It is clear that the internet is being used more often for social interactions but the reasons why people adopt these newer technologies are still unclear. Over the last thirty years numerous adoption theories have been proposed however few account for the newer types of technology, such as social website usage. Purpose – The study will compare and contrast two different models of adoption to see if one model is better than the other in understanding the usage of social networking websites such as Facebook. At an organisational level the idea of extended usage of technology has been encapsulated in the construct of infusion of technology into a work place. The study will also show that infusion of technology may occur at an individual level of research. The argument is made that since national culture has been shown to affect usage, national culture may moderate the level of infusion that is found. Methodology – The study will use a quantitative methodology to survey potential (or actual) users of Facebook using a structured questionnaire. Since two adoption models are being tested, two questionnaires were developed and tested. The items for the questionnaires have been adapted from prior literature. Reliability and validity tests confirmed the scales from prior literature. The sample was selected from higher education institutions within the Johannesburg region .Specifically, students from the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg were invited to complete the questionnaires. The two questionnaires were mixed randomly between the students. Findings – It was found that the traditional technology acceptance model could better explain the usage of social networking websites when compared to the more modern WebQual framework. The study found that there is a strong positive relationship between usage and infusion. In line with the prior research on national culture moderating usage, the study found that national culture does moderate the relationship between usage and infusion. Implications – The study has a number of implications. Firstly, the research compared two models of technology usage. The study showed that the technology acceptance model was better at explaining the usage of social networking websites. Future research should focus on improving the TAM model and may result in better understanding the usage of social websites. Secondly, a set of scales are provided for future research which allow for the measurement of infusion at an individual level. These scales were tested for reliability and validity in two separate data collections and in both collections the scales met or exceeded the statistical requirements. Thirdly, the relationship between usage and infusion is seen to be moderated by national culture. This has 5 large implications for organisations and people who use Web2.0 as a medium for business. As an example, marketers could use the results in better understanding the usage of these types of websites, in the hope that it would allow for better targeting and placement of adverts. Lastly, the implications may extend beyond the context of the research. The study found a relationship between usage and infusion at an individual level of analysis. The relationship may exist in other areas of research which relate to Information systems including but not limited to Marketing (increasing the life cycle of products and increasing the value of customers through brand loyalty) and human resources (increasing employee efficiency through understanding peoples infusion of different types of technology). Research limitations – The research is limited to the sample that was achieved. The findings can be directly inferred to a similar sample base within South Africa, however cannot be generalised to samples of dissimilar natures. While the study used Facebook as a case, it should be cautioned that the results should not be generalised to other forms of social networking websites such as Twitter. Originality – The study is original in the following ways: Firstly, the study was conducted in South Africa where few other studies been found with a similar nature. Secondly, the study extended the thoughts on usage to the idea of infusion. Thirdly, two models were directly compared with independent data collections occurring. Fourthly, the relationship between usage and infusion is seen to be moderated by national culture. Both the relationship as well as the moderation effects has previously been empirically shown.

El proyecto empresarial se denomina VESYKA S.A.C., el cual pertenece al sector servicios de vestimenta para mujeres conformado por un equipo de cinco personas que asumirán la gerencia general, la jefatura de diseño, asistentes comercial, logístico y contable. Cada uno de los integrantes del proyecto posee las competencias y habilidades para desempeñarse en sus respectivas áreas. VESYKA S.A.C. es una tienda online donde se podrá alquilar vestidos de gala a través de una página web disponible para cualquier plataforma como celulares, computadoras, entre otras. Asimismo, el canal de contacto directo con el cliente empleado para este proyecto es la red social Facebook, dado que es la red social más usada del planeta en la actualidad, según NextU. El modelo de negocio está orientado a mujeres pertenecientes al rango de edad encontrado entre los 25 a 55 años, con un estilo de vida moderna y sofisticada y que deseen lucir un vestido exclusivo. A medida que los años transcurren, es creciente la necesidad, de las mujeres, de lucir bien y únicas para los eventos de gala que se les presenten, motivo por el cual encontrar el vestido ideal puede tardar días. Es por esta razón que nace VESYKA S.A.C., proyecto que ofrece a las clientas la oportunidad de tener un guardarropa alternativo a un precio justo. Además, VESYKA S.A.C. ofrece un ahorro de tiempo importante para las usuarias a través de la optimización del proceso mediante nuestro servicio de entrega personalizado. Este mismo consiste en la visita a domicilio de un modista hacia el punto de ubicación detallado por la clienta, para la medida de tallas y personalización del vestido según la preferencia de la mujer. Posteriormente, se realiza la entrega del vestido con las modificaciones realizadas y se procede con el recojo del mismo en la fecha pactada. El enfoque principal de VESYKA S.A.C es la satisfacción de la clienta, desde la valorización de su tiempo hasta hacerlas sentir únicas y especiales en ese evento tan importante para ellas a través de nuestros vestidos de alta calidad y diseños exclusivos. / The business project is called VESYKA S.A.C., which belongs to the women’s clothing services sector, made up of a team of five people who will assume general management, design management, commercial assistants, logistic and accounting. Each of the members of the project has the competencies and skills to perform in their respective areas. VESYKA S.A.C. is an online store where you can rent gala dresses through a website available for any platform such as cell phones, computers, among others. Likewise, the direct channel of contact with the client employed for this project is the social network Facebook, since it is the most used social network of the planet today, according to Nextu. The business model is oriented towards women of the age range found between 25 and 55 years old, with a modern and sophisticated lifestyle and wishing to wear an exclusive dress. As the years go by, there is a growing need for women to look good and unique for the gala events presented to them, which is why finding the ideal dress can take days. It is for this reason that VESYKA S.A.C., a project that offers clients the opportunity to have an alternative wardrobe at a fair price. In addition, VESYKA S.A.C. offers significant time savings for users through process optimization through our personalized delivery service. The same consists of a visit home of a seamstress to the location point detailed by the customer for measuring sizes and customization of the dress according to the woman’s preference. Subsequently, the garment is delivered with the modifications made and is collected on the agreed date. The main focus of VESYKA S.A.C is customer satisfaction, from valuing their time to making them feel unique and special in that event so important to them through our high-quality dresses and exclusive designs. / Trabajo de investigación

The purpose of this explorative field study using elements of case study design was to understand how DIY (Do It Yourself) fashion designers learn to engage in entrepreneurship. DIY fashion designers in this study refers to designers who personally design and make each garment without relying on manufacturers. These fashion designers all have design skills, but as they transition from designer to designer-entrepreneur with existing skills, they realize an additional set of skills is needed. To understand why they started the business and how they learned the skills necessary to maintain this dual role, the researcher interviewed 20 designer-entrepreneurs with different levels of experience: novice (3-5 years), middle-level (6-10 years), and seasoned (11 plus years). A selected literature review was conducted to shed light on the work of other researchers related to fashion entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, and adult learning. The researcher used a qualitative methodology to explore how the designer-entrepreneurs learned and what they learned to maintain their dual role. A purposeful sample was drawn from a group of designer-entrepreneurs with different educational backgrounds and professional experiences. Data were collected through individual interviews followed by two focus group discussions. Data were examined to understand why certain DIY fashion designers chose to become designer-entrepreneurs, what challenges they faced in the dual role, how and what they learned, and which learning strategies they used. All designer-entrepreneurs in this study indicated that the motivation for becoming a designer-entrepreneur was to address their inner needs, which required both intrinsic reward and extrinsic validation. An overwhelming majority of them stated that most of the challenges stemmed from the entrepreneurial half of their dual role because they lacked the information needed to sustain it. All designer-entrepreneurs in this study learned through experiential and self-directed learning. A majority of them indicated that their main learning strategies consisted of finding or forming social networks for their design and business needs and developing their own learning habits. Based on these findings, the researcher made recommendations for educators teaching fashion or entrepreneurship and for current designer-entrepreneurs.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This dissertation explored the degree and distribution of social capital forms-social networks, volunteer associations, generalized trust, particularized trust and norms of reciprocity in rural Ethiopia. It aims to contribute to the academic understanding of social capital formation in Africa. Whereas the extent of literature focused on uncovering difference in the distribution of social capital at macro, meso and micro levels, this dissertation instead unpacks how political and economic conditions in rural Ethiopia shape the extent of the different forms of social capital at different levels.

This research highlights the retention of organisational memory when employees resign, as an issue that organisations battle with. Attempts to counter the impact of organisational memory loss has led to the use of various tools and methods which do not completely eliminate the knowledge gap caused, when employees leave. The purpose of the research is to determine if the use of social networks can enable retention of organisational memory. The target population were defined as people employed or previously employed. A quantitative method was used for the research. Data was collected by completion of an online survey distributed as a link to the sample group. The research findings suggest if social networking is to be used for retention of organisational memory; the employees‟ ages are not a predictor of how they will use it. Keeping in contact with ex-employees and enabling a knowledge-sharing culture within organisations does not predict how ex-employees will engage in social networking, when attempting to exchange information to retain organisational memory. When employers do not enable access to social network sites at the work place, it is unlikely that employees will engage in work-related discussions in social network sites for the benefit of their employers. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

The rise and growth of online social networks have spurred tremendous changes in our understanding of human behavior. Social scientists and companies have devised new tools to analyze the vast amounts of data obtained from these networks. Such advances have had two major consequences. First, it has allowed firms to significantly improve their segmentation and targeting strategies. Second, it also modified how problems are conceptualized. For example, books, academic papers, or webpages are now being studied under methods developed for social network analysis. This dissertation contributes to both applications. Essays 1 and 2 describe efficient targeting strategies in situations where access to information or computing power is costly. Although existing “seeding” methods have been quite successful in social networks, they often do not account for firms' limited computing power or assume that firms are omniscient. Essay 3 focuses on the art industry by conceptualizing paintings as items connected to each other in a network through their visual similarities. Indeed, we still do not perfectly understand what makes art financially valuable and even major auction houses are at awe when paintings are sold at prices multiple times higher than what they expected. In particular, we aim to quantify how an art piece's visual features and historical importance may impact prices and assess how auction houses and their marketing efforts may modify how art is evaluated and valued. This dissertation has three essays. In the first essay, we analyze how the friendship paradox, which states that your friends have more friends than you, may be generalized to situations where relationships are asymmetric. Indeed, the result assumes symmetric relations: if two people are friends, then each is the other's friend. For social networks that satisfy this assumption (e.g., Facebook), the friendship paradox implies that firms can potentially achieve faster and more widespread diffusion of information by seeding it with the friends of a group of people than with people in the group itself. We generalize the result to allow one-sided (leader/follower) relations and examine the implications for seeding in social networks where messages can be sent only by a leader to his/her followers. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions under which the highest number of followers is obtained by seeding with (1) leaders, (2) followers, and (3) individuals chosen by ignoring the distinction between leaders and followers. We examine the seeding implications of the results for a subset of Twitter users. The second essay furthers our understanding of the friendship paradox and relates it to beta centrality and eigenvector centrality. We generalize the results to asymmetric relations, define two beta centrality measures and relate them to the singular vectors of the associated directed graph. Our first generalization shows that the expected number of k removed friends is no smaller than the expected number of k-1 removed friends when k is an even number. Such a relation does not necessarily exist when k is an odd number. As k increases to infinity, the limiting value of the expected number of k removed friends converges to the largest eigenvalue of the associated undirected graph. We interpret beta centrality to be a weighted sum of an infinite series of the numbers of k removed friends. It approaches eigenvector centrality when the weighting parameter becomes arbitrarily close to the inverse of the limiting value of the expected number of k removed friends. We further generalize these results to asymmetric relations (say, between followers and leaders) that can be represented by directed graphs. We show that the last person in a randomly selected alternating sequence of 2k+1 leaders and followers (followers and leaders) has no fewer followers (leaders) than the last person in a randomly selected alternating sequence of 2k followers and leaders (leaders and followers). As k increases to infinity, the expected number of leaders of the last person in a randomly selected sequence of 2k alternating leaders and followers converges to a value proportional to the largest singular value of the associated directed graph. Similarly, the expected number of followers of the last person in a randomly selected sequence of 2k alternating followers and leaders converges to a (different) value proportional to the largest singular value of the associated directed graph. We show that there is a reciprocal relation between the limiting expected values of leaders and followers. We generalize beta centrality to asymmetric relations and relate the limiting values of beta centrality scores for followers and leaders to the singular vectors of the associated directed graph. The third essay focuses on the art market. Auction houses hold auctions regularly throughout the year. However, once or twice a year, art investors and wealthy consumers attend highly selective marquee events: day and evening sales. Those carefully designed and highly marketed events often generate a lot of excitement for connoisseurs as most paintings get sold for tremendous amounts of money. But what makes those paintings special? We investigate how art is evaluated across those three types of auctions. Specifically, we build a deep learning model to summarize the paintings into a low dimensional representation space where each factor encodes a specific feature of the paintings’ aesthetics and further utilize those components to create “network” variables that will determine how influential and creative a painting is. We use those predictors in hedonic regression models to study how art returns differs across the three types of sales and subsequently analyze whether the paintings are evaluated differently. In particular, we find that paintings sold in evening sales generated an annualized return of 14.33% in the period 1999-2018 - more than three times the returns of paintings sold in regular or day auctions. Finally, we adopt a propensity score matching approach to create a homogeneous population of paintings - based on their likelihood to be auctioned in an evening sale - to assess the causal impact of being featured in an evening sale and find that such highlight increases a painting's price by almost $6 million.

No description available.

La finalidad de este trabajo de investigación es descubrir la relación del Social Commerce con la Intención de Compra de smartphones, tanto de gama media alta y alta, aplicado en jóvenes Millennials. Esta investigación brindará una visión detallada de los componentes o constructos del Social Commerce en el ámbito de la categoría de smartphones y así descubrir el impacto que realmente poseen las redes sociales entre los usuarios consumidores. A su vez, esta investigación ofrece la contextualización de la dinámica digital en redes sociales durante las etapas de Intención de Compra, lo cual es muy rico para que a partir de esto las marcas de smartphones tomen decisiones importantes y certeras al momento de establecer campañas con un ecosistema digital potente. Esto permitirá no solo inducir a la compra sino también identificar los mejores momentos o situaciones para crear lazos y prosumidores positivos para la marca. / The purpose of this research work is to discover the relationship of Social Commerce with the Purchase Intent of smartphones, both upper-middle and high-end, applied to young Millennials. This research will provide a detailed view of the components or constructs of Social Commerce in the field of the smartphone category and thus discover the impact that social networks really have among consumer users. At the same time, this research offers the contextualization of the digital dynamics in social networks during the stages of Purchase Intent, which is very rich so that from this the smartphone brands make important and accurate decisions when establishing campaigns with a powerful digital ecosystem. This will allow not only to induce the purchase but also to identify the best moments or situations to create positive ties and prosumers for the brand. / Trabajo de investigación

Magister Artium - MA / Death is an everyday occurrence for many urban Africans living in South Africa, and it is expressed through the everyday management of financial and social networks. The purpose of this study is to investigate what happens to African migrants, particularly the Ngemba people of Cameroon living in Cape Town when they die “away from home”. In this study, I will be exploring the steps followed, the rites that are performed, perceptions regarding death and funerals, as well as the social implications that death has for the group members concerned, and the various challenges faced when someone dies ‘away from home’. In other to achieve all this, I used a qualitative research design in which in-depth interviews and participant observation were administered to sixteen (16) participants.

El presente proyecto de investigación tiene como finalidad la implementación de un negocio enfocado en la venta de snacks saludables por medio del canal online, basado en la recopilación de información de un público que procura adoptar un estilo de vida saludable. Esta investigación se realizó en Lima Metropolitana a los NSE “A” y “B”, enfocándonos principalmente en quienes buscan practicidad y mantienen un perfil digital. Esta propuesta de negocio es atractiva ya que encontramos a un consumidor interesado en desarrollar hábitos de consumo más saludables; aprovechando que en el mercado existen escazas opciones que atiendan sus necesidades, creamos Piquéalo. Emprendimiento dedicado al delivery de snacks saludables hechos a base de ingredientes naturales y de alta calidad, con una presentación atractiva y medio ambientalmente responsable. Para desarrollar este proyecto se realizó un análisis profundo que abarcó lo siguiente: Validación del Modelo de Negocio, Análisis Interno y Externo, Desarrollo del Plan de Negocio, Plan de Operaciones, Plan de Marketing, Plan de Recursos Humanos, Plan de Responsabilidad Social Empresarial y Plan Financiero. Todo ello con la finalidad de validar la viabilidad del proyecto y poder llevarlo a la realidad. / The purpose of this research project is to implement a business focused on the sale of healthy snacks through the online channel, based on the compilation of information from an audience that seeks to adopt a healthy lifestyle. This research was carried out in Metropolitan Lima for socioeconomic level "A" and "B", focusing mainly on those who seek practicality and maintain a digital profile. This business proposal is attractive since we find a consumer interested in developing healthier consumption habits; Taking advantage of the fact that there are few options in the market that meet those needs, we created Piquéalo. An Entrepreneurship dedicated to the delivery of healthy snacks made from natural and high-quality ingredients, with an attractive and environmentally responsible presentation. In order to achieve this project, an extensive analysis was carried out that included the following: Validation of the Business Model, Internal and External Analysis, Development of the Business Plan, Operation Plan, Marketing Plan, Human Resources Plan, Corporate Social Responsibility Plan and Financial plan. All this in order to validate the viability of the project and take it to completion. / Trabajo de investigación