Influence of national culture on employee commitment forms : a case study of Saudi-Western IJVs vs. Saudi domestic companies

Saudi Arabia is experiencing a transformative period in its economic history, as its market has been opened up for foreign investment. The last 5 years have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of foreign investment into Saudi Arabia particularly through International Joint Ventures. The managers in these IJVs come from various cultures that can be categorised as collectivist or individualist societies. This study to investigate the relationship between national culture and employee commitment within Western-Saudi IJV environments in contrast to the commitment forms found within domestic (monoculture) organisations. In this study, Western and Saudi managers were compared as to their levels of organisational commitment and professional commitment, while a second survey focused on individualism/collectivism among respondents. This study found that Western managers working in Saudi IJVs had significantly higher levels of professional commitment than did their Saudi counterparts. Similarly, Saudi managers working in Saudi IJVs had significantly higher levels of organisational commitment than did their Western counterparts. This study also found that Saudi managers working in Saudi IJVs experienced higher levels of professional commitment than did their Saudi counterparts working in purely Saudi firms, and that Western managers who had previously worked in collectivist cultures had higher levels of organisational commitment than did Western managers who had not previously worked in collectivist cultures. In addition, significant differences were found between respondent groups with regard to individualism/collectivism. The results support a correlation between individualism and professional commitment, as well as between collectivism and organisational commitment. The results found that an employee’s cultural orientation can be modified through exposure to employees from other cultures. The knowledge contributed from the study findings will enrich the existing scholarly theories of employee commitment and individualism/collectivism values within IJVs setting in Saudi Arabia. Also, this knowledge will contribute to facilitate foreign investors and HRM practitioners in developing strategies to maximise the benefits from different forms of employee commitment

Ascorbic Acid Metabolisms: A review

Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) is a water-soluble, hexonic sugar, with a molecular weight of 176. It is known to play vital roles in numerous functions of the body, especially in hydroxylation reactions. Its requirement by animals may be increased when challenged in the form of immune and metabolic stress. The main objective of this brief review is to outline the catabolic and anabolic pathways of ascorbic acid as well as its metabolic functions

Using optimal control to adjust the production rate of a deteriorating inventory system

AbstractThis work represents is another contribution to the application of optimal control theory to production inventory systems. We consider a firm that produces some product at a certain rate and aims at improving this rate. We successfully formulated the model as an optimal control problem and obtained an explicit solution using the maximum principle. An illustrative example is provided and the sensitivity of the model to some of the system parameters was addressed

The homologous region sequence (hr1) of Autographa californica multinucleocapsid polyhedrosis virus can enhance transcription from non-baculoviral promoters in mammalian cells

The Autographa californica multinucleocapsid polyhedrosis virus homologous region sequence hr1 enhances transcription from the viral polyhedrin promoter in Spodoptera frugiperda insect cells and independently functions as an origin of replication (ori) sequence. The binding of the host nuclear protein, hr1-binding protein (hr1-BP), is crucial for the enhancer activity (Habib, S., Pandey, S., Chatterji, U., Burma, S., Ahmad, R., Jain, A., and Hasnain, S. E. (1996) DNA Cell Biol. 15, 737-747 and Habib, S., and Hasnain, S. E. (1996) J. Biol. Chem. 271, 28250-28258). We demonstrate that hr1 can also enhance transcription from non-baculoviral promoters like cytomegalovirus and hsp70 in mammalian cells but does not support ori activity in these cells. Unlike insect cells, hr1 can also function in mammalian cells as an enhancer when present in trans. hr1 DNA sequence binds with high affinity and specificity to nuclear factors in the mammalian cells. The insect hr1-BP- and the hr1-BP-like proteins from mammalian cells (mhr1-BP) have different properties with respect to ion requirements, DNA groove binding, and molecular size. When mammalian cells are infected with a recombinant baculovirus containing two promoters, the baculovirus polyhedrin and Drosophila hsp70 gene promoter, the hsp70 gene promoter alone is active in these cells, and this activity is further enhanced by the presence of an additional hr1 in the recombinant virus. hr1 may thus also have a role in baculovirus-mediated gene delivery in mammalian cells

Cloud Forensics : Isolating Cloud Instance

Cloud computing has been the trending model for storing, accessing and modifying the data over the Internet in the recent years. Rising use of the cloud has generated a new concept related to the cloud which is cloud forensics. Cloud forensics can be defined as investigating for evidence over the cloud, so it can be viewed as a combination of both cloud computing and digital forensics. Many issues of applying forensics in the cloud have been addressed. Isolating the location of the incident has become an essential part of forensic process. This is done to ensure that evidence will not be modified or changed. Isolating an instant in the cloud computing has become even more challenging, due to the nature of the cloud environment. In the cloud, the same storage or virtual machine have been used by many users. Hence, the evidence is most likely will be overwritten and lost. The proposed solution in this paper is to isolate a cloud instance. This can be achieved by marking the instant that reside in the servers as "Under Investigation". To do so, cloud file system must be studied. One of the well-known file systems used in the cloud is Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Thus, in this paper the methodology used for isolating a cloud instance would be based on the HDFS architecture

Evaluating the effectiveness of primary teachers in Kuwait

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN014579 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

A novel ultrasonic spectrometer with automatic control and geometrical alignment for the study of liquids

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN015222 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo