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The impact of internal and external influences upon management practice adoption and strategic decision-making in growth oriented firms: an empirical investigation
No full textThis thesis provides an examination of how and why growth firms adopt and implement management practices and processes. It also analyses the extent to which management development can facilitate further expansion and provide growth oriented firms with sustainable competitive advantages. The continued interest given to the small business sector by policy makers and academics can be attributed to the belief that these ventures will increasingly become the cornerstones of economic prosperity and wealth creation. The study draws its participants from the Wales Fast Growth Fifty Network, an initiative set up to champion the cause of growth firms in Wales. This initiative highlights that despite past successes in securing inward investment, the economic future of Wales will increasingly be 4ependent upon indigenous growth oriented businesses. The research adopts a two stage qualitative methodology and results are based upon three group interviews involving 18 growth oriented firms and a further 31 semi-structured interviews with owner-managers of growing business ventures. The phenomenon of small firm growth has been approached from a wide range of theoretical perspectives. These approaches fail however, to explain how the abilities and motivations of the entrepreneur or owner-management team shape management development. Moreover, previous studies have yet to explore the internal mechanisms of the firms and in particular the extent to which firms can manoeuvre themselves in to favourable market positions by establishing competency and knowledge based barriers to competition. This study contends that the effective adoption of management practices and processes geared to long term market advantage is determined by the ability and experience of
owner-managers. The research also reports that management practices such as
marketing, planning, quality assurance and standardisation are all routinised and utilised by growth firms to engender sources of sustainable competitive advantage. Finally, a theoretical framework is posited, utilising the concepts of an entrepreneurial and management filter developed and refined in this thesis, to explain management development and how competitive advantages merge
Analysis of information remaining on hand held devices offered for sale on the second hand market
No full textThe ownership and use of mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants and other hand held devices is now ubiquitous both for home and business use. The majority of these devices have a high initial cost, a relatively short period before they become obsolescent and a relatively low second hand value. As a result of this, when the devices are replaced, there are indications that they tend to be discarded. As technology has continued to develop, it has led to an increasing diversity in the number and type of devices that are available, and the processing power and the storage capacity of the digital storage in the device. All organisations, whether in the public or private sector increasingly use hand held devices that contain digital media for the storage of information relating to their business, their employees or their customers. Similarly, individual private users increasingly use hand held devices containing digital media for the storage of information relating to their private lives. The research revealed that a significant number of organisations and private users are ignorant or misinformed about the volume and type of information that is stored on the hand held devices and the media on which it is stored. It is apparent that they have either not considered, or are unaware of, the potential impact of this information becoming available to their competitors or those with criminal intent. This main purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the volume and type of information that may remain on hand held devices that are offered for sale on the second hand market. A second aim of the research was to determine the level of damage that could, potentially be caused, if the information that remains on the devices fell into the wrong hands. The study examined a number of hand held devices that had been obtained from sources in the UK and Australia that ranged from internet auction sites, to private sales and commercial resellers. The study was carried out by the security research team at the BT IT Futures Centre in conjunction with Edith Cowan University in Australia and the University of Glamorgan in the UK. The basis of the research was to acquire a number of second hand hand held devices from a diverse range of sources and then determine whether they still contained information relating to a previous owner or whether the information had been effectively removed. The devices that were obtained for the research were supplied blind to the researchers through a third party. The ‘blind’ supply of the devices meant that the people undertaking the research were provided with no information about the device and that the source of the devices and any external markings were hidden from them. This process was put in place to ensure that any findings of the research were based solely on the information that could be recovered from the digital storage media that was contained within the device. The underlying methodology that was used in the research was based on the forensic imaging of the devices. A forensic image of a device is a copy of the digital media that has been created in a scientifically sound manner to a standard that is acceptable to the courts. This procedure was implemented to ensure that the evidential integrity of the devices was maintained, with the devices also then being stored in a secure manner. All subsequent research was then conducted on the image of the device. This was considered to be a sensible precaution against the possibility that information discovered on a device might indicate criminal activity and require the involvement of law enforcement. Following the forensic imaging of the devices, the images that were created were then analysed to determine whether any information remained and whether it could be easily recovered using commonly available tools and techniques that anyone who had purchased the device could acquire
Investigation of the M2/G2/1/∞,N queue with restricted admission of priority customers and its application to HSDPA mobile systems
No full textThis paper investigates a queuing system for QoS optimization of multimedia traffic consisting of aggregated streams with diverse QoS requirements transmitted to a mobile terminal over a common downlink shared channel. The queuing system, proposed for buffer management of aggregated single-user traffic in the base station of High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), allows for optimum loss/delay/jitter performance for end-user multimedia traffic with delay-tolerant non-real-time streams and partially loss tolerant real-time streams. In the queuing system, the real-time stream has non-preemptive priority in service but the number of the packets in the system is restricted by a constant. The non-real-time stream has no service priority but is allowed unlimited access to the system. Both types of packets arrive in the stationary Poisson flow. Service times follow general distribution depending on the packet type. Stability condition for the model is derived. Queue length distribution for both types of customers is calculated at arbitrary epochs and service completion epochs. Loss probability for priority packets is computed. Waiting time distribution in terms of Laplace–Stieltjes transform is obtained for both types of packets. Mean waiting time and jitter are computed. Numerical examples presented demonstrate the effectiveness of the queuing system for QoS optimization of buffered end-user multimedia traffic with aggregated real-time and non-real-time stream
Expressing properties of resource-bounded systems: the Logics RTL* and RTL
No full textComputation systems and logics for modelling such systems have been studied to a great extent in the past decades. This paper introduces resources into the models of systems and discusses the Resource-Bounded Tree Logics RTL and RTL*, based on the well-known Computation Tree Logics CTL and CTL*, for reasoning about computations of such systems. We present initial results on the complexity/decidability of model checking
Road accident analysis in Yemen: the identification of shortcomings in road accident data adjustment, cost and development of road fatality model
No full textThe true extent of the road accident problem in Yemen is questionable. Some. agencies and citizens believe
that the safety situation in Yemen is very critical while others disagree with this belief. Both sides however
agree that the road accident problem in Yemen is such that it requires considerable attenfion. Since Yemen
has no history in road safety research and since there are no reliable road accident data in the country,
making final judgements on the situation is difficult unless supported by adequate research.
The aim of the present researchi s to providea betteru nderstandingo f the road accidentp roblemi n the Yemen.
This can be made by investigation of the real dimensions of the road accident problem. This includes the
identification of the shortcomings in road accident data, the cost of road accidents and modelling road
accident fatalities
Starving strikers and the limits of the “humanitarian discovery of hunger” in late Victorian Britain
No full textBy the late nineteenth century, the hungry increasingly found themselves constructed as objects of compassion. However, there were real limits to the “humanitarian discovery of hunger”. Not every famished body was understood as deserving of sympathy. Compassionate citizens were particularly troubled by the mass distress that often accompanied lengthy strikes. How should they respond to such hunger? A study of newspaper representations of strike-induced hunger reveals that a gendered discourse evolved which repeatedly concentrated attention on the starving “innocents”: the wives and children of male strikers. The discourse was apparently apolitical but, in truth, it was nothing of the sort. It adjudged the “innocents” worthy recipients of food aid, whilst frequently ignoring the hunger of the striking male and denying him support. Labour leaders had to choose their words carefully if they were to get his suffering recognized
Multi-agency work on sexual violence: challenges and prospects identified from the implementation of a Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC)
No full textThe current policy climate in Britain requires that agencies work together to improve their performance and provide a better service to clients. This is especially apparent in recent initiatives designed to improve the services afforded to victims of crime. Whilst there is an established literature dealing with both the potential benefits of, and challenges posed by, multi-agency work (for example, Crawford 1997; Hughes 2007; Maguire 2004; Pearson et al. 1992; Taylor 2003), the unique issues arising from multi-agency partnerships dealing with sexual violence have received less attention, even though the interface of criminal justice and health is a relatively new and unusual phenomenon warranting scrutiny. For the current study, interviews with professionals working together to develop a Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) were conducted to address this gap. Positive aspects of multi-agency work identified by the respondents included: a shared concern over the poor quality of existing arrangements; a shared vision for a better response to victims; sharing a broader view of the victim; and having experience with, and commitment to, multi-agency work. Continuing challenges were noted as: sustained multi-agency participation; diverse agency cultures; competing agendas and priorities across agencies and systems; funding and staffing issues; and future responsibility for, and ownership of, the SARC. Implications of the research are discussed
Automated verification of multi-agent programs
No full textIn this paper, we show that the flexible model-checking of multi-agent systems, implemented using agent-oriented programming languages, is viable thus paving the way for the construction of verifiably correct applications of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Model checking experiments were carried out on AJPF (agent JPF), our extension of Java PathFinder that incorporates the agent infrastructure layer, our unifying framework for agent programming languages. In our approach, properties are specified in a temporal language extended with (shallow) agent-related modalities. The framework then allows the verification of programs written in a variety of agent programming languages, thus removing the need for individual languages to implement their own verification framework. It even allows the verification of multi-agent systems comprised of agents developed in a variety of different (agent) programming languages. As an example, we also provide model checking results for the verification of a multi-agent system implementing a well-known task sharing protocol
Quality of Service for Multimedia and Real-Time Services
No full textNew web technologies have encouraged the deployment of various network applications that are rich with multimedia and real-time services. These services demand stringent requirements are defined through Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as delay, jitter, loss, etc. To guarantee the delivery of these services QoS routing algorithms that deal with multiple metrics are needed. Unfortunately, QoS routing with multiple metrics is considered an NP-complete problem that cannot be solved by a simple algorithm. This paper proposes three source based QoS routing algorithms that find the optimal path from the service provider to the user that best satisfies the QoS requirements for a particular service. The three algorithms use the same filtering technique to prune all the paths that do not meet the requirements which solves the complexity of NP-complete problem. Next, each of the three algorithms integrates a different Multiple Criteria Decision Making method to select one of the paths that have resulted from the route filtering technique. The three decision making methods used are the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT), and Kepner-Tregoe KT. Results show that the algorithms find a path using multiple constraints with a high ability to handle multimedia and real-time applications