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Projects are important to industry, but project performance continually disappoints stakeholder expectations. Organizations react to this performance problem in many ways, and purchase consultancy, training, methods and tools as possible solutions. There is no published evidence that any of these solutions are consistently successful in improving project performance. This thesis answers the question, "What can be done to improve project management practices, and thus project performance?" by demonstrating that a novel form of continuous action research can contribute such evidence. Firstl...

Funding private projects in emerging markets - in a safely manner - requires a thorough evaluation and analysis of several aspects that are constituent to the project itself, to the specific country where it is located, and to the project owners. The author has studied the functioning of Financial Markets in developing countries for several years, compared them to International Financial Markets, and has come to the conclusion that the contributions made in the past do not cover all the information required in order to judge and secure the viability of projects in these countries. T By devel...

This study analyses the legal condition of women in Catalonia, Spain, in the early modern ages, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by way of the study of primary legal sources. The legal discourse was conceived as being different for men and women: women were treated as a specific social category, were judicially discriminated against and were given inferior legal personality. Following the moral discourse of the time, jurists classified women as honest and dishonest, and tried to establish a physical and legal barrier to divide the good from the bad. As a result, wo...

The goal of the work reported in this dissertation is to develop methods for the acquisition and reproduction of high quality digital color images. To reach this goal it is necessary to understand and control the way in which the different devices involved in the entire color imaging chain treat colors. Therefore we addressed the problem of colorimetric characterization of scanners and printers, providing efficient and colorimetrically accurate means of conversion between a device-independent color space such as the CIELAB space, and the device-dependent color spaces of a scanner and a printer...

Remuneration may be viewed as more than merely a cost in doing business. It may be used as a motivational tool to help achieve a multitude of strategic goals. Within the global context, effective use of this tool requires addressing not only motivational factors but also cultural factors. In this thesis, factors are considered within a multinational corporate framework and within a Cultural Remuneration Model. The model defines corporate culture, professional culture, national culture and individual characteristics as factors influencing employee values associated with remuneration prefer...

On July 1st 1993, the EU implemented the Common Organization for the Market of Bananas (COMB) to replace the different national banana policies that previously existed in its member countries. As it turned out, the adopted regime became one of the most bitterly internally disputed outcomes of the completion of the EU single common market, and is an on-going source of dispute at the WTO level between the EU on the one side, and the US and Latin American countries on the other side. The most controversial aspects of the COMB relate to the management of banana trade with non-EU countries, and in ...

The theory of the commodity is used by critical theorists to explain the general organization and development of capitalist society. It was originally proposed by Marx, and subsequently developed by Lukacs and later Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Media scholars such as Dallas Smythe, Judith Williamson, Robert Goldman and Eileen Meehan have identified the commodity structure in several forms throughout the process of mass communication. Although commodity theory is not always articulated as a part of critical studies, it is useful for understanding the process of mass communication under capi...

This thesis analyses the origins and the implications of the services sector's development, including a case study on Switzerland. In the first part, we study the definitions and classifications of service activities, as well as the post- and neo-industrial theses on the origins of the strong expansion of services in developed countries over the last decades. The second part analyses the implications for economic growth, employment and productivity growth of the services sector's development. Starting from a discussion of Baumol's unbalanced growth model, we discuss the variety of productivity...

This study had two primary purposes. First, this study assessed the psychometric properties of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) questionnaires used to record juvenile firesetting events (Fineman, 1997a, 1997b,1997c). Second, this study initiated preliminary analyses that (1) contributed to the identification of a typology of firesetters, (2) account for variance in the severity of fires set by juveniles, and (3) predicted the likelihood of recidivistic behaviors in juvenile firesetters. Predictors were restricted to a limited set of exploratory variables; including age, sex, deli...

This study focused on factors that have positively influenced the model of economic success for commercial and thrift megabanks involved in merger and acquisition activities for the period 1990 - 1997, a period characterized by an unprecedented flurry of merger and acquisition activities among megabanks in the United States. This study identified and measured key independent variables for identifiable mergers and acquisitions among megabanks and tested the extent to which, such independent variables influenced abnormal returns for underlying equities traded in capital markets. This study also ...