Includes bibliographical references. / This model attempts to trace a blue-print of personnel development and training from grass roots to successful operation. To best illustrate this transition, I have divided the thesis into three major parts. In chapters one to three, I introduce the personnel administrator, his position in the South African economy and the problems he faces at grass roots level. In chapters four and five, I deal with the establishment of a personnel development programme to deal with the problems confronting the personnel administrator. Chapters six to ten deal with the training model, the use of educational television, specific training programmes and the results obtained from such training programmes.

The mother-child relationship has been 11 field of interest of a variety of educational disciplines. The subject has been studied from many viewpoints.

Participatory photography initiatives promise to 'empower', 'give voice' and 'enable social change' for marginalised communities through photography. This thesis questions this promise, demonstrating participatory photography to be a contested practice defined as much by inherent tension, ethical complexity and its limitations as by its potential. Caught up in governmental practices and instrumental discourses, 'NGO-ised' participatory photography has lost its purpose and politics. Using multiple case-studies and presenting empirical research on TAFOS, a pioneering Peruvian participatory photography project, this thesis explores under examined areas of participatory photography practice, including its governmentality, spectatorship and long term impact on participants. It establishes the effectiveness of photography as a tool for fomenting an enduring critical consciousness (Freire 1970, 1973) while questioning the romantic narrative of participatory photography's inherently empowering qualities and capacity to enable change. Pluralism is used as a theoretical and conceptual framework for re-framing the promise of participatory photography. It is argued that a pluralized notion of participatory photography highlights the paradoxical, uncertain and negotiated character of the practice. It re-conceptualises the method as a mode of mediation that enables a plurality of seeing, that supports emerging and unrecognized claims and that cultivates a critical engagement with difference; qualities that are vital to democratic pluralism. The notion of a 'Photography of Becoming' re-imagines the critical and political character of participatory photography and the complex and vulnerable politics of voice in which it is immersed.

Over recent years, the service sector has grown at a dramatic rate, and with it has come significant challenges for the operators in this field. Not least of these has been the desire of these operators to create real competitive advantage by offering levels of service that call upon the servers in the interaction to engage in an emotional way with their customers, in addition to offering transactional efficiency and cost containment. The focus of this study is to examine the emotional dimension of the service experience from the perspective of the key stakeholders in the encounter, the customer, the service employee and the outlet manager. This study is carried out in the pub restaurant sector, with the brand leader in the full-service restaurant business. The research focuses on the role that emotions play in the performance outputs of outlet management in particular using the concept of emotional intelligence and the use of the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (Eqi) as a measurement instrument to explore the relationships between emotions and performance. The study then focuses on the server population who interact with the customers everyday, using measures of emotional intelligence and emotional labour to understand their relationship to the performance outputs of the servers, essentially the service quality offered to their customers. Finally the responses of the customer are measured from an emotional perspective, gathering their emotional response to a range of service cues. This customer data forms the basis of the relationships explored between server emotional competence and their delivery of service quality. The research reveals significant relationships between the emotional competencies of the managerial group and their business performance achievements in the areas of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, employee turnover and outlet profit growth. It demonstrates relationships between the emotional make-up of service personnel and aspects of emotional labour. The study also demonstrates the level of emotional response of customers to a range of service stimulants and finally the research reveals the extent to which a range of interactive service stimulants can create positive emotional expression in customers. The study culminates in the presentation of two models that are designed to guide service organisations to developing and then maintaining an integrated approach to emotional service development in their own market sector. These models build on the findings in the research that demonstrate a high level of inter-relationship between the different components that contribute to the overall service experience. The study ultimately argues that to ignore or isolate the consideration of the emotions right across the service chain, from brand proposition through to recruitment, development and measurement of the overall service quality at best leaves the service organisation exposed to sub-optimising its service offering. Conversely the value of adopting a fully integrated approach to the development of the service organisation could lead to a level of loyalty from both employees and customers that would provide sustainable competitive advantage in the service market.

This project investigates the development of mature student mothers’ identities in the dual contexts of constructions of the women’s at-home study practices and of their ‘responsibilities’ for their children’s development. Interviews were conducted with 23 women – all ‘new university’ students – and with their schoolaged children. I used discourse analysis focussing on language as performative and constitutive in order to understand positioning of, and by the women. I also drew upon critical developmental psychological theory and the concepts of discourse, intersubjectivity and dialogicality as epistemological resources in order to understand the women’s and children’s accounts. The methodology yielded a diversity of constructions of the women, these drawing upon a variety of discourses. The first empirical chapter addresses constructions of mature student mothers, the second, constructions of child development and the third, constructions of ‘influence’. The organisation of the empirical chapters reflects not only the importance I accorded to particular themes, but also the idea that separating mothers’ concerns and those of their children can be less fruitful in examinations of identity construction than addressing these together. The key issues that are a thread connecting the empirical chapters are time (requiring ‘balancing’ of social positions); change (in mothering practices and confidence); perceived ‘influence’ on children’s development, and relationships (including the ways in which identities are constructed in the ‘space in the middle’). Participants addressed these issues in different ways with some women positioning not spending ‘quality’ time with their children as meeting children’s developmental needs (addressed in Chapter Seven). Other important themes were mothering constructed as mundane and undervalued (in Chapter Five), children’s constructions of ‘roles’ as helpers (in Chapter Six) and perceived intersubjectivity in mother/child interactions (examined in Chapter Seven). In the concluding chapter I discuss the implications of the findings in terms of the contribution of the research to theoretical debates about motherhood, mothering and child development. I also reflect on my position as a mature student mother, examining my involvement in the research process and finally, suggest applications for the findings reported in the thesis.

No description available.

The after-school period of older primary school-aged children was used to examine how the social construct of childhood is being shaped and how it changes over time. With studies on childhood still relatively new academic terrain, this research makes a contribution by identifying some key structural and social forces impacting upon childhood. This research investigated firstly how children spend their time in the after-school period, secondly the reasons why they do so, and thirdly parental and child understandings and opinions on this subject. Childhood was found to be differentially constructed by socioeconomic backgrounds, and mediated by employment status. Results suggest that increasing parental employment accompanied concerns over safety for children and the need to protect them. This meant that there was a tendency for families to mediate between the child and wider society through increased surveillance of children. For one-parent families this took the form of supervision of children through after-school programmes. Two-parent families, who were more able to organise their work arrangements so that one parent was home after-school, monitored their children's activities within localised areas based around the home. Parental 'risk anxiety' was seen to be shaping the lives of children in terms of defining safe places and spaces for them. Children themselves tended to prefer informal, unstructured activities within these contexts, and did not seem too concerned about safety issues.

The link between employment and well-being is well-documented. However, limited research is available examining how employment affects the well-being of military spouses. Using data from the 2003 Air Force Community Assessment Survey, this study examines the impact of employment characteristics on depression levels, satisfaction with emotional well-being, and life satisfaction for military spouses. Results indicate that being unemployed and looking for employment outside of the home is detrimental to well-being for this group. Other personal, familial, and military factors are also discussed in relationship to employment and well-being of military spouses. Practical implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.

This feminist project explores the experiential accounts of twenty-five women who have lived through abuse within their intimate relationships. Their stories, gathered through a series of semi-structured face-to-face interviews intended to elicit accounts of resilience were saturated with emotion-talk, especially shame-talk. To address questions of the relationship between these accounts and theoretical accounts of abuse, and shame the women’s texts were engaged in an analytic dialogue with feminist knowledges of abuse against women, Erving Goffman’s sociological understandings of shame, stigma and mortification of the self, Thomas Scheff’s sociological theory of shame and social bonds, and feminist poststructuralist understandings around the constitution of human subjectivity. These conversations enabled development of a conceptual representation of the special and highly specific form of social bonding experienced by victims of abuse within intimate relationships. This bonding begins with processes of mortification of the self, the gradual erosion of a sense of self through the systematic imposition of various shaming and shameful actions. These processes take place within a specific social context created through the constitutive power of dominant discourses of gender, heterosexual coupledom, matrimony and motherhood which work to shape the lives of individual women. Because of the specific ways in which these discourses currently operate within Aotearoa New Zealand they result in the constitution of a narrow range of tightly prescribed subject positions available to victims of intimate partner abuse. This analysis leads to an argument that women’s inability to ‘do’ motherhood or intimate partnership in line with dominant discourses of mothering and relationships (because these simply cannot be achieved within an abusive context), opens them to the debilitating effects of shame. Shame, both actual and threatened, promotes silence, isolation and dangerous private spaces as women seek to protect themselves from its painful experience. I argue that it is therefore crucial to promote the availability of discursive positioning for women living through abuse which offers non-shaming and realistic choices.

No abstract available / Development Studies / D.Admin.