The field of strategic human resource management attempts to investigate the role and contribution that human resources may provide to organizations. Although various theoretical perspectives have been applied to the field of strategic human resource management, some scholars still label this field as atheoretical. I apply discretion theory to this atheoretical discussion with the expectation that discretion theory will allow a better examination of what may be occurring in the “black box” between human resource practices (i.e. high performance work practices) and organizational outcomes. Specifically, my intent was to determine under what conditions human resource managers might influence the high performance work practices/organizational outcomes relationship. I surveyed dyads consisting of one senior human resource manager and one other human resource employee within various organizations to assess 1) the nature of the human resource practices that each organization employs, 2) the intensity of the senior human resource manager’s individual discretion, and 3) the intensity of the organization’s contextual discretion. Moderated regression analysis was utilized to test each hypothesis. Upon testing each hypothesis, partial support was found for the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1a: The use of high performance work practices will be negatively related to absenteeism, Hypothesis 1b: The use of high performance work practices will be negatively related to turnover, Hypothesis 2a: The use of high performance work practices will be positively related to ROA, Hypothesis 3b: Individual discretion will moderate the relationship between HPWPs and turnover: specifically, HPWPs will be more strongly related to turnover (i.e. less turnover) when individual discretion is high than when individual discretion is low, and Hypothesis 4a: Individual discretion will moderate the relationship between HPWPs and ROA; specifically, HPWPs will be more strongly related to ROA (i.e. higher levels of ROA) when individual discretion is high than when individual discretion is low. No support was found for Hypotheses 2b, 3a, and 4b. With respect to each of the three-way interaction hypotheses, slope difference tests revealed that none of the slopes for were significantly different from one another, hence no support was provided for Hypotheses 5a-5c, 6a-6c, 7a-7c, and 8a-8c.

This thesis explores how people exert their agency in policy processes that pertain to natural resource governance, and how they construct the required sense of legitimacy for such actions. It also examines the manner in which facilitated multi-stakeholder processes foster legitimate stakeholder agency, and reflects on how they may ensure the rigour of research interventions in situations characterised by intractable uncertainty and controversy. / Contents:Chapter I. Introduction. Chapter 2-7: 6 papers. Chapter 8: Discussion and synthesis

Två begrepp som ofta diskuteras inom organisationsteori är Medarbetarskap och Human resource management. Personalen ses ofta som ett företags främsta resurs. Denna uppsats bygger på en kvantitativ undersökning bland personalen inom en Telekomkedja. Vårt syfte är att bringa klarhet i frågan om i vilken utsträckning det ”myndiga medarbetarskapet” existerar, hur olika strategiska åtgärder påverkar försäljningen, vad som påverkar medarbetarnas motivation samt hur deras lojalitet gentemot arbetsgivaren ser ut. Undersökningen visar att personalen i Telekomkedjan trivs bra på sin arbetsplats. Det ”myndiga medarbetarskapet” existerar till stor del och personalen anser sig ha goda möjligheter att påverka. Vi har även lyckats hitta ett antal strategiska åtgärder som påverkar försäljningen positivt. Motivationsfaktorerna är främst beroende av sociala relationer och det har visat sig att relationer medarbetarna emellan är minst lika viktiga som relationen mellan medarbetaren och närmsta chefen. Medarbetarna uppger även att de har en stark lojalitet mot företaget ifråga både till den närmsta butiken där de arbetar, gentemot butikskedjan som helhet samt koncernen de tillhör.

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Abstract This study is to discuss the topic of human resource management on the Volunteer Recruiting and Employ Project of the 2009 World Games Kaohsiung. By documentary analysis and synthesis it is about to find out the internal and external factors which influenced the operation procedure in the KOC organization, and to know the status of volunteer recruiting and volunteer management. The conclusions of this study are presented as follows: 1. At present most of the recruited volunteers are students with high academic degree, and there is only 60% of them with the English ability to communicate to people from different countries. 2. Among the national nonprofit sports organizations, Chinese Taipei University Sports Federation and Chinese Taipei School Sports Federation are suitable to be invited to participate in KOC. Among the national sports associations, it is worthy to invite the members of those associations to be the expert volunteer of KOC. Universities and the student¡¦s clubs are the main objects to be encouraged to join the volunteer group and general volunteer. 3. KOC should encourage people from different areas not only in Taiwan but also from overseas to take a part in the World Games. Inside of the KOC organization, it is needed to take more coordination and communication. And it is necessary to make the precise division of labor between KOC and Kaohsiung City Government. The recruiting of World Games Volunteer Group needs to be paid more attention to. 4. The discrepancy of statistics on the volunteer manpower demand is great different between the World Games Volunteer Recruiting and Employ Project(2004) and the statistics from each bureau of the Kaohsiung City Government in 2007. 5. KOC has the well-planned training and service programme for the volunteers. But the reemploy project following the ending of the World Games is needed to be raised as early as possible.

<p>Development of the World Wide Web makes it possible for multiple computers to work together in order to solve problems and make the most efficient use of resources. A distributed system is composed of such computers which are separately located and connected with each other through a network. One paradigm for computation using distributed systems is the multi-agent systems, in which many autonomous agents interact with each other to solve problems. The agents in a multi-agent system may be distributed on different computers (or nodes), where each computer owns its resources. Although the resources in a multi-agent system are connected by a network through which mobile agents can migrate for accessing sufficient resources, how to share these independently owned resources in both an effective and an efficient way is not fully understood. A key challenge in multi-agent systems is how to account for and control the resources which are located on individual nodes.</p> <p>The CyberOrgs model offers one approach to manage resources among competitive or collaborative agents by organizing computations and resources in a hierarchy. A cyberorg encapsulates agents and resources in a boundary and distributes the resources available to it within this boundary. A cyberorg contained in another cyberorg has a contract with the outer cyberorg, according to which it receives resources that it may use. A cyberorg also encapsulates an amount of the eCash, which is the currency for purchasing resources from its host cyberorg. Therefore, cyberorgs have a hierarchical structure in which resources are delivered to computations by a process where resources flow down from the root to the leaves of the hierarchy and the eCash flows up from the leaves toward the root. However, the hierarchical structure of the CyberOrgs model presents challenges in scalability. As a result, efficiency is an important concern in the implementation of CyberOrgs.</p> <p>In this thesis, an efficient implementation of the CyberOrgs model is described. System design, APIs of the implementation, example applications, experimental results, and future directions are presented.</p>

Cloud computing has recently gained popularity as a cost-effective model for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. In a cloud computing environment, a cloud provider packages its physical resources in data centers into virtual resources and offers them to service providers using a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Meanwhile, a service provider uses the rented virtual resources to host its services. This large-scale multi-tenant architecture of cloud computing systems raises key challenges regarding how data centers resources should be controlled and managed by both service and cloud providers. This thesis addresses several key challenges pertaining to resource management in cloud environments. From the perspective of service providers, we address the problem of selecting appropriate data centers for service hosting with consideration of resource price, service quality as well as dynamic reconfiguration costs. From the perspective of cloud providers, as it has been reported that workload in real data centers can be typically divided into server-based applications and MapReduce applications with different performance and scheduling criteria, we provide separate resource management solutions for each type of workloads. For server-based applications, we provide a dynamic capacity provisioning scheme that dynamically adjusts the number of active servers to achieve the best trade-off between energy savings and scheduling delay, while considering heterogeneous resource characteristics of both workload and physical machines. For MapReduce applications, we first analyzed task run-time resource consumption of a large variety of MapReduce jobs and discovered it can vary significantly over-time, depending on the phase the task is currently executing. We then present a novel scheduling algorithm that controls task execution at the level of phases with the aim of improving both job running time and resource utilization. Through detailed simulations and experiments using real cloud clusters, we have found our proposed solutions achieve substantial gain compared to current state-of-art resource management solutions, and therefore have strong implications in the design of real cloud resource management systems in practice.

Nutrient mitigation capacity of low-grade weirs in agricultural drainage ditches

Effect of implementing best management practices on water and habitat quality in the Upper Strawberry River Watershed, Fulton County, Arkansas, USA

The earth has a finite supply of fresh water operating within a specific natural cycle. Due to population increases, massive industrialization of developing nations, and a culture of water consumption based on endlessness, the world is facing a massive crisis of freshwater shortage. Past and present solutions to local crisis have focused on supply management, when the real solution is demand management. Demand is founded on societal habits, cultural practices, and an individually based perception of water's value. The built environment mirrors this perception, where architecture as a cultural construct becomes an access terminal for various resource infrastructures. This thesis proposes an architecture that renders visible the cyclic specificity and finitude of water by proposing a new typology of public building that experientially transforms the inherited habits of citizens towards a balanced perception of water.