Reducing Causal Ambiguity in Acquisition Integration: Intermediate Goals as Mediators of Integration Decisions and Acquisition Performance

Integration is a difficult process, but one that is vital to acquisition performance. One reason acquirers encounter difficulties is that the integration process exhibits high levels of intrafirm linkage ambiguity – a lack of clarity of the causal link between integration decisions and their performance outcomes. We introduce the construct of intermediate goals as a mechanism that reduces intrafirm linkage ambiguity. Our structural model results, based on a sample of 129 horizontal acquisitions, indicate that the achievement of two intermediate goals (internal reorganization and market expansion) fully mediates the relationships between four integration decisions and acquisition performance

Districts Developing Leaders: Lessons on Consumer Actions and Program Approaches From Eight Urban Districts

Profiles eight Wallace-supported approaches to preparing future principals to succeed in improving troubled city schools, including establishing clear expectations so that university preparation programs can craft training accordingly

Humans and Nonhumans Becoming Political: Memphis Women\u27s March Assemblages

In this post-qualitative feminist study, object-interviews with women who participated in the Memphis Womens March (MWM) and nonhuman objects were used to explore the interconnections of the MWM and the women and the nonhuman objects, and the relational knowledge generated by the interconnections between humans (e.g., the women who marched, other marchers) and nonhumans (e.g., posters, banners, t-shirts, pink pussyhats, and/or photographs). This study is significant in two ways. First, this post-qualitative feminist study attends to the interconnections of the MWM and the women and the signs. Second, this study will contribute to current post-qualitative work by utilizing object-interviews to create a conversational middle space for human and nonhuman participants to share their experiences before, during, and after the MWM. Braidottis nomadic theorya posthumanist feminist theoryprovided an alternative way to think about power, difference, and change. Nomadic theory provided an opportunity to explore the interconnections of the MWM and the women and the nonhuman objects. This work provided a space where humans and nonhumans unfolded, reached out, and folded in other humans and nonhumans through positive interconnections. The positive interconnections of humans and nonhumans resulted in MWM participants resisting dominant thought by becoming political; provided a sense of community and belonging; led to empowerment and continued unfolding, reaching out, and folding in; and the transformation of negative affects into the consideration of potential affirmative futures

Diagnostic imaging of the tympanic bulla and temporomandibular joint in the dog, cat and rabbit.

The area of the skull incorporating the tympanic bulla (TB) and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) is significant clinically in the dog, cat, and more recently the rabbit. Diagnostic imaging is important in the assessment of disease of these structures but there is a relative lack of comparative anatomical information relating to the normal that may be used to understand the abnormal features encountered when using currently available diagnostic imaging modalities. A review of conventional radiography demonstrated that views for imaging the canine and feline TB could be extrapolated for use in the rabbit but the same did not apply to the TMJ. Plastinated multiplanar anatomical sections proved useful for the identification of anatomical features on corresponding tomographic images. Ultrasound imaging of this region has not been widely reported but allowed evaluation of the TB in all three species, although the information obtained regarding the TMJ was limited. Directly acquired computed tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance (MR) images were of better quality than previous publications due to technological advances in the equipment available. Directly acquired images were still better than reconstructed ones and reduced image acquisition times are likely to make this viable in clincal cases. CT produced optimal imaging of the TB but only allowed assessment of the bony elements of the TMJ. Little information was obtained regarding the normal TB using MR imaging due to the indistinguishable signal voids produced by the bone wall and gas lumen. However, T1 weighted sequences allowed identification of intra-articular TMJ soft tissue structures in the dog and rabbit. While opening the mouth altered the areas of the TMJ examined using each modality, it did not improve visualisation of the intra-articular structures. The introduction of fluid into the middle ear cavity of dog, cat and rabbit cadavers aided identification of the TB and acted as a model of one of the major features of acute otitis media, or inflammation of the middle ear cavity. CT was most accurate at identifying middle ear material in cadavers and clinical cases, while ultrasound produced better results than radiography in cadavers but not clinical cases. These imaging modalities also proved useful in the characterisation of the unexpected anatomical anomalies that were encountered during the study. The results of this study indicate that the optimal imaging technique will vary with the species and area being examined, and that extrapolation between species is not always appropriate. Continual improvements in technology and image quality make studies such as this necessary to allow selection of the most appropriate single or combination of imaging techniques and to obtain the maximum amount of information from the resulting images

Reading the City, Walking the Book: Mapping Sydney's Fictional Topographies.

This thesis locates itself on the double ground of Sydney’s fictional and material topographies. My purpose is to read and write the city’s spatio-temporal dimensions through four novels: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970) and David Ireland’s City of Women (1981). Deploying a hybrid methodology informed by critical and creative approaches to the city in literature and modernity, the thesis investigates the manifold ways in which the novels draw on Sydney’s topographies to shape and structure their narratives spatially, not only in an abstract and symbolic sense but through the materiality of urban places. Each novel I argue, offers new perspectives on the relationships between text, place and writer. My approach and methodologies draw on J. Hillis Miller’s work on literary topographies, particularly novelistic creations of figurative maps. This textual approach is complemented by Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of the modern city as a landscape to be read critically with a ‘topographical consciousness’ which I interpret as a set of modes for reading the city as text and the text as city. Intertwined with these literary and material approaches is an ‘on the ground’ methodology for ‘walking the book’. Influenced by Benjamin’s ‘art of straying’, the Surrealists and the Situationists, I reconceptualise the dérive or urban drift as a critical and creative practice for literally and figuratively walking fictional and material Sydney. Through reading the city and walking the book I conclude, familiar urban spaces are imaginatively and critically opened up as past, present and future, the fictional and the material, collide and re-assemble into new configurations: alternative cartographies