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Institutions develop geographic strategies in order to diffuse their ideas and organizations. These strategies may be either or both explicit and implicit and involve the generation of organizational structures, the examination of problems and possibilities and the deployment of resources. American Protestant religious institutions expand territorially and numerically by establishing new congregations. Founding methods, operational relationships between judicatories and existing congregations, and deployment processes of six denominations (Dutch Reformed, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist and Methodist) in upstate New York before 1810 are explored, with special emphasis on the Methodist Episcopal Church which showed the most successful expansion during that period. A series of maps and charts have been assembled to indicate the diffusion patterns of these six religious institutions. The various time periods examined, 1788 and before, 1789-1793, 1794-1798, 1799-1803, 1804-1810, correspond with significant growth and realignments of Methodist districts. The results of this study show that geographic strategies have directly affected the success and failure of denominational expansion.

The thesis aims to examine and explore NPD activities within China and establish whether a Western interpretation of NPD is appropriate to indigenous Chinese companies, engaged in an economy which is entering an era of globalisation.The research is based on ten case studies undertaken within five industrial sectors: lighting (light fabrication), watches (personal consumer products), white goods, automotive and telecommunications. Cases are representative of the differing types of Chinese organisations, and include examples of privately, collectively and state owned enterprises (POEs, COEs and SOEs), together with international joint ventures (IJVs). Conceptual approaches are developed to examine organisational background, NPD culture, technology transfer, NPD coordination, entrepreneurial behaviour, network development and market dynamics within each case study. The units of analysis in the framework reflect three main themes of intra, extra-organisational and strategic issues which are revisited throughout the thesis.The case studies are analysed using a mapping process in which each of the cases is described in terms of its engagement with NPD roles and performance and their correlation with economic development, compared with Western practice. Contingent on this, the thesis identifies a series of assumptions within Western literature, which are evaluated by assessing the case study findings, to establish the transferability of NPD conceptions. In addition, correlations between differing NPD related issues are identified using repertory grid theory detailed in a separate appendix and complementary to the case study analysis.The thesis concludes by proposing models of strategic NPD specific to Chinese organisations, at both intra-organisational, and micro and macro-economic levels; these provide an overview of distinctive NPD performance in indigenous companies, contextualised within the Chinese economy. The implication is that the future development of the Chinese economy will necessitate greater engagement with NPD, albeit in a differing form.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo five times over five years while Prime Minister. As a result, Japan's relations with China and Korea have declined to their worst state since the end of World War Two. However, Prime Minister Koizumi has accused the two of meddling in Japan's internal affairs - he does not see this as an international issue. For China, Korea, and others the fact that the shrine also includes 14 Class A War Criminals makes the Prime Minister's visits to the Shrine, official or not, an issue of international concern. Why is there such a rift not only between Japan and its neighbors but also between the way Koizumi sees his visits and the way in which China, Korea, and other countries perceive these visits? What do the visits mean? This thesis has three arguments. First, this thesis argues that the Yasukuni Shrine is caught in a paradox of its legacy - a religious shrine and a state memorial to the war dead left untouched from before the war, in a country that since the end of World War Two has had a separation of Church and State. Second, this thesis argues that the domestic politics vis-à-vis Yasukuni are defined by this paradox, with an ill-fitting policy of separation of church and state without resolution of the need to recognize the war dead. Third, this thesis argues that by visiting the Shrine, along with various policies of the Government of Japan that have endorsed and supported the shrine since Japan signed the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, Koizumi demonstrates to Japan's neighbors that it is hollowing out Japan's post war reconciliation. While Japan has officially apologized for its actions in World War Two, for Japan's neighbors, visiting the shrine is a visible sign that Japan does not wish to act very sorry.

The core issue underlying the bulk of scholarly research into the Japanese political economy is the relationship between the bureaucracy and the politicians. My study investigates whether there has been a relative decline in bureaucratic influence and whether politicians are displaying more independence in the policy making process than they did during previous decades. My main hypothesis is that the loss of bureaucratic influence has largely been a function of the declining position of former bureaucrats within the ruling Liberal Democrat Party (LDP), and that it has largely been politicians who were able to enter the Diet at a young age due to hereditary recruitment who have gained influence. Their ability to build up seniority has placed them at an advantage in promotion to key party and government posts due to the adoption of a seniority system of selecting cabinet ministers and party leaders. . I use probit and logit analysis of LDP cabinet and Diet members (1955-2003) to demonstrate the decline of former bureaucrats within the LDP in terms of their overall numbers and their occupancy of key posts. I use cross case study analysis of the work of three major blue-ribbon administrative reform panels (the Provisional Administrative Reform Commission established in 1962, the Second Provisional Administrative Reform Commission established in 1981, and the Administrative Reform Council established in 1996) to demonstrate how the lack of former bureaucrats within the LDP left the Ministry of Finance vulnerable to reform that stripped it of authority and altered its traditional policy preferences. My case studies analysis shows that following the founding of the LDP in 1955, former bureaucrats in the party supported delegating substantial authority to the bureaucracy and resisted attempts to curtail bureaucratic influence, acting as conduits for bureaucratic influence in the LDP. However, over time as former bureaucrats lost their pre eminent position within the LDP, attempts to reduce bureaucratic influence were successful. I conclude that the reforms implemented on the recommendations of the Administrative Reform Council fundamentally changed Japanese financial administration and altered financial policy in a way that was a major departure from traditional bureaucratic preferences.

This study investigated the distribution of Reactive Tokens in natural conversation by male and female speakers of Japanese. According to Clancy et al. a reactive token (RT) is "a short utterance produced by an interlocutor who is playing a listener's role during the other interlocutor's speakership" (1996, p. 355). Clancy et al. classify RTs into five types: backchannels, reactive expressions, collaborative finishes, repetitions, and resumptive openers. This study investigated the distribution of these five types of RTs. In particular, it studied their use in turn management and their distribution by gender. To identify the distribution of the five types of RTs more clearly, all five types of Reactive Tokens were divided into two levels: those that occurred at the boundary of a Pause-bounded Phrasal Unit (PPU) and those that occurred within a PPU.The participants in this study were 82 pairs of native speakers of Japanese: 82 female and 82 male native speakers of Japanese between 18 and 22 years of age. All pairs consisted of classmates or friends in the same university.Participants were audiotaped during 20 minutes of natural conversation. Six minutes from each conversation were extracted, and RTs were identified and coded using WaveSurfer (Sjölander & Beskow, 2000). Frequencies of RTs per minute were then calculated for each participant.Using principal components analysis, three coherent components were identified among the ten categories (five RT types each at two different levels). These three components were labeled sequential RTs, accompanying RTs, and repetitive RTs. Also, MANOVA and ANOVA revealed significant differences between Japanese male and female RT use, with females using more accompanying RTs than males.These findings suggest that different types of Reactive Tokens serve different turn-taking functions in Japanese, and that factors besides language, such as gender, may affect a speaker's choice of a particular type of Reactive Token.

We present results from an adaptive optics survey conducted with thePalomar and Keck telescopes over 3 years, which measured the frequency ofstellar and sub-stellar companions to Sun-like stars. The survey samplecontains 266 stars in the 3-10000 million year age range atheliocentric distances between 8 and 200 parsecs and with spectral typesbetween F5-K5. A sub-sample of 101 stars, between3-500 million years old, were observed in deep exposures with acoronagraph to search for faint sub-stellar companions. A total of 288candidate companions were discovered around the sample stars, which werere-imaged at subsequent epochs to determine physical association with thecandidate host stars by checking for common proper motion. Benefitting froma highly accurate astrometric calibration of the observations, we wereable to successfully apply the common proper motion test in the majorityof the cases, including stars with proper motions as small as20 milli-arcseconds/year.The results from the survey include the discovery of three new brown dwarfcompanions (HD 49197B, HD 203030B, and ScoPMS 214B), 43 new stellar binaries,and a triple system. The physical association of an additional, apriori-suspected, candidate sub-stellar companion to the star HII 1348 isastrometrically confirmed. The newly-discovered and confirmed young browndwarf companions span a range of spectral types between M5 and T0.5, andwill be of prime significance for constraining evolutionary models ofyoung brown dwarfs and extra-solar planets.Based on the 3 new detections of sub-stellar companions in the 101 starsub-sample and following a careful estimate of the survey incompleteness,a Bayesian statistical analysis shows that the frequency of 0.012-0.072solar-mass brown dwarfs in 30-1600 AU orbits around young solar analogsis 6.8% (-4.9%, +8.3%; 2-sigma limits). While this is a factor of 3lower than the frequency of stellar companions to G-dwarfs in the sameorbital range, it is significantly higher than the frequency of browndwarfs in 0-3 AU orbits discovered through precision radial velocitysurveys. It is also fully consistent with the observed frequency of0-3 AU extra-solar planets. Thus, the result demonstrates that theradial-velocity "brown dwarf desert" does not extend to wideseparations, contrary to previous belief.

The telecommunications industry has evolved into a very competitive industry since 1980. Aggressive competition is the norm in the long distance, equipment, operator services and many other segments of the industry. The remaining segment of the market without widespread meaningful competition is the "last-mile" wireline service to the customer premise. Incumbent local exchange carriers enjoy a monopoly to serve nearly all residences and most business customers, collecting over 99% of all local exchange service revenues. Using their monopoly status, incumbents have developed a cross-subsidy system which uses the rates paid by some customers to lower the rates paid by others to support a policy known as "universal service." This policy has resulted in telephone service reaching 94% of America's households. Carriers claim that this policy cost them $20 billion annually, potential entrants claim the true cost is as low as $4 billion and the rest is profit.In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress ordered the end of the local exchange monopoly and opened the local markets to competition. Congress also specified the continuation of universal service, specified that telephone penetration should be increased and specified that the universal service concept will be applied to America's schools, libraries and rural health centers. Congress also specified that, unlike today, all carriers will contribute fairly and equitably fairly to the universal service fund and that all carriers providing local service, including new competitors, will be eligible to receive support from the fund. The cost to meet these requirements in a competitive environment totals $7.2 billion, or 5.1% of net carrier revenue.This thesis addresses the definition of universal service and the services that should be eligible for support, the new competitive environment, how to collect the universal service support fund, and how to best distribute the funds to customers targeted to receive support from the system: those in high-cost areas, low-income consumers, and schools and libraries for advanced communications services.