Doing Business in the ASEAN Countries
Southeast Asia is home to the ten ASEAN nations of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Collectively they comprise a huge market of over half a billion people, with a total land area of 4.5 million square kilometers, a combined domestic product in excess of US$1.1 trillion and total trade of over US$1.4 trillion. It is the most dynamic and fastest growing region in the world but also has some of the world's most distinctive cultures and business systems. It offers tremendous opportunities for investors and businesses. But to succeed you need to be familiar with the unique business environment including political and business systems, cultural idiosyncrasies, management practices, social structures, legal frameworks, government priorities, potential competition, establishing relationships and selecting partners, and dealing with corruption and other ethical pitfalls. The book will apply a framework to understand each country along these dimensions. This book is a practical and comprehensive guide to succeeding in ASEAN countries. It allows for a deeper understanding of the business environment of these diverse economies. You will be better able to evaluate the risk factors and make meaningful decisions.
A comparison of interactions on Facebook brand pages between global brands and publics in individualistic and collectivistic countries
PITCHPATU WAIYACHOTE: A comparison of interactions on Facebook brand pages between global brands and publics in individualistic and collectivistic countries (Under the direction of Lois Boynton) The present study presents a comparative analysis of how Facebook was used to build and maintain relationships between global brands and their publics in individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Mixed methods — a quantitative content analysis and an online survey — were used. A total of 5,753 wall posts on the six global brands' Facebook brand pages available in five selected countries were analyzed. The U.S. represented individualistic cultures, while four Southeast Asian countries represented collectivistic cultures. Overall, the study found that differences in cultures play an important role in the interactions on Facebook between the global brands and their publics. The global brands used Facebook to build and maintain relationships with their publics in the U.S., but used it as an integrated tool to promote products and stay in touch with their publics in Southeast Asian countries. The publics in individualistic and collectivistic cultures alike were likely to use Facebook to maintain relationships with the global brands. The study also found that two dialogic communication features, a communication loop and an incentive, had an impact on the volumes of responding comments, especially in the individualistic country. A greater number of the brand community characteristics were found on Facebook brand pages in the U.S. than those in the Southeast Asian countries. ! ! iv! The findings in regards to brand personality suggested that the global brands did not use heavily Facebook to portray brand personality. Acknowledging the limited survey sample size, the study found that the congruency between brand personality portrayal and brand personality perceptions seemed to be associated with the presence of brand community on Facebook brand pages. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to my dissertation committee members: Dr. and Dr. William Ware for their guidance and support throughout the process of my dissertation work. I also want to thank my professors and cohorts at the school of Journalism for making my experience at UNC a memorable one. My gratitude also goes to all of my professors and teachers who have influenced me to want to become a teacher. I also would like to thank my soon-to-be coworkers at UTCC. Thank you all of my friends at Maree, Traim, ISU, and H&K for cheering me on. Thanks so …
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.