<p>This dissertation takes on a key and persistent challenge within teacher education: pre-service teacher learning in field experience. I approach this historical problem through its local manifestations, and this study examines an intervention that brought together three university supervisors and six classroom mentor teachers from one university-school partnership for seven meetings over the six months of student teaching. Framed by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the emergent design of the Mentoring Study Group intervention aimed to provoke expansive learning (Engestr&ouml;m, 1987; 2001) to transform how practitioners understand their work and to support them in constructing new tools and concepts for practice for themselves. Qualitative methods were used to examine the key problems of practice participants identified, the new tools and concepts for practice they developed, and to interpret learning in terms of the expansive learning conceptual model to understand how features of the model design enabled the group to broaden their understanding and coordinate their work. Results demonstrate that through participation in the structured collaboration offered by the emergent professional development approach, participants were able to uncover a fundamental contradiction embedded within teacher preparation, between goals of helping pre-service teachers develop ambitious instructional practice and preparing pre-service teachers to lead &ldquo;formula lessons.&rdquo; In attempting to confront and resolve this contradiction, the Mentoring Study Group devised a shared tool to coordinate their work, The Five High-Leverage Math Practices +1 Protocol and field-based pedagogical practices to guide modeling, observations, and feedback on teaching. This model of structured collaboration for teacher education practitioners holds promise for university-school partnership efforts to come together to develop shared approaches to mentoring and a common language of practice for the purpose of preparing beginning teachers for ambitious practice in the field. </p>

<p> Dialogue is a useful organizational strategy that supports a shared understanding that is useful in the solving complex problems. A community hospital challenged with publicly transparent quality metrics and the associated financial and reputation penalties developed a culture supportive of dialogue and participation and was the setting for this research. </p><p> The purpose of the research was to explore the decisions and messages an executive leadership team implemented that support the practice of dialogue and facilitated a culture of participation. This retrospective, qualitative study reviewed documents and artifacts over a seven-year time span from 2007-2014. two sources, 1) the Operation Committee meetings and 2) The all- employee forums provided by the senior leadership were reviewed. These source were coded utilizing a predetermined coding scheme based upon information from 3 theories, 1) Isaac&rsquo;s dimensions of dialogue, 2) Isaac&rsquo;s action theory of dialogue and 3) Fischer&rsquo;s levels of participation. These three theories when integrated provide a three dimensional perspective that supports the practice of dialogue. </p><p> The conclusions of this study are that 1) A single theory of dialogue is not sufficient. 2. An effective model for communication must include, at a minimum, contain an aspect of action theory, a dimension of dialogue, and a level of participation. 3. Delaying decision-making in order to obtain feedback allows for the prolongation of deliberation and for the emergence of dialogue and deliberation and 4. Expansion of the deliberation time is a mechanism that helps the group to suspend assumptions and is a methodology supportive of dialogue. This research recommends a three step, <i>how to</i> approach to supporting dialogue and a culture of participation. The recommended pattern is to 1) ask for feedback thus 2) delaying the decision, and 3) listening to the feedback.</p>

<p> Using a single case study methodology and the theoretical lens of collective memory, this study explored the stories told in a family-owned business. From the research, a robust picture of these stories emerged. </p><p> Interviews, observation, and document review occurred at a family-owned, agriculturally based manufacturing business. Three family member and 22 non&ndash;family member employees were interviewed for this study. From the interviews, five stories emerged, which met the criteria of being shared among either the family member employees, the non&ndash;family member employees, or both employee categories. </p><p> Collective memory, as defined by Casey (1997), provided the theoretical foundation for the study, allowing the stories identified to be considered in relation to history and commemoration (Schwartz, 2005) and nonparticipant narrators (Casey, 1997; Linde, 1997). In the analysis of both family members&rsquo; and non&ndash;family members&rsquo; stories, the notion of a hybrid story emerged. A hybrid story incorporates two distinct stories, a family story and an organizational story, that could each stand independently. However, within the hybrid story, the two distinct stories are united into one cohesive story. </p><p> The identification of the hybrid story answered the calls of multiple scholars. Using collective memory to analyze these stories addressed Boje&rsquo;s (2008) appeal for more theorizing and research uniting collective memory and organizational stories. The hybrid story represents a new type of entrepreneurial story, as Wry et al. (2011) requested. Stories, including the hybrid story, are an artifact of an organization&rsquo;s culture. As such, the hybrid story presents further cultural exploration, as Nicholson (2008) invited. Finally, the inclusion of non&ndash;family member employees&rsquo; data allowed for their representation within this study, a gap previously noted within the family business literature (James et al., 2012; Mitchell et al., 2003; Sharma, 2004). </p><p> The implications of the hybrid story are unknown at this time; however, some benefits for family-owned businesses can be hypothesized. First, the hybrid story may provide employees with a greater sense of stability. Second, hybrid stories may create increased stability and understanding during periods of organizational change. Finally, hybrid stories may have implications for increased legitimacy.</p>

<p>This dissertation extends and contributes to the extant literature on social enterprise by examining the enterprise-beneficiary relationship in social enterprises with particular focus on performance measurement and social value creation. Ironically, while social missions and commitment to beneficiaries is what distinguishes social entrepreneurship from traditional entrepreneurship, little research has been conducted to examine this relationship. Utilizing a portfolio of 101 social enterprises based in New England, this study consisted of two phases: the development of a typology of social enterprise based on the enterprise-beneficiary relationships present in the portfolio, and a comparative case study closely examining six cases of social enterprise across the typology. </p><p> By examining beneficiary positioning, level of interaction, and relationship characteristics four archetypes of social enterprise were identified: general benefit enterprises, philanthropic enterprises, social business enterprises, and relational social enterprises. Examining these models, the concept of entwinement emerged. I define entwinement as the mutual reliance and commitment between two parties, in these cases the enterprises and the individual beneficiaries they seek to serve. These models fall along a continuum of entwinement, ranging from no entwinement in the general benefit enterprises to high entwinement in the relational social enterprises. By examining two cases each of philanthropic enterprises, social business enterprises and relational enterprises I found that entwinement has positive implications for stakeholder salience and depth of impact for individual beneficiaries. I also found that while funding requirements are a key driver of the development of formalized social performance measurement programs, the level of entwinement moderates that relationship. </p><p> This dissertation contributes directly to stakeholder theory and to the social entrepreneurship literature. It offers an explanation for how managers recognize the salience of their stakeholder groups by raising entwinement as a key mechanism through which managers recognize the legitimacy and power of the beneficiary group. By utilizing the capabilities approach from the development literature, this study also presents a framework through which depth of impact can be examined across issue are and business model design. Finally, this paper identified funder requirements as a key driver of social performance measurement systems, suggesting that even as social enterprises diversify their revenue streams and business models they still bear significant semblance to non-profit organizations. </p>

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

With the recent discovery of traumatic brain injuries developing in retired professional football players, this study seeks to explore players’ perceptions of their careers in the sport, and how this may reflect notions of personal health over the long-term. Current and former football players, athletic staff, and other members of the football community were interviewed with the goal of learning about the full trajectory of a football career. Using grounded metaphorical analysis to examine the interview data, our study found the use of metaphor by participants to be integral in players’ descriptions of their careers. Participants likened aspects of their careers to enduring a war, having a religious experience, and being part of a family unit. Long-term, post-career health implications are discussed in relation to players’ conceiving of their experiences through these metaphors, along with limitations of the study and directions for future research. / text

My dissertation examines competition, cooperation, and efficiency in three market settings in which a population of economic agents interact, either directly with each other in pairwise matches, directly with firms, or with firms via a platform. In one chapter I consider a population of customers who have different valuations for a good sold by competing merchants, as well as varying preferences over the merchant from which to purchase the good and the payment form with which to make the purchase, and examine what the effects might be if a merchant placed an additional surcharge on transactions completed with a payment form that is more costly for the merchant. The cost for the merchant can vary dramatically depending on the payment form used. For example, a credit card transaction is generally more expensive for the merchant than a debit card transaction, even if the transaction is completed using the same technology and is processed over the same network (e.g., a MasterCard signature debit transaction and a MasterCard credit card transaction). Historically, with limited exceptions, merchants have been prohibited, both by law and by the contract permitting the acceptance of that network's cards, from charging customers different prices for transactions completed using different payment cards, despite the different costs these transactions impose on them. Recent concessions made by several major payment networks in response to legal challenges raises the possibility that this paradigm might change in the future. This chapter examines what the effects might be if merchants were permitted to charge customers different prices based on the payment form and whether these effects depend on differences between the merchants, such as differences in the marginal cost of providing the good. In another chapter, I consider a population of individuals made up of more-patient and less-patient types who interact directly with each other in a repeated prisoner's dilemma embedded in a search model. A player is matched anonymously with another player to play a prisoner's dilemma game repeatedly until the match is ended, either exogenously or endogenously by one of the players, at which point each player may receive another random match. I first determine when it is feasible to achieve the best outcome in which all players cooperate. When it is not possible to achieve full cooperation, I examine how welfare can be improved over the outcome in which no players cooperate. When conditions are such that less-patient players choose not to cooperate, I first examine how separation by action within a single market can increase welfare for all players over the uncooperative equilibrium, with more-patient players choosing to cooperate in hopes of forming a cooperative relationship, despite the risk of being matched with a less-patient player who chooses not to cooperate. I then examine how full separation of the more- and less-patient players, made possible by introduction of a second market, can increase the welfare of the more-patient players without harming the less-patient players. In a third chapter, customers choose to purchase a good from one of several competing firms in a setting in which network congestion and firms' investment in capacity plays an important role in firm costs and product quality, e.g., the wireless industry. Wireless carriers (e.g., Verizon) compete not only on the price of their service but also on its quality. The quality of a carrier's service is determined in part by the quantity of customers it serves and by investment in capacity with which to serve them. While the primary effect of a carrier increasing its capacity is an increase in that carrier's service quality, there are also externality effects on other wireless carriers. For example, if carrier A increases its capacity, thereby increasing its service quality, and causes some customers to leave a competing carrier B, the service quality experienced by customers who remain with carrier B will increase as a result of the decreased congestion in carrier B's network. This chapter examines the interplay between these effects alongside traditional price competition in this oligopoly setting. / text

In this article, problems users are having searching for known works in current online public access catalogs (OPACs) are summarized. A better understanding of AACR2R/MARC 21 authority, bibliographic, and holdings records would allow us to implement the approaches outlined in the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records to enhance, or â FRBRize,â our current OPACs using existing records. The presence of work and expression identifiers in bibliographic and authority records is analyzed. Recommendations are made concerning better indexing and display of works and expressions/manifestations. Questions are raised about the appropriateness for the creation of true catalogs of clientserver technology that deliver records over the Internet.

The paper suggests extensions to SKOS Core to make explicit where concepts in a knowledge organization system have changed from one version of the system to another.

File systems have long been the most important and most widely used form of shared permanent storage. File systems in traditional time-sharing systems such as Unix support a coherent sharing model for multiple users. Distributed file systems implement this sharing model in local area networks. However, most distributed file systems fail to scale from local area networks to an internet. This thesis recognizes four characteristics of scalability: size, wide area, autonomy, and heterogeneity. Owing to size and wide area, techniques such as broadcasting, central control, and central resources, which are widely adopted by local area network file systems, are not adequate for an internet file system. An internet file system must also support the notion of autonomy because an internet is made up by a collection of independent organizations. Finally, heterogeneity is the nature of an internet file system, not only because of its size, but also because of the autonomy of the organizations in an internet. This thesis introduces the Jade File System, which provides a uniform way to name and access files in the internet environment. Jade is a logical system that integrates a heterogeneous collection of existing file systems, where heterogeneous means that the underlying file systems support different file access protocols. Because of autonomy, Jade is designed under the restriction that the underlying file systems may not be modified. In order to avoid the complexity of maintaining an internet-wide, global name space, Jade permits each user to define a private name space. In Jade's design, we pay careful attention to avoiding unnecessary network messages between clients and file servers in order to achieve acceptable performance. Jade's name space supports two novel features: It allows multiple file systems to be mounted under one directory, and it permits one logical name space to mount other logical name spaces. A prototype of Jade has been implemented to examine and validate its design. The prototype consists of interfaces to the Unix File System, the Sun Network File System, and the File Transfer Protocol.