by Wong Hang-Tat. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1992. / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iii / Chapter I --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Petroleum Business in Hong Kong --- p.1 / Retail Market --- p.2 / Shell --- p.12 / Convenience Store Concept --- p.14 / Study Objectives --- p.18 / Chapter II --- TARGET GROUP --- p.23 / Chapter III --- METHODOLOGY --- p.26 / Chapter IV --- RESULTS & ANALYSIS --- p.33 / Customer perception --- p.33 / Investment --- p.41 / Profitability --- p.43 / Operations --- p.47 / Competitor Marketing Strategies --- p.49 / Chapter V --- RECOMMENDATIONS --- p.51 / Limitations --- p.51 / Recommendations --- p.52 / Conclusion --- p.58 / Further Work --- p.59 / APPENDIX --- p.60

[pt] Inúmeras mudanças no comportamento da sociedade levaram o consumidor a querer mais rapidez e conveniência em seu cotidiano. Principalmente nos grandes centros, é latente a necessidade de conciliar a tarefa de reposição dos alimentos e itens de necessidades do consumidor com as atividades do trabalho, estudo, momentos com família e lazer. Em função dessas mudanças, o varejo de conveniência é um formato que passa por transformações no Brasil, tendo como destaque as grandes redes do varejo alimentício e as distribuidoras de combustíveis representadas por suas marcas de conveniência. Neste contexto, a presente dissertação tem como objetivo identificar quais são os atributos considerados mais relevantes na escolha de uma loja de conveniência fora dos postos de combustíveis, segundo a visão dos consumidores e mensurar o grau de importância relativa atribuído a cada um deles. A condução da pesquisa ocorreu em duas etapas: uma primeira com caráter exploratório, em que foram entrevistados 17 consumidores e 6 gestores da área de conveniência, aspirando à identificação dos atributos relevantes no mercado de varejo de conveniência e seus níveis distintos; e uma segunda etapa quantitativa por meio da metodologia de análise conjunta para definir qual o grau de utilidade atribuído a cada um deles. Identificou-se como os principais atributos para escolha de uma loja de varejo de conveniência: mix de produtos, agilidade no atendimento, ambiente físico e localização. / [en] Numerous changes in society s behavior have led consumers to want more speed and convenience in their daily lives. Especially in large centers, there is a latent need to reconcile the task of replacing food and items of consumer needs with the activities of work, study, moments with family and leisure. As a result of these changes, convenience retail is a format that is undergoing transformations in Brazil, highlighting the large food retail chains and fuel distributors represented by their convenience brands. In this context, this dissertation aims to identify which attributes are considered most relevant when choosing a convenience store outside gas stations, according to the view of consumers; and measure the degree of relative importance attributed to each of them. The research was conducted in two stages: the first with an exploratory character, in which 17 consumers and 6 managers in the convenience area were interviewed, aiming to identify the relevant attributes in the convenience retail market and their different levels; and a second quantitative stage using the conjunct analysis methodology to define the degree of utility attributed to each of them. It was identified as the main attributes for choosing a convenience retail store: product mix, agility in service, physical environment and location.

Waste management is an integral part of sustainable urban development. In the modern world, when attitude to waste is being shifted towards “waste as resource” and “waste as income generator”, ensuring separation of hazardous waste from the general waste stream becomes increasingly important. Sorting hazardous waste is critical in light of the whole recycling idea. Hazardous elements, while bearing a certain value if properly handled, can negate the costs of the recyclable materials if found in their stream. They present enormous long-term losses, if introduced into the environment, and can negatively influence our ability to benefit from recycling. Convenience is one of the most effective tools in increasing recycling rates (Carlson 2001, p.1275). It is a personally defined concept, and often depends on the users’ lifestyle-related factors. This thesis explores users’ understanding and habits of handling hazardous waste, as well as the challenges they encounter and their views and suggestions on convenience of hazardous waste recycling systems. The main method used in this comparative case study research is qualitative interviews conducted with a variety of people with different lifestyles living in Malmo. First, the thesis develops a list of lifestyle-related factors which lower the perceived convenience of recycling. People consider recycling to be effort demanding or easy not just because they are women or men, young or old, live in a dense area or not. But this perception is influenced by having or not having access to a transporting vehicle and time available, their household’s waste producing rates, time spent living in a certain place, available space for storing waste; physical constraints or difficulties with self-organization at home; established or not recycling habits or level of environmental concern. People’s recycling behavior is determined by these personal lifestyle-related factors. Second, aspects of convenience are being presented as the focus areas which planners should consider in increasing recycling rates. The convenience aspects are developed with regards to the challenges people with different lifestyles experience in recycling. While lifestyle-related factors cannot be influenced directly, aspects of convenience can be employed in ensuring efficiency of hazardous waste collection system. It is important that the hazardous waste collection system design takes them into the full account. Detailed descriptions of the aspects of perceived convenience are presented. They are grouped into convenience of access to information and convenience through facilities and services. The final conclusion of the thesis is that involving users would assist in addressing key aspects of recycling systems’ perceived convenience and increase their efficiency. It is hoped that the information can be helpful in designing successful hazardous waste collection systems with increased capability to reach national goals in recycling and reduce the amounts of hazardous substances in general waste. / Master Programme: Sustainable Urban Management, 2011-2012Thesis: On the Way to the Convenient Hazardous Waste Collection System in Malmo, Sweden. Users’ PerspectiveAuthor: Olga Belorusova (OB)Tutor: Peter ParkerDate of Submission: 24 May, 2012.

The Convenience Store Industry in Taiwan is booming. The Asian island-nation has become the most densely populated country in terms of convenient stores in the world. Sales from the Convenience Store Industry account for more than 26% of the whole country’s retail sales, second only to department stores. These numbers have continued to grow as demonstrated by total sales figures reaching NTD$ 295 billion by the end of 2015. Taipei City, the country’s capital, is renowned for its convenient way of life. The broad range of services offered by convenience stores has contributed to the overall convenience of living in Taiwan, allowing customers to have a one-stop shop for paying electricity, water, telephone, internet, and gas bills, as well as photocopying, event ticketing, and even package reception. Taiwanese consumers have been accustomed to a very high access to convenience, but oddly enough, convenience stores in Taiwan have still not incorporated the service that takes convenience to another level: being able to shop from the comfort of your own home, office, or wherever you may be, and receiving your products almost instantly at your location, at a competitive price. The Delivery Service Industry in Taiwan is still in its very early stages of development, almost uniquely sticking to the delivery of groceries from high-end supermarket and department store franchises. New start-ups providing professional grocery shopping services have also entered the Taiwanese market in recent years, providing a new alternative to the supermarket and department store delivery service. In any case, the delivery of the groceries can take anywhere from 1-48 hours. 快快intends to provide the consumer in the major metropolitan areas of Taiwan with the option of purchasing a wide range of high-quality fast-moving consumer goods from the comfort of wherever their location may be, even if it doesn’t have an address – including sidewalks or parks – and receiving it within 30 minutes or less at a competitive price, with no minimum purchase order amount or hidden fees, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. By doing so, 快快will imprint a new meaning to the word convenience, allowing customers to more effectively manage and enjoy the single most valuable resource in every person’s life - time.

This research is focused on three food multiple retailers, Sainsbury plc, Tesco plc, and Safeway plc. The research is designed to explore the relationship between technology and strategy in these organisations. The currently held view among the researchers and managers of these organisations is that technology has a limited impact on the processes that formulate strategy, and as such may be regarded as having an enabling role. This thesis proposes that while this view may have been correct in the past it is so no longer, and that technology is not following strategy but leading strategy in the food retailers examined. In order to confirm this thesis the history, technical development and technical structure of the three retailers was investigated. The results of this research was subsequently analysed and the following conclusions were made: a. Technology has a much greater impact on the strategy of multiple food retailers than has been previously thought. Technology defines the boundaries of operational activities, and, through controlling a substantial proportion of the information that managers use in the strategy making process, technology de facto if not de jure greatly influences the retailers strategies, and in some cases may actually lead them. b. The food multiples, in not appreciating the extent to which their fate is tied up with the information technology they are using, are failing to educate and train the general management of the organisations technologically. c. Technological progress is widening the gap between the general management and technical management, and in the long run this will cause serious strategic problems unless this gap is closed through positive action

This thesis presents two studies where natural and sexual selection have interacted to evolve sexual behaviours. The thesis uses mathematical modelling to understand how these forces have caused each behaviour to evolve. This is useful because the results allow for reflection on the potential role of sexual selection in adaptation of these species to a changing environment. The first study is of early male arrival to spring breeding grounds in migratory avian species, this is termed protandry. The study explores the main hypotheses for avian protandry and then tests the susceptibility of each hypothesis to changing environment. The second study is of convenience polyandry in species where there is conflict over mating rate. Females have multiple strategies to avoid harassive males but strategies vary in cost and success rate; she must balance her strategy use to minimise her fitness depreciation. The study identifies the main factors that cause convenience polyandry to evolve and paves the way for future studies to investigate if sexual selection over resistance strategy provides these species a future advantage in adaptation to a changing environment.

A presente pesquisa busca verificar a constitucionalidade da aplicação da concessão administrativa para a contratação de particulares na atuação complementar junto ao Sistema Único de Saúde - SUS, assim como a sua conveniência, no plano teórico, para a máxima efetivação do direito fundamental à saúde. Para tanto, desenvolve um exame das transformações na concepção do Estado e de suas funções até o momento atual, destacando os novos papéis da Administração Pública e os seus reflexos no campo do direito administrativo e na evolução de seus institutos. Na sequência analisa a repercussão do modelo gerencial de Administração Pública nos sistemas mundiais de saúde e no brasileiro, com enfoque para a participação privada nos serviços públicos de saúde. Realiza um mapeamento do direito à saúde, a partir do conceito do bem jurídico \"saúde\" e dos seus princípios constitucionais. A partir de uma abordagem das diversas concepções de serviço público inclui nesta categoria os serviços de saúde prestados, direta ou indiretamente, pelo Estado no âmbito do SUS. Ainda, explora os mecanismos definidos na Constituição Federal para a participação privada complementar, os convênios e os contratos de direito público, além do contexto histórico em que estes ajustes foram inseridos no texto constitucional. Após, o estudo se direciona para as novas parcerias nos serviços públicos de saúde, criadas por leis posteriores à promulgação da Constituição Federal de 1988, verificando que os contratos de gestão (Lei nº 9.637/98) e as concessões administrativas (Lei nº 11.079/2004) são ajustes adequados para a transferência da gerência destes serviços à particulares. Na sequência, efetiva a contextualização da concessão gênero e da sua espécie concessão administrativa, por meio de uma síntese histórica da utilização destas ferramentas no Brasil e da averiguação dos regimes jurídicos das concessões translativas, em especial, os aspectos peculiares da concessão administrativa que a tornam conveniente para sua aplicação ao SUS. Por fim, conclui pela constitucionalidade desta modalidade de parceria público-privada (em sentido estrito) nos serviços públicos de saúde, assim como pela sua conveniência, no plano teórico, para a máxima efetivação do direito à saúde. / This study aims to analyses the constitutionality of using administrative concession to hire private sector in order to work in partnership with \"Sistema Único de Sáude - SUS\", it also analyses how this partnership can act to bring effective improvements in healthy fundamental rights. The paper describes the changes of State concept and its roles until now, highlighting the new roles of Public Management and its effect in Administrative Rights field and its entities evolution. After that, the analysis is focused on the repercussion of Public Management model in healthy system over the world and Brazil, detailing the private sector participation in healthy public services. The study analyses the right to healthy from the juridical concept of \"healthy\" and its constitutional principles. Also it approaches the different concepts of public services including the healthy services provided, direct or indirect, by the State though SUS. The paper analyses the mechanisms defined in Federal Constitution to guide private sector complementary participation, agreements, and public right contracts; it also describes the historical context in which these mechanisms were included in Federal Constitution. After that, the study approaches the new partnerships in healthy public services originate by laws created after 1988 Federal Constitution, it verifies that the management contracts (Law nº 9.637/98) and administrative concessions (Law nº 11.079/2004) are correct changes in law to guarantee the properly transfer of services management to private sector. There is a description of concession and administrative concession concepts based on historical resume of the utilization of these juridical tools in Brazil and on checking the juridical aspects of transmission concessions, mainly the peculiar aspects of administrative concession that are key factors for using this tool in SUS. At the end, the paper concludes for the constitutionality of this model of public/private partnership (strict concept) in healthy public services, as its convenience to bring effective improvements in healthy fundamental rights.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber / This dissertation seeks to understand obstetricians’ lived experience of decision-making in childbirth and investigate how the organizational context within which obstetricians work influences how they make treatment decisions. Understanding how obstetricians make decisions in childbirth is important because maternity care in the United States is in crisis. Our system is failing women on multiple accounts: between 1990 and 2013, maternal mortality more than doubled in the United States, and is higher than most other high-income countries. Furthermore, women continue to suffer from abusive practices by maternity care providers who dismiss their concerns and sometimes outright refuse to honor their self-determination in childbirth. Today multiple stakeholders acknowledge a need for maternity care reform; this creates new challenges for health care policy and opportunities for social science research. Obstetrician-gynecologists provide the majority of maternity care to American women, and this dissertation examines their lived experience of decision-making in birth and analyzes how a range of social forces affect this process. To investigate this phenomenon I performed 50 in-depth interviews with obstetricians from Massachusetts, Louisiana and Vermont about how they make patient care decisions in birth. The specific research questions and analysis for each chapter evolved through an iterative process that combined analytical grounded theory and template analysis. I present this in a three-article format. In article one I show how shift-work models of labor and delivery pose challenges to using a patient-centered approach to decision-making. Obstetricians either work shifts in labor and delivery or they work on-call for their patients’ births. The current thinking is that shifts are good because they allow work-life balance for doctors, reduce fatigue, and reduce convenience-based decisions. Shift work models assume that doctors and patients are interchangeable because doctors will follow protocols and standards of care produced by medical professional organizations. I argue shift work does not work in practice the way it does in theory. I explain how there are not standards for many decisions in birth, instead these decisions are characterized by medical uncertainty. In these cases, doctors rely on patient-centered approaches to make decisions. But shift work limits doctors’ ability to use patient-centered approaches. I found that shift-work models of hospital care do not provide doctors the opportunity to get to know their patients and understand their preferences. In practices that do not depend on shift work, the doctor patient relationship is far less fragmented and doctors tend to experience less conflict with their patients and are less likely to rely on stereotypes that reproduce social inequality. In article two I examine obstetricians’ understandings of convenience as a motivation in decision-making. Anecdotal evidence suggests that obstetricians sometimes make clinical care decisions less out of concern for their patients and more out of concern for their own time and schedule. This may be a particular problem in on-call models. In this paper I show doctors’ stories match anecdotal evidence: Some obstetricians make clinical decisions in birth based partially on their own convenience. Yet others actively resist the temptation of convenience, even in on-call care. A key dimension of this difference lies in doctors’ understandings of the nature of time in labor and the safety of interventions. Some doctors have a faster-the-better approach to birth and believe the routine use of interventions is the best way to practice in labor and delivery. These doctors frame their own convenience as legitimate because it overlaps with the idea that speeding up the labor is inherently good. Alternatively, other doctors believe time in labor is productive, and that interventions should be used judiciously because they increase risk of harm. These doctors cannot easily legitimize convenience because it conflicts with the reduction of interventions as a key dimension of this philosophy. I argue that because shift work poses serious challenges to patient-centered care, cultural change is a better avenue for reducing births of convenience. Article three addresses an ongoing question in medical sociology about whether physicians maintain control over their clinical work amidst challenges to their authority. Patient empowerment and standardization are two movements that sociologists have theorized in terms of weakening of doctors’ clinical discretion. I uncover how obstetricians draw on the conflicting nature of these approaches strategically to maintain their power in the face of a threat. Standards and patient empowerment act as countervailing powers; they drew on one to off set the challenge to their authority posed by the other. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

O presente estudo pretende oferecer uma interpretação da reflexão moral de Montaigne que se opõe àquelas que a vêem centrada na alegação da passividade do ensaísta, reduzindo-a à prescrição de uma subordinação pragmática às leis e aos costumes e fazendo dos Ensaios uma mera descrição da condição humana. Através da leitura daqueles ensaios em que Montaigne mais parece passivo (nos quais tais interpretações justamente apóiam suas hipóteses), acreditamos encontrar os modos de operação de uma ação discreta, pautada pela exigência de adequação aos objetos e às circunstâncias, uma ação que abre espaço para o livre jogo das paixões segundo a conveniência. Espera-se, com isso, resgatar a dimensão normativa dos Ensaios, seja lançando luz sobre as preocupações permanentes do autor com a própria liberdade (sempre ameaçada pelo risco da servidão aos afetos), seja chamando a atenção dos leitores para o Montaigne político, atento aos riscos que a ambição, as inovações e os remédios extremos (a perfídia) trazem para ordem pública e, ao mesmo tempo, ocupado em sugerir (através do exemplo de seus mandatos à frente da mairie de Bordeaux) parâmetros para uma ação política discreta. / The present study has the purpose of responding to the commentators who interpret Michel de Montaignes thought under the key of passivity and see a complete absence of an ethics on the essays and reduce all montaigniana morality to a pragmatic subordination to the laws and costumes, and also seeing the Essays as a mere description of the human condition. Reading the essays in which Montaignes passivity seems attain his higher level (where such commentaries exactly base their hypotheses on) we sought to find the operating ways of a discreet action, ruled by that the objects and their circumstances impose; an action in which passions are gladly admitted only when it is convenient. We expect here to recover the Essays normative dimension, be it through shedding light on the authors permanent concern with his own freedom (always threatened by the risk of the servitude to affections), be it drawing the readers attention to the politician Montaigne, aware of the risks that ambition, innovations and grievous remedies (the perfidy) bring to the public order and, at the same time, able to suggest (through the example of his mandates ahead of mairie de Bordeaux) some patterns for a discreet political action.