Opening the black box : how strategy practitioners develop their practices : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

While strategic management has been the focus of much research since the 1960s, there have been comparatively few studies on strategy practitioners, the human actors responsible for the process. These actors are often reduced to a set of observable demographic variables such as education level, work tenure, or job description. Consequently there is limited knowledge regarding strategy practitioners and, in particular, little is known about how they develop their practices, the knowledge and skills they use when engaged in strategic management. To address this gap in knowledge, this study, conducted within the strategy-as-practice (SAP) perspective, interviewed strategy practitioners identified by their peers as effective strategy practitioners. The responsive interviewing technique employed opened the so called ‘black box’, the subjective views of individuals, and allowed participants to reflect and, importantly, provide their meaning of what significantly influenced their strategic management practice development. Eighteen interviews were conducted and the analysis of the rich, deep data collected allowed an understanding of practice development from a practitioner’s perspective to emerge. The study revealed that this group of strategy practitioners see strategic management in holistic terms with a focus on organisational outcomes and not in a traditional, normative view which privileges the creation of a strategy. This contribution was not, however, a primary research outcome but participants view of strategic management impacted significantly on how they view themselves as strategy practitioners, the purpose of strategic management and, vitally, the practices they believe are needed to be effective. Within this context, the study shows that participants develop their practices idiosyncratically and learning from practice, notable literature and being involved with a broad range of people, were valued significantly in their practice development. It was through this meaning that participants were able to relate important aspects of their own development. This study contributes an empirical study to the SAP perspective that goes well beyond simple demographics in understanding how strategy practitioners develop their practices. In regards to research, the selection of strategy practitioners without considering their historical development has been identified as an area that may be problematic, especially for studies seeking to understand how strategy is practised. Business school education was not identified as a direct, meaningful contributor to participants’ development. This observation raises the interesting, and unresolved, question of the actual relationship between business schools and practice. The participants’ idiosyncratic career paths contributes to the viewpoints of authors who question whether the strategic management field should, or could, attain the status of a profession such as law or medicine

Unstable particles in modern field theory

The problem of extending the Quantum Theory of Fields to include a description of decay processes has provoked a rapid growth of interest in recent years. This problem was temporarily by-passed in the early attempts to formulate a relativistic Quantum Field Theory for the obvious reason that it was simpler initially to ignore decay phenomena and to consider only the collision processes of stable particles. The inadequacy of a field theory of stable particles is evident from the fact that among the sixteen experimentally established particles, and of course their sixteen antiparticles — although not all particles are distinct from their anti-particles — only four; the proton, electron, photon and neutrino, are stable

An Investigation of Some Routes to 11-Oxygenated Steroids

Abstract Not Provided

Perspective in historical fiction by British writers

The thesis is that the best historical novels in Britain today make a lively and varied body of literature united by a concern for perspective. This is defined as a present point of view which respects the integrity of the past. The first chapter discusses the nature of their achieveient. Historical fiction has seen many ambitious failures in perspective, where the past has been distorted for the sake of modern causes. In recent decades, the value of realistic narrative and the possibility of historical objectivity have been widely questioned. The success of even a few writers in this genre shows a discrepancy: betteen the most challenging critical theories and the most original creative practice. The argument is continued in a series of critical studies. Two chapters examine Mary Renault's use of contemporary realism to follow the 'sightlines' of ancient cultures. The next two chapters discuss a different, Joycean or 'ludic' stand in fiction, in the vork of Anthony Burgess (Nothing Like the Sun and Napoleon Symphony) and Robert Nye (falstaff); it is argued that they share Mary Renault's sense of a real past vhich is not to be distorted. Chapter 6 shows that J.G. Farrell's trilogy about the British Empire is equally original and intelligent in perspective, while following different methods again. Chapter 7 contrasts John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman and William Golding's Rites of Passage - one novel which exhibits fashionable doubts about the hiscorical imagination, and one which effectively dispels them. These are impressive, if minor, works in a species of fiction which has always been difficult. Their quality shows that much recent talk about the death of the past and the death of the novel has been unduly pessimistic

Fish Oil Supplementation Reduces Markers of Oxidative Stress But Not Muscle Soreness After Eccentric Exercise

Peer reviewedPostprin

Inference of transcriptional regulation using gene expression data from the bovine and human genomes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Gene expression is in part regulated by sequences in promoters that bind transcription factors. Thus, co-expressed genes may have shared sequence motifs representing putative transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs). However, for agriculturally important animals the genomic sequence is often incomplete. The more complete human genome may be able to be used for this prediction by taking advantage of the expected evolutionary conservation in TFBSs between the species.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A method of <it>de novo </it>TFBS prediction based on MEME was implemented, tested, and validated on a muscle-specific dataset.</p> <p>Muscle specific expression data from EST library analysis from cattle was used to predict sets of genes whose expression was enriched in muscle and cardiac tissues. The upstream 1500 bases from calculated orthologous genes were extracted from the human reference set. A set of common motifs were discovered in these promoters. Slightly over one third of these motifs were identified as known TFBSs including known muscle specific binding sites. This analysis also predicted several highly statistically significantly overrepresented sites that may be novel TFBS.</p> <p>An independent analysis of the equivalent bovine genomic sequences was also done, this gave less detailed results than the human analysis due to both the quality of orthologue prediction and assembly in promoter regions. However, the most common motifs could be detected in both sets.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Using promoter sequences from human genes is a useful approach when studying gene expression in species with limited or non-existing genomic sequence. As the bovine genome becomes better annotated it can in turn serve as the reference genome for other agriculturally important ruminants, such as sheep, goat and deer.</p

Observing and modelling phytoplankton community structure in the North Sea

© Author(s) 2017. CC Attribution 3.0 License. Phytoplankton form the base of the marine food chain, and knowledge of phytoplankton community structure is fundamental when assessing marine biodiversity. Policy makers and other users require information on marine biodiversity and other aspects of the marine environment for the North Sea, a highly productive European shelf sea. This information must come from a combination of observations and models, but currently the coastal ocean is greatly under-sampled for phytoplankton data, and outputs of phytoplankton community structure from models are therefore not yet frequently validated. This study presents a novel set of in situ observations of phytoplankton community structure for the North Sea using accessory pigment analysis. The observations allow a good understanding of the patterns of surface phytoplankton biomass and community structure in the North Sea for the observed months of August 2010 and 2011. Two physical-biogeochemical ocean models, the biogeochemical components of which are different variants of the widely used European Regional Seas Ecosystem Model (ERSEM), were then validated against these and other observations. Both models were a good match for sea surface temperature observations, and a reasonable match for remotely sensed ocean colour observations. However, the two models displayed very different phytoplankton community structures, with one better matching the in situ observations than the other. Nonetheless, both models shared some similarities with the observations in terms of spatial features and inter-annual variability. An initial comparison of the formulations and parameterizations of the two models suggests that diversity between the parameter settings of model phytoplankton functional types, along with formulations which promote a greater sensitivity to changes in light and nutrients, is key to capturing the observed phytoplankton community structure. These findings will help inform future model development, which should be coupled with detailed validation studies, in order to help facilitate the wider application of marine biogeochemical modelling to user and policy needs

Flowering Phenology Change and Climate Warming in Southwestern Ohio

Global surface temperature has increased markedly over the last 100 years. This increase has a variety of implications for human societies, and for ecological systems. One of the most obvious ways ecosystems are affected by global climate change is through alteration of organisms’ developmental timing (phenology). We used annual botanical surveys that documented the first flowering for an array of species from 1976 to 2003 to examine the potential implications of climate change for plant development. The overall trend for these species was a progressively earlier flowering time. The two earliest flowering taxa (Galanthus and Crocus) also exhibited the strongest shift in first flowering. We detected a significant trend in climate suggesting higher temperatures in winter and spring over the sampling interval and found a significant relationship between warming temperatures and first flowering time for some species. Although 60% of the species in our study flowered earlier over the sampling interval, the remaining species exhibited no statistically detectable change. This variation in response is ostensibly associated with among-species variation in the role of climate cues in plant development. Future work is needed to isolate specific climate cues, and to link plant phenology to the physiological processes that trigger plant development