Behavior
Essays

Demographics: Male, 13 years old, Chinese heritage, healthy otherwise, scores in 90th percentile in most intelligence tests; non-violent, intensely curious, we will call him Lon

Organizational Behavior and Leadership Profile

The modules examined in these discussion threads focus upon some of the major themes we've looked at as a class. Our discussion threads spotlight some of the common instances of pretense and assumption when it concerns race and our society. It's been fascinating to look at the connected and underlying issues to these themes as they impact our society immediately

Social Norm Experiment: Scenario 6 -- Facing the Wrong Way in an Elevator

Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning theory have all had a major impact on education theories and strategies. This essay reviews these three theories of learning and then provides real-life examples of each. Particular attention is paid to the core elements of each theory, including positive and negative reinforcement, positive and negative punishment, and attention, retention, production, and motivation.

It seems as though people have a fear of rural/ vegetation filled environments associating their privacy and wild confinement with the possibility that crime may more likely occur in these habitats. park authorities, universities, and municipalities, for instance, across North America actively remove shrubbery and vegetation that is thought to conceal and facilitate crime, whilst people fear densely vegetates areas for the same reason. At least two empirical studies, however, indicate that not only does vegetative areas not engender crime but they may also facilitate decrease of crime. The researchers proposed that certain regions of vegetation do not generate crime and may in fact even hinder it. The environment that the researchers had in mind were widely spaced, high-canopied trees and other visibility-preserving forms of vegetation. These not only do not promote crime but also hinder it.

¶ … Reality Therapy; a New Approach to Psychiatry by Dr. William Glasser. The writer explores the book and its contents and holds it against other theories in the field of mental health to more fully explain Glasser's…

¶ … Charles Manson and his criminal activity. Specifically it will discuss how the various theoretical schools of crime causation would attempt to explain Charles Manson's criminal behavior.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, like the works of Homer, stand as a piece of literary history and also as an indication of actual history. For nearly a millennium Europe was absent of any significant works of literature;…

Both articles and their extensive empirical and theoretical research have a wealth of insights and intelligence that brings e-commerce into a more realistic and pragmatic perspective. Starting with Exploring E-commerce benefits for businesses in a developing country (Molla, Heeks, 2007) that authors explain how they have interviewed 92 businesses in South Africa who have moved beyond the basic stage of ecommerce as defined by the 6-point e-commerce capability indicator cited in their article (Molla, Heeks, 2007). In citing this scale the authors contend that the much-hyped benefits of e-commerce surrounding operating efficiency gains including lower transaction costs and greater fluidity and flexibility of e-commerce are in fact not occurring in the emerging economy of South Africa. Instead, the authors state that the greatest gains are being made in the area of intra- and interorganizational communication and collaboration, clustered primarily in services industry as evidenced by their cited research (Molla, Heeks, 2007). This is certainly the case in Brazil where the continued growth of e-commerce has succeed while other nations have failed mainly due to the exceptional stability of the nations' banking system, strong laws and regulations to protect e-commerce and online commerce, and an infrastructure that makes automating supply chains more achievable than many other regions and nations of the world (Paulo, Dedrick, 2004). Brazil is also unique in that is government subsidizes new ventures and seeks out global technology partners, including Intel, for its e-commerce and infrastructure-dependent industries (Callaway, 2008). Juxtaposing the growth of Brazil is the stagnation of South Africa as is shown in the analysis, which implies e-commerce is better at breaking down the walls of organizations and getting them to work together more effectively than it is in driving top-line revenue from transactions., This consistent with the more pragmatic and practical studies of e-commerce adoption in emerging nations that show e-commerce system development and implementation will teach a business more about itself than it had never considered prior to the implementation (Alemayehu, Heeks, 2007). The process of creating an e-commerce strategy including the process and system integration, coordination of product and services catalogues, redefining and clarification of pricing, and the ability to define expediting processes for service and service recovery of negative customer events all force a business to grow faster than it had anticipated (Standing, Benson, 2000). Small businesses enter e-commerce thinking the big pay-off will be increased top-line revenue growth and greater transaction efficiencies (Molla, Heeks, 2007). Small businesses in commodity driven industries will also do this to specifically drive down the cost per transaction and pool purchasing power to gain an advantage in negotiating with suppliers (Salcedo, Henry, Rubio, 2003). All of these actual benefits are completely different than the much-hyped and promoted benefits of e-commerce being frictionless commerce throughout a supply chain, greater revenue growth at lower transaction costs, and ease and speed of generating customer loyalty, all contributing to skyrocketing profitability of an enterprise (Romano, 2009). All of these benefits accrue, in actuality, to oligopolistic firms who have the infrastructure, from a corporate IT staff to a well-known brand and the ability to selectively disintermediate their own supply chain to gain the much-hyped transaction cost efficiencies (Molla, Heeks, 2007). The greater the global market power of a company and its commanding position in an oligopoly, the more it can enforce its market-maker statue and drive change (Alemayehu, Heeks, 2007). Molla and Heeks (2007) deflate the hype of Transaction Cost Theory and its corollary of disintermediation by showing through their research that perfect competition doesn't exist in e-commerce globally and is especially problematic in emerging countries due to the lack of value chain integration and transparency. The authors also make an excellent point that the main catalysts or fuel of e-commerce growth in many nations is market research and mass customization (Molla, Heeks, 2007). There are myriad of examples of how e-commerce combined with mass customization has led to explosive, profitable growth on the part of companies with Dell not only reaching over $1B in revenues from online sales but also achieving double-digit inventory turns and extensive operational efficiencies at the same time (Luo, John, Du, 2005). The authors contend that for many emerging nations this however is not possible given the lack of trust and adoption of e-commerce, and the lack of alacrity and accuracy in complex supply chain relationships including a lack of clarity in communications and procurement performance (Molla, Heeks, 2007). Contrasting this however are the effects of a stabilized and trusted banking system in Brazil for example (Brazilian e-Commerce, 2005). The greater the trust levels in a given nation's financial system the higher the level of e-commerce adoption, even in highly collectivist cultures (Joia, Sanz, 2005). The authors continue with a triangulation of market performance, communications and transaction cost reduction, showing how e-commerce is more of a catalyst of organizational synchronization than a platform for selling more online (Molla, Heeks, 2007).