In the last few years accountancy firms have started to use outsourcing due to market pressure to be competitive. The industry is highly regulated, and outsourcing poses constraints including confidentiality of information, regulatory restriction and ethical implications. The legal and ethical responsibility of any work outsourced remains with the accounting firm that has purchased the outsourcing service, and not with the outsourcer. Since the aim of outsourcing is to make the accounting firm more efficient, it needs to be sure that the benefits of outsourcing will exceeds the costs and risks of the process. As a knowledge-based industry, this gives the sharing of knowledge a central role in outsourcing. Outsourcing in accounting creates a relationship not only between two organisations, but more importantly among those organisations' workers. The main asset of an accounting firm is its staff and their specialist knowledge. Most outsourcing studies focus on the relationship between organisations, with little emphasis on the relationship between workers. A particular quality of accounting is that workers are the owners of their own knowledge, and firms employ these workers without having a definitive right to the sharing of their knowledge. An efficient working environment stems from the workers' ability to share their knowledge (their assets) within the organisation and in an outsourcing process. The objective of this research is to understand the blocks to knowledge-sharing in a medium-sized accounting firm from an individual unit of analysis with focus on its outsourcing operations. This study examines the following research questions: What is the influence of trust and power on knowledge-sharing from the individual perspective? How does accounting outsourcing create a shift in the unit of analysis, and how does it differ from other types of outsourcing? From the perspective of the individuals involved, what are the blocks to knowledge-sharing within the firm and within its outsourcing operations? To be able to study worker relationships and behaviour in detail, data for analysis was gathered using the participant observation method. The study finds that trust and power are important elements that can influence the sharing of knowledge among individuals. The main types of trust that influence knowledge-sharing, particularly in head office, are found to be benevolence and competence trust, while one of the main factors to influence trust within the outsourcing context is communication. Lack of communication creates fear among in-house staff and thus makes outsourcing contractors less trustworthy. Power is mainly driven by specificity of knowledge and individualism; these two factors promote the use of knowledge as a power tool. Trust and power are blocks to knowledge-sharing in the organisation's in-house activities, but are less influential in blocking knowledge in outsourcing, where the two main blockages are: (i) Physical distance and lack of suitable technological platform to share knowledge, and (ii) Gap in knowledge awareness between the accounting firm and the outsourcing provider. Accounting outsourcing is shown to be different from other types because it is the outsourcing of a core competence (known as third generation outsourcing), and also of knowledge-based work. The accounting firm uses outsourcing within its legal and ethical limits, reducing costs indirectly, because it has to negotiate the profession's constraints. In this context there are two types of outsourcing, namely internal and external outsourcing. This research applies participant observation to an original context and shows the importance of using such a method in future management studies.

Background: In 1994, the Swedish parliament decided to realize an infrastructural project with PPP. The chosen project, Arlandabaneprojektet, is a four-track railway between Stockholm central station and Arlanda airport. The Swedish government established a PPPcontract with a private consortium which implied that the Swedish government was obligated to finance about one third of the total project cost. The contract also implied that the private consortium got all rights reserved for the operational service. This PPP-project has changed the prerequisites for the Swedish government to meet the transport political objectives. Aim: The aim of this study is to examine how the Swedish government fulfil the transport political objectives in a PPP-project. The purpose of this study is also to examine how the structure of the project contract affect the governmental performance management. Completion: This is a qualitative study. The interview study is based on six interviews. Three interviewees are representing the government’s responsible delegates. The other three interviews were conducted with experts and researchers with extensive knowledge in the project. The interview material is complemented with a document study of reports and investigations. We have also completed a theoretical study of governmental performance management in infrastructural PPP-projects. Furthermore, we have analyzed the empirical study based on the theoretical framework. Conclusions: The government’s possibilities to pursue performance management in line with transport political objectives has been and still is limited. The government has been tied up to a long term contract driven by commercial goals. The main factor behind this is that the government got into the project without having any specific and measureable objectives.

M.Com. (Business Management) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

The empirical evidence and the academic literature point to the opposed directions on the capability of the territorial arrangements to extenuate conflict in ethnically divided and civil war-worn countries. Little is known about the diverse capacities of the territorial power sharing arrangements in diminishing violence in the post-conflict societies. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to the field through studying the conditions under which territorial power sharing arrangements reduce violence in the post-conflict settings. I argue that a resumption of violence is less likely following territorial power sharing arrangements in cases where a relatively  high level of economic decentralization is provided for a subnational entity, as it allows the rebel groups to sustain their support base among key constituencies. To test the theoretical argument, a structured, focused comparison of territorial power sharing arrangements in Aceh province of Indonesia and Mindanao province of the Philippines is conducted. The empirical findings give support to the hypothesis in the expected direction. Aceh, where the resumption of violence did not occur, also was enjoying a relatively higher level of economic decentralization. While in ARMM, where the violence resumed after five years following the peace agreement, economic decentralization was relatively low. Nevertheless, the extended analysis reveals additional factors. Transformation of the rebel organization into the political parties and inclusive peace agreements potentially may have impact on the territorial power sharing arrangements’ capability to contain violence in the post conflict environments.

The current research aimed to examine children’s understanding of cardinality by looking at their ability to use several quantitative concepts that underpin this understanding: correspondence, counting and equivalence in the context of sharing. Understanding cardinality requires children to develop knowledge about the relations between these quantitative concepts which is important for the development of mathematical reasoning. The first study aimed to investigate how flexibly children can use correspondence to build equivalent sets in different types of sharing scenarios: equal sharing, reciprocity and equity. In some situations two characters each received one object at a time, and in others one character received double units while the other character received single units. After children shared blocks between the two characters, they were asked to make a number inference about the cardinal of one set after counting a second, equivalent set. Children had more difficulty sharing in the reciprocity and equity conditions than the equal sharing condition. The majority of children were able to make number inferences in the equal sharing and reciprocity conditions where both characters received equivalent shares in the end. A second study with new groups of four and five- year-olds investigated whether children were using visual cues about the relation between double and single blocks to help build equivalent sets and make number inferences. It was predicted that the use of coins would be difficult and would increase the difference between the equal sharing and reciprocity conditions. In half of the trials children shared Canadian $2 and $1 coins and in half they shared blocks. There are no visual cues about the relation between $2 and $1 coins because they are the same size. Children were allowed to use counting or correspondence to build equivalent sets to compare their use of both strategies. Contrary to the first study, the reciprocity and equal sharing conditions were not significantly different. This may be due to the appearance of a new sharing strategy in the reciprocity condition termed “equalizing” where children first counted each set, dealt singles to make the two sets equal and then shared blocks or coins on a one-to-one basis. There was also no significant difference between the trials using coins and trials using blocks. The majority of children were able to answer the number inference questions correctly, however 25% of children made the number inference after sharing all singles but not after sharing doubles and singles, suggesting that using different units did impact their understanding of the equivalence of the two sets. A third study aimed to investigate children’s ability to coordinate cardinal and ordinal information to determine the cardinal of a single set, and their ability to coordinate counting principles with knowledge of equivalence to determine the cardinal of an equivalent set. Children in this study were asked to make a numerical inference about a set of blocks after watching a puppet correctly or incorrectly count an equivalent set of blocks. Many children were able to identify that the puppet did not count correctly, but struggled to correct the mistake. This indicates a gap in their knowledge about ordinality and cardinality in the context of a single set. The miscount also impacted their ability to make a correct number inference. Children performed significantly better on trials where the puppet counted correctly than trials where he made a counting error. This suggests that while children have good knowledge of counting principles in isolation, they are still developing an understanding of how to coordinate these principles with ordinal information and knowledge of equivalence to establish the cardinal of one set and to infer the cardinal of an equivalent set.

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The current generation of Palm PDA devices is designed to share information records primarily with a base desktop system, or a server. Therefore, their built- in features for sharing data during ad-hoc collaboration among groups of mobile users are inadequate. In this thesis, we describe a new framework that addresses this problem by allowing users to transparently share the record databases of common applications during spontaneous collaborative sessions. The framework also allows users to define custom sharing policies for each application/user pair. These policies determine the manner in which records are exchanged and update, thereby automating the process of handling conflicts and preserving user privacy preferences. We also present implementation results, in which we have used the framework to create shared versions of common applications, such as Calendar and Memo. Our experimental results show that the programming effort involved is minimal and the user interaction with the application is, essentially, the same as in the original application.

Knowledge sharing is of great importance for many of the companies today (Spender and Grant, 1996) and been a hot topic amongst researchers in the field of business and organization science (Alvesson and Karreman, 2001). Previous researches have been focusing on; the construction of good knowledge management systems, the general challenges of knowledge sharing including from a psychology perspective, increasing motivation to share knowledge etc. (Hahn and Subramani, 2000; Hung et. al, 2011). However, less research has been done on knowledge sharing between the organization and an acquired company specialized in a different area of knowledge (Gammelgaard et. al., 2004).  Hence, the objective of this thesis is to study the arising knowledge sharing challenges during an acquisition and whether reward system can be utilized to motivate the employees to overcome these challenges by encouraging them to engage in knowledge sharing activities.   In order to conduct this study, a case of a mid-sized consultant company with approximately 600 employees acquiring another smaller consultant company in a different field of knowledge with approximately 200 employees was used. Interviews were conducted with chosen people from both companies, amongst them were both CEOs and consultants. From the findings made from the interviews, the following conclusions were drawn. The identified challenges, which arose during the acquisition, were not dividing the company, communication, motivation and the use of terminology. In addition, although reward systems would increase employees’ motivation to engage in knowledge sharing activities, in the short-term, it should be avoided since it does not influence the long-term motivation. Intrinsic motivation was found to have the best long-term effect when coupled with the culture of the organization.

My dissertation is based on the premise that possessions are an extension of the self. Beyond simple functional benefits that possessions provide us, I question whether possessions affect our self-perception and behavior. Specifically, I focus on two aspects of possessions: Ownership (Essay 1) and Sharing (Essay 2). In Essay 1, I find that feeling a sense of product ownership has downstream consequences in one’s representation of who s/he is. Here I reveal that salient feelings of product ownership activate a product-related self in one’s mind, but more importantly deactivate product-unrelated self. By identifying simultaneous identity activation and deactivation, I show that an individual can only hold a limited number of salient selves, and activating one’s self aspect requires a trade-off. This finding updates the prior assumption in the literature that an individual can hold an unlimited number of selves, and further suggests that there is still a finite limit to what can be salient at a given time. My interest in ownership extends to Essay 2, where I examine another behavioral aspect of consumers: sharing. Sharing behavior has received much attention lately due to the rise of sharing economy platforms, which provide new opportunities for consumers to share personal belongings with others. In Essay 2, I mine people’s latent motivation behind sharing by using a transaction dataset from one of the largest sharing economy platforms, Airbnb. Here I find that people are driven by not only monetary, but also non-monetary reasons, such as desires to meet others and share the beauty of their homes. Then I explore how each motivation affects people’s engagement on the sharing economy platform and their continued effort to share. This second essay highlights individuals’ new role as micro-entrepreneurs in this new era of the 21st century.

This thesis deals with a subject of collaboration economy and it aims at two of its representatives in particular, Airbnb and Uber. My focus targets at current status in terms of established or missing regulation and mapping of up to date trends for regulation to be developed or to be improved in contrast to what has already set. Simultaneously, there is described its functional system and familiarization with them for a potential user. At least but not last, one of the goals is to clarify why new representatives as Uber or Airbnb might be spotted controversial. It is observed that current legal status of collaborative economy does not reflect its ability to share a global market and its potential regulation from government point of view has become likely. However, politician opinions on how this regulation should look like vary. Nevertheless what may be found identical in those opinions is that there is no will collaborative economy to be repressed however, rules and limits should be clearly stated. Expansion of digital technologies and its relation to collaborative economy growth was hardly predictable. For traditional services, for instance, taxi drivers, rules and limits are very restrictive regardless modern social and technological situation does not require such a strict limits since modern...