Sustainable development aims at improving human well-being, particularly by alleviating poverty, increasing gender equality, and improving health, human resources, and stewardship of the natural environment. Sustainable development is based on three pillars, namely, environmental protection and social progress and economic development. This study intended to contribute to sustainable development in the area of developmental social work practice by addressing the issues of new conceptualisations of social work practice, and in particular of intervention strategies, within the paradigm of sustainable social work practice. The purpose of this study was to explore and construct a foundation of general perceptions and tentative theories with regard to sustainable development and the position and value of the social work profession within the sustainable development paradigm. The goal of this research study was to explore current social work practice with regard to sustainable development and identify new challenges and opportunities for sustainable social work practice in the changing South Africa. The researcher utilised focus group discussions as a method of generating data and an exploratory research purpose as little is known about the topic of investigation and the utilization of focus groups are particularly useful in its ability to explore the topic. This study was a process of discovery and not the testing of a hypothesis. The researcher entered the realm of the participants’ everyday experience and through conversation extracted detailed descriptions of their perceptions, ideas and concerns. In this qualitative research the emphasis was on understanding the experiences, attitudes, assumptions and perspectives of the participants. The instrumental case study was used to provide insight into sustainable development as a new paradigm within the social welfare field and to discover the issues and challenges faced by the social work profession as it pertained to sustainable development. The data was organised around emerging themes and subsequently examined in relation to the literature. Based on the findings and conclusions drawn, the following recommendations were made: - The social work profession needs an information-sharing platform. - Collaboration and cooperation are crucial components in the process of sustainable development. - Social work practitioners have to become self-directed and lifelong learners who will be able to adapt to the changing circumstances in society. - Social work practitioners need to develop creative strategies within a multidisciplinary approach to address the issues of poverty, underdevelopment and unemployment in a sustainable manner. - Social work practitioners need to actively contribute to processes and structures that support the delivery of adult literacy and skills training efforts. - Social work practitioners need to explore ways and means of facilitating economic opportunities by addressing the obstacles and/or regulations that prevent people from accessing available markets. / Thesis (DPhil (Social Work))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Social Work / unrestricted

The aim of this project was to identify discourses of traditional African and African Christian women in a Tshivenda speaking community regarding the bereavement rituals performed after the death of a husband. Six focus groups were held with women who had lost their husbands to death. The verbal data were transcribed verbatim and translated from Tshivenda to English. I used a social constructionist paradigm to identify how Tshivenda women construct meaning about the bereavement rituals. The discourses that informed the construction of bereavement rituals were analysed to identify the situated meanings that emerged from the social reality during the performance of the prescribed cultural rituals. Certain discourses were found to be common to most of the women from both Christian and traditional African religions. The abnormality discourse was prevalent in informing the way that the participants, irrespective of their religious affiliation, constructed their grief experiences and bereavement rituals. They used language that implicated them as not normal and in need of healing (through performance of the rituals) for the injury caused by the death of their husbands. The power/patriarchal discourse informed the way participants used language to describe themselves as subordinate and powerless in relationships, while positioning others as having more power. A gender discourse in their constructions, implied that they performed rituals not only for socio-political reasons, but also because they were women, wives and mothers. Nevertheless, some participants used language that represented them as dominant and responsible for their actions, while others resisted cultural and societal labels of a widow as passive and with no voice about what happens in her life after the husband’s death. These participants accepted their gender stereotype, but enacted their freedom of action and interaction. These participants either performed the rituals because they were willing to or believed in their (rituals) role and significance in their lives or they did not perform the rituals because they were in a position to resist cultural norms and other people’s oppression. A religious-cultural discourse emerged in terms of social relationships and structures of the wider culture. The language they used was informed by their religious affiliation and a collectivist culture. Lastly, minor discourses (fear, blame, religious and witchcraft discourses) informed the participants’ description of other aspects of their experiences in ways that legitimised both the rituals and the participants’ positions. The discourses should be considered to help sensitise and inform people about the impact of bereavement rituals on the psychological well-being of bereaved women. It is also important for people to understand the positions women are subjected to by themselves, by others and by their religious-cultural heritage. The present study showed that it is important to empower widows who identified themselves as powerless and not responsible for their actions regarding bereavement rituals. They should be encouraged to re-construct their positions and their notions of issues like responsibility, power and womanhood that can assist them to understand the positions that they could accept or deny before and after the death of their husbands. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Psychology / unrestricted

Eleven official languages are spoken in South Africa. Misunderstandings during communication seems to be inevitable. The researcher or psychologist often does not speak or have full command of the language of the group that is being investigated, and therefore has to rely on interpreters to understand the internally experienced world of these persons. Trained interpreters are scarce and this study endeavours to determine the extent of the validity of translations done by the available interpreters. This is done by means of a psychological-systemic perspective. The nature of this study is qualitative. Fifteen interviews were conducted with trauma patients at the Maxilla- and Face Surgery Department of the Garankuwa Hospital. Only eleven of these were useable. Mouth injuries etc. affected the quality of the other interviews not used. Four nurses from this department interviewed the patients and wrote up the interpreted answers on a semi-structured interview schedule made available by the researcher. A verbatim translation of the interviews was made from the tape recordings. Units of meaning were assigned and a comparison of the interpreted and the verbatim translations were made. Three perceptual styles were used to identify how much of the meaning the interpreter included (sharpening), excluded (levelling) and changed (assimilation) during the translation. The translation-interpretation process is analysed against the contextual background and paradigms of the participants The results make it clear that South Africa indeed has a problem with the validity of the outputs of interpreters being used as well as the availability of interpreters and their subject-specific training. Copyright 2005, University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. Please cite as follows: Barsby, A 2005, Die rol van tolke in onderhoudvoering : ‘n sielkundig-sistemiese perspektief en geldigheidsbepaling (Afrikaans), MA dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-10172005-152643 / > / Dissertation (MA (Research Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Psychology / unrestricted

In a global media environment characterized by change and conflict, narratives are especially useful to understand how the media form and distribute shared understanding of how the world works and who the important actors are. As the borders between local and global politics are blurred in the digital media landscape, protesters are in increased rate turning their placards to global broadcasters’ cameras, especially when political movements such as the U.S.-based Black Lives Matter movement get international counterparts. The scholarship concerned with the framework through which the media report protests argue the protest paradigm offers useful variables for the study of protests, while problematizing the lack of research on global broadcasting media. Global broadcasters, International Relations scholars argue, need to be understood as resources of soft power that distribute strategic narratives, but they have yet to develop a methodology for how broadcasts can be empirically studied. With this research gap as a point of departure, the chosen case study is the unrest in Ferguson in August 2014. A quantitative mapping and a comparative narrative analysis focusing on the narrative structure were conducted on 16 days of news bulletins from Al Jazeera English, BBC World News and RT. The results show several differences in the reports, the first concerns the amount of attention that was given to Ferguson by each broadcaster, where RT gave almost twice the amount of attention as the other two broadcasters. Further differences were found in the sources each broadcaster used and how they used violence as an entry-point to what their narratives where about, which in the case of AJE was the effects violence has on a society; BBCW’s narrative was of a political issue of high importance that concerns people of color; whereas RT’s narrative was about the militarization of the U.S. police force. The results imply the global broadcasters offer distinctive narratives, which through different storytelling techniques convey different attitudes and morals.

Due to various shortcomings of the visual system, some visual stimuli can only be identified with 100% accuracy if they are shown for a certain amount of time. This time can be measured using the Inspection Time (IT) paradigm. In an IT task, a “pi” figure with differing leg lengths is typically presented briefly (e.g., 20-200 ms) and is then immediately masked to prevent retinal afterimages. Participants are subsequently required to choose which of the two legs was longer. The objective of this task is to determine the shortest amount of time the pi figure needs to be shown for it to be perceived with 80% accuracy. Given that visual processing has been shown to be altered during and /or prior to a movement, the present experiment sought to test how the requirement to perform a motor task affected IT. Twenty-eight participants took part in the experiment, which was comprised of three conditions: no-movement (NM), peak velocity (PV), and foreperiod (FP). In the NM condition, participants grasped a manipulandum and engaged in the IT paradigm. At the end of every trial, participants verbally stated which leg they believed was longest. In the PV condition participants made a rapid movement to a target, and the IT stimulus was presented when their limb reached peak velocity. Finally in the FP condition the IT stimulus was presented during foreperiod (FP). In all three conditions the IT stimulus was randomly presented from between 15-105 ms (in 15 ms increments) and masked for 400 ms. Results showed no significant differences on the IT task between the NM and FP conditions, suggesting no visual upregulation during foreperiod. However, IT performance was significantly poorer in the PV condition in comparison to both the NM and FP condition, suggesting a visual downregulation at that particular movement kinematic.

Doppelt defends the key elements of Kuhn's thesis that scientific revolutions occur when one paradigm is replaced by another and that crucial aspects of competing paradigms are incommensurable. He concedes the merits in the views of those positivist critics of Kuhn who contend that for paradigms to be comparable their proponents must be able to communicate with one another, to agree on a common core of meaning for basic concepts and to deal with shared data and problems. However, he maintains that in identifying the problems which are held to be of fundamental importance and in adopting the standards by which explanatory adequacy is to be evaluated, rival paradigms do not overlap sufficiently for them to have genuine commensurability. This leads Doppelt to accept Kuhn's version of epistemological relativism which maintains that the rationality of the acceptance of new paradigms by the scientific community, at least in the short-run, has an irreducible normative dimension that is strongly conditioned by subjective factors. Doppelt also accepts Kuhn's views with respect to the loss of data, and the question of cumulative progress. The absence of paradigm-neutral external standards allegedly allows each paradigm to assign priority to its own internal standards, thus providing persuasive grounds for the incommensurability of competing paradigms and for epistemological relativism. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that the validity of these arguments over the long term is a contingent issue which can only be resolved by a careful examination of the historical evidence. A chemical revolution took place in the latter part of the eighteenth century when the oxygen theory replaced that based on hypothetical phlogiston. This transition is frequently cited as a typical example of a paradigm - one that illustrates Kuhn's claims for a shift in standards and a loss of data as central features of scientific revolutions. The phlogiston theory held that phlogiston was a normal constituent of air. It explained smelting as the transfer of phlogiston from the air (or from phlogiston-rich charcoal) to the earthy components of the ore, and held that the similar properties of the metallic products could be attributed to their phlogiston content. Combustion, including the calcination of metals and the respiration of living organisms, was viewed as a process involving the release of phlogiston to the atmosphere. The development of improved techniques for collecting gases and for measuring their volume and weight lead to emphasis on precise quantitative methods for evaluating chemical data as distinct from those based on simple quantitative descriptive observations. These developments soon posed difficulties for the phlogiston theory (eg.,the anomalous weight loss during combustion). Eventually, clarification of the composition of water and the use of the 'nitrous air1 test for the ability of a gas to support combustion and respiration (its 'goodness') led to the discovery of oxygen as a component of air and the demonstration that combustion involved combination with an exact quantity of this gas. Within a relatively short period of time, the oxygen theory gained general acceptance and the phlogiston theory was abandoned by most chemists. A critical examination of the events which culminated in the chemical revolution fails to bear out the claim that it was accompanied by a significant loss of empirical data or that it did not represent genuine cumulative progress in scientific knowledge. Instead the history of this revolution indicates that paradigm-neutral external standards for evaluating explanatory adequacy (conservatism, modesty, simplicity, generality, internal and external coherence, refutability, precision, successful predictions) were available and played a crucial role in bringing about this transition. Accumulating evidential warrant played the decisive role in the triumph of the oxygen theory. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

La Responsabilité Sociale des Entreprises (RSE) constitue un mouvement majeur d'évolution des organisations actuelles du secteur économique. Au cœur d'une société moderne en perpétuelle mutation, la notion de responsabilité acquiert une place centrale dans la conception et la réalisation de l'action. Les démarches RSE menées par les entreprises font donc l'objet de nombreuses études dans leurs dimensions économiques et gestionnaires, mais restent encore peu questionnées quant à leur dimension socio-culturelle singulière.Ce travail doctoral étudie les répercussions de l'introduction de discours et de pratiques relevant de la RSE sur les salariés des entreprises du secteur de la grande distribution. L'émergence d'un véritable paradigme social de la responsabilité, qui mobilise un ensemble de valeurs et de croyances transversales à une société, somme ces individus de surmonter l'épreuve paradigmatique de la responsabilité par laquelle ils se devront d'intégrer les attentes de responsabilités au cœur des représentations et des actions de leur travail quotidien. Dans ce cadre, l'organisation endosse un rôle accompagnateur singulier de l'individu éprouvé en lui fournissant de nombreux supports, mais aussi en lui opposant des contraintes importantes, issus, pour l'ensemble, de l'histoire et des structures organisationnelles.L'étude qualitative, réalisée autour de l'analyse approfondie de quarante-deux entretiens semi-directifs et d'une étude documentaire fouillée, montre comment l'individu devient le dépositaire de la lourde charge d'énacter dans son travail les enjeux sociaux et macro-sociaux des évolutions de l'univers paradigmatique de la société auquel il participe. / Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a major evolution for the current organizations in the economic sector. At the heart of a modern ever-changing society, the notion of responsibility takes a central place in the design and implementation of the action. The economic and managerial dimensions of CSR initiatives undertaken by companies are thus the subject of numerous studies, but these initiatives remain poorly surveyed concerning their unique socio-cultural dimension.This doctoral work examines the implications of the introduction of discourse and practices of CSR on employees of companies in the retail sector. The emergence of a social paradigm of responsibility, which involves a set of values and beliefs across a society, requires these individuals to overcome the paradigmatic challenge of responsibility; they can then incorporate this sense of responsibility into the heart of the ideals and actions of their daily work. In this context, the organization provides a singular accompanying role for the individual's experience by providing a variety of supports, but also by upholding major boundaries derived from fundamental organizational ethos and established structures.The qualitative study conducted around the thorough analysis of forty-two semi-structured interviews and an extensive documentation study, shows how the individual becomes the custodian of the heavy burden of enacting in his work, the social and macro-social issues of developments of the paradigmatic world of the society in which he participates.

As Narrativas Políticas são histórias que contêm começo, meio e fim; vilões e heróis; perdas e ganhos; e, sobretudo, uma moral (soluções políticas). E por que estes elementos narrativos são importantes nesse estudo? Por meio de sua análise, pudemos compreender aquilo que é considerado a pedra fundamental das articulações e mudanças políticas: As ideias e os interesses. A Política Científica e Tecnológica (PCT) brasileira apresentou distintas narrativas nas últimas décadas, os documentos oficiais de C&T da década de 1970, como o I e II Plano Nacional Básico de Ciência Tecnologia (PBDCT, 1972-74 e 1976-1979, respectivamente), tinham como meta, impulsionar a autonomia nacional em setores estratégicos e suprir a demanda de mão-de-obra qualificada para que o processo de industrialização nacional fosse finalizado. Todavia, á medida que a crise econômica aumentava na década de 1980, a C&T perdia a imagem de ferramenta para o progresso, desta forma, o fomento público foi retirado progressivamente e a Academia teve que seguir sem amplo amparo estatal dos Planos anteriores, como vimos no III PBDCT (1980-1985). O resultado desta falta de financiamento público à C&T foi catastrófico: Houve um verdadeiro desmonte no setor, ocasionada pela falta de recursos. A C&T não tinha espaço estratégico na Agenda pública. A situação foi, gradualmente, revertida quando Fernando Henrique Cardoso assumiu a presidência em 1995 e promoveu inúmeras reformas, entre elas, tentar tornar o setor de C&T mais eficaz, empreendedor e inovativo. Para isto, era preciso desenvolver rearranjos estatais, como os que foram postulados no PlanoPluriAnual (PPA, 1997), no Programa de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, sobretudo, em sua terceira fase (III PADCT, 1998-2004), no Livro Verde (2001) e Livro Branco (2002). Estes documentos apontavam que as políticas públicas C&T estariam empenhadas em assumir novos desafios, convidar novos atores para sua fabricação e remodelar sua dinâmica de produção para atender um objetivo central: Produzir Inovações Tecnológicas por meio da interação universidade-empresa. Tal sinergia foi apresentada como peça-chave na transformação de conhecimento em riqueza, isto agregaria competitividade às nossas empresas, provocando uma nova inserção do Brasil nas relações comerciais internacionais. Essa seria a justificativa última para o financiamento público da ciência. Esta e demais premissas, também estavam presentes nos documentos de C&T&I de seu sucessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, como nos textos da Lei da Inovação (2004) 3º Conferência Nacional de C&T&I (2006) e Livro Azul (2010). Nosso estudo buscou analisar os elementos narrativos de todos os documentos citados e, ao analisa-los, pudemos concluir que desde 1995 o Paradigma que informa a Política Nacional de C&T é lastreado em pressupostos bem distintos daqueles vividos pelo auge do binômio na década de 1970. Acreditamos que esta reorientação se deve, sobretudo, pelo fato da Comunidade Científica ter absorvido, há quinze anos, o discurso da Inovação tecnologia empresarial como alternativa para manter-se no bojo do processo decisório da PCT, captar recursos e continuar a Pesquisa, instrumentos inviáveis nas décadas de 1980-90. / Policy Narratives are stories that contain \"beginning, middle and end\"; villains and heroes; losses and gains; and, above all, a moral (political solutions). And why these narrative elements are important in this study? Through its analysis, we understand what is considered the cornerstone of the joints of political changes: The ideas and the interests. The Science and Technology Policy (PCT) Brazilian showed distinct narratives in recent decades, the official documents of S & T in the 1970s, as the Basic I and II National Plan for Science, Technology (PBDCT, 1972-74 and 1976-1979, respectively), had as its goal, to boost national autonomy in strategic sectors and meet the demand for skilled labor for the national industrialization process was finalized. However, as the economic crisis grew in the 1980s, S & T lost its image as a \"tool\" to progress. In this way, the public support was withdrawn and the Academy had to follow on without extensive state support given by the earlier Plans, as we saw in PBDCT III (1980-1985). The result of this lack of public funding to the S & T sector was catastrophic: There was a real disassemble the sector, caused by lack of resources. The S & T had no strategic space in the public agenda. This situation was gradually reversed when Fernando Henrique Cardoso took office in 1995. The new President promoted numerous reforms, among them, the one trying to make the most effective use of S & T sector, as a tool for innovation and entrepreneurship. In order to reach this results, it was necessary to promote institutional rearrangements, which spelled out in the PlanoPluriAnual (PPA, 1997), in the Third phase of the Plan for Support of Scientific and Technological Development, mainly, the third step (III PADCT, 1998-2004) the Green Paper (2001) and White Paper (2002). These documents indicated that S & T policies would now be committed to take on new challenges, invite new players to reshape the dynamics of their production in order to meet a central goal: to produce technological Innovations through university-industry interaction. This synergy was presented as a key in transforming knowledge into wealth. And by doing that, science would add competitiveness to our companies, supporting a new insertion of Brazil in international market. This and other assumptions were also present in the documents of S & T & I of his successor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, as the texts of the Innovation Law (2004) 3rd National Conference on S & T (2006) and Blue Book (2010). That said, our study investigates the narrative elements of any cited documents and to analyze them, we concluded that since 1995 the paradigm that informs the National Policy of S & T is backed by very different assumptions of those experienced by the binomial peak in decade 1970. we believe that this shift is due, above all, because the scientific community has absorbed fifteen years ago, the discourse of Innovation with half remain at the core of decision-making of the PCT, raise funds and continue the search, viable instruments in decades of 1980-90.

Studien undersöker de huvudsakliga motiven bakom kinesiska företagsförvärv på den svenska marknaden. På senare tid har Kinas direktinvesteringar inom de europeiska länderna ökat, där Sverige har varit en av de huvudsakliga mottagarna. Som följd har det uppstått en oro i såväl Europa som Sverige kring vilka motiv som ligger bakom investeringarna. För att undersöka vilka de huvudsakliga motiven är har en egen analysmodell med fyra propositioner utarbetats. Analysmodellen baseras på Dunnings fyra motiv för utländska direktinvesteringar (FDI), tidigare studier om Kinas investeringsmönster samt fakta om den svenska marknadens egenskaper. För att besvara studiens forskningsfråga genomfördes fyra intervjuer. Resultatet visade att samtliga av Dunnings motiv går att applicera på kinesiska investerare vid val av investeringsmarknad, men där vissa motiv är mer vanligt förekommande. Studien tyder även på den kinesiska statens starka inflytande över kinesiska investerare och hur det kan överträffa individuella motiv.

Aim of this master's thesis is to create a tool for checking correctness of design diagrams in UML. The work describes the UML language and connected standards, defines the problem of UML correctness and explains the approach of using incorrectness pattern database to check the UML correctness. Furthermore it suggests the QVT language as a suitable for implementing the incorrectness patterns. The problem is decomposed into shared incorrectness pattern database manageable via web interface, standalone tool for use from the command line and a plugin for the UML design software Visual Paradigm. All of the components are designed, implemented, tested and evaluated. The important aspect is the openness and extensibility of the tool.