Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
The primary question this thesis seeks to resolve is whether institutional voids have any practical use informing managers about business environments in the Global South. The hypothesis is that the concept is now so diffuse that it has become effectively meaningless and that managers in the real world use more sophisticated methods of assessing potential host countries. The telecommunications industry is particularly vulnerable to the institutional capabilities of host governments is because of its reliance on the host government to provide effective capital markets and appropriate legal mechanisms needed for investment in infrastructure and technology. For this reason, this research will focus on what role, if any, Institutional Voids play in corporate decision making.
After performing a comparative case analysis, the researcher found that after examining the cases the outcomes diverged from what the institutional voids hypothesis would have suggested, suggesting that the hypothesis is insufficient at predicting outcomes. Researcher then suggests using statistically proven models from development research to better analyze government capacity across countries.
We cannot ignore factors of religion, politics, and culture. There is a rise in political populism: Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign, Brexit, a rise in Russian and Chinese nationalism, just to name a few. New global players want to establish themselves as leaders, through technology and territorial growth. The purpose of my research is to analyze China’s growth in the automotive sector, identify trade issues with respect to this industry between the United States and China, and to encourage others to re-evaluate our position in a global, interconnected economy. A global economy that is too dependent on a single, state-funded production hub is a vulnerable one. The main issues are in China’s unfair trade practices, including currency manipulation, Chinese import dumping, poor working conditions, safety standards violations, and nationalized or government owned businesses.