College of Humanities & Social Sciences

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    Electronic Procurement Assimilation, Procurement Process and Value for Money in the Public Sector: Investigating the Role of Influence Mechanisms and Absorptive Capacity
    (KNUST, 2019) Frimpong, John Manso
    The concept of value for money has become very critical in developing countries where states struggle to raise the needed revenue in-house and must augment with funds from international sources to finance public projects. Given the limited resources available to government, ensuring value for money in procurement is key to attain the optimum utilization of scarce budgetary resources. To realize the objective of value for money in public procurement, several interventions have been employed by developing nations including instilling professionalism in procurement actors, enacting procurement laws and implementing sustainable initiatives. One initiative is the use of electronic procurement systems in the public procurement process. These systems afford public sector organisations to respond rapidly to changes and to pursue technologically innovative strategies. The ability of public institutions to recognize the value of a new information, assimilate and apply it largely depends on the institutions’ prior knowledge, institutional pressures emanating from regulations that govern the practice of procurement in the public sector and government policies and initiatives. However, the relationships among institutional pressures, absorptive capacity, e-procurement assimilation and value for money have not been studied. The study first develops a survey instrument to measure value for money and examines how absorptive capacity and institutional pressures influence e-procurement assimilation and the tendering process to achieve value for money in public procurement. A total of 306 public entities were surveyed and partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the empirical data. Theoretical implications of the study include: 1) institutional pressures and absorptive capacity are key drivers of an efficient and effective tendering process, 2) institutional pressure have direct effect on institutional absorptive capacity, 3) the influence of institutional pressures on e-procurement assimilation is mediated by absorptive capacity, 3) the influence of e-procurement assimilation on value for money is mediated by an efficient tendering process and 4) industry type has marginal statistical significance on the influence of institutional pressures and absorptive capacity on e-procurement assimilation leading to value for money in public procurement. Practical implication of this study include: 1) a legal framework for e-procurement would compel actors to comply and use the application, 2) provision of tools needed to scan, identify and assimilate new information necessary for e-procurement application use would enhance efficient procurement process and 3) the instrument developed could be used to conduct value for money audit prior to the selection of appropriate service providers in public sector tendering.
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    Attention-Based Drivers, Operational Resilience, And Operational Efficiency: Model Development And Empirical Analysis
    (KNUST, 2019) Essuman, Dominic
    Developing knowledge of drivers and outcomes of operational resilience is important for building resilient societies as societal welfare depends on the sustenance of business operations. However, such knowledge will not only be incomplete but also misleading if the operational resilience construct remains ambiguous. This study first develops the conceptual domain of operational resilience, and second combines insights from the attention-based view of the firm, the contingency theory, and the resource-based view to propose a model to investigate how attention to threats, uniquely, and in interaction with strategic mission rigidity and disruption orientation, affect operational resilience and how operational resilience affects operational efficiency. The proposed conceptual model is tested on survey data from 259 firms in a major Sub-Sahara African economy - Ghana. The measurement and the structural parts of the model are analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and three-stage least squares estimator respectively. Results support the arguments that operational resilience consists of two distinct theoretical components: disruption absorption and recoverability; and that attention to threats positively relates to operational resilience. Additional analysis, however, shows that there is a limit to the operational resilience benefit of attention to threats: extreme levels of attention to threats are associated with low levels of operational resilience. Further results support the arguments that strategic mission rigidity and disruption orientation negatively and positively moderate the attention to threats-operational resilience relationship respectively and that operational resilience is positively related to operational efficiency. The study demonstrates that contingency-based models can be useful for investigating the drivers and outcomes of operational resilience. A key practical implication from the study is that managers' ability to match emphasis on attention to threats with relevant attention structures may boost operational resilience, and accordingly operational efficiency.
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    Problèmes de traduction : le cas des étudiants à kwame Nkrumah university of science and technology, kumasi
    (2019) Azasu, Cornelius Yaw
    The focus of this work was to take an inventory of translation problems through an evaluation of translation skills of undergraduate students learning French at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi. basically, the underlying hypotheses stem from the following: firstly, the translator's translation of an utterance is dependent on relevant choices of information made in the context; secondly, when the translator translates by taking into account only lexical information, the result is literal translation if the meaning of the utterance is left out; thirdly, translation is a hypothetical process where comprehension is important. A model of skills grouped into six sub-skills was used. These sub-skills constituted the know-how, the body of knowledge, skills and abilities. In addition, each touches on the main areas that the translator should master in his work. It has to do with knowledge universally acquired and the subject learnt. Two questionnaires with forty-one variables were coded and entries made into the statistical package for Social Sciences, SPSS 20.0 Then, frequency distribution tables were generated according to levels of study for two consecutive academic years, i.e. the first semester of both the 2015/2016 and the 2016/2017 academic years. Analyses from our findings have enabled us to validate all our hypotheses. We have also discovered that regarding computer assisted translations, computers are not capable of making contextual inferences and this fact marks off the translator from the machine.
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    Attention-Based Drivers, Operational Resilience, and Operational Efficiency: Model Development and Empirical Analysis
    (KNUST, 2019) Essuman, Dominic
    Developing knowledge of drivers and outcomes of operational resilience is important for building resilient societies as societal welfare depends on the sustenance of business operations. However, such knowledge will not only be incomplete but also misleading if the operational resilience construct remains ambiguous. This study first develops the conceptual domain of operational resilience, and second combines insights from the attention-based view of the firm, the contingency theory, and the resource-based view to propose a model to investigate how attention to threats, uniquely, and in interaction with strategic mission rigidity and disruption orientation, affect operational resilience and how operational resilience affects operational efficiency. The proposed conceptual model is tested on survey data from 259 firms in a major Sub-Sahara African economy - Ghana. The measurement and the structural parts of the model are analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and three-stage least squares estimator respectively. Results support the arguments that operational resilience consists of two distinct theoretical components: disruption absorption and recoverability; and that attention to threats positively relates to operational resilience. Additional analysis, however, shows that there is a limit to the operational resilience benefit of attention to threats: extreme levels of attention to threats are associated with low levels of operational resilience. Further results support the arguments that strategic mission rigidity and disruption orientation negatively and positively moderate the attention to threats-operational resilience relationship respectively and that operational resilience is positively related to operational efficiency. The study demonstrates that contingency-based models can be useful for investigating the drivers and outcomes of operational resilience. A key practical implication from the study is that managers' ability to match emphasis on attention to threats with relevant attention structures may boost operational resilience, and accordingly operational efficiency
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    Regulatory Institutional Environment and Operational Performance: The Roles of Inter-Firm Governance Mechanisms and Structural Network Complexity
    (KNUST, 2019) Anin, Emmanuel Kwabena
    The regulatory institutional environment (hereafter regulatory environment) has important implications on a firm’s strategies and operations. Accordingly, several scholarly works, over the years, have focused on investigating its influences on business performance outcomes. Yet, how regulatory environment affects business performance outcomes is still not clear as the emerged evidences have been largely inconsistent and inconclusive. Of interest, knowledge of the conditional processes through which regulatory environment may enhance or undermine operational performance appears limited. Drawing on institutional theory and inter-firm governance literature, this study proposes and tests a model that suggests that regulatory environment drives operational performance, via inter-firm governance mechanisms, but that this indirect effect is conditional upon levels of structural network complexity. The study uses a sample of 331 firms from the service and manufacturing sectors in Ghana—a developing economy in sub-Saharan Africa—to test the proposed relationship. Largely supporting the theoretical predictions, the results from structural equation modelling show that under varying conditions of structural network complexity, different dimensions of governance mechanisms (formal control and social control) play differential mediating roles in the relationship between regulatory environment and firm operational performance. Specifically, the study finds that at low and high levels of structural network complexity, the positive indirect effects of regulatory environment on operational performance, via formal control and social control are strengthened respectively. The significance of the findings is that they provide a possible explanation for the divergent and sometimes conflicting results obtained on the direct regulatory environment-performance relationship. The theoretical implication is that different dimensions of governance mechanisms channel the impact of macro level regulatory conditions to firm level operational performance at different levels of structural network complexity. Practical implications for managers who make strategic and operational decisions about inter-organizational business networks are discussed.