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This study presents a detailed examination of the Arab League¿s history, development, structure and roles in an effort to understand the cause of its failure as a regional security organisation. The research¿s point of departure is a questioning of the nature and scope of this failure in terms of the interplay between the conditions under which it was formed and the many actors and dynamics that had a long term-impact on the prospects for the League. To this end, the study looks at the League¿s conditions of emergence and Arab-Arab relations with the focus on Arab national security as the main concept determining its security role. The research synthesises methods of analysis from the existing literature and schools of thought so as to identify where and why failure and success occurred in relation to international relations theories, the security and international organisations literature, and comparable international models. The development and conditions affecting the League as discussed in the research demonstrate that none of the existing broad theories or approaches can fully explain the League¿s failure; however, the constructivist approach, although never before applied in this context, is shown to offer the most relevant approach for explaining this organisation and its unique parameters. The research also examines the role played by the Arab League in regional peacekeeping and conflict prevention in the context of Arab national security, with Palestine as a case study.

This research explores leadership effectiveness in organisations in Kuwait from the perspective of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). This is an area that has been neglected by the extant literature, and no integrated model for assessing CEO effectiveness exists for us to fully understand the phenomenon. Based on a positivist qualitative research approach, evidence was drawn from 16 CEOs using semi-structured interviews. The evidence was corroborated by using data obtained from participant observations of two CEOs working in the same organisation as the researcher. The results indicated that CEOs perceive leadership effectiveness as driving execution and not necessarily the realisation of goals themselves. Their experiences of leadership lead to CEOs in Kuwait believing that leadership effectiveness depends on their leadership style, relationship with the Board and the Executives, experience and family ground, societal and organisational culture, the business environment and CEO characteristics. On the basis of the participants’ perceptions of leadership effectiveness, it is recommended that CEO leadership development in Kuwait should focus on these areas, as this should equip CEOs to be effective in formulating clear visions and executing strategies to enable economic development of the country, and this should help them to compete globally. As the study focused on private and public companies, future research could consider CEOs from governmental and not-for-profit organisations to expand the sample of CEOs.

Agile methodology has existed for over a decade – its potential benefits have made it attractive and popular. As part of innovation, public organisations increasingly invest in information technology systems. Nevertheless, complex information technology adaptive systems require adaptability and flexibility to improve public organisations' delivery systems. Even though the Agile methodology can increase productivity and quality, adopting agile scrum methodology in public organisations is challenging. This study investigates public organisations where IT projects have unclear requirements and cross-functional team environments – which the scrum methodology is typically best suited for. However, despite the widely spread agile method concept and the need increased in the last two decades, still public organisations are not fully adapted to agile scrum methodology, and researchers have noticed slow and ineffective changes in adopting it. While many studies are available on challenges in adopting agile scrum methodology in public organisations' IT project management, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of these challenges. Therefore, challenges in adopting Agile scrum methodology in public organisations' IT project management context were studied in this literature review. This study aims to report on a systematic literature review about adopting agile scrum methodology in public organisations' IT project management and provide empirical evidence about its current situation and challenges. This research has used a systematic literature review as a research strategy and thematic analysis to analyse the secondary data, where the analysis is conducted based on the filtered themes, sub-themes and codes. The systematic literature review uses the preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework; inclusion and exclusion criteria systematically assess the quality of chosen papers and either include or exclude them for this research. Most relevant studies for final inclusion were selected, screened, and shortlisted based on the keywords from academic databases and other online resources to investigate and analyse the research question. The implementation of the agile scrum methodology in IT project management can present notable challenges for public organisations. A number of sources have identified these challenges, and a thorough examination of the matter reveals their frequency.

This master thesis explores how sexual harassment is handled and managed in organisations and to what extent bystander intervention is known and seen as a potential prevention mechanism. Ten interviews have been conducted with HR managers and other leading department heads working in private organisations in Germany. The purpose of this thesis was to gather knowledge on how sexual harassment is perceived and dealt with in those organisations under consideration of the concept of organisational culture and its impact. Bystander intervention has been discussed as a potential prevention strategy. Leadership behaviour and dominating power relations have been uncovered as significant impact factors shaping organisational culture and enabling space for sexually harassing behaviour to happen. Based on the findings this thesis offers implications for transforming organisations towards becoming more gender equal in the future such as creating awareness and enabling spaces to talk about it openly and educating people on forms and harms of sexual harassment as well as possibilities to act as a bystander.

In 1999 the European Union (EU) defined for the first time common priorities in the area of migration and asylum. In 2014 the Justice and Home Affairs Council is deciding on the fourth multi-annual strategic guidelines. This thesis examines the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the EU influencing these guidelines through the European Commission public consultation, and their impact on shaping the future agenda for migration and asylum. While the EU has gained more competences in this field and increased legal protection standards across the EU, member states favour restrictive and security-oriented policies. EU NGOs represent a more liberal rights based approach, and having difficulties getting their points across. A step-by-step process tracing reveals the factors that enabled influence, such as a structured civil dialogue with opportunities for input. However, there were also elements disabling this influence, related to the disconnection between civil society and the Council, which partly undermined the purpose of the consultation.

The aim of this study is to look at how organisations’ discourse is tailored to reach and persuade the donors, how it is constructed in terms of representation and power, and if there has been a change on representation of aid over the last decade. The study is conducted from texts and visuals from the Anglo-Saxon Save the Children Organization and the French Apprentis d’Auteuil Catholic Foundation to evaluate cultural points in relation to discourse constructions; most of the selected Material has been extracted from respective website at the same period of time (2003, 2013, and 2014) to make the comparison fair. The theoretical framework includes communication for development, post-colonialism, social theology, representation, discourse and power; the methodology is related to discourse analysis and visual analysis. The deconstruction of the texts has revealed that the traditional way of representing the disadvantaged as the voiceless ‘Others’ and the hegemonic approach, in the name of globalisation, are still strongly present as it seems to be a trigger for the act of donation. Nevertheless, according to studies, a new wind of social responsibility instead of Christian duty is emerging. A gap between the traditional representation of aid and actual modern actions implemented by organisations has been noticed mostly on the French national level. The recommendation to the organisations would be to compose a new discourse in their communication, placing the helper and the helped on a balanced representation, giving a common ‘human’ voice, promoting participation and insuring sustainable social change, towards a real changing of mentalities of the audience. This communication should also be homogenised between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media as well as speeches held by the organisations’ staff.

What kind of activity is global governance? What do all of the many sectoral forms of global governance – of the planetary environment, of global finance and global health – have in common? Moving beyond sector-specific studies, this book outlines the fundamentals of global governance in eight chapter-length propositions.

No / Faith-based organisations (FBOs) have delivered services to vulnerable people for many years. They are frequently characterised by values also to be found within social work, notably a commitment to social justice. In the context of recent attempts by governments, notably in the USA, United Kingdom and Australia, to ‘roll-back’ the state, to ‘marketise’ and ‘privatise’ welfare services, FBOs are increasingly called-upon to tender for and volunteer to provide public services, including ‘social work’. In the United Kingdom, as elsewhere, religious beliefs are central to how many people conduct themselves, especially in response to personal crises and challenges. The authors’ previous research indicates that religious beliefs and traditions may have a profound impact (for good or ill or for both) on the actions of both individual service users and practitioners, but that social workers and agencies (whether faith-based or not) are often ill equipped to respond appropriately. They acknowledge both the positive contributions to public welfare of many faith-based organisations and the potential dangers inherent in relying on such agencies for services to vulnerable people. The authors argue that evaluations need to consider the effectiveness, appropriateness, ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ of individual faith-based services in their particular contexts, and that their contribution needs to be analysed in relation to the varied nature and variable impact of such services. Social work has often struggled in its aim of challenging and addressing the structural causes of inequality as its efforts have been channelled towards meeting the needs of the individual. Current policy proposals provide potential opportunities to review and assess the contribution of neo-liberal approaches to welfare and to promote alliances amongst those members of different FBOs and other welfare providers to agree more collective, community-based approaches with an agreed agenda of creating a fairer society.

Surprisingly few studies have been performed regarding gender and general staff in higher education, a workforce that in Sweden is called stödpersonal, meaning supportive staff (my translation). Academic staff is called kärnpersonal, meaning core staff (my translation). The academy is a hierarchical organisation where core staff holds the decisive power of the means and the goals of the organisation. These terms can be seen as symbols for gendering processes, constructed by what Acker (1990) calls a gendered organisation. There is a gender imbalance between the categories, for example at Umeå University, 77 percent of those who work with administrative tasks are women (i.e. supportive staff), and 68 percent of the professors are men (i.e. core staff). In order to study the experiences of the supportive staff, qualitative interviews were made with members of the supportive staff at Umeå University. The study shows that supportive staff experiences a lack of participation in meetings and working teams, and it also experiences that the core staff doesn’t recognise its competence. The supportive staff also sees that there are few possibilities to career development. Supportive staff in this study might not know how to improve its situation, but it knows that in order to reach respectability and valuation (Skeggs, 1997, 2014) it should create a distance to an image of a secretary, a subject position that is created for the supportive staff by the university. A secretary represents a woman without a decisive power of her own; she is also a generalist, which is not meritorious in an organisation where the highest power is held by people with high level of specialist knowledge.