Business Commons^™

Exploring The Effectiveness Of Environmentally Sustainable Practices In Municipal Government: A Case Study Of The City Of Knoxville’S Department Of Parks And Recreation, Anthony Michael Brown

Masters Theses

Sustainability practices produce programs and services that meet current needs while preserving the environment and natural resources for the future. City parks and recreation departments are facing budget shortfalls and increasing expectations from customers. Governments are now embracing sustainability practices to create financial savings while also fostering relations with customers.

The purpose of this single case study was twofold: (1) to examine the effectiveness of one city department’s strategies in outsourcing its environmental sustainability program through a performance contract with Ameresco; and (2) to examine the perceptions of key department employees about the effectiveness of the sustainability initiative. A …

Knots Of Knowledge: How Community-Based Organizations Advance Social Change, Jennifer Cohen

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Building on existing literature and research that identify nonprofits as agents of democracy, this research explores how community-based organizations (CBOs) advance social change. Strategically placed to improve social and economic security for individuals, families, and communities, CBOs have unique characteristics, successes, and challenges. The study seeks to understand, document, and apply these in building theories for use by practitioners, academics, public officials, and people living the experiences that public policies address. The research articulates a new model of social change, wherein individual transformation, organizational growth, community strengthening, and public policy work together in dynamic and complementary spheres.

The methodology is …

The Role Of Financial Services Advertising On Investors' Decision-Making, Tae Jun Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

The present study assesses the effect of financial services advertising on investors’ decision-making by adopting a two-sided approach: a stimulus-side analysis to document the nature and prevalence of advertising strategies and advertising disclosures being used and a response-side investigation to examine the investors’ processing of and receptiveness to financial services advertising. By performing a content analysis of recently published financial services magazine advertisements, this study provides a contemporary look at whether and how financial services companies inform, persuade, and communicate with average investors. Results from this content analysis method is also used as a foundation to help design realistic test …

Credit Default Swaps Regulation And The Use Of Collateralized Mortgage Obligations In U.S. Financial Institutions, Jon Patraic Neill

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The fast and easy global movement of capital throughout the financial system, from lenders to borrowers and through intermediaries and financial market participants, has been recognized as a source of instability associated with illiquidity and financial crises. The purpose of this research was to better understand how regulation either enables or constrains capital movement. The theoretical framework comprised 2 contrasting public policymaking models, Arrow's rational-comprehensive model and Kingdon's garbage can model, which were used to derive opposing hypotheses. The research question addressed the nature of the relationship between Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) regulations and the flow of capital into Collateralized …

The Perspectives Of African American Nonprofit Female Executives From The Northeastern Region Of The United States About The Work-Family Balance, Tammy Evans-Colquitt

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Although many studies have been conducted on the increased pressure and stress facing women who are trying to fulfill work and family demands, little is known about African American women in executive positions and their perspectives about work-life balance. A particular gap in the research literature exists on the lived experience of African American nonprofit executive women in maintaining work-life balance. The conceptual framework of this phenomenological study was the bidirectional frame of both work interfering with family and family interfering with work. Data were collected through semistructured telephone interviews of 12 African American women ages 30 to 45 and …

An Investigation Into How Greater Financial Stability Can Be Achieved For Portugal’S National Museums Under Management Of The Portuguese Institute Of Museums And Conservation (Imc), Luis Ramos Pinto

MA Theses

The European sovereign debt crisis has led to considerable cuts in public funding for the arts. Portugal, one of the countries most affected by the crisis has recently seen consistent public cuts for its cultural organizations. With the prospect of continued budget cuts, this paper seeks to examine how Portugal's largest public institute for the management of museums and built heritage the IMC (Instituto de Museus e Conservação) can seek to generate more private revenue and lower its costs in order to garner greater financial stability for itself. The research, based primarily on financial information dating up to 2010 looks …

Public Dollar Private Owners; Tax Subsidies For New Stadiums In Professional Sports, Grant J. Bunnage

CMC Senior Theses

The growing popularity of North American professional sports over the last twenty years directly coincides with the recent trend of urban communities using tax dollars to publically subsidize professional football, baseball, and basketball stadiums. Communities across North America invest substantial amount of public tax dollars in private facilities in light of a consensus among policy analysts that the economic impact of the new stadium is greatly exaggerated. The economic impact of new stadiums has been extensively researched, the focus of this paper rather, is to examine the impact publically subsidized facilities built in the last twenty years have on the …

Business As Usual : The Nonprofit Sector In The U.S. National Elite Network, Scott Vincent Dolan

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Research on the structure and distribution of power in the United States has focused mostly on the relative power of business, and has largely neglected the nonprofit sector. This is despite evidence that points to the emergence and growth of large-scale, bureaucratic, and elite-led nonprofit organizations. When the political role of the nonprofit sector has been examined, it has come predominantly from two sets of literature: the civic engagement/social capital tradition or the interest group tradition. I argue that both sets of literature, however, start with faulty assumptions about the nature of power and politics, and thereby fail to situate …