The challenge of agricultural co-operatives internationalisation : case studies of Fonterra and Zespri : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies in Agribusiness at Massey University

Internationalisation of agricultural co-operatives is a worldwide trend that has been identified by several studies as one of the key challenges co-operatives are currently facing. The main question that this paper aims to answer is: how can agricultural co-operatives internationalise without generating conflicts with or distancing themselves from their members? Starting with a comprehensive literature review of the internationalisation of agricultural co-operatives globally, the paper introduces a new descriptive model for determining internationalisation of co-operatives. Using the mentioned model, the paper develops in detail the case studies of two New Zealand co-operatives: Fonterra, a pure co-operative in the dairy industry and Zespri, a co-operative hybrid in the kiwifruit industry, and their internationalisation situation. Based on a cross-case comparison the paper finally outlines the risks, potential conflicts and critical factors these two co-operatives face in their internationalisation process. Keywords: agricultural co-operatives, internationalisation, international business, agribusiness, dairy industry, kiwifruit, Fonterra, Zespri

Doctors with Borders? An Authority-based Approach to the Brain Drain

According to the brain drain argument, there are good reasons for states to limit the exit of their skilled workers (more specifically, healthcare workers), because of the negative impacts this type of migration has for other members of the community from which they migrate. Some theorists criticise this argument as illiberal, while others support it and ground a duty to stay of the skilled workers on rather vague concepts like patriotic virtue, or the legitimate expectations of their state and co-citizens. In this article, on the contrary, we suggest that the liberal conception of states’ legitimate political authority demands, and not just permits, that developing states from which migration of skilled workers occurs set up contractual mechanisms. These mechanisms will ensure that state-funded training in the health sector is provided against a commitment on the part of future professionals to reciprocate with their services for the benefits obtained. If one of the conditions for the state to maintain legitimate political authority is to provide basic services such as healthcare to its subjects (while respecting at the same time their autonomy and freedom), then this is what developing states affected by the brain drain ought to do. What we call the authority-based approach to the brain drain also helps to clarify the obligations that other states have not to interfere with these contractual mechanisms when they exist, and not to profit from their absence. Inspired by FIFA’s legal instruments of training compensation and solidarity mechanism for the transfer of players, we conclude by suggesting a plausible global policy to complement this authority-based approach

Uniformly rigid models for rigid actions

In this article we show that any ergodic rigid system can be topologically realized by a uniformly rigid and (topologically) weak mixing topological dynamical system

An institutional approach to the role of cost accounting in regulated markets: the case of the royal soap factory of Seville (1515-1692)

Regulated markets and state-owned monopolies characterized the economies of many Southern European and Latin American territories around the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Strikingly, however, investigation into the functioning of cost accounting in such contexts has been widely neglected in accounting research. In this paper, we examine the role of early cost systems in regulated markets by focusing on the case of the soap production and distribution monopoly in the City of Seville (Spain). In 1423, the King of Castille granted the soap monopoly to the Duke of Alcalá as a reward for his war achievements, but the decision on the price of soap rested in the hands of the local government. Disputes between the Duke of Alcalá and the local government (the parties) about the fair price of a pound of soap were resolved through tests that replicated the soap production process and determined its cost through complex calculations. Drawing on the insights of institutional sociology, we found that the test and its accompanying cost calculations constituted an institution that legitimized the parties both in the public opinion and before the King. Further, our data revealed that the parties engaged in active agency before the King of Spain to shape in their favor the constitutive elements of the institution, such as the use of purpose-purchased or stored materials in the soap test; incorporation into the total cost the rents that would have been earned if the factory buildings were leased; and the salaries of some employees (i.e., slaves, factory administrator and priest)

A pointwise cubic average for two commuting transformations

Huang, Shao and Ye recently studied pointwise multiple averages by using suitable topological models. Using a notion of dynamical cubes introduced by the authors, the Huang-Shao-Ye technique and the Host machinery of magic systems, we prove that for a system $(X,\mu,S,T)$ with commuting transformations $S$ and $T$, the average $$\frac{1}{N^2} \sum_{i,j=0}^{N-1} f_0(S^i x)f_1(T^j x)f_2(S^i T^j x)$$ converges a.e. as $N$ goes to infinity for any $f_1,f_2,f_3\in L^{\infty}(\mu)$

Dialectometric analysis of language variation in Twitter

In the last few years, microblogging platforms such as Twitter have given rise to a deluge of textual data that can be used for the analysis of informal communication between millions of individuals. In this work, we propose an information-theoretic approach to geographic language variation using a corpus based on Twitter. We test our models with tens of concepts and their associated keywords detected in Spanish tweets geolocated in Spain. We employ dialectometric measures (cosine similarity and Jensen-Shannon divergence) to quantify the linguistic distance on the lexical level between cells created in a uniform grid over the map. This can be done for a single concept or in the general case taking into account an average of the considered variants. The latter permits an analysis of the dialects that naturally emerge from the data. Interestingly, our results reveal the existence of two dialect macrovarieties. The first group includes a region-specific speech spoken in small towns and rural areas whereas the second cluster encompasses cities that tend to use a more uniform variety. Since the results obtained with the two different metrics qualitatively agree, our work suggests that social media corpora can be efficiently used for dialectometric analyses.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Accepted to VarDial 201

Nonorthogonal Polyhedra Built from Rectangles

We prove that any polyhedron of genus zero or genus one built out of rectangular faces must be an orthogonal polyhedron, but that there are nonorthogonal polyhedra of genus seven all of whose faces are rectangles. This leads to a resolution of a question posed by Biedl, Lubiw, and Sun [BLS99].Comment: 19 pages, 20 figures. Revised version makes two corrections: The statement of the old Lemma 14 was incorrect. It has been corrected and merged with Lemma 13 now. Second, Figure 19 (a skew quadrilateral) was incorrect, and is now removed. It played no substantive role in the proof