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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Palliative care for non-dominant ethnocultural groups is problematized in the palliative care literature, which often presents essentialist conceptions of cultural beliefs on death and dying. Death is often portrayed as a taboo topic within the Chinese community, and thus, the assumption is that dying at home may not be the preferred option. Beyond these stereotypical representations, little is known about what it is like for Chinese immigrants with terminal cancer to receive palliative home care. Home is a complex site where cultural “difference” becomes contextually salient when home care providers introduce palliative care. More is potentially at stake than the violation of a taboo, as Chinese immigrant care recipients, their family caregivers, and home care providers negotiate changes to the existing routines of the home. The purpose of this study was to examine how meanings of home condition negotiations of care between Chinese immigrants with terminal cancer receiving palliative home care, family caregivers, and home care providers. Postcolonial theory provided a critical lens for this focused ethnographic study of palliative home care for Chinese Canadian immigrants. The analysis drew on postcolonial concepts such as Othering, subjugation, and hybridity. The methods included interviews with 11 key informants, and observational visits and interviews were conducted in 4 cases of Chinese immigrant care recipients, their family caregivers, and home care nurses. Two major findings emerged: 1) colonization and distancing and 2) negotiating hybridity. The meaning of home was deeply altered as palliative home care occupied care recipients’ and family caregivers’ everyday lives and represented a form of micro-colonization - the home was metaphorically invaded. The ambivalent relationship between care recipients and home care providers was characterized by a mutuality of need, but care recipients used distancing as a way to resist colonization. Palliative care presented its own unique cultural influence, which was imbued with meanings, beliefs, and practices. For care recipients, the meaning of dying at home was fluid, situational, and contextually informed. Subsequently, differences were created and highlighted in the confrontation between the meaning of palliative care for home care providers and the meaning of dying at home for care recipients. It was in the meeting, blending, clashing, and grappling of differences where participants had to negotiate and generate new, hybrid meanings and practices so that particularized, personal approaches to dying could be achieved. The findings capture the realities and complexities of palliative home care, and highlight the sophisticated and evolving ways providers come to know and care for care recipients and families in their homes. Although culture was prominently featured in participant narratives, the pragmatics of dying at home were more pressing than was adherence to essentialized cultural beliefs of death and dying. A key implication is the need to move away from simplistic conceptualizations of culture to a critical approach that will enable providers to understand and find comfort in working with the fluid, dynamic, and contextually-driven nature of culture and dying at home.

Palliative care for non-dominant ethnocultural groups is problematized in the palliative care literature, which often presents essentialist conceptions of cultural beliefs on death and dying. Death is often portrayed as a taboo topic within the Chinese community, and thus, the assumption is that dying at home may not be the preferred option. Beyond these stereotypical representations, little is known about what it is like for Chinese immigrants with terminal cancer to receive palliative home care. Home is a complex site where cultural “difference” becomes contextually salient when home care providers introduce palliative care. More is potentially at stake than the violation of a taboo, as Chinese immigrant care recipients, their family caregivers, and home care providers negotiate changes to the existing routines of the home. The purpose of this study was to examine how meanings of home condition negotiations of care between Chinese immigrants with terminal cancer receiving palliative home care, family caregivers, and home care providers. Postcolonial theory provided a critical lens for this focused ethnographic study of palliative home care for Chinese Canadian immigrants. The analysis drew on postcolonial concepts such as Othering, subjugation, and hybridity. The methods included interviews with 11 key informants, and observational visits and interviews were conducted in 4 cases of Chinese immigrant care recipients, their family caregivers, and home care nurses. Two major findings emerged: 1) colonization and distancing and 2) negotiating hybridity. The meaning of home was deeply altered as palliative home care occupied care recipients’ and family caregivers’ everyday lives and represented a form of micro-colonization - the home was metaphorically invaded. The ambivalent relationship between care recipients and home care providers was characterized by a mutuality of need, but care recipients used distancing as a way to resist colonization. Palliative care presented its own unique cultural influence, which was imbued with meanings, beliefs, and practices. For care recipients, the meaning of dying at home was fluid, situational, and contextually informed. Subsequently, differences were created and highlighted in the confrontation between the meaning of palliative care for home care providers and the meaning of dying at home for care recipients. It was in the meeting, blending, clashing, and grappling of differences where participants had to negotiate and generate new, hybrid meanings and practices so that particularized, personal approaches to dying could be achieved. The findings capture the realities and complexities of palliative home care, and highlight the sophisticated and evolving ways providers come to know and care for care recipients and families in their homes. Although culture was prominently featured in participant narratives, the pragmatics of dying at home were more pressing than was adherence to essentialized cultural beliefs of death and dying. A key implication is the need to move away from simplistic conceptualizations of culture to a critical approach that will enable providers to understand and find comfort in working with the fluid, dynamic, and contextually-driven nature of culture and dying at home.

This senior thesis is a study of Putnam’s two-level game theory and how it applies to the Israeli-Arab and later the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In particular, I analyze how Putnam’s theory explains the successes and failures of past negotiations and what this means about the future of potential negotiations. I conclude that win-sets between the Israeli and Palestinian governments are too far apart for the parties to reach a successful peace accord and that until their citizens are willing to make more significant concessions there will not be lasting peace.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the lives of thirty community HIV educators in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Compared to quantitative studies this is a small number, but by keeping the number of participants small it has been possible to obtain an extensive understanding of the lives of each individual, which helps to explain why they make the decisions they do. The reason for choosing community HIV educators as the participants in this study is because it could be stated from the outset that they are well-informed about HIV prevention and, depending on the specific NGO they work for, they have been recipients of either ‘female empowerment’ or ‘responsible masculinity’ programmes. This is significant because early HIV prevention interventions have assumed that providing individuals with HIV awareness and gender equality programmes would lead to the implementation of HIV preventative behaviour. Studying the willingness and ability to implement HIV prevention practices of these particular individuals could therefore help to answer the question whether HIV awareness and gender-related programmes are indeed sufficient to create HIV preventative behaviour change. Furthermore, it was useful to hear from these participants what they experience as enabling and restricting factors when it comes to implementing HIV preventative behaviour. The core research question is: How do community HIV educators in KwaZulu-Natal negotiate HIV prevention in their everyday intimate relationships? The data presented in this thesis was collected during ten months of participant observation amongst community HIV educators whilst they were at work, at home, or out with their peers. To further aid the general understanding of Zulu culture, the researcher lived as part of a Zulu family for six months. The thesis presents several examples of community HIV educators who do not consistently use condoms in their everyday lives despite the fact that they promote the use of condoms. How is it possible that those who speak of being transformed as a result of HIV awareness and female empowerment or responsible masculinity programmes, and who promote condom use in their communities, do not always consistently use condoms in their personal lives? This thesis is concerned with trying to resolve this apparent illogicality. It argues that when individual interventions fail to lead to behaviour change it is because individuals act in relation to other people instead of in isolation. The thesis draws on the work of Bourdieu, particularly his concepts of habitus, field, and capital, to explain how structural factors influence individual practice. This means that the negotiation of HIV prevention is affected by what is generally considered appropriate in terms of existing dispositions. Hence the perception of a particular HIV prevention practice as either appropriate or inappropriate affects the ability of an individual to implement this practice. Examples are provided of how, when it comes to the practice of condom use, which has generally been perceived as inappropriate, structural factors have a restricting effect on HIV prevention. This thesis also provides examples of how, when it comes to the practice of medical male circumcision and virginity testing, which have generally been perceived as appropriate, structural factors actually have an encouraging effect on HIV prevention. As a result this thesis argues that instead of addressing individuals, HIV prevention interventions should address the collective. However, this thesis also argues that an increase in economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital can suppress the effect of structural factors. To support this argument the thesis attends to individuals who, when they can afford to do so as a result of having capital at their disposal, deviate from collectively determined ideal practice, for example by discreetly negotiating HIV counselling and testing with their sexual partners.

In this thesis, besides the developing a bilateral automated negotiation model between agents, in incomplete information state, integrating the personality effects of human on the negotiation process and outcomes, we proposed an architecture of such agents ("buyer" or "seller"). To do so, a new offer generation approach of three adaptive families of tactics has been proposed as follows : the time dependent tactics (time supposed as continuous), behavior dependent tactics, and time independent tactics.This thesis takes into consideration also the personality effects (of negotiator agent) on negotiation process and outcome. In fact, with regard to "Big five" personality model and introducing the cognitive orientations, we have developed a negotiator agent's architecture based on personality. This architecture is, mainly, inspired from the game theory. In fact, the artificial agent's cognition in terms of negotiation is considered as a certain negotiator's mental orientation favorising the concession of the negotiator agent towards one of following three equilibria (based on game theory) : Win-Lose, Lose-Win, and Win-Win According to the privileged orientation and the personality of negotiator, such a negotiator agent decides the adequate combination of tactics (models, etc) in order to modulate, consequently, the expected outcomes of negotiation

The research seeks to suggest the use of negotiations as a managerial task of the school principal with learners to eliminate or at least limit unrest practices like violence, intimidation of learners by principals and intimidation of principals by learners, suspicions, vandalism, strike actions and class boycotts which destroy and negate the culture of learning and teaching services. All these destructive practices, lead to poor production of matric results in schools in South Africa in general and in the North West Province in particular. The purpose of this study therefore was to determine by means of a review of literature and an empirical investigation, the nature of negotiations in schools and the skills needed by practising principals in the discharge of their management tasks. The empirical study was also aimed at determining the most important and the least important of the negotiation skills. Chapter 1 deals with the statement of the problem, aims of the research and the methods employed in achieving the purpose of the study. This includes a discussion of the population and sample used for the empirical research and an outline of the chapters. The second Chapter highlights on the nature of negotiation in general and in schools in particular. Explanation of the concept negotiation was given and terms closely related to negotiation were defined and all shown to be different from negotiation. Models of negotiation were identified, causes for negotiation were mentioned, effects of negotiation on school performance were discussed a:; well as approaches and attitudes to the use of negotiation in schools. In Chapter 3, the focus was on the context of negotiation and skills needed in successful negotiation in schools. The negotiation climate, elements of negotiation and legal aspects or basis of negotiation were discussed under the context of negotiation. Listening, timing, empathy, trust, questions, needs, patience, politeness, as well as other skills like stamina, tolerance, confidence were discussed as negotiation skills. Negotiation style and strategies were treated under skills needed in successful negotiation. The empirical research design, administrative procedures, population and the systematic sampling as well as statistical techniques were discussed in Chapter 4. The duly completed questionnaires returned by principals as respondents were empirically analysed and interpreted in this chapter. The last chapter, Chapter 5, throws light on the summary of all the chapters, research findings and recommendations based on the research findings derived from the previous chapters as well as a final remark. It was found that all the respondents recognize that listening is essential to any relationship and therefore listening was the most important negotiation skill practised by principals. Again, it was revealed from the empirical study that most principals do not succeed in building trust with learners by making wild promises. Principals therefore seldomly make wild promises to learners as a negotiation skill. Finally based on the research, a negotiation skill training programme for principals was recommended for future research. / Thesis (MEd)--PU for CHE, 1999

The research seeks to suggest the use of negotiations as a managerial task of the school principal with learners to eliminate or at least limit unrest practices like violence, intimidation of learners by principals and intimidation of principals by learners, suspicions, vandalism, strike actions and class boycotts which destroy and negate the culture of learning and teaching services. All these destructive practices, lead to poor production of matric results in schools in South Africa in general and in the North West Province in particular. The purpose of this study therefore was to determine by means of a review of literature and an empirical investigation, the nature of negotiations in schools and the skills needed by practising principals in the discharge of their management tasks. The empirical study was also aimed at determining the most important and the least important of the negotiation skills. Chapter 1 deals with the statement of the problem, aims of the research and the methods employed in achieving the purpose of the study. This includes a discussion of the population and sample used for the empirical research and an outline of the chapters. The second Chapter highlights on the nature of negotiation in general and in schools in particular. Explanation of the concept negotiation was given and terms closely related to negotiation were defined and all shown to be different from negotiation. Models of negotiation were identified, causes for negotiation were mentioned, effects of negotiation on school performance were discussed a:; well as approaches and attitudes to the use of negotiation in schools. In Chapter 3, the focus was on the context of negotiation and skills needed in successful negotiation in schools. The negotiation climate, elements of negotiation and legal aspects or basis of negotiation were discussed under the context of negotiation. Listening, timing, empathy, trust, questions, needs, patience, politeness, as well as other skills like stamina, tolerance, confidence were discussed as negotiation skills. Negotiation style and strategies were treated under skills needed in successful negotiation. The empirical research design, administrative procedures, population and the systematic sampling as well as statistical techniques were discussed in Chapter 4. The duly completed questionnaires returned by principals as respondents were empirically analysed and interpreted in this chapter. The last chapter, Chapter 5, throws light on the summary of all the chapters, research findings and recommendations based on the research findings derived from the previous chapters as well as a final remark. It was found that all the respondents recognize that listening is essential to any relationship and therefore listening was the most important negotiation skill practised by principals. Again, it was revealed from the empirical study that most principals do not succeed in building trust with learners by making wild promises. Principals therefore seldomly make wild promises to learners as a negotiation skill. Finally based on the research, a negotiation skill training programme for principals was recommended for future research. / Thesis (MEd)--PU for CHE, 1999

The objective of IAS 36 is to guide a company on how to apply procedures to ensure that its assets are carried at no more than their recoverable amount. The standard IAS 36 is however obscure and full of gaps to be filled with assumptions made by the CFO. Considering the obscurity of IAS 36, the audit of goodwill impairment tests and possible write downs can have different outcomes depending on the relationship between the auditor and CFO. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating how the auditor-CFO relationship influences the audit of goodwill impairment tests and possible write downs. The primary data consist of eight semi-structured interviews with four auditor-CFO pairs, in four Swedish listed companies. The auditor- CFO relationship and related negotiations are found to highly influence the audit of goodwill impairment tests and possible write downs. The findings indicate that the respondents view the auditor-CFO relationship as being proactive. Depending on what role the auditor is ascribed in the relationship by the CFO, the goodwill impairment tests and possible write downs have a different outcome, where optimistic values of the impairment tests are either upheld by implementation of relevant strategies or write downs are conducted.