This thesis explores barriers to the establishment of trust needed for high performing teams due to inequality in the context of a global economy. Postcolonial Theory is introduced to illustrate how inequality is a key aspect of diversity in the current context of the global workplace. Different philosophies underlying the values and norms in organizations are examined to make sense of contemporary approaches to diversity management in terms of how power, difference, and identity are addressed. This provides an understanding of the context of current team development praxis in working with diversity. Using autoethnography, the author tells personal stories of working in diverse teams to convey the complex ways in which power, difference, and identity coalesce in real-life experience. Some theoretical foundations are developed for facilitating the building of team trust in contexts with different philosophical approaches to diversity. Addressing social justice in Organization Development work is considered.

This thesis explores barriers to the establishment of trust needed for high performing teams due to inequality in the context of a global economy. Postcolonial Theory is introduced to illustrate how inequality is a key aspect of diversity in the current context of the global workplace. Different philosophies underlying the values and norms in organizations are examined to make sense of contemporary approaches to diversity management in terms of how power, difference, and identity are addressed. This provides an understanding of the context of current team development praxis in working with diversity. Using autoethnography, the author tells personal stories of working in diverse teams to convey the complex ways in which power, difference, and identity coalesce in real-life experience. Some theoretical foundations are developed for facilitating the building of team trust in contexts with different philosophical approaches to diversity. Addressing social justice in Organization Development work is considered.

Over time, the state has undertaken various reforms to govern the development of education. The issue of using new media may be seen as such an example. A change in the use of media in education imposes great challenges on both municipalities and teachers. This thesis aims to visualise and discuss governance in the contradictions that arise in practical activities aimed at integrating new media in school teaching, based on three actors’ perspectives, namely the dilemmas of the teacher, the media pedagogue and the media developer. The study is based on systemic thinking about governance and I employ both activity theory and the concept of governmentality to visualise and discuss the governance. The study is conducted in the form of a case study. The case consists of a municipality where, based on the curriculum’s mission, teachers have tried to find ways to integrate new media into their teaching. My own connection to the case consists of having been a driving and governing force in the work as a teacher, media pedagogue and media developer. The case was chosen because the municipality’s work on the national level and via the media has been held up as a good example. The empirical part consists of both my own life narrative and studies of different documents, texts, images, films and sound recordings that show how govern­mentalities are formed and take shape on the micro, macro and meso levels. I use a methodological prism, a combination of different analytical perspectives, discourse, activity, narratives and governmentality. The results reveal that the driving actors are innovatively handling the systemic contradictions that arise in the work of carrying out the curriculum’s mission. The governance of the activities is based on a trust rationality. The more the use of new media is spread in the municipality’s schools, the more contradictory it becomes for the middle level’s actors. The trust rationality has been superseded by a distrust rationality, creating a growing gap between the administration and the activities.

Educational institutions have not yet succeeded in their quest to formally educate Aboriginal students with success. In an effort to increase the graduation levels, many school districts have implemented mandates to hire more Aboriginal teachers and administrators. Through sharing her lived experience as an Indigenous elementary principal the researcher argues that although many bureaucratic organizations have formal policies to hire Aboriginal people into leadership positions, they still seek to maintain their power to keep the status quo in their organizations. This qualitative autoethnographic study acknowledges Indigenous ways of knowing through the sharing of stories and experience. The experiences will highlight emotional and cultural struggles that one can face when differing cultures and values emerge in a bureaucratic system based on colonialist viewpoints. Due to the vantage point of an insider, the researcher has traced her life from childhood and shared experiences and stories as a mixed-blood Mohawk woman and leader in the education system. Through an examination of signifying moments these stories depict a personal struggle for identity in her role as a female Mohawk principal in a school with a predominant Aboriginal student population. Chosen stories and incidents are recounted to reveal the social, political, historical, institutional, and cultural systems that are embedded within society. Both the researcher and her mother’s stories are universal in terms of experience that transcends understanding among Aboriginal people who are aiming to create organizational change. This genre of qualitative research will allow the reader to see the ongoing transformation that has occurred in the researcher’s first five years as an administrator in the public school system. Her upbringing and her mother’s teachings are internalized and become the catalyst for navigating through turbulent times and allow for continuing growth as an Indigenous leader in education. / Graduate

In this dissertation, African/Caribbean-Canadian women’s experiences of coping with divorce were explored using a qualitative methodology. This study was approached from a Black Feminist paradigm using the lived experiences of Black women as a source of knowledge. Divorce and coping literature provided a theoretical framework for understanding the issues related to divorce in the Black community and effective coping efforts among Black women, particularly as it pertains to divorce. Six separated/divorced women from the same family, representing two generations, were interviewed individually and as a group using a semi-structured interview guide. The participants discussed their reflections on marriage and marital disruption, their post-separation experiences and challenges, and the coping resources they accessed during the divorce process. The participants also discussed how their own marriages and divorces were influenced by the marriages and marital disruptions of their family members. The results from the interviews were reported in a case study format using the voices of the participants to tell their own stories. A grounded theory analysis found that Black women faced the common challenges of starting over, single parenting, financial loss, lifestyle adjustment, and emotional adjustment during the divorce process. To cope with these challenges, the majority, if not all, of the women cited a support network, a sense of responsibility, a positive perspective, spirituality, and independence as effective coping resources. It was the hope of the participants and the researcher that this study would help other women experiencing divorce by illustrating how effective coping efforts can lead to greater happiness after divorce.

This dissertation is a report on research into the development and evaluation of a career assessment and counselling procedure that falls under the aegis of the constructivist, narrative approach: My Career Chapter: A Dialogical Autobiography. My Career Chapter enables an individual to construct a holistic understanding of his or her career. The procedure facilitates an individual writing and reflecting on an autobiographical account of his or her career that is contextualised amidst systems of career influences. The resulting autobiographical text can be used in career counselling, including co-constructive dialogue between client and counsellor. The literature underpinning the research project is described with a wide-ranging discussion of issues that critically pertain to the research endeavour and essentially provide a primary base for the work. Two theoretical frameworks that exemplify constructivism in vocational psychology underpin the research: the Systems Theory Framework and the Theory of Career Construction. From the base of those two theoretical frameworks, narrative career counselling is explicated and exemplars are described. The Theory of Dialogical Self is introduced to inform the design of My Career Chapter and, ultimately, the theory and practice of narrative career counselling. The research is predominantly positioned within a paradigm of constructivism/interpretivism and the results of the studies are collectively interpreted accordingly; but postpositivism and critical ideological paradigms are present in a secondary form due to the mixture of research methods used in the project as a whole. Six empirical studies investigate the experience of My Career Chapter from the perspective of the developer, the counsellor-user, and the client-user; each explicated with two studies respectively. Research methods include autoethnography for the developer's experience, interpretative phenomenological analysis and focus group for the counsellor-users' experience, and quasi-experiment and interpretative phenomenological analysis for the client-users' experience. The studies of the developer's experience of My Career Chapter comprehensively explicate how and why the procedure was developed and emphasise the importance of reflexive science and practice. Crucially, the autoethnographies revealed a nexus of theory-practice-person which underpins the production of My Career Chapter, and critically influences the entire research project. The studies involving counsellor-users affirmed My Career Chapter's alignment with recommendations for the development and application of qualitative career assessment and counselling procedures. These studies also raised questions pertaining to the characteristics of client-users that may mediate the efficacy of the procedure (e.g., age, language ability). Studies of client-users firstly support the conclusion that My Career Chapter is a safe career assessment and counselling procedure, with minimal attendant risk of inducing psychological harm or distress. The procedure was experienced as being helpful as a tool for personal reflection, through its theoretically-derived processes of facilitating clients writing, reading, and hearing and talking their autobiographical manuscripts through in the interpretation phase. There are four dimensions of significance associated with this research project. Firstly, the divide between theory and practice has indeed been much lamented in vocational psychology and counselling psychology. Thus, the overall significance of the research reported upon in this dissertation is significant because it attempts to bring theory and practice together through a reflexive and theoretically informed research process into a career assessment and counselling procedure. Secondly, the research and development process produced a new career assessment and counselling product which will add to the limited range of techniques that fall under the aegis of constructivist career assessment and counselling broadly, and the narrative approach specifically. My Career Chapter complements other procedures. Thirdly, two of the research methods used in the project (viz., autoethnography and interpretative phenomenological analysis) demonstrated their potential as additional qualitative methods for research within vocational psychology. Finally, the research process has enabled the articulation of the Theory of Dialogical Self—from another branch of psychology—into the extant corpus of literature on career development theory and practice.

This autoethnographic study qualitatively explores a trainee's journey towards becoming a clinical psychologist in South Africa. Both the formal and informal processes for becoming a psychotherapist are explored. The formal processes governing the training and registration of a clinical psychologist in South Africa are outlined. A critical appraisal of the training program is covered. The informal processes of the journey of this trainee psychologist is contextualised within the life story of that same person. In so doing a seventeen-year long struggle and academic relationship with UNISA is highlighted, including the insatiable desire and life long dream of the writer in wanting to become a psychologist. An autoethnographic study was done by using the researcher as the only research subject. The personal writings of the researcher and her family serve as the primary data for the study. An autoethnographic approach was employed in creating and collecting the data. The stories are presented in narrative form, and the data are analysed by employing narrative analysis for extracting and highlighting initial and inferred themes. / Psychology / M. A. (Clinical Psychology)

Submitted by Viviane Narducci Ferraz (vnarducci@uol.com.br) on 2012-10-28T19:05:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 F - Versão Final completa 09-10-2012.pdf: 1206127 bytes, checksum: ac955ae22b10eb27a03b8ebc2090fb2c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by ÁUREA CORRÊA DA FONSECA CORRÊA DA FONSECA (aurea.fonseca@fgv.br) on 2012-11-05T13:10:33Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 F - Versão Final completa 09-10-2012.pdf: 1206127 bytes, checksum: ac955ae22b10eb27a03b8ebc2090fb2c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2012-11-07T16:36:20Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 F - Versão Final completa 09-10-2012.pdf: 1206127 bytes, checksum: ac955ae22b10eb27a03b8ebc2090fb2c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2012-11-07T16:36:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 F - Versão Final completa 09-10-2012.pdf: 1206127 bytes, checksum: ac955ae22b10eb27a03b8ebc2090fb2c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-08-27 / Despite the effort expended by organizational researchers and scholars to understand and monitor the changes and transformations in the everyday life of organizations, it is known that there are still variables that the rationalist positivism view, hegemonically present in the studies conducted in the last century, have failed to reveal. In order to advance studies and research to acknowledge the subjectivity that permeates the members of organizations, we sought to identify, from the perspective of the aesthetic approach, how the employees at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) assimilated the changes in organizational culture occurred at the institution from the 90s of last century. From the perspective of phenomenological hermeneutics, we carried out ethnographic research, and, as the researcher is an employee at the organization studied, the research also has autoethnographic components. The field research was conducted in four areas and the data was collected through participant observation and 57 interviews. The fieldnotes and interviews were transcribed and subjected to content analysis. The field findings were presented in 11 categories that represent the aesthetic judgments of the employees belonging to the group surveyed, about the changes in organizational culture in recent decades: the beautiful, the sacred, the picturesque, the graceful, the sublime, the comic, the ugly, the sadness, the tragic, the rhythm, the unspeakable. The study concluded that the knowledge gained by members of the organization, from their sensory experiences and their aesthetic judgments, is influenced as much as it influence the organization’s own culture. / A despeito do esforço despendido pelos pesquisadores e estudiosos organizacionais em compreender e acompanhar as mudanças e transformações ocorridas no cotidiano das organizações, sabe-se que ainda existem variáveis que a corrente racionalista positivista, hegemonicamente presente nos estudos realizados no século passado, ainda não conseguiram desvelar. Com o objetivo de avançar em estudos e pesquisas que admitam a subjetividade que permeia os integrantes das organizações, buscou-se identificar, sob a ótica da abordagem estética, como os servidores do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) apreenderam as mudanças na cultura organizacional ocorridas na instituição a partir da década de 90 do século passado. A partir da perspectiva fenomenológica hermenêutica, realizou-se pesquisa tipo etnográfica e, como a pesquisadora pertence ao quadro de servidores da organização estudada, a pesquisa possui também caráter autoetnográfico. A pesquisa de campo foi realizada em quatro órgãos singulares e a coleta dos dados ocorreu por meio da observação participante e em 57 entrevistas. As anotações de campo e as entrevistas foram transcritas e submetidas à análise de conteúdo. As revelações do campo foram apresentadas em 11 categorias que representam os juízos estéticos dos servidores, pertencentes ao grupo pesquisado, acerca das mudanças ocorridas na cultura organizacional nas últimas décadas: o belo, o sagrado, o pitoresco, o gracioso, o sublime o cômico, o feio, a tristeza, o trágico o ritmo, o indizível. O estudo concluiu que o conhecimento adquirido pelos integrantes da organização, a partir de suas experiências sensoriais e seus juízos estéticos, tanto é influenciado quanto possui influência sobre sua cultura.

What must we transform in ourselves as white settlers to become open to the possibility of ethical, respectful, authentic relationships with Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands? Situating this research in Stó:lō Téméxw (Stó:lō lands/world) and in relationships with Stó:lō people, this question has become an effort to understand what it means to be xwelítem and how white settlers might transform xwelítem ways of being towards more ethical ways of being. Xwelítem is a Halq’eméylem concept used by Stó:lō people which translates as the hungry, starving ones, and is often used to refer to ways of being many Stó:lō associate with white settler colonial society, past and present. Drawing on insights and wisdom of Stó:lō and settler mentors I consider three aspects of xwelítem ways of being. First, to be xwelítem is to erase Stó:lō presence, culture and nationhood, colonial history and contemporary colonial realities of Indigenous oppression and dispossession, and settler privilege. Second, being xwelítem means attempting to dominate, control, and repress those who are painted as “inferior” in dominant cultural narratives, it means plugging into racist colonial narratives and stereotypes. Third, being xwelítem is to be hungry and greedy, driven by consumption and lacking respect, reverence and reciprocity for the land. Guided by Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, critical place inquiry, narrative therapy, and autoethnography, I shape three narratives that speak to each aspect of being xwelítem, looking back towards its roots and forward towards pathways of transformation. I draw on interviews and experiences with Stó:lō and settler mentors, personal narratives, family history, and literature from critical Indigenous studies, anti-colonial theory, settler colonial studies, analytic psychology, and critical race theory. I aim to share what I have learned from rather than about Stó:lō culture, stories, teachings, and practices as these have been shared in relationships and as they have pushed me towards seeing anew myself and my family, communities, histories, and cultures. I have also walked this path as I have become a mom, and the co-alignment of these journeys has meant a focus on my role as a parent in recognizing and intervening with becoming/being xwelítem as it influences my daughter. I specifically center the space of intergenerational parent-child relationships and intimate family experiences as a deep influence on developing white settler subjectivities, and therefore also a relational space of profound transformative potential. I end with a call for settlers to offer our gifts towards the wellbeing of the land and Indigenous peoples through cycles of reciprocity as a basis for ethical relationships. Transforming white settler subjectivities is situated within the broader vision of participating in co-resistance, reparations and restitution, of bringing about justice and harmony, which inherently involves supporting the self-determination and resurgence of Indigenous peoples. / Graduate

Often referred to as people in transition, international students usually arrive in the U.S. with a clear sense of their academic goals; however, they often have not considered what their lives will be like or how they may change in non-academic ways. In addition to the typical level of university-related stress, international students face additional problems and difficulties generated in part by the cultural differences between the U.S. and their own countries. This is particularly true for Asian students. Of several studies that have investigated the experiences of international students in the U.S., only a handful have examined Asian students' unique experiences of acculturation, and although the number of Asian women students in the U.S. is increasing, there are even fewer studies about them. This study served as a corrective to these tendencies by focusing specifically on the transformative experiences of Asian women international students (AWIS). Utilizing autoethnographic and ethnographic methodologies, the researcher conducted a qualitative study, exploring in depth the lived experiences of eleven Asian women in cultural transition. The findings bring to light rich and conflicting emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal experiences and strategies of AWIS, who attempt to balance the cultural and familial injunctions of their parents (e.g., Bring Honor, Stay Asian, and Obey Us or Else) with the freedom and opportunities of American culture and campus life. The findings of this research will be relevant to various stakeholders. University administrators and staff, particularly professionals in student affairs and, more specifically, those working with international students and/or in student counseling centers, will benefit from a nuanced understanding of the complexities of these students' lives. Both researchers and clinicians will gain an appreciation for how a systemic focus can be maintained while interviewing individuals. Clinicians will also be better equipped to handle the cultural complexities encountered by these women and to provide culturally sensitive counseling.