internal handling equipment. The objective is to minimize overall delays at the terminal. The problem is represented as a network flow problem and implemented as a linear mixed integer programming model. A case study for a terminal at the Grand Port Maritime de Marseille is carried out. We also showed that combining the allocation problem with the dimensioning of a truck appointment system may reduce overall delays at the terminal. The second part uses information on announced container retrievals and container positions to improve retrieval operations. The objective is to retrieve containers from a bay in a given sequence with a minimum number of parasite relocations. We improve an existing binary programming model and introduce an exact branch and price approach - with a binary subproblem and two variants of an enumerative subproblem - and a heuristic branch and price approach - with a heuristic subproblem. The exact approach solves only small instances; the heuristic approach performs well on several instances, but should be improved further. We also deal with a dynamic version of the problem where the retrieval order becomes revealed over time and evaluate different relocation strategies for this case.

Bien que les champignons soient régulièrement utilisés comme modèle d'étude des systèmes eucaryotes, leurs relations phylogénétiques soulèvent encore des questions controversées. Parmi celles-ci, la classification des zygomycètes reste inconsistante. Ils sont potentiellement paraphylétiques, i.e. regroupent de lignées fongiques non directement affiliées. La position phylogénétique du genre Schizosaccharomyces est aussi controversée: appartient-il aux Taphrinomycotina (précédemment connus comme archiascomycetes) comme prédit par l'analyse de gènes nucléaires, ou est-il plutôt relié aux Saccharomycotina (levures bourgeonnantes) tel que le suggère la phylogénie mitochondriale? Une autre question concerne la position phylogénétique des nucléariides, un groupe d'eucaryotes amiboïdes que l'on suppose étroitement relié aux champignons. Des analyses multi-gènes réalisées antérieurement n'ont pu conclure, étant donné le choix d'un nombre réduit de taxons et l'utilisation de six gènes nucléaires seulement. Nous avons abordé ces questions par le biais d'inférences phylogénétiques et tests statistiques appliqués à des assemblages de données phylogénomiques nucléaires et mitochondriales. D'après nos résultats, les zygomycètes sont paraphylétiques (Chapitre 2) bien que le signal phylogénétique issu du jeu de données mitochondriales disponibles est insuffisant pour résoudre l'ordre de cet embranchement avec une confiance statistique significative. Dans le Chapitre 3, nous montrons à l'aide d'un jeu de données nucléaires important (plus de cent protéines) et avec supports statistiques concluants, que le genre Schizosaccharomyces appartient aux Taphrinomycotina. De plus, nous démontrons que le regroupement conflictuel des Schizosaccharomyces avec les Saccharomycotina, venant des données mitochondriales, est le résultat d'un type d'erreur phylogénétique connu: l'attraction des longues branches (ALB), un artéfact menant au regroupement d'espèces dont le taux d'évolution rapide n'est pas représentatif de leur véritable position dans l'arbre phylogénétique. Dans le Chapitre 4, en utilisant encore un important jeu de données nucléaires, nous démontrons avec support statistique significatif que les nucleariides constituent le groupe lié de plus près aux champignons. Nous confirmons aussi la paraphylie des zygomycètes traditionnels tel que suggéré précédemment, avec support statistique significatif, bien que ne pouvant placer tous les membres du groupe avec confiance. Nos résultats remettent en cause des aspects d'une récente reclassification taxonomique des zygomycètes et de leurs voisins, les chytridiomycètes. Contrer ou minimiser les artéfacts phylogénétiques telle l'attraction des longues branches (ALB) constitue une question récurrente majeure. Dans ce sens, nous avons développé une nouvelle méthode (Chapitre 5) qui identifie et élimine dans une séquence les sites présentant une grande variation du taux d'évolution (sites fortement hétérotaches - sites HH); ces sites sont connus comme contribuant significativement au phénomène d'ALB. Notre méthode est basée sur un test de rapport de vraisemblance (likelihood ratio test, LRT). Deux jeux de données publiés précédemment sont utilisés pour démontrer que le retrait graduel des sites HH chez les espèces à évolution accélérée (sensibles à l'ALB) augmente significativement le support pour la topologie « vraie » attendue, et ce, de façon plus efficace comparée à d'autres méthodes publiées de retrait de sites de séquences. Néanmoins, et de façon générale, la manipulation de données préalable à l'analyse est loin d’être idéale. Les développements futurs devront viser l'intégration de l'identification et la pondération des sites HH au processus d'inférence phylogénétique lui-même. / Despite the popularity of fungi as eukaryotic model systems, several questions on their phylogenetic relationships continue to be controversial. These include the classification of zygomycetes that are potentially paraphyletic, i.e. a combination of several not directly related fungal lineages. The phylogenetic position of Schizosaccharomyces species has also been controversial: do they belong to Taphrinomycotina (previously known as archiascomycetes) as predicted by analyses with nuclear genes, or are they instead related to Saccharomycotina (budding yeast) as in mitochondrial phylogenies? Another question concerns the precise phylogenetic position of nucleariids, a group of amoeboid eukaryotes that are believed to be close relatives of Fungi. Previously conducted multi-gene analyses have been inconclusive, because of limited taxon sampling and the use of only six nuclear genes. We have addressed these issues by assembling phylogenomic nuclear and mitochondrial datasets for phylogenetic inference and statistical testing. According to our results zygomycetes appear to be paraphyletic (Chapter 2), but the phylogenetic signal in the available mitochondrial dataset is insufficient for resolving their branching order with statistical confidence. In Chapter 3 we show with a large nuclear dataset (more than 100 proteins) and conclusive supports that Schizosaccharomyces species are part of Taphrinomycotina. We further demonstrate that the conflicting grouping of Schizosaccharomyces with budding yeasts, obtained with mitochondrial sequences, results from a phylogenetic error known as long-branch attraction (LBA, a common artifact that leads to the regrouping of species with high evolutionary rates irrespective of their true phylogenetic positions). In Chapter 4, using again a large nuclear dataset we demonstrate with significant statistical support that nucleariids are the closest known relatives of Fungi. We also confirm paraphyly of traditional zygomycetes as previously suggested, with significant support, but without placing all members of this group with confidence. Our results question aspects of a recent taxonomical reclassification of zygomycetes and their chytridiomycete neighbors (a group of zoospore-producing Fungi). Overcoming or minimizing phylogenetic artifacts such as LBA has been among our most recurring questions. We have therefore developed a new method (Chapter 5) that identifies and eliminates sequence sites with highly uneven evolutionary rates (highly heterotachous sites, or HH sites) that are known to contribute significantly to LBA. Our method is based on a likelihood ratio test (LRT). Two previously published datasets are used to demonstrate that gradual removal of HH sites in fast-evolving species (suspected for LBA) significantly increases the support for the expected ‘true’ topology, in a more effective way than comparable, published methods of sequence site removal. Yet in general, data manipulation prior to analysis is far from ideal. Future development should aim at integration of HH site identification and weighting into the phylogenetic inference process itself.

Teigiama visuomenės nuomonė apie instituciją prasideda nuo sėkmingos jos veiklos. Visuomenės nuomonei formuoti naudojama ryšių su visuomene veikla. Tačiau valstybinių institucijų ryšių su visuomene tikslai skiriasi nuo privačių institucijų. Kadangi valstybinės institucijos negamina parduodamo produkto, jų ryšių su visuomene pagrindinis tikslas – kad visuomenė teisingai suprastų institucijos misiją ir naudojamas priemones tikslams pasiekti. Valdžios institucijų ryšių su visuomene specialistai turi viešai pateikti kuo daugiau reikalingos informacijos, kuri įgalintų visuomenę teisingai įvertinti priimamus sprendimus. Valstybinių institucijų ryšių su visuomene veikla yra mažai tyrinėta, todėl jos procesų, pritaikymo specifinėms šių įstaigų reikmėms galimybių ir trūkumų analizė yra labai aktuali. Ryšių su visuomene sfera plačiausiai išplėtota centrinėse vykdomosios valdžios institucijose bei savivaldos institucijose. Teritorinėse vykdomosios valdžios institucijose ryšių su visuomene padaliniai įsteigti visai neseniai. Šiuo darbu siekta išnagrinėti teritorinių vykdomosios valdžios institucijų – apskričių viršininkų administracijų (Vilniaus, Kauno, Šiaulių, Klaipėdos, Panevėžio, Marijampolės, Utenos, Tauragės, Telšių bei Alytaus) išorinės komunikacijos strategijos kūrimo bruožus. Analizuojama apskričių viršininkų administracijų atstovų spaudai naudojamos išorinės komunikacijos priemonės bei kanalai, ir jų efektyvumas, siekiant institucijos strateginių tikslų, atsižvelgiant į... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The positive opinion of the society about institution begins from the successful institution work. To form the opinion of society, it is used public relations. But the purposes of public institutions differ from the purposes of private ones. Since the public institutions do not make products for sale, their main public relations purpose is to define their mission and useable implements to reach the aims. The public relations specialists of authorities have to officially render as much needed information as possible, in order that society could fairly measure the decisions made by public institutions. Public relations of public institutions are not explored very much, that‘s way this is very relevant. The sphere of public relations is streamed the most in the self-government and central Executive Branch institutions. The packs of public relations in the territorial Executive Branch institutions are established newly. The aim of this work is to research the creation traits of external communication strategy in the territorial Executive Branch institutions – County Governors administrations (of Vilnius, Kaunas, Šiauliai, Klaipėda, Panevėžys, Marijampolė, Utena, Tauragė, Telšiai and Alytus). In these papers, it was analyzed external communications implements and channels (and their efficiency) used by spokespersons of County Governors administrations. The analyses were made from the territorial Executive Branch institutions with society aspect. In these papers, there are... [to full text]

La phylogénie moléculaire fournit un outil complémentaire aux études paléontologiques et géologiques en permettant la construction des relations phylogénétiques entre espèces ainsi que l’estimation du temps de leur divergence. Cependant lorsqu’un arbre phylogénétique est inféré, les chercheurs se focalisent surtout sur la topologie, c'est-à-dire l’ordre de branchement relatif des différents nœuds. Les longueurs des branches de cette phylogénie sont souvent considérées comme des sous-produits, des paramètres de nuisances apportant peu d’information. Elles constituent cependant l’information primaire pour réaliser des datations moléculaires. Or la saturation, la présence de substitutions multiples à une même position, est un artefact qui conduit à une sous-estimation systématique des longueurs de branche. Nous avons décidé d’estimer l‘influence de la saturation et son impact sur l’estimation de l’âge de divergence. Nous avons choisi d’étudier le génome mitochondrial des mammifères qui est supposé avoir un niveau élevé de saturation et qui est disponible pour de nombreuses espèces. De plus, les relations phylogénétiques des mammifères sont connues, ce qui nous a permis de fixer la topologie, contrôlant ainsi un des paramètres influant la longueur des branches. Nous avons utilisé principalement deux méthodes pour améliorer la détection des substitutions multiples : (i) l’augmentation du nombre d’espèces afin de briser les plus longues branches de l’arbre et (ii) des modèles d’évolution des séquences plus ou moins réalistes. Les résultats montrèrent que la sous-estimation des longueurs de branche était très importante (jusqu'à un facteur de 3) et que l’utilisation d'un grand nombre d’espèces est un facteur qui influence beaucoup plus la détection de substitutions multiples que l’amélioration des modèles d’évolutions de séquences. Cela suggère que même les modèles d’évolution les plus complexes disponibles actuellement, (exemple: modèle CAT+Covarion, qui prend en compte l’hétérogénéité des processus de substitution entre positions et des vitesses d’évolution au cours du temps) sont encore loin de capter toute la complexité des processus biologiques. Malgré l’importance de la sous-estimation des longueurs de branche, l’impact sur les datations est apparu être relativement faible, car la sous-estimation est plus ou moins homothétique. Cela est particulièrement vrai pour les modèles d’évolution. Cependant, comme les substitutions multiples sont le plus efficacement détectées en brisant les branches en fragments les plus courts possibles via l’ajout d’espèces, se pose le problème du biais dans l’échantillonnage taxonomique, biais dû à l‘extinction pendant l’histoire de la vie sur terre. Comme ce biais entraine une sous-estimation non-homothétique, nous considérons qu’il est indispensable d’améliorer les modèles d’évolution des séquences et proposons que le protocole élaboré dans ce travail permettra d’évaluer leur efficacité vis-à-vis de la saturation. / Molecular phylogeny provides an additional tool complementary to paleontological and geological studies, allowing the reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships between species and the estimate of their divergence time. Researchers are mainly focusing on the topology of a phylogenetic tree; i.e. the relative connection between different nodes. Whereas, the branch lengths of this phylogeny are often considered as secondary, i.e. as additional parameters containing little information. However, the branch lengths are the primary information for molecular dating. Importantly, saturation, the presence of multiple substitutions at the same position, is an artifact that leads to an underestimation of the branch length. We are therefore interested in estimating the magnitude of this phenomenon and its impact on divergence time. We chose to study the mammalian mitochondrial genome, which is available for many species and displays a high level of saturation. Furthermore, the phylogenetic relationships of mammalians are known, thus allowing us to fix the topology, thus eliminating one of the parameters influencing the branch lengths. We used two main approaches to improve the detection of multiple substitutions: (i) an increase in the number of species breaks the longest branches of the tree, (ii) more realistic models of sequence evolution. The results demonstrate that there is a very pronounced underestimation of branch lengths (up to a factor of 3). Furthermore, the use of a large number of species is the factor that influences most the detection of multiple substitutions, not the improvement of the model of sequence evolution. This suggests that even the most complex evolutionary models currently available, like the CAT+ Covarion model, which takes into account the heterogeneity of the substitution process between sites and the rates of evolution over time, are still far from taking the entire complexity of biological processes into account. Despite the important underestimation of branch lengths, the impact on dating appeared to be relatively limited, because the underestimation is more or less homothetic. This is obviously true for the complex evolutionary models. Since multiple substitutions are most effectively detected when breaking the long internal branches via the addition of species. This raises the problem of bias in the taxonomic sampling, due to the impact of extinction on the history of life on earth. Because this kind of bias leads to a non-homothetic underestimation, we consider it essential to improve models of sequence evolution and suggest that the protocol developed in this work will allow to evaluate their effectiveness towards saturation.

Les débris spatiaux constituent une menace pour l'exploration et l'exploitation de l'espace. Leur nombre ne cesse d'augmenter et continuera à grandir même si on arrête toute activité spatiale, augmentant ainsi la probabilité d'entrer en collision avec un satellite actif. Le retrait des débris s'avère le seul moyen de protéger ces satellites. Le nombre des débris spatiaux étant très élevé, il convient préalablement de repérer les plus dangereux. Dans la première partie de la thèse, nous avons élaboré une approche multicritère afin de classer les débris selon leur degré de priorité d'enlèvement. Les débris de la classe la plus prioritaire, feront l'objet d'une mission spatiale de retrait de débris. La planification d'une telle mission est étudiée dans la deuxième partie de la thèse. Elle doit être réalisée en minimisant deux critères : le coût de la mission ainsi que la durée nécessaire pour traiter tous les débris. La navette se déplace d'une orbite à une autre, traite les débris un par un puis retourne à son orbite initiale. Etant donné que le transfert entre deux orbites de débris peut être effectué de multiples façons, chacune correspondant à un compromis possible entre la durée et le coût de transfert, et que ces coûts et durées dépendent des moments de départ et d'arrivée sur les orbites, l'ensemble des solutions réalisables est défini sur un multigraphe dynamique orienté. Un tour dans un tel graphe définit un scénario de mission possible. Il s'agit de trouver l'ensemble des tours non dominés dans un tel multigraphe. Ceci revient à résoudre un problème de voyageur de commerce biobjectif et dépendant du temps. Nous avons développé un algorithme basé sur la technique de séparation et évaluation pour restituer l'ensemble de ces tours. L'optimisation de l'algorithme est faite sur deux niveaux : - On limite le nombre des transferts possibles entre deux orbites en évitant de calculer le coût pour les transferts qui s'avéreraient dominés. - Des règles de dominance sont utilisées pour couper certaines branches de l'arborescence de recherche qui ne mèneront pas à des solutions efficaces. Des résultats expérimentaux illustrent l'efficacité de la procédure.

The advent of new technology enhance the speed and reduce the cost for sequencing biological data. Making biological sense of this genomic data is a big challenge to the algorithm design as well as the high performance computing society. There are many problems in Bioinformatics, such as how new functional genes arise, why genes are organized into chromosomes, how species are connected through the evolutionary tree of life, or why arrangements are subject to change. Phylogenetic analyses have become essential to research on the evolutionary tree of life. It can help us to track the history of species and the relationship between different genes or genomes through millions of years. One of the fundamentals for phylogenetic construction is the computation of distances between genomes. Since there are much more complicated combinatoric patterns in rearrangement events, the distance computation is still a hot topic as much belongs to mathematics as to biology. For the distance computation with input of two genomes containing unequal gene contents (with insertions/deletions and duplications) the problem is especially hard. In this thesis, we will discuss about our contributions to the distance estimation for unequal gene order data. The problem of finding the median of three genomes is the key process in building the most parsimonious phylogenetic trees from genome rearrangement data. For genomes with unequal contents, to the best of our knowledge, there is no algorithm that can help to find the median. In this thesis, we make our contributions to the median computation in two aspects. 1) Algorithm engineering aspect, we harness the power of streaming graph analytics methods to implement an exact DCJ median algorithm which run as fast as the heuristic algorithm and can help construct a better phylogenetic tree. 2) Algorithmic aspect, we theoretically formulate the problem of finding median with input of genomes having unequal gene content, which leads to the design and implementation of an efficient Lin-Kernighan heuristic based median algorithm. Inferring phylogenies (evolutionary history) of a set of given species is the ultimate goal when the distance and median model are chosen. For more than a decade, biologists and computer scientists have studied how to infer phylogenies by the measurement of genome rearrangement events using gene order data. While evolution is not an inherently parsimonious process, maximum parsimony (MP) phylogenetic analysis has been supported by widely applied to the phylogeny inference to study the evolutionary patterns of genome rearrangements. There are generally two problems with the MP phylogenetic arose by genome rearrangement: One is, given a set of modern genomes, how to compute the topologies of the according phylogenetic tree; Another is, given the topology of a model tree, how to infer the gene orders of the ancestor species. To assemble a MP phylogenetic tree constructor, there are multiple NP hard problems involved, unfortunately, they organized as one problem on top of other problems. Which means, to solve a NP hard problem, we need to solve multiple NP hard sub-problems. For phylogenetic tree construction with the input of unequal content genomes, there are three layers of NP hard problems. In this thesis, we will mainly discuss about our contributions to the design and implementation of the software package DCJUC (Phylogeny Inference using DCJ model to cope with Unequal Content Genomes), that can help to achieve both of these two goals. Aside from the biological problems, another issue we need to concern is about the use of the power of parallel computing to assist accelerating algorithms to handle huge data sets, such as the high resolution gene order data. For one thing, all of the method to tackle with phylogenetic problems are based on branch and bound algorithms, which are quite irregular and unfriendly to parallel computing. To parallelize these algorithms, we need to properly enhance the efficiency for localized memory access and load balance methods to make sure that each thread can put their potentials into full play. For the other, there is a revolution taking place in computing with the availability of commodity graphical processors such as Nvidia GPU and with many-core CPUs such as Cray-XMT, or Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor with 60 cores. These architectures provide a new way for us to achieve high performance at much lower cost. However, code running on these machines are not so easily programmed, and scientific computing is hard to tune well on them. We try to explore the potentials of these architectures to help us accelerate branch and bound based phylogenetic algorithms.

I denna studie utforskas relationen mellan lönearbete och ojämlikhet inom servicearbete ur ett feministiskt perspektiv. Teoretiskt förenar avhandlingen ett arbetsprocess- och ett intersektionellt perspektiv med syfte att fånga variationen och mångfalden i de maktrelationer som formar servicearbete. Studien baseras på en kvalitativ ansats och bygger på 24 djupintervjuer med hotell- och restauranganställda verksamma i en svensk storstad. Avhandlingen visar hur arbetsprocessen är grundläggande för skapandet och återskapandet av ojämlikheter, och att arbetsprocessen formas av arbetsgivares, kunders och anställdas föreställningar, fantasier och maktrelationer. Avhandling visar också hur ojämlika sociala relationer av klass, kön, sexualitet och ”ras”/etnicitet görs i själva arbetsprocessen samt hur fundamentalt lönearbete är för skapande av gemenskap, motstånd och identiteter. / This study explores the relationship between paid work and the reproduction of (gendered) inequalities, with special focus on the hotel and restaurant branch. Theoretically the study takes it points of departure in a feminist re-appraisal of a labour process perspective and in a feminist intersectional understanding of gender relations. Methodologically the research is based on a qualitative study that consists of 24 in-depth interviews with employed in the hotel and restaurant branch located within a large city in Sweden. The study shows how different forms of inequality are shaped within and through the labour process, a labour process that is also shaped by employers, customers, and employees ideas and fantasies and the power relations between them. The study also shows how fundamental the labour process is in the doing of (unequal) social relations of gender, sexuality, class and “race”/ethnicity and how central paid work is in the construction of identities, forms of resistance and belonging.

This research employs a non-parametric, fractional, linear programming method, Data Envelopment Analysis to examine the Customer Service Representative resource allocation efficiency of a major Canadian bank’s model. Two DEA models are proposed, (1) to evaluate the Bank’s national branch network in the context of employment only, by minimizing Full Time Equivalent (FTE) while maximizing over-the-counter (OTC) transaction volume; and (2) to evaluate the efficacy of the Bank’s own model in meeting the desired customer satisfaction benchmarks by maximizing fraction of transactions completed under management’s target time. Non-controllable constant-returns-to-scale and variable-returns to-scale model results are presented and further broken down into branch size segments and geographical regions for analysis. A comparison is conducted between the DEA model results and the Bank’s performance ratios and benchmarks, validating the use of the proposed DEA models for resource allocation efficiency analysis in the banking industry.