This study deals with the issue of entrepreneurship and gender. A central part is to understand how entrepreneurial opportunities and identities are constructed and linked to each other. The aim is to increase our understanding about entrepreneurial processes, identification and role creation. A gender structure is a premise and it is ar-gued that norms, values and meanings in society affect women that are entrepreneurs in the sense that they are seen as “the other” and are compared to a male norm. Entre-preneurship is described as opportunity construction rather than opportunity recogni-tion or opportunity finding. The empirical context is drawn from interviews with 15 en-trepreneurs, all women from the county of Gävleborg in Sweden, who have left a job in the public sector in order to start new private ventures. The main contribution of this study is an increased understanding of entrepreneu-rial identification processes, from a gender perspective. One part of these processes is resistance that the entrepreneurs meet and practice. This study identifies the strong presence of a male discourse and describes how women, who are entrepreneurs deals with that. It is argued that there is a need to open up the concept entrepreneurship, to a more gender neutral one, in order to make it easier for women who are entrepreneurs to identify themselves as entrepreneurs and not just ‘female entrepreneurs’. An empiri-cal contribution is a description of how different and contradictory identification proc-esses are going on at the same time. Marginalization and identification processes illus-trates that if entrepreneurs feel that they are not taken seriously in their attempt to cre-ate business practices that fit with their preferences, a struggle for recognition emerges. This study shows that processes of marginalization and role creation are intertwined in different ways that affect women who are entrepreneurs. A methodological contribu-tion is the deconstruction of interviews in order to understand how processes of imita-tion and reinterpretation exists as simultaneous and parallel events. The findings are presented in five recurrent themes: break away, identification, po-larization, marginalization and resistance. The themes are used in order to increase the understanding about how the entrepreneurs create contexts for their ventures and how this context can be understood as an arena where entrepreneurial opportunities are constructed. Three aspects, all related to gender, of resistance are described; resistance that the entrepreneurs have met during the time as employees in the public sector, re-sistance that the entrepreneurs have met during the process of starting their ventures and finally, resistance that the entrepreneurs practice in meetings with male norms.

Composition instructors agree writing instruction should focus on helping students become better writers. Pedagogical commonality, however, ends here. Composition instructors disagree about what constitutes good writing, what student should be learning, and how best to approach a composition classroom. I argue that pedagogical diversity among composition instructors is detrimental to the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition, because it has contributed to the public perception that we have no teachable content. Focusing around the removal of and reintegration of rhetoric from American college English departments, I argue composition studies and the rhetorical tradition have historically been viewed as separate disciplines. This project will illustrate that composition studies needs to reconnect to the rhetorical tradition in order formulate a unified practical pedagogical identity. With a unified pedagogical identity, composition studies can finally claim it has a teachable and defendable content: the production of better critical thinking skills.

Environmental challenges do not exist around by themselves. They are constructed andput in our mind by the key stakeholders, who draw public attention to certain issues. People experience the world through the words of others. Construction of environmental concerns is an ever ongoing process, and we need to be aware about things that can change. In the 60s the world was concerned about limited number of issues, whilst today the planet seems to shout from pain, though in fact amount of problems have hardly raised. It is environmental organizations’ desert that people managed to raise their awareness about the world. This study exposes social constructs of environmental challenges created and narrated through social media by two leading environmental organizations, Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature. For this purpose, theories of social constructionism and agenda setting serve as the main theoretical framework. Therefore, most actively social media used by ENGOs was identified to be Facebook. The insight to the topic was provided by the content analysis of status updates from both organizations’ fan pages for the period from September 2009 to May 2012. It showed that social constructs of environmental challenges are not equally distributed in the world and number of concerns is disregarded. ENGOs do hope that regular citizens can contribute to sustainability, by giving real support to the projects which aim to have impact on policy makers. Our awareness let changes on the governmental level happen, as ‘when ENGOs speak, people debate, and policy makershear’. Thereby, through media construction of challenges solutions to them are articulated as well.

This study examines the representation of women and men through the quantitative analysisof quotations in three Swedish newspapers - Dagens nyheter, Aftonbladet and Barometern.The roles in which they appear have also been recorded, for example; managerial, political orparental. In addition to the main study, this report analyzes how often women and men appearin the respective photos of the articles examined. In total, 36 newspapers were included in thisstudy (12 of each paper) which resulted in a data set of 1453 articles and 1296 photos.The main aim of this study was to measure the degree of equality and in what differing roleswomen and men appear when being interviewed. Secondly, this study aims to highlight anydifference between women and men appearing in text and photo. The results were comparedacross the three newspapers examined with established theories on gender and feminism,equality, social construction, representation and media power being applied to understand andanalyse these results.The study shows patterns of an unequal distribution between the representation of women andmen in the three Swedish newspapers examined. In the articles where the individuals could beidentified by gender, approximately 65 percent of the persons interviewed were male and 32percent female (the remainder were not identified). Men were more likely to be quoted inexpert or managerial roles where as it was more common for woman to appear under thefamily and consumer headings. However, it was more common for women to appear in photothan in text, with 60 percent of the photos examined containing men and 40 percent women.

No description available.

There are a number of issues within the fear of crime literature, such as problems defining and measuring fear of crime, which continue to exist. Thus, the first aim of this thesis was to empirically test a new fear of crime model that consists of three components: fear of victimization (emotive), perceived risk (cognitive) and constrained behaviour (behavioural). The multiple component theory posits that a reciprocal relationship exists between the components that contribute to people feeling threatened by criminal victimization (also referred to as the threat of victimization). Past research has also indicated that gender is always a significant predictor of fear of crime, and therefore was included in the test to assess if women continue to feel threatened by victimization more than men in the new model. Finally two common theories used to explain why women fear crime more than men; specifically gender construction that equates femininity with vulnerability and masculinity with invulnerability and prior experience with intimate partner violence and stalking, were explored. The data came from the Statistics Canada General Social Survey 2004: Cycle 18, which is a Canadian telephone survey that measures fear of crime as well as various types of criminal victimization. A quantitative analysis was done using multiple logistic regressions to assess all three objectives. Results for this thesis indicate that a reciprocal relationship exists between all three components of the threat of victimization and must continue to be measured as separate constructs. Perceived risk and constrained behaviour are particularly influenced by gender construction and intimate partner violence and stalking victimization. It is concluded that accurate and consistent measures need to be created for each of the components of the threat of victimization to facilitate validity, replication and comparison. As well, (in)vulnerability linked to masculinity and femininity, appear to have negative implications for both women and men in relation to the threat of victimization, which need to be addressed through education and active resistance.

Social accounts of technological change make the flexibility and openness of interpretations the starting point of an argument against technological determinism. They suggest that technological change unfolds in the semantic domain, but they focus on the social processes around the interpretations of new technologies, and do not address the conceptual processes of change in interpretations. The dissertation presents an empirically grounded case study of the design process of an open-source online software platform based on the framework of distributed cognition to argue that the cognitive perspective is needed for understanding innovation in software, because it allows us to describe the reflexive and expansive contribution of conceptual processes to new software and the significance of professional epistemic practices in framing the direction of innovation. The framework of distributed cognition brings the social and cognitive perspectives together on account of its understanding of conceptual processes as distributed over time, among people, and between humans and artifacts. The dissertation argues that an evolving open-source software landscape became translated into the open-ended local design space of a new software project in a process of infrastructural implosion, and the design space prompted participants to outline and pursue epistemic strategies of sense-making and learning about the contexts of use. The result was a process of conceptual modeling, which resulted in a conceptually novel user interface. Prototyping professional practices of user-centered design lent directionality to this conceptual process in terms of a focus on individual activities with the user interface. Social approaches to software design under the broad umbrella of human-centered computing have been seeking to inform the design on the basis of empirical contributions about a social context. The analysis has shown that empirical engagement with the contexts of use followed from conceptual modeling, and concern about real world contexts was aligned with the user-centered direction that design was taking. I also point out a social-technical gap in the design process in connection with the repeated performance challenges that the platform was facing, and describe the possibility of a social-technical imagination.

There are a number of issues within the fear of crime literature, such as problems defining and measuring fear of crime, which continue to exist. Thus, the first aim of this thesis was to empirically test a new fear of crime model that consists of three components: fear of victimization (emotive), perceived risk (cognitive) and constrained behaviour (behavioural). The multiple component theory posits that a reciprocal relationship exists between the components that contribute to people feeling threatened by criminal victimization (also referred to as the threat of victimization). Past research has also indicated that gender is always a significant predictor of fear of crime, and therefore was included in the test to assess if women continue to feel threatened by victimization more than men in the new model. Finally two common theories used to explain why women fear crime more than men; specifically gender construction that equates femininity with vulnerability and masculinity with invulnerability and prior experience with intimate partner violence and stalking, were explored. The data came from the Statistics Canada General Social Survey 2004: Cycle 18, which is a Canadian telephone survey that measures fear of crime as well as various types of criminal victimization. A quantitative analysis was done using multiple logistic regressions to assess all three objectives. Results for this thesis indicate that a reciprocal relationship exists between all three components of the threat of victimization and must continue to be measured as separate constructs. Perceived risk and constrained behaviour are particularly influenced by gender construction and intimate partner violence and stalking victimization. It is concluded that accurate and consistent measures need to be created for each of the components of the threat of victimization to facilitate validity, replication and comparison. As well, (in)vulnerability linked to masculinity and femininity, appear to have negative implications for both women and men in relation to the threat of victimization, which need to be addressed through education and active resistance.

In Melbourne between 1880 and 1907, the construction and propagation of a vagrant stereotype and its manifestation in law, constituted an important means of controlling the behaviour of individuals and groups who were perceived to be socially undesirable or economically burdensome.

No description available.