Business Commons^™

Effective Leader Development Within A Church-Planting Organization For A Changing And Chaotic World, Jeremy Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A challenge in cross-cultural church planting is developing leaders. Cross-cultural church-planting organizations like Latin American Mission (LAM; pseudonym) that lack a leadership development strategy struggle to form lasting leaders, sending missionaries with Biblical training but not leader development training. Additionally, developing leaders in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment creates specific challenges that missionaries must address. The purpose of this qualitative, Delphi method study was to investigate the leadership development perceptions and experiences among existing LAM missionaries in the regions of Latin America (Colombia, Cuba, Mexico City, Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador) to provide suggestions for improving effective leadership …

Xbox In Japan? Understanding The Distinctions Of The Japanese Video Game Market To Increase Microsoft's Competitive Advantage, Sekani Adebimpe

Senior Theses

Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony remain the biggest players in the video game console space. While all three companies have achieved worldwide success, Microsoft’s performance with the Xbox brand in Japan is an outlier for its historically poor sales numbers dating back to its 2001 debut. The purpose of this thesis is to unearth the various cultural distinctions inherent to the Japanese gaming industry that Microsoft must consider to gain a stronger foothold in the country, as well as diagnose the biggest issues facing Xbox with Japanese consumers. To accomplish this, several cultural frameworks were used to assess the differences between …

The Bidirectional Relationship Between Art And Business, Hannah Brletich

Information Systems Undergraduate Honors Theses

There has long been an established relationship between art and business, finding its roots in the Industrial Revolution when the effects of arts on the economy were first explored. Since then, creative economies have been influenced by adaptation of businesses through urban development and revitalization and by continuous growth in artistic and cultural spaces. Capturing the relationship between arts and urban design, cultural districts establish strong economic communities within vastly creative, business- and culture-centered spaces. Current research provides insight to the economic, social, and cultural outcomes of creative economies.

As a contribution to that narrative, I will use this analysis …

Tanzanian Art: Attracting Tourism And Constructing A Packaged African Image, Ben Washburn

Honors Theses

Over the past thirty-or-so years, there has been a large increase of tourism in East Africa. In the coastal town Bagamoyo of Tanzania, many young men have made a career out of the tourist-industry – by producing tourist art. In this paper, I analyze the lives of local artists in Bagamoyo, as well as argue that they brand their art in particular ways that align with their ideas of tourist expectations and preconceived ideas of Africa. I argue that these artists practice different types of branding – primarily depicting Africa as primitive and wild, as they see producing art as …

"We Can't Do It Without You!" Crowdfunding As Cultural And Economic Negotiations Within Neoliberal Culture, David Zachary Gehring

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis is a qualitative study that critically examines crowdfunding campaigns established to fund music projects. It argues that these campaigns are instantiations of neoliberalism, influenced by and reflective of cultural commitments operative within music communities and a shifting industrial context. For this study, neoliberalism represents a particular mode of free market capitalism characterized by discourses emphasizing individual agency free from regulatory constraints, and the rearticulation of cultural values rhetorically prioritized over market interests. Emerging within this cultural and industrial ecology informed and motivated by neoliberalism, and shaped through the dynamic flux of fan/artist relationships and industrial uncertainty, the crowdfunding …

Mapping Decisions Of Reporting Asset Misappropriation Within An Accounting Department Using Behavioral, Cognitive, And Cultural Traits, Nora Alaniz Bouqayes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The problem of global fraud continues to be pandemic with the cost to organizations exceeding $3.9 trillion of lost revenues every year. Accounting research is slowly embracing the behavioral science research and has expanded limited literature addressing the traits of fraud perpetrators. This study begins to examine behavioral, cognitive, and cultural traits of reporters of fraud in accounting departments. This study narrows the area of interest to asset misappropriation as part of the Occupational Fraud and Abuse Classification System created by the Association of Fraud Examiners. An initial instrument to measure traits is developed and used to map decision paths …

The Sixty-Six Percent, Natalie Abruzzo

Capstones

The Sixty-Six Percent represent the percentage of women in the U.S. who are overweight. They are regarded as full-figured or “plus” size in the world of women’s apparel. Even though more than half of American women wear a “plus” size - size 14 and up - designs for these women account for a fraction of women’s apparel - Only 37% of women's wear is plus-size.

The Sixty-Six Percent is coming at an important time in a broader conversation about de-stigmatizing what it means to be a plus-size woman in America. Fat shaming has become taboo and mainstream media as well …

Ethical Insights Of Early 21st-Century Corporate Leaders, Kevin B. Jones

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

From 2001 to 2010, a lack of documented standards within ethics programs inhibited decision making, management practices, and corporate strategies for corporate leaders in the United States. Seminal theories in transformational, charismatic, servant, spiritual, and ethical leadership formed the conceptual framework for this phenomenological study, whose intent was to explore how senior leaders of Fortune 500 companies in Washington, DC integrated ethics into daily business decisions and the role in organizational performance. A convenience sample of 20 Fortune 500 leaders participated in face-to-face semistructured interviews to explore the assessment, definition, and documentation of various ethical standards in the company; the …

Differences In Financial Performance And Risk Tolerance At Faith-Based Credit Unions, Bruce J. Toews

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In the United States, faith-based and other small credit unions are vanishing at the rate of nearly a credit union each workday. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to provide managers of faith-based credit unions with information about differences in financial performance and risk tolerance between faith-based and non-faith-based credit unions in order to improve their investment strategy and long-term sustainability. The study included a comparison of ratios measuring the financial performance and risk tolerance of randomly selected faith-based credit unions in the United States with the corresponding ratios of non-faith-based credit unions of similar size and location from …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Expatriates' Acculturation Strategies: Going Beyond "How Adjusted Are You?" To "How Do You Adjust?", Matthew Lineberry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Expatriates' degree of adjustment to living and working in a foreign country is well-accepted as an important outcome variable in expatriate management research. However, measures of degree of adjustment do not capture the breadth of strategies expatriates may use to achieve such adjustment, which may be critical for understanding whether expatriates have achieved a healthy and productive orientation to life abroad. Borrowing from research on immigrant populations, this study examines the construct of expatriate acculturation strategies, which characterize expatriates' mode of adjustment along two independent dimensions reflecting maintenance of one's home culture and engagement of the host culture, respectively. One …