From March 2006 until March 2008 I worked and did research with young people in El Salvador. I coordinated a local youth participation project in the capital, where, at the same time, I conducted fieldwork for my PhD research. The youth project aimed at empowering young people through participatory action research (PAR) and, together with the young participants, I critically reflected on the empowering impact of this participatory process. While participatory researchers and practitioners traditionally stress the importance of critical consciousness and critical discourse as the principal motors for individual and social transformation, my research with the young people particularly confronted me with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges. This research focuses in particular on the politics of emotions; their role in confirming exclusion and oppression and in facilitating empowerment and resistance. In this thesis, I bring together different bodies of theory. I start from the critical literature on PAR and from a poststructuralist account of power and empowerment. I build on an understanding of emotions as socio-culturally constructed and, at the same time, as deeply embodied phenomena. I look into emotional geographies considering emotions as relational and as always functioning within power relations and I use non-representational theory to challenge the privilege of cognition by focussing on practical and embodied knowledges and explicitly recognising their political and empowering potential. I conclude that although participatory researchers have increasingly extended and refined their understanding of power and empowerment, they still focus too much on critical reflection, discourse and conscious/linguistic representation as key to personal and social change. This focus has distracted their attention from the way power works through emotions and embodied knowledges. I believe that participatory researchers should become more sensitive still to the subtleties of power by paying more explicit attention to how emotions and embodied knowledges function within power relations to reproduce or challenge the existing status quo. Such a focus also opens new doors to new ways of empowerment (and politics) by considering alternative methods and media directly engaging with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges to shape the social world.

There is an ongoing discussion about trusts significance and role in the reliance on accounting performance measures (RAPM) field and organizational behavior. This knowledge gap has led to opposite findings but still many researchers give recognition to the concept that trust may be crucial and significant in management control. Considering previous research a continuation is necessary and since it seems that the researchers have come to an impasse, it is time to include different variables that can help to explain the variation in the relationship. The main purpose of this study is to challenge the research gap and change the dependent variable; instead of behavioral outcome this study investigates performance. Is it possible that mutual trust, high budget participation and empowerment together have an impact on organizational performance? If so, is it possible that these variables together can lower the information asymmetry and increase performance? A qualitative research method is used to investigate these questions in form of a critical incident survey and semi structured interviews. To test if there is any connection or correlation between the variables a supportive correlation analysis is conducted in the program SPSS. The results have shown that there is a connection and correlation between the variables trust, budget participation and empowerment. When these variables function together it is possible to see a greater organizational performance. When there is mutual trust and high budget participation there is more willingness to disclose information directly. This study has contributed to the current knowledge gap and provided new theoretical and empirical insight. Keywords: Trust, budget participation, empowerment, information asymmetry, organizational performance.

Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / Timothy J. Dalton / Smallholder farmers in Tanzania remain susceptible to food insecurity and poverty. To combat these challenges, the country and development organizations have turned to agriculture. In particular, value chains have been identified as a point of interest. Specifically, the maize value chain is of critical importance since maize is the staple crop of the country as well as the staple carbohydrate in the Tanzanian diet. Markets are beneficial because they enable households to specialize in agricultural production according to their comparative advantage. Specifically, markets have been shown to be one tool for increasing welfare, measured through the proxy income. The objective of this thesis is to identify the determinants of a household’s decision to participate in the maize market as well as identify the determinants of a household’s decision regarding how much maize to sell in a given market. This research examines formal and informal market participation among 908 households during the 2008 long rainy season. Probit models were estimated to determine market participation for the formal, informal, and aggregate sale market levels. A Heckman OLS model was used to further analyze the value sold by the household in a given market. Econometric results indicate that “quantity harvested” positively and significantly impacts market participation decisions as well as value sold decisions. The variable “male-headed households” was positive and significant in the formal market while the variable showed no significant impact in the informal market participation model. Both “radio ownership” and “mobile telephone ownership” proved to be positive and significant in the formal model while only the ownership of a radio was significant in the informal market. Additionally it was found that for the formal market participation decision, “bicycle ownership” was positive and significant. Overall, it appears that households participate in the informal market as a way to meet cash needs since farmers were not price-responsive. However, in the formal market farmers were found to be very price-responsive, following neo-classical economic theory.

Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / Vincent Amanor-Boadu / Transaction costs, one of the most significant barriers to market participation, may vary by buyer type. Depending on who a farmer sells their produce to, they may alter their potential transaction costs consequently influencing their market participation. This study examines the effect of buyer type on smallholder market participation in Northern Ghana where poverty is still endemic and often exacerbated by fewer opportunities for commercialization such as limited access to markets. The analysis is based on data from the agriculture production survey conducted in 2013 and 2014 and the Population based Survey conducted in 2012 in northern Ghana. Analysis is performed using the Double Hurdle approach to control for self-selection bias, ensure more flexibility on the variables affecting the decision to sell and how much to sell as well as to provide unconditional effects of the variables on market participation. The results reveal greater market participation of cash crop producing farmers than those producing a lower value food crop - Maize. The results also show that farmers selling to aggregator-type middlemen and other buyers have a propensity to sell more. The aggregators and ‘other buyers’ buy in bulky, offer lower prices and are associated with lower transport, loading and offloading costs than consumers. Farm output, access to information and price also have a significant positive impact on intensity of market participation. These findings support policy initiatives such as supporting aggregator-type middlemen, increasing the provision of information, promotion of cash crops as well as supporting more interventions focusing on increasing production and yields.

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M.Ed. (Educational Management) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

M.Com. / Participative management has been hailed as the strategic choice to overcoming problems at the workplace. It has become a buzzword for management in the 1980s, and yet has not become entrenched far enough in South Africa to say that participative management practice is, and has been a success ...

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This study investigated the extent and scope of citizen voice in public decision-making in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature (GPL) from two theoretical perspectives. It is structured around three components; an in-depth exposition of the literature on citizen participation, application of two theoretical frameworks applied to the scope of citizen voice in the GPL and an applied case study approach. This study found that the literature ascribes multiple meanings to citizen participation and that there are incongruities in the manner in which the literature conceptualises, describes the mechanisms, and outlines the intentions, and outcomes of citizen participation. Citizen voice in the GPL is deemed to be contextual to and influenced by the interplay of the socio-political environment, multiple interests, values and sub-systems. The case study approach allows for an expanded analysis of the implicit power dynamics in the GPL and the institutional political processes on the nature and extent of citizen voice. In this study citizen voice is regarded as an opportunity for direct, representational and/or institutional expression of citizen interests in public decisions consolidating democracy, citizenship and legitimate government.The GPL’s policy documents point to a stated intent of democratic public participation conceived and pursued as citizen control, empowerment and partnership. However the conclusion is that this participation vacillates between information sharing and consultations, but not decisionmaking control. The study asserts that the theory on citizen voice in public decision-making is under-developed and there is a disconnection between the literature and citizen experiences.

Thesis advisor: Callista L. Roy / Purpose: The purpose of this research was to address the gap in the literature related to frail older adults' experience of participating in clinical trials. Background: Frail older adults are generally underrepresented in the population of research volunteers from which evidence-based guidelines are derived. To improve care for frail older adults, research must be expanded to specifically target this population. Most of the users of healthcare today are greater than 65 years old, use more health care services than any other age cohort and suffer from coexisting illnesses for which they take several prescribed medications. Since the number of elders is increasing within the general population, it is important to reach a more thorough understanding of frail older adults' experience. Acquiring a better understanding of their experience will give the investigator more insight into barriers of recruitment, retention, and factors affecting elders' decision to participate in research. Method: Using a qualitative descriptive approach involving semi-structured interviews, a cohort of participants age 65 and older was asked about their experience of participating in research studies. Data analysis used an interpretive paradigm involving the methods of Miles, Huberman, and Saldana (2014). Results: Participants identified the main factors influencing their decision to participate as the opinions and encouragement of family members with the strongest influence being a recommendation from their doctor. Participants were varied in the emotions evoked by their participation in the study procedures. The majority of participants stressed how important it was to them to receive feedback in the form of results of studies in which they had participated. The majority of participants stated that receiving feedback or research results was the exception. Conclusions: Data generated from this study related to the experience of frail elder participation in clinical trials will be useful in designing future clinical trials to be more inclusive of this patient population. Keywords: frail elders, research participation, clinical trials, chronic illness, qualitative, multmorbidity / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Connell School of Nursing. / Discipline: Nursing.