Networks of Influence: Implementing Politically Sustainable Multinational Stakeholder Strategies

In a bid to gain stakeholder support for their operations, multinational firms operating in politically uncertain environments often inappropriately apply a rational financial approach to a sociopolitical problem. Using the tools of network theory, I present an alternative sociopolitical approach to gaining stakeholder support by engendering cooperative relations and increasing tie formation while minimizing conflict. This dissertation comprises three paper chapters. The first, theory, paper chapter outlines a theory of influence exploring how the firm\u27s strategic position within the network of stakeholders affords it positional benefits of information and reputation, while also highlighting the costs of exposure to pre-existing conflict and the fostering of conflict through asymmetric relations. The second, empirical, paper chapter explores how firms can best manage altercentric and egocentric uncertainty in the nonmarket environment and compares the efficacy of the ex ante strategies that the firm can use to manage both types of uncertainty. I hypothesize and find that through strategic network positioning that affords it information, the firm can manage its egocentric uncertainty; and, by managing how it is perceived through its associations, the firm can also manage stakeholders\u27 altercentric uncertainty. When both strategies are assessed together, I find greater returns to firms in terms of engendering cooperation, minimizing conflict and forming ties by managing altercentric uncertainty through strategic associations. In the third, also empirical, paper chapter, I use insights from structural balance theory to explore the relationship between dyadic structure and triadic closure among networks of actors in the sociopolitical context. I outline and test hypotheses of four types of structural homophily of the actors in the triad—access to resources, status, likeability and number of ties (popularity)—on the likelihood of the closure of that triad. I find that a link that closes an open directed triad is more likely when the actors of the triad have different access to resources, different status, and similar numbers of ties to other actors. I also find that likeability among actors in the triad has no impact on the likelihood of closing that triad. My empirical papers test the relationships among firms and stakeholders in a novel hand-coded database of 51,754 stakeholder events linking 4,623 unique stakeholders of a population of 19 publicly traded gold mining firms which operate 26 mines in 20 largely emerging economies

Spinning Gold: The Financial Returns to Stakeholder Engagement

We provide direct empirical evidence in support of instrumental stakeholder theory\u27s argument that increasing stakeholder support enhances the financial valuation of a firm, holding constant the objective valuation of the physical assets under its control. We undertake this analysis using panel data on 26 gold mines owned by 19 publicly traded firms over the period 1993–2008. We code over 50,000 stakeholder events from media reports to develop an index of the degree of stakeholder conflict/cooperation for these mines. By incorporating this index in a market capitalization analysis, we reduce the discount placed by financial markets on the net present value of the physical assets controlled by these firms from 72 percent to between 37 and 13 percent

Method and apparatus for relative navigation using reflected GPS signals

A method and system to passively navigate an orbiting moving body towards an orbiting target using reflected GPS signals. A pair of antennas is employed to receive both direct signals from a plurality of GPS satellites and a second antenna to receive GPS signals reflected off an orbiting target. The direct and reflected signals are processed and compared to determine the relative distance and position of the orbiting moving body relative to the orbiting target

DIFFICULTIES OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN PRODUCTIVE SKILL

This paper aims at describing students’ difficulties in spoken utterances. To achieve the objective, the research site is some schools in Yogyakarta Special Province, both public and private schools. The reason to choose is first, the schools provide English from the very beginning level, that is the first grade of elementary school, second, the teachers are from English educational background and third, the schools get A for the accreditation. Observation and interview techniques are employed to collect data. The results reveal that English teachers tend to teach form and vocabularies. As a result, a complete text in a form of dialogue or a descriptive text is still difficult to reach. The students perform uncontextual and uncomplete text. The text is not a monologue or dialogue, a short functional text, or a descriptive text as suggested by the curriculum. Most utterances are in a form of words, phrases and sentences; the text produced is sentence copying from textbooks or from teachers. The teaching learning process then is divided into three steps of teaching, namely pre-teaching, while-teaching, and post-teaching. Of the three steps of teaching, English teachers tend to be teachers centered teaching and the focus is still on vocabularies and English rules. They teach about the language. They speak more in Bahasa Indonesia starting from pre-teaching up to post teaching. The tasks given are on vocabulary and forms. As the result of teachers’ teaching then it affects on students’ performance. The students are in doubt even do not know how to communicate or perform a simple dialogue among friends in English. It contrasts to the aim of English learning for children, that is performative level. They actually should be trained more on formulaic expressions rather than on rules. In brief, to be an English teacher for elementary level needs to have good ability in English classroom instructions, be a grammar sensitive teacher and be a creative teacher in conducting teaching learning process

Probing the Galactic Potential with Next-Generation Observations of Disk Stars

Near-future surveys promise a dramatic improvement in the number and precision of astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic measurements of stars in the Milky Way's disk. We examine the impact of such surveys on our understanding of the Galaxy by "observing" particle realizations of non-axisymmetric disk distributions orbiting in an axisymmetric halo with appropriate errors and then attempting to recover the underlying potential using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach. We demonstrate that the azimuthally averaged gravitational force field in the Galactic plane--and hence, to a lesser extent, the Galactic mass distribution--can be tightly constrained over a large range of radii using a variety of types of surveys so long as the error distribution of the measurements of the parallax, proper motion and radial velocity are well-understood and the disk is surveyed globally. One advantage of our method is that the target stars can be selected non-randomly in real or apparent-magnitude space to ensure just such a global sample without biasing the results. Assuming we can always measure the line-of-sight velocity of a star with at least 1 km/s precision, we demonstrate that the force field can be determined to better than ~1% for Galactocentric radii in the range R=4-20 kpc We conclude that near-future surveys, like SIM Lite, Gaia, and VERA, will provide the first precise mapping of the gravitational force field in the region of the Galactic disk.Comment: 41 pages and 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

School Logo Cleveland State University Logo Title Evolutionary Optimization for Safe Navigation of an Autonomous Robot in Cluttered Dynamic Unknown Environments

We present a path planning approach based on probabilistic methods for a robot to navigate in a cluttered, dynamic, unknown environment. There are dynamic obstacles moving around and static obstacles located in the map. The robot does not have any prior information about them but should be able to navigate through the map beginning from a known starting point and safely ending at a known target point. The only information the robot has is the location of the starting point and the target point and it uses sensory information to collect information about its surroundings. Our method is compared to the D* Lite algorithm and results are presented. In the last section, the parameters of the robot are optimized using biogeography-based optimization (BBO). This is an efficient multivariable optimizer and it is shown that the results of optimization achieve significant improvement in robot navigation performance. In this thesis, we show that using evolutionary optimization methods like BBO can reduce the risk of collision and the navigation time by about 25% each. The resulting risk of collision indicates safe navigation by the robot which leads to the conclusion that this is a feasible method for real-world robots