The education of looked-after children (LAC) in the care of the Local Authority (LA) is supported by government initiatives to reduce the attainment gap that exists between LAC and their peers. Long-term outcomes for LAC pupils are poor (Sebba et al. 2015). The Virtual School (VS) has a statutory role in the education of LAC (DfE, 2014a) and aims to encourage stringent monitoring and intervention for LAC pupils, for example via a personalised education plan (PEP) outlining attainment, strategies intended to accelerate progress, and resources needed for doing so. The PEP process involves termly meetings between pupil, Social Worker and school's designated teacher. The current study uses Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 1999) as a lens through which to conceptualise change for LAC pupils during the PEP process. Data was collected from three PEP meetings and accompanying documentation in one LA setting, using ethnomethodology, in order to explore the human and non-human actors in the PEP network which are active in creating change for LAC. The analysis made visible the strong role of the PEP document in providing structure for the meeting, along with the instrumental role of the designated teacher and their knowledge of the pupil embodied in non-human entities such as resources, timetabling and grades. The Social Worker influence on the network was less visible. ANT is explored as a material semiotic tool for analysis through a conceptual review of current literature within educational research, with a focus on the construction of research questions. The review demonstrates that ANT can attempt to answer questions about 'how' things came to be and 'who' and 'what' they are composed of. The current research also incorporates an appraisal of evidence-based practice, and a consideration of the implications and dissemination of the findings of the study at LA level and beyond.

'The Company' had introduced 'Being Responsible' a program for the embedding of responsibility-sustainability. Corporate responsibility-sustainability here describes efforts to address entangled cares of responsibility and sustainability. The program showed potential to change the business model, which led to the research problem: 'How can responsibility-sustainability programs change business models?'In this thesis, business models are understood as three dynamically interlinked states: Logics, devices and actor networks. Business model change may happen through the embedding of responsibility-sustainability into any of these states, and through the dynamics between them. Main conceptual lenses are organizational institutionalism and actor-network theory, which are connected through a social constructionist philosophy. Qualitative methods used include an in-depth case study of The Company (104 interviews with 72 interviewees) and thematic analyses of business model descriptions (devices) of FTSE corporations (100 documents).Seven papers study distinct aspects of the research problem: Papers 1 and 2 provide a conceptual basis. Papers 3 and 4 study how the embedding of responsibility-sustainability into the FTSE100s' business model devices changed the logics they described. Papers 5-7 study embedding into The Company's business model actor network. I found how embedding of responsibility-sustainability into the three states of commercial business models happened through three processes: Blending of logics, combination of device elements and translation between actors. Such embedding of responsibility-sustainability led to misalignment and tensions between responsibility-sustainability and the dominant commercial logic. This misalignment in turn fueled the dynamics of change between logics, devices and actor networks. First, this thesis contributes to an emerging literature on the dynamics of business model logics, devices and actor networks. It makes explicit the distinction between these states and illustrates how their dynamics provide novel insight into business model change. Secondly, I showcase how actor-network theory may complement the activity systems study of business models as well as stakeholder thinking in responsibility-sustainability research. Insights into how to use devices to change business models and to embed responsibility-sustainability appear relevant for practitioners.

This thesis aims to assess the usefulness of actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) in understanding the process of implementing mobile phone-based innovations within the broader government-led public sector in less developed countries. An examination of the literature on implementations of innovations involving mobile-phones suggests that previous studies have either focused on the social elements or the physical elements in isolation and have failed to consider how one influences the other. It is proposed that actor-network theory may be able to provide an alternative ontological perspective that bridges this social physical divide and allows the influence of the relationships between the human and the non-human elements to be taken into consideration. In order to assess this, the thesis utilises a single case study from its inception, through development, to its eventual end. The case in question, is the implementation of a mobile phone- based information system known as MADEX. This effort, is a nation-wide project made by the federal government of Nigeria to deploy this innovation within the government-led public health sector. MADEX was designed to support a nation-wide scheme known as the Midwives Service Scheme (MSS); a public sector initiative that was set up to address the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) relating to mother and child health. The main objective of MADEX in its initial stages was to enable the routine reporting of maternal health information from primary health facilities across the country up to the national level (NPHCDA) where this information is required by public health administrators for action - that is regular and timely monitoring of key maternal and child health indicators as well as strategic planning and the setting of priorities. The expectation was that, MADEX will bring about increased information accessibility for monitoring and planning, ensure global transparency and accountability in the area of maternal and child health statistics and promote m-health activities. An interpretive approach using qualitative methods was adopted in this research to obtain and analyse the data acquired through interviews. These interview, were conducted with a total of about 75 participant from across the various levels of the public health system. Whilst initially these events are narrated using a traditional chronological format, the use of such a format hides the complex nature of the relationships that enable the case under study. Actor-network theory therefore provides a means of exposing some of this complexity and as a result can be regarded as a useful methodology for understanding mobile phone innovations deployed in the public sector of LDCs. In addition, the thesis shows that the actor-network perspective allows the process of implementing mobile-phone innovations, to be considered in a manner that demonstrates the complex interdependent relationships between the physical and the social dimensions as well as the impact of non-humans in shaping this process.

O presente estudo se destina a pensar como o cuidado é performado nas práticas realizadas numa escola que segue a proposta da Pedadogia Waldorf, partindo da orientação teórico-metodológica da Teoria Ator-rede (TAR). A proposta é repensar esse espaço através das relações de cuidado que são estabelecidas nas práticas, especialmente através do vínculo que se dá na ação professor / aluno. Percebe-se que os alunos são aqueles os quais se deve conduzir e os professores, aqueles que devem conduzi-los, muitas vezes sem saber ao certo a utilidade do estão ensinando. Mol (2006) propõe que o cuidado tem uma Lógica própria, intitulada por ela como Lógica do Cuidado. Esta se contrapõe à Lógica da Escolha, a qual retrata o cuidado sendo estabelecido por um especialista que indica o que deve ou não ser feito, cabendo a quem é cuidado, seguir as orientações do cuidador. No entanto, uma prática que segue a Lógica do Cuidado, parte da ideia de que, aquele que é cuidado, é tão ator quanto aquele que cuida, uma vez que aquele não é passivo em relação ao próprio cuidado ou as condições em que este se dá. Amplia-se assim a rede do cuidar, sendo considerados todos os atores que a performam, compreendendo o processo de ensino-aprendizagem enquanto um conjunto de afetações, integrando a afetividade e a cognição. O trabalho foi desenvolvido acompanhando uma escola Waldorf, para observação da rotina e de atividades onde são performadas práticas de cuidado, especialmente aquelas que seguem a Lógica do Cuidado, o que nos viabiliza pensar outro devir escola. O campo estudado contribuiu para desconstruir a forma tradicionalmente performada de cuidado, viabilizando pensar a escola enquanto um espaço que amplie as possibilidades de cuidar. / The present study was designed to consider how care is performed in practice conducted in a school that follows the proposal of Pedadogia Waldorf, based on the theoretical and methodological orientation of Actor-Network Theory (ART). The proposal is to rethink this space through care relationships that are established in practices, especially through the link that takes action on teacher / student. It is noticed that the students are the ones who should lead and teachers, who should lead them, often unsure of the utility they are teaching. Mol (2006) proposes that care has a logic of its own, as she headed for Logic of Care. This opposes the Logic of Choice, which portrays the care being provided by a specialist that indicates what should or should not be done, being who is careful to follow the guidelines of the caregiver. However, a practice that follows the logic of Care, part of the idea that one who is so careful is actor as one who cares, since he is not passive about their own care or the conditions under which this occurs. Thus expands network of caring, all of the actors being considered that perform this network, comprising the teaching-learning as a set of affectations, integrating affectivity and cognition. The study was conducted following a Waldorf school for observation and routine activities which are performed care practices, especially those who follow the logic of Care, which enables us to think becoming another school. The field study helped to deconstruct the form traditionally care performed, enabling think the school as a space that expands the possibilities of caring.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tarcisio de Sa Cardoso.pdf: 1957795 bytes, checksum: 2ec735b233e87e46a64f20519835aa98 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-14 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Interdisciplinary researches have been found problems using conceptual systems founded on philosophical dichotomies such as subject/object, mind/matter, human/non-human, which are often unable to cope with emergent properties, especially interesting for such studies. In order to contribute to a maturing of the discussion interested at the border more than in the center of the disciplines, this research will study the idea of mediation that the work of Bruno Latour has given rise in its construction of a non-dualistic theory. We believe that the notion of mediation, which appears in several parts his work, is a key concept to promote a non-dualistic thinking as it establishes a mediator ground between the poles built by modern philosophy. In this sense, the present research asks: how the concept of mediation appears in the reticular thinking of Bruno Latour and what it adds to modern thought? / Pesquisas interdisciplinares têm encontrado problemas em usar sistemas conceituais fundados em dicotomias filosóficas como sujeito/objeto, mente/matéria, humano/não humano, muitas vezes incapazes de dar conta das características emergentes, especialmente interessantes para tais estudos. Tendo em vista contribuir para um amadurecimento da discussão interessada mais nas bordas do que nos centros das disciplinas, o presente trabalho vai estudar o que a ideia de mediação ensejada na obra de Bruno Latour tem a acrescentar para a construção de modelos não dualistas. Acredita-se que a noção de mediação, que aparece em diversas obras do autor, seja um conceito-chave para fomentar um pensamento não dualista, pois instaura um fundamento mediador entre os polos construídos pela filosofia moderna. Neste sentido, esta pesquisa pergunta: como o conceito de mediação aparece no pensamento reticular de Bruno Latour e o que ele acrescenta ao pensamento moderno?

Accidental and targeted data breaches threaten sustainable business practices and personal privacy, exposing all types of businesses to increased data loss and financial impacts. This single case study was conducted in a medium-sized enterprise located in Brevard County, Florida, to explore the successful data protection strategies employed by the information system and information technology business leaders. Actor-network theory was the conceptual framework for the study with a graphical syntax to model data protection strategies. Data were collected from semistructured interviews of 3 business leaders, archival documents, and field notes. Data were analyzed using thematic, analytic, and software analysis, and methodological triangulation. Three themes materialized from the data analyses: people--inferring security personnel, network engineers, system engineers, and qualified personnel to know how to monitor data; processes--inferring the activities required to protect data from data loss; and technology--inferring scientific knowledge used by people to protect data from data loss. The findings are indicative of successful application of data protection strategies and may be modeled to assess vulnerabilities from technical and nontechnical threats impacting risk and loss of sensitive data. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential to alter attitudes toward data protection, creating a better environment for people to live and work; reduce recovery costs resulting from Internet crimes, improving social well-being; and enhance methods for the protection of sensitive, proprietary, and personally identifiable information, which advances the privacy rights for society.

This thesis examines everyday food practices such as sensed by seven households in the city ofStockholm, Sweden. By sensuously exploring the acts of acquiring, preparing, cooking, eating,and wasting food, I analyze how food is a matter of olfactory, gustatory, auditory, tactile, andvisual significance, as much as matter per se. More specifically, I address relational andbounded aspects of food, looking at how ambient surroundings, presences of material andimmaterial factors, sensuously influence everyday experiences of food. Intrigued by the at onceinter-, extra-, and re-corporeal matters of food, I analytically position myself alongside Latour,Ingold, Douglas, and Bennett. In entertaining their theoretical lines of thoughts, using them asanalytical springboards, this thesis explores socio-material dimensions of food practices, as wellas corporeal dynamics of human-material encounters. Methodologically carried out by meansof sensuous ethnography, following Pink’s notion of participatory practice, I have during tenweeks of fieldwork—in people’s homes and in their frequented grocery stores—engaged mysenses to experientially sense the world of food, such as lived by them. In our conjoint sensorialexploration, taken-for-granted mundane understandings of what food constitutes and whatconstitutes it, have emerged as domestically diverse, bounded to sensuous perceptionsderivative of the past, carried out in the presents, and cor(po)related to the future. By surveyingsituated meanings of what is smelled when savored, tasted when flavored, seen when looked,and felt when touched, simultaneously as accounting for nonhuman matters salient to coursesof actions, the thesis remarks context-sensorial-imbued figurations of everyday food.

Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2018. / Healthcare facilities in South Africa accumulate big data, daily. However, this data is not being utilised to its full potential. The healthcare sector still uses traditional methods to store, process, and analyse data. Currently, there are no big data analytics tools being used in the South African healthcare environment. This study was conducted to establish what factors hinder the effective use of big data in the South African healthcare environment. To fulfil the objectives of this research, qualitative methods were followed. Using the case study method, two healthcare organisations were selected as cases. This enabled the researcher to find similarities between the cases which drove them towards generalisation. The data collected in this study was analysed using the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Through the application of ANT, the researcher was able to uncover the influencing factors behind big data analytics in the healthcare environment. ANT was essential to the study as it brought out the different interactions that take place between human and non-human actors, resulting in big data. From the analysis, findings were drawn and interpreted. The interpretation of findings led to the developed framework in Figure 5.5. This framework was developed to guide the healthcare sector of South Africa towards the selection of appropriate big data analytics tools. The contribution of this study is in twofold; namely, theoretically and practically. Theoretically, the developed framework will act as a useful guide towards the selection of big data analytics tools. Practically, this guide can be used by South African healthcare practitioners to gain better understanding of big data analytics and how they can be used to improve healthcare service delivery.

Consensus conferences evolved as a response to the public's increasing dissatisfaction with technocratic decision-making processes that are judged to have repeatedly failed to serve its interests. The staging of the first Australian consensus conference at Old Parliament House in Canberra in March 1999 therefore presented an ideal opportunity to analyse the evolution of this new kind of policy input from its conception through to its implementation and subsequent evaluation. This thesis set out to provide an analysis of that trajectory using elements of the theoretical approach known as actor-network theory (ANT). Previous analyses of consensus conferences have generally provided only limited evaluations of single aspects of the entire process of setting up, implementing and evaluating such a conference. Furthermore, many of the early evaluations were conducted by reviewers or units which were themselves internal to the consensus conference under scrutiny. My own analysis has tried to offer broader, although inevitably less detailed, coverage, using a perspective from contemporary social theory that offers particular advantages in analysing the creation of short-term networks designed for specific purposes. By describing and analysing the role of this relatively new policy-making instrument, I have explored the different sub-networks that operate within the consensus conference process by focussing on the ways in which the conference was organised and how the relationships between the organisers and the participants helped to shape the outcomes. Thus the entire consensus conference sequence from idea to outcome can be thought of as a construction of a network to achieve at least one immediate goal. That goal was a single potential policy input, a consensus position embodied in the report of the lay panel. To realise that goal, the network needed to be recruited and stabilised and its members made to converge on that collective statement. But how is it that a range of disparate actors, including lay and expert, are mobilised to achieve that particular goal and what are the stabilisation devices which enable, or fail to enable this goal to be reached? In the context of the first Australian consensus conference, three key alignment devices emerged: texts, money and people. Yet it is clear from the evidence that some of these network stabilisation devices functioned poorly or not at all. This thesis has drawn attention to the areas in which they were weak and what importance that weakness had for the kind of policy outcome the consensus conference achieved. The role and extent of these powerful stabilisation devices in networks was therefore a vital issue for analysis. If one of the criteria to evaluate the success of a consensus conference is that it provides the stimulus to hold another, then the Australian conference must be deemed so far a failure. No further Australian consensus conference is planned. However, Australia stands to forfeit a number of advantages if no further consensus conferences or similar occasions are organised. Policy formation in contemporary democracies has had to accommodate an increasing array of new participants in order to track more effectively the diversity of potentially significant opinions on complex policy issues. This process requires new and transparent ways to educate and inform the public on policy issues and to ensure that policy makers are better informed about the needs and concerns of their community. As the evidence presented in thesis for the Australian example and its predecessors overseas suggests, consensus conferences have the potential to play a role in the contemporary policy-making context. But the realisation of that potential will vary according to their institutional contexts and the capacity of the actors to create the temporarily most stable and productive network out of the heterogeneous human and material resources to hand.

Previous studies of the design studio have tended to treat learning to design as a matter of learning to think in the right way, despite the recognition that material artifacts and the ability to make and manipulate them in architectural ways is important to the design process. Through the use of empirical data gathered from watching design teachers and students in action, this thesis works to discover how material things and bodies are important to the fabrication of architectural meaning and architectural subjectivity within design studios. In particular the role of gesture is highlighted as doing important work in design studio knowledge practices. / The approach taken in this thesis is to treat design activity in design studios in a ‘post-human’ way. An analytical eye is turned to how things and people perform together and are organised in various ways, using Actor network theory (ANT) as a way to orientate the investigation. The assumption drawn from ANT is that that architectural meaning, knowledge and identity can positioned as network effects, enacted into being as the design studio is ‘done’ by the various actors — including material things, such as architectural representations, and human behaviours, such as gesture. / Gesture has been largely ignored by design studio researchers, perhaps because it tends to operate below the threshold of conscious awareness. Gesture is difficult to study because the meanings of most gestures produced during conversations are spontaneous and provisional. Despite this humans seem to be good interpreters of gesture. When studied in detail, ongoing design studio activity is found to rely on the intelligibility of gesture done in ‘architectural ways’. The main site for the observation of gesture during this study was the ‘desk crit’ where teachers and students confer about work in progress. In the data gathered for this thesis gesture is found to operate with representations in three key ways: explaining and describing architectural composition, ‘sticking’ spoken meanings strategically to representations and conveying the phenomenological experience of occupying architectural space – the passing of time, quality of light, texture and movement. / Despite the fact that most of the work of the thesis centres on human behaviour, the findings about the role of gesture and representation trouble the idea of the human as being at the centre of the action, putting the bodies of teachers and students amongst a crowd of non human others who participate together in design knowledge making practices.