Inter-organizational projects have become common forms of organizing in various industries such as construction, advertising, music, film making etc. The unique structural nature of Inter-organizational projects coupled with the fact that they carried out through the participation of multiple organizations, raises issues of coordination. Particularly when it comes to creative industries, coordination is challenged by demand and transactional uncertainties. In order to understand how inter-organizational projects achieve coordination in such situations, it is important to study their interior processes putting in consideration their environmental context.  The aim of this research is to study how network embeddedness enhances coordination in inter-organizational projects within creative industries. Inter-organizational projects: are projects that are carried out through the collaboration of multiple legally independent organizations Inter-organizational networks: refer to sets of long-term ties among independent organizations that are engaged in continuous exchange relations. Embeddedness: refers to the continuous interaction of individuals, organizations, projects etc. with their environmental context. Macrocultures: refer to the shared beliefs, norms values rules and practices with in inter- organizational networks that guide members on their actions. A qualitative approach using a multiple comparative case study was conducted. Accordingly four projects chosen from creative industries were studied using both primary and secondary data. Macrocultures that are embedded inter-organizational networks facilitate coordination within inter-organizational projects. Further projects that differ in their constituents task nature, time duration and team composition relied on different types of embeddedness for coordination.

Many pervasive computing applications demand expressive situational awareness, which entails an entity in the pervasive computing environment learning detailed information about its immediate and surrounding context. Much work over the past decade focused on how to acquire and represent context information. However, this work is largely egocentric, focusing on individual entities in the pervasive computing environment sensing their own context. Distributed acquisition of surrounding context information is much more challenging, largely because of the expense of communication among these resource-constrained devices. This thesis presents Grapevine, a framework for efficiently sharing context information in a localized region of a pervasive computing network, using that information to dynamically form groups defined by their shared situations, and assessing the aggregate context of that group. Grapevine’s implementation details are presented and its performance benchmarked in both simulation and live pervasive computing network deployments. / text

Despite decades of effort in academia and industry, it is not yet possible to build machines that can replicate many seemingly-basic human perceptual abilities. This work focuses on the problem of face identification that most of us effortlessly solve daily. Substantial progress has been made towards the goal of automatically identifying faces under tightly controlled conditions; however, in the domain of unconstrained face images, many challenges remain. We observe that the recent combination of widespread digital photography, inexpensive digital storage and bandwidth, and online social networks has led to the sudden creation of repositories of billions of shared photographs and opened up an important new domain for unconstrained face identification research. Drawing upon the newly-popular phenomenon of “tagging,” we construct some of the first face identification datasets that are intended to model the digital social spheres of online social network members, and we examine various qualitative and quantitative properties of these image sets. The identification datasets we present here include up to 100 individuals, making them comparable to the average size of members’ networks of “friends” on a popular online social network, and each individual is represented by up to 100 face samples that feature significant real-world variation in appearance, expression, and pose. We demonstrate that biologically-inspired visual representations can achieve state-of-the-art face identification performance on our novel frontal and multi-pose face datasets. We also show that the addition of a tree-structured classifier and training set augmentation can enhance accuracy in the multi-pose setting. Finally, we illustrate that the machine-readable “social context” in which shared photos are often embedded can be applied to further boost face identification accuracy. Taken together, our results suggest that accurate automated face identification in vast online shared photo collections is now feasible. / Engineering and Applied Sciences

Many studies have focused on the effects of MNC subsidiaries' external relational embeddedness. Little attention has been given to its antecedents and especially to the potential effect that the business network context might have. We try to fill this gap and attempt to explain variation among subsidiaries' degree of relational embeddedness. Our results show a strong and robust effect of the business network context -- i.e. the network context in which the direct business relationships between the subsidiary and its partners are embedded -- on the degree of relational embeddedness. However, contrary to previous literature, we find an inverted u-shaped relationship. We discuss our findings with regard to the issue of over-embeddedness and the literature on the strength of weak versus strong ties.

This study departed from a research basis being somewhat lacking in the context of green building certification and especially the two-folded problem, regarding the characteristics of the network of business relationships and how an energy supply company should exploit opportunities in this network context and its relationships. As such, the purpose of this study is to investigate and analyse the network context and its business relationship characteristics, as well as to present recommendations of how an energy supply company can engage green building certification and cope with the business relationships in order to exploit business opportunities. Based on previous research regarding the real estate industry, energy service industry and the construction industry, a well-founded literature base could be extended further by applying theoretical concepts related to business relationship elements and strategy-making. The nature of green building certification and to fulfil the purpose of the study, called for a qualitative research strategy performed through a multiple-case study design. This led to the investigation of four certification projects, subject to certifications in the systems of EU GreenBuilding and Miljöbyggnad, where the most important actors, relationships and project contents constitute the empirical data. The findings of this thesis suggest that the relationships are characterized as having a short-term focus and an avoidance to become interdependent. In this manner elements such as commitment and adaptation are shown as rather shallow, where actions of commitment are not typically short-term sacrifices for a long-term mutual benefit and adaptations mostly occur with respect to specific projects. The adaptive behaviour is also more or less explained as a standardized procedure, avoiding relationship specific investments. Trust is an important element mostly in order to reflect the competence of the counterpart, where previous successful projects indicate the skill and knowledge. Despite the characteristics of the relationships, the benefits of long-term, high involvement, cooperative relationships were highlighted as good aspects to consider in this context. These characteristics, along with outspoken market demands, acted as the basis for the development of recommendations for an energy supply company in terms of a step-wise action framework. In this sense, the first acknowledgement of the framework is that the current position related to green building certification projects of an energy supply company is rather unestablished, with only one exception found. This implies a strategic approach in terms of understanding how to develop and maintain their business relationships, with respect to the previously mentioned characteristics. Through a successful utilization of the action framework (with respect to certain barriers to overcome), this thesis emphasizes a wide range of opportunities such as to have a proactive approach, maintain interactions between projects, to develop the knowledge, to offer a holistic approach and to utilize long-term cooperative relational benefits. The analysis and framework is highly suitable when applied by an energy supply company, but the authors also argue for the findings to be of relevance also for other practitioners in the context of green building certification. In addition, the authors believe that the orientation of this thesis might be a trigger for future similar research approaches, applied in different contexts.

This study examines power factors (resource dependence, attraction of relationship maintenance, and institutional forces) in relation to actors' behaviors and ties of varying strength between them within a network of business and sociopolitical spheres. The focus is on Samsung Electronics and Asahi Breweries in the context of the ROK-Japan trade dispute (2019-2023). An analysis model, incorporating perspectives from network theory, resource dependency theory, relationship marketing, and institutional theory, is operationalized and applied to the empirical data. A qualitative content analysis of primarily two Japanese and ROK-based newspapers, along with quantitative data, reveals a domino effect of events impacting the two focal firms, highlighting their interconnected networks. The study also demonstrates how layering of relevant spheres in a given context shapes the perception and impact of power factors, influencing actors' behavior and their ties. Additionally, it emphasizes the benefits of diversifying ties and the importance of distinguishing between short-term and long-term. / Denna studie undersöker maktfaktorer (resursberoende, attraktion att upprätthålla relationer och institutionella tryck) i relation till aktörers beteenden, samt förbindelser sinsemellan i varierande styrka, inom nätverk bestående av affärsmässiga och sociopolitiska sfärer. Fokus ligger på Samsung Electronics och Asahi Breweries i samband med handelskonflikten mellan ROK och Japan (2019-2023). En analysmodell som bygger på perspektiv från nätverksteori, resursberoendeteori, relationsmarknadsföring och institutionell teori har operationaliserats och tillämpats på empirin. En kvalitativ innehållsanalys av främst två japanska respektive ROK-baserade tidningar, kombinerat med kvalitativa data, påvisar en dominoeffekt av händelser som påverkar de två fokala företagen och framhäver deras integrerade nätverk. Studien visar också hur skiktningar av relevanta sfärer i en given kontext formar perception och inverkan av maktfaktorer, vilket påverkar aktörers beteende och deras förbindelser.  Dessutom betonar studien fördelen med diversifiering av förbindelserna och vikten av att skilja mellan långsiktighet  och kortsiktighet.