Management

There is a growing interest and attention for organizations to move from a shareholder capitalist to stakeholder capitalist business model, in which delivering environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance is becoming more pronounced. Because of this transition, there is growing pressure for managers at all levels to act in sustainable, socially responsible, and ethical (SRE) ways; yet the current management models are based on maximizing economic value and scientific management. Therefore, the attempts to try and manage 21st century organizations with 20th century management practices and the aspirations of responsible management education have not demonstrated the desired effect (Laasch & Gherardi, 2019), as seen by continued business failures. It is not yet understood whether it is possible for the everyday manager to effectively navigate the tensions and contradictions of trying to deliver economic value to shareholders, social and ecological value to other stakeholders, while simultaneously attending to regulatory policies and, in the process, avoiding burnout for overtasked managers. Conducted in a debt remediation call center in the Dominican Republic, this study used an eclectic design integrating abductive analysis with a cultural-historical activity theory methodology to explore responsible management practices at the lowest levels of management. The findings describe responsible managers as pressure moderators enacting four primary elements: 1) embracing a pluralistic logic of responsibility, 2) accepting tensions with resilience, 3) engaging practices dynamically to moderate pressures, and 4) learning primarily on the job amid real work. In this organization, moderating the pressures of emotional labor was the primary object of their attention.

In essay 1, I investigate the association of place attachment and financial reporting quality. Management characteristics affect a wide range of corporate decisions, including decisions affecting financial reporting quality; however, the influence of managerial place attachment on corporate decision-making has received relatively little attention - even though place attachment is thought to play a significant role in forming individual identity. Place attachment affects the decisions that individuals make with regards to social and environmental policies, lifestyle, and, in the corporate context, firmlevel policies. Because firms hire local CEOs and CFOs five to eight times more often than expected if geography were irrelevant to the matching process, the question of how managerial place attachment affects financial reporting outcomes is an important one. I investigate the effect of managerial place attachment on financial reporting quality in a sample of publicly traded U.S. firms. My findings indicate that firms with place attached CEOs display higher financial reporting quality, indicating a significant caretaking bond between CEO and stakeholders. CFOs, on the other hand, are marginally associated with lower financial reporting quality, indicating that they are more likely than CEOs to extract personal gain when they are local to their firm headquarters.

In last few years there has been significant growth in the area of wireless communication. Quality of Service (QoS) has become an important consideration for supporting variety of applications that utilize the network resources. These applications include voice over IP, multimedia services, like, video streaming, video conferencing etc. IEEE 802.16/WiMAX is a new network which is designed with quality of service in mind. This thesis focuses on analysis of quality of service as implemented by the WiMAX networks. First, it presents the details of the quality of service architecture in WiMAX network. In the analysis, a WiMAX module developed based on popular network simulator ns-2, is used. Various real life scenarios like voice call, video streaming are setup in the simulation environment. Parameters that indicate quality of service, such as, throughput, packet loss, average jitter and average delay, are analyzed for different types of service flows as defined in WiMAX. Results indicate that better quality of service is achieved by using service flows designed for specific applications.

During the last few years, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been considered to be the new phase in the evolution of distributed enterprise applications. Even though there is a common acceptance of this concept, a real problem hinders the widespread use of SOA : A methodology to design and build secure service-oriented applications is needed. In this dissertation, we design a novel process to secure service-oriented applications. Our contribution is original not only because it applies the MDA approach to the design of service-oriented applications but also because it allows their securing by dynamically applying security patterns throughout the whole process. Security patterns capture security knowledge and describe security mechanisms. In our process, we present a structured map of security patterns for SOA and web services and its corresponding catalog. At the different steps of a software lifecycle, the architect or designer needs to make some security decisions.

Web Service Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become a standard language in the world of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for specifying interactions between internet services. This standard frees developers from low-level concerns involving platform, implementation, and versioning. These freedoms risk development of less robust artifacts that may even become part of a mission-critical system. Model checking a BPEL artifact for correctness with respect to temporal logic properties is computationally complex, since it requires enumerating all communication and synchronization amongst various services with itself. This entails modeling BPEL features such as concurrency, hierarchy, interleaving, and non-deterministic choice. The thesis will provide rules and procedures for translating these features to a veriable model written in Promela. We will use these rules to build a program which automates the translation process, bringing us one step closer to push button verification. Finally, two BPEL artifacts will be translated, manually edited, verified, and analyzed.

Management of water resources has become more complex in recent years as a result of changing attitudes towards sustainability and the attribution of greater attention to environmental issues, especially under a scenario of water scarcity risk introduced by climate changes and anthropogenic pressures. This thesis addresses the conflicts in optimizing multi-purpose hydropower operations under an environment where objectives are often conflicting and uncertain. Mathematical programming formulations can be used to achieve flexible, feasible and optimal operation and planning solutions to satisfy expectations of multiple stake-holders, including regulatory environmental compliance and sustainability. Innovative optimization models using MINLP with binary variables, fuzzy set theory, partial constraint satisfaction and multi-objective formulations incorporating unit commitment problem and adaptive real-time operations are developed and applied to a real life case study. These methodologies provide advances and valuable insights on optimal operations of hydropower systems under uncertain decision making environments.

Research, tests and analysis are presented on several reinforcements placed in the asphalt overlay of a roadway built over soft organic soils. Non-destructive Evaluation (NDE) methods and statistical analysis were used to characterize the pavement before and after rehabilitative construction. Before reconstruction, falling weight deflectometer, rut and ride tests were conducted to evaluate the existing pavement and determine the statistical variability of critical site characteristics. Twenty-four 500ft. test sections were constructed on the roadway including sixteen reinforced asphalt and eight control sections at two test locations that possessed significantly different subsoil characteristics. NDE tests were repeated after reconstruction to characterize the improvements of the test sections. Test results were employed to quantify the stiffness properties of the pavement based on load-deflection data to evaluate the relative performance of the reinforced sections. Statistical analysis of the data showed the stiffness of the reinforced sections was consistently higher than the control sections.

Ports and container terminals have very complex and dynamic operations. Effective and efficient berth schedules are essential for profitable and sustainable operations. This research studies berth scheduling under uncertainties in arrival and handling times. Port operators usually face challenges in the development of berth schedules. This thesis presents a model formulation of discrete berth space that accounts for uncertainty in arrival and handling times. The problem is reformulated as a biobjective bi-level optimization berth scheduling problem. A solution approach is presented using evolutionary algorithms and heuristics. The objective of the formulation is to provide a robust berth schedule by minimizing the average and the range of the total service times for all vessels served at the terminal. Simulation is utilized to evaluate the proposed berth scheduling policy and compare it to two first-come-first-served policies. Results showed that the proposed berth schedules outperform under high congestion.

This research explores the attitudes held by marketing managers about building their company's corporate reputation, and about the impact of their actions on performance. In an environment of costly brand building, declining customer loyalty, and increasing scrutiny from stakeholders who demand corporate responsibility and transparency, a concern for corporate reputation is increasingly important for everyone in the company, including marketing managers. The marketing literature, however, has not explored how managers who are concerned about the reputation of their companies can effectively adapt marketing strategy for reputation enhancement. The theoretical justification for this research is grounded in stakeholder theory, dynamic capabilities theory, and strategic choice theory. The study contributes to the marketing strategy literature and the nascent field of stakeholder marketing. It makes a theoretical connection between the corporate-level construct of reputation orientation, and its impact on functional-level decisions about marketing strategy. Reputation orientation is the concern that top management and employees share about their company's commitment to nurturing a positive corporate reputation among key stakeholders. A scale for reputation was conceptually defined and empirically tested (Churchill, 1979). It consists of three dimensions: consciously created corporate identity, internal identity dissemination, and external stakeholder impact. Reputation orientation was found to be a valid and reliable construct that was further tested within the framework of how marketing managers formulate, implement, and evaluate their strategic marketing decisions. This research also tested the impact of stakeholder-conscious marketing strategy on corporate reputation and marketing performance.

In the period leading up to the early 2000s there were a series of large company failures attributed at least in part to audit failures. Consequently, the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) was promulgated in July 2002 to restore confidence in public company financial reporting and the work of auditors. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) was established by SOX and appointed as the regulator of the accounting firms that audit the financial statements of public companies. The PCAOB is required to routinely inspect the operations of these accounting firms in an effort to satisfy its mandate to bring about an improvement in the audit quality of these companies. These inspections extend to the non-US auditors of companies that are cross-listed in the US. Despite various mainly US studies on inspections, there is limited evidence that the inspections have resulted in improved audit quality. ... I examine companies whose securities are cross-listed in the US in the periods before and after inspection in order to provide evidence on the benefits of inspections. I find some evidence that inspections improve the audit quality of companies that are cross-listed in the US. This suggests the audit quality of companies from countries that do not permit inspections may be positively affected should inspections be permitted.