The resource-based view of the firm - resources, capabilities and sustainable competitive advantage

The main objective of this research paper was to synthesize, integrate and analyze the theoretical foundation of the resource-based view of the firm on sustainable competitive advantage. Accordingly, this research was a literature research employing the methodology of interpretative study of concept and unobtrusive measures. The core and majority of the research data was gathered from the major online journal databases. Only peer-reviewed articles from highly-esteemed journals on the subject of competitive advantage were used. The theoretical core of the research paper was centred on resources, capabilities, and the sustainability dilemma of competitive advantage. Furthermore, other strategic management concepts relating to the resource-based view of the firm were used with reference to the research objectives. The resource-based view of the firm continues to be a controversial but important are of strategic management research on sustainable competitive advantage. Consequently, the theoretical foundation and the empirical testing of the framework needs further work. However, it is evident that internal organizational factors in the form of resources and capabilities are vital for the formation of sustainable competitive advantage. Resources and capabilities are not, however, valuable on their own - competitive advantage requires seamless interplay and complementarity between bundles of resources and capabilities.

Dialogue in the crisis of representation : realism and antirealism in the context of the conversation between theologians and quantum physicists in Göttingen 1949-1961

The aim of this study is to analyse the content of the interdisciplinary conversations in Göttingen between 1949 and 1961. The task is to compare models for describing reality presented by quantum physicists and theologians. Descriptions of reality indifferent disciplines are conditioned by the development of the concept of reality in philosophy, physics and theology. Our basic problem is stated in the question: How is it possible for the intramental image to match the external object?Cartesian knowledge presupposes clear and distinct ideas in the mind prior to observation resulting in a true correspondence between the observed object and the cogitative observing subject. The Kantian synthesis between rationalism and empiricism emphasises an extended character of representation. The human mind is not a passive receiver of external information, but is actively construing intramental representations of external reality in the epistemological process. Heidegger's aim was to reach a more primordial mode of understanding reality than what is possible in the Cartesian Subject-Object distinction. In Heidegger's philosophy, ontology as being-in-the-world is prior to knowledge concerning being. Ontology can be grasped only in the totality of being (Dasein), not only as an object of reflection and perception. According to Bohr, quantum mechanics introduces an irreducible loss in representation, which classically understood is a deficiency in knowledge. The conflicting aspects (particle and wave pictures) in our comprehension of physical reality, cannot be completely accommodated into an entire and coherent model of reality. What Bohr rejects is not realism, but the classical Einsteinian version of it. By the use of complementary descriptions, Bohr tries to save a fundamentally realistic position. The fundamental question in Barthian theology is the problem of God as an object of theological discourse. Dialectics is Barth¿s way to express knowledge of God avoiding a speculative theology and a human-centred religious self-consciousness. In Barthian theology, the human capacity for knowledge, independently of revelation, is insufficient to comprehend the being of God. Our knowledge of God is real knowledge in revelation and our words are made to correspond with the divine reality in an analogy of faith. The point of the Bultmannian demythologising programme was to claim the real existence of God beyond our faculties. We cannot simply define God as a human ideal of existence or a focus of values. The theological programme of Bultmann emphasised the notion that we can talk meaningfully of God only insofar as we have existential experience of his intervention. Common to all these twentieth century philosophical, physical and theological positions, is a form of anti-Cartesianism. Consequently, in regard to their epistemology, they can be labelled antirealist. This common insight also made it possible to find a common meeting point between the different disciplines. In this study, the different standpoints from all three areas and the conversations in Göttingen are analysed in the frameworkof realism/antirealism. One of the first tasks in the Göttingen conversations was to analyse the nature of the likeness between the complementary structures inquantum physics introduced by Niels Bohr and the dialectical forms in the Barthian doctrine of God. The reaction against epistemological Cartesianism, metaphysics of substance and deterministic description of reality was the common point of departure for theologians and physicists in the Göttingen discussions. In his complementarity, Bohr anticipated the crossing of traditional epistemic boundaries and the generalisation of epistemological strategies by introducing interpretative procedures across various disciplines.

Equivalence and translation strategies in multilingual thesaurus construction

In the present dissertation, multilingual thesauri were approached as cultural products and the focus was twofold: On the empirical level the focus was placed on the translatability of certain British-English social science indexing terms into the Finnish language and culture at a concept, a term and an indexing term level. On the theoretical level the focus was placed on the aim of translation and on the concept of equivalence. In accordance with modern communicative and dynamic translation theories the interest was on the human dimension. The study is qualitative. In this study, equivalence was understood in a similar way to how dynamic, functional equivalence is commonly understood in translation studies. Translating was seen as a decision-making process, where a translator often has different kinds of possibilities to choose in order to fulfil the function of the translation. Accordingly, and as a starting point for the construction of the empirical part, the function of the source text was considered to be the same or similar to the function of the target text, that is, a functional thesaurus both in source and target context. Further, the study approached the challenges of multilingual thesaurus construction from the perspectives of semantics and pragmatics. In semantic analysis the focus was on what the words conventionally mean and in pragmatics on the ‘invisible’ meaning - or how we recognise what is meant even when it is not actually said (or written). Languages and ideas expressed by languages are created mainly in accordance with expressional needs of the surrounding culture and thesauri were considered to reflect several subcultures and consequently the discourses which represent them. The research material consisted of different kinds of potential discourses: dictionaries, database records, and thesauri, Finnish versus British social science researches, Finnish versus British indexers, simulated indexing tasks with five articles and Finnish versus British thesaurus constructors. In practice, the professional background of the two last mentioned groups was rather similar. It became even more clear that all the material types had their own characteristics, although naturally not entirely separate from each other. It is further noteworthy that the different types and origins of research material were not used to represent true comparison pairs, and that the aim of triangulation of methods and material was to gain a holistic view. The general research questions were: 1. Can differences be found between Finnish and British discourses regarding family roles as thesaurus terms, and if so, what kinds of differences and which are the implications for multilingual thesaurus construction? 2. What is the pragmatic indexing term equivalence? The first question studied how the same topic (family roles) was represented in different contexts and by different users, and further focused on how the possible differences were handled in multilingual thesaurus construction. The second question was based on findings of the previous one, and answered to the final question as to what kinds of factors should be considered when defining translation equivalence in multilingual thesaurus construction. The study used multiple cases and several data collection and analysis methods aiming at theoretical replication and complementarity. The empirical material and analysis consisted of focused interviews (with Finnish and British social scientists, thesaurus constructors and indexers), simulated indexing tasks with Finnish and British indexers, semantic component analysis of dictionary definitions and translations, coword analysis and datasets retrieved in databases, and discourse analysis of thesauri. As a terminological starting point a topic and case family roles was selected. The results were clear: 1) It was possible to identify different discourses. There also existed subdiscourses. For example within the group of social scientists the orientation to qualitative versus quantitative research had an impact on the way they reacted to the studied words and discourses, and indexers placed more emphasis on the information seekers whereas thesaurus constructors approached the construction problems from a more material based solution. The differences between the different specialist groups i.e. the social scientists, the indexers and the thesaurus constructors were often greater than between the different geo-cultural groups i.e. Finnish versus British. The differences occurred as a result of different translation aims, diverging expectations for multilingual thesauri and variety of practices. For multilingual thesaurus construction this means severe challenges. The clearly ambiguous concept of multilingual thesaurus as well as different construction and translation strategies should be considered more precisely in order to shed light on focus and equivalence types, which are clearly not self-evident. The research also revealed the close connection between the aims of multilingual thesauri and the pragmatic indexing term equivalence. 2) The pragmatic indexing term equivalence is very much context-depended. Although thesaurus term equivalence is defined and standardised in the field of library and information science (LIS), it is not understood in one established way and the current LIS tools are inadequate to provide enough analytical tools for both constructing and studying different kinds of multilingual thesauri as well as their indexing term equivalence. The tools provided in translation science were more practical and theoretical, and especially the division of different meanings of a word provided a useful tool in analysing the pragmatic equivalence, which often differs from the ideal model represented in thesaurus construction literature. The study thus showed that the variety of different discourses should be acknowledged, there is a need for operationalisation of new types of multilingual thesauri, and the factors influencing pragmatic indexing term equivalence should be discussed more precisely than is traditionally done.

Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in angiosperm communities in the Baltic Sea

The biological variation in nature is called biodiversity. Anthropogenic pressures have led to a loss of biodiversity, alarming scientists as to what consequences declining diversity has for ecosystem functioning. The general consensus is that diversity (e.g. species richness or identity) affects functioning and provides services from which humans benefit. The aim of this thesis was to investigate how aquatic plant species richness and identity affect ecosystem functioning in terms of processes such as primary production, nutrient availability, epifaunal colonization and properties e.g. stability of Zostera marina subjected to shading. The main work was carried out in the field and ranged temporally from weeklong to 3.5 months-long experiments. The experimental plants used frequently co-occur in submerged meadows in the northern Baltic Sea and consist of eelgrass (Z. marina), perfoliate pondweed (Potamogeton perfoliatus), sago pondweed (P. pectinatus), slender-leaved pondweed (P. filiformis) and horned pondweed (Zannichellia palustris). The results showed that plant richness affected epifaunal community variables weakly, but had a strong positive effect on infaunal species number and functional diversity, while plant identity had strong effects on amphipods (Gammarus spp.), of which abundances were higher in plant assemblages consisting of P. perfoliatus. Depending on the starting standardizing unit, plant richness showed varying effects on primary production. In shoot density-standardized plots, plant richness increased the shoot densities of three out of four species and enhanced the plant biomass production. Both positive complementarity and selection effects were found to underpin the positive biodiversity effects. In shoot biomass-standardized plots, richness effects only affected biomass production of one species. Negative selection was prevalent, counteracting positive complementarity, which resulted in no significant biodiversity effect. The stability of Z. marina was affected by plant richness in such that Z. marina growing in polycultures lost proportionally less biomass than Z. marina in monocultures and thus had a higher resistance to shading. Monoculture plants in turn gained biomass faster, and thereby had a faster recovery than Z. marina growing in polycultures. These results indicate that positive interspecific interactions occurred during shading, while the faster recovery of monocultures suggests that the change from shading stress to recovery resulted in a shift from positive interactions to resource competition between species. The results derived from this thesis show that plant diversity affects ecosystem functioning and contribute to the growing knowledge of plant diversity being an important component of aquatic ecosystems. Diverse plant communities sustain higher primary productivity than comparable monocultures, affect faunal communities positively and enhance stability. Richness and identity effects vary, and identity has generally stronger effects on more variables than richness. However, species-rich communities are likely to contain several species with differing effects on functions, which renders species richness important for functioning. Mixed meadows add to coastal ecosystem functioning in the northern Baltic Sea and may provide with services essential for human well-being.

Universal Quantum Cloning

After introducing the no-cloning theorem and the most common forms of approximate quantum cloning, universal quantum cloning is considered in detail. The connections it has with universal NOT-gate, quantum cryptography and state estimation are presented and briefly discussed. The state estimation connection is used to show that the amount of extractable classical information and total Bloch vector length are conserved in universal quantum cloning. The 1  2 qubit cloner is also shown to obey a complementarity relation between local and nonlocal information. These are interpreted to be a consequence of the conservation of total information in cloning. Finally, the performance of the 1  M cloning network discovered by Bužek, Hillery and Knight is studied in the presence of decoherence using the Barenco et al. approach where random phase fluctuations are attached to 2-qubit gates. The expression for average fidelity is calculated for three cases and it is found to depend on the optimal fidelity and the average of the phase fluctuations in a specific way. It is conjectured to be the form of the average fidelity in the general case. While the cloning network is found to be rather robust, it is nevertheless argued that the scalability of the quantum network implementation is poor by studying the effect of decoherence during the preparation of the initial state of the cloning machine in the 1 ! 2 case and observing that the loss in average fidelity can be large. This affirms the result by Maruyama and Knight, who reached the same conclusion in a slightly different manner.