My dissertation investigates questions of boredom and architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century through the work of two figures: the American-Italian architect Robert Venturi (b. 1925) and the Romanian-born American architect and artist Saul Steinberg (1914-1999). The topic of boredom in architecture, and specifically within this timeframe, has been largely ignored in architectural history, theory, and criticism where, with the exception of a few articles, there is no consistent body of scholarship on this issue. Looming large in the sterile iterations of various –isms, boredom remains critical in contemporary architectural practice as the production and obsolescence of images becomes ever faster with new technologies. Quickly saturated with information presented in fleeting displays that are easy to produce, easy to delete, and easy to consume, as soon as our expectation for novelty and change fails to satisfy us, we fall back into the loop of boredom. While boredom as the dissociation of person from place has raised architects' interest especially during the middle decades of the twentieth century, there is no significant scholarship on this topic. In this context, my research looks at the work of two architects who go beyond the attractive rhetoric of boredom and explore its potential as both a critical and a generative tool. / PHD

Boredom at work is a concern, as both employees and organisations are affected by the negative effects that this phenomenon holds. Workplace boredom is becoming an increasingly common occurrence within organisations and most employees are susceptible to it. To date, no reliable and valid scale for workplace boredom is available in South Africa. This study aimed to validate the Dutch Boredom Scale (DUBS) within the South African context in an attempt to provide a scale suitable for South African employees. The general objective of the study was to determine the reliability and validity of the workplace boredom scale (DUBS) within the South African context by means of investigating the reliability, factorial validity, convergent validity, predictive validity and discriminant validity. A cross-sectional research approach was utilised by means of a random convenience sample (N = 490) from organisations within the manufacturing and logistics sectors. The reliability of the workplace boredom scale was established by investigating the alpha and omega values. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to determine the factor structure of the DUBS and to ascertain factorial validity. In order to prove convergent and discriminant validity, the relationship between workplace boredom and similar theoretical constructs (work engagement, workload, job satisfaction and organisational commitment) as well as constructs assumed to differ from work place boredom (i.e. gender) was investigated. Finally, regression with regard to one-directional relationships was examined between workplace boredom and appropriate outcomes (work engagement, organisational commitment and job satisfaction) in order to establish predictive validity. The results indicate that the DUBS consists of a one-factor structure, and that this factor has acceptable reliability. Relationships between workplace boredom and work engagement, workload, job satisfaction, organisational commitment and turnover intention were negatively and practically significantly correlated. No significant relationship existed between workplace boredom and gender. Workplace boredom had significant negative regressions to work engagement, job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Recommendations are made for use in practice and additionally for future research. / MCom (Industrial Psychology), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Boredom at work is a concern, as both employees and organisations are affected by the negative effects that this phenomenon holds. Workplace boredom is becoming an increasingly common occurrence within organisations and most employees are susceptible to it. To date, no reliable and valid scale for workplace boredom is available in South Africa. This study aimed to validate the Dutch Boredom Scale (DUBS) within the South African context in an attempt to provide a scale suitable for South African employees. The general objective of the study was to determine the reliability and validity of the workplace boredom scale (DUBS) within the South African context by means of investigating the reliability, factorial validity, convergent validity, predictive validity and discriminant validity. A cross-sectional research approach was utilised by means of a random convenience sample (N = 490) from organisations within the manufacturing and logistics sectors. The reliability of the workplace boredom scale was established by investigating the alpha and omega values. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to determine the factor structure of the DUBS and to ascertain factorial validity. In order to prove convergent and discriminant validity, the relationship between workplace boredom and similar theoretical constructs (work engagement, workload, job satisfaction and organisational commitment) as well as constructs assumed to differ from work place boredom (i.e. gender) was investigated. Finally, regression with regard to one-directional relationships was examined between workplace boredom and appropriate outcomes (work engagement, organisational commitment and job satisfaction) in order to establish predictive validity. The results indicate that the DUBS consists of a one-factor structure, and that this factor has acceptable reliability. Relationships between workplace boredom and work engagement, workload, job satisfaction, organisational commitment and turnover intention were negatively and practically significantly correlated. No significant relationship existed between workplace boredom and gender. Workplace boredom had significant negative regressions to work engagement, job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Recommendations are made for use in practice and additionally for future research. / MCom (Industrial Psychology), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This diploma thesis represents a sum of theoretical findings about correlates and antecedents of boredom and an empirical investigation of opened questions about boredom, according to the literature. This was done through a laboratory experiment in which the author of the thesis, in order to investigate the research questions, induced boredom in the research participants. The research aim of this thesis involves three topics. The primary purpose of the experiment is to assess the experimental manipulation effects of causal attribution of attentional failure on the intensity of boredom. In order to investigate the main research questions, the author of this thesis created a specific experimental design. This includes a fictive subliminal distracting element representing an alternative cause explaining attentional failure during a task reliably eliciting boredom. Experimental design was also developed to fulfil a secondary aim of this thesis, to explore some of the correlates of boredom with emphasis on the question of relation between activation and boredom. The third aim is to investigate hypothesis about the type of activities preferred after the boredom induction by giving a choice to participants between interesting and an enjoyable videoclip. The results of the experiment do not support the main...

This paper interrogates the phenomenon of boredom at work by considering Ernst Jünger’s potential contribution. We contend that Jünger offers an important yet overlooked alternative to the dominant perspectives of boredom in Management and Organization Studies (MOS), which are largely composed of ‘simple’ psychological diagnoses and managerial prescriptions. Such studies largely understand boredom as a localised experience at work which can be overcome by targeted managerial prescriptions, techniques and interventions. In contrast we show how Jünger understands boredom from a ‘profound’ perspective as a central feature of modernity. This is premised on Jünger’s broader critique of the bourgeois values that define 20th and 21st century managerial work and organization. Jünger’s cultural-historical perspective is therefore aligned to the discrete field of Boredom Studies. By addressing how Jünger understands ‘work’ as the defining feature of the modern age, his critique situates the phenomenon of boredom at work within the broader social, institutional and cultural order of the 21st Century. While Jünger does not set out to provide a theory of boredom as such, we reconstruct such a theory through an exegesis of his writing on ‘work’ and ‘danger’. This reveals boredom and danger as phenomenologically intertwined concepts, which is an understanding of boredom that has not been considered in MOS or Boredom Studies. It is through this, we argue, that Jünger’s conception of work holds the potential for a powerful critique and understanding of boredom at work under the contemporary regime of neoliberal managerialism.

Detta är ett essäistiskt försök att fånga den flyktiga tråkigheten. Med fenomenologin som grund undersöks lärarens levda erfarenhet av tråkighet och hur den kommer till uttryck i hennes yrkesvardag. I skärningspunkten mellan två gestaltningar ur min lärarvardag, i filosofen Martin Heideggers tre former av tråkighet – uttråkad av, uttråkad med och djupgående tråkighet – och kultur- och utbildningsteoretisk forskning växer tre beskrivningar av 2020-talets lärare fram.  För det första består en del av lärarens yrkesvardag i att förhålla sig till en samtid där delar av hennes yrkespraktik digitaliserats och den administrativa bördan successivt ökat. Med utgångspunkt i litteraturvetaren Eran Dorfmans jämförelse mellan Heideggers uttråkad med och det Dorfman vill kalla för tråkighetsutmattning argumenterar jag för att tråkighetsutmattningen är en fjärde form av tråkighet. I det gestaltade mötet med kollegan Assar träder en lärarvardag fram som visar hur lärare dels verkar i ett tidsligt limbo där tiden är påträngande och ständigt beräknad, dels upplever en tomhet trots att vardagen hela tiden fylls med ett flöde av digital stimuli.  För det andra. Enligt Heidegger tvingar tråkigheten, framför allt den djupgående, oss till ett avbrott i vardagen och det han kallar för ”Mannet”, ett slags diffust ”de andra”. Den djupgående tråkigheten tvingar oss att lyssna till vårt autentiska jag och den vi skulle kunna vara. Sett ur en yrkespraktikers vardag undersöker jag hur relationen mellan tråkighet, ett autentiskt mer kreativt praktikerliv och min läraridentitet ser ut. Min undersökning visar bland annat att även om Mannet är starkt finns möjligheter till kreativa mikromotstånd för att värna om yrkesidentiteten. Men frågan är om motståndet är tillräckligt för att kunna nå en verklig autenticitet? Mot bakgrund av det som beskrivs i föregående avsnitt och i mötet med elever, kollegor och den egna läraridentiteten gör lärare etiska ställningstaganden. I det tredje avsnittet ges en beskrivning av relationen mellan tråkighet och de etiska ställningstaganden som lärare gör. Den bild som träder fram är komplex. Lärare gör många etiska val som ibland är motsägelsefulla. Som tidigare nämnts är Mannet starkt och för att lärare ska kunna värna om sin läraridentitet och göra kloka överväganden i mötet med elever – gestaltat i exemplet med eleven Pricken – behöver de gå samman för att bland annat kunna stå emot de krafter som förorsakar tråkighetsutmattning. / This is an essayistic attempt to capture the elusive boredom. With phenomenology as a basis, the teacher's lived experience of boredom and how it is expressed in her professional everyday life is examined. At the intersection of some compositions from my everyday life as a teacher, in the philosopher Martin Heidegger's three forms of boredom – bored by, bored with and profound boredom – and cultural and educational theoretical research, three descriptions of teachers of the 2020s emerged.                 Firstly, part of the teacher's professional everyday life consists of relating to a time where parts of her professional practice have been digitized and the administrative burden has gradually increased. Based on the literary scholar Eran Dorfman's reading of Heidegger's bored with and what Dorfman wants to call boredom-fatigue I argue that boredom-fatigue is a fourth form of boredom. In the described meeting with my colleague Assar, a teacher's everyday life emerges that shows how teachers work in a temporary limbo where time is intrusive and constantly calculated, and how they experience an emptiness even though everyday life is constantly filled with a flow of digital stimuli.                Secondly. According to Heidegger, boredom, especially the profound one, forces us to take a break from everyday life and what he calls “the They”, a kind of diffuse "the others". The profound boredom forces us to listen to our authentic selves and who we could be. Seen from the everyday life of a professional practitioner, I examine what the relationship between boredom, an authentically more creative practitioner life, and my teacher identity looks like. My study shows that even though “the They” is strong, there are opportunities for creative micro-resistance to, among other things, protect the professional identity. But the question is whether the resistance is sufficient to achieve true authenticity?                In the light of what is described in the previous sections and the encounters with students, colleagues, and one’s own teacher identity, teachers make ethical positions. The third section describes the relationship between boredom and the ethical positions that teachers make. The picture that emerges is complex. Teachers make many ethical choices that are sometimes contradictory. As previously mentioned, “the They” is strong and for teachers to be able to protect their teacher identity and make wise considerations in the encounters with students – for example with the student I call Pricken – they need to come together to be able to withstand the forces that cause boredom-fatigue.

Anthropological approaches to contexts of violence and conflict often focus on the exceptional and extraordinary moment of violence or its memory, leaving little room for the ordinary ways in and through which much conflict is lived. How might conflict and violence permeate ordinary practice, daily events and experience? What about the mundane and anticipatory moments through which violence may be predicted, anticipated and waited upon? This thesis explores ordinary security perspectives and practices among Jewish-Israelis in Tel Aviv. It is based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork among security guards, civil guards and city residents between 2005 and 2007 as they do and discuss bitachon (security). Participant observation with street-level security staff, with civil guard patrols and within the critical activities and conversations at a local neighbourhood kiosk café all explore practices, perspectives and experiences of security. This thesis argues that security practices that are often invoked as a precaution against danger and a provider of protection may paradoxically produce a sense of even more danger, uncertainty and insecurity. Security is not only about spectacular conflicts or strategic concepts but is also engaged with and experienced through mundane and ordinary social life. As well as claiming to protect the nation-state or managing strategic threats, security is also a kind of practice and emotion; an atmosphere, activity, and a feeling. Security is not only about extraordinary events and explosive situations, but also about a particular kind of waiting; an uncertain and boring anticipation of potential violence to come. It may be less about performance, legibility, or defence against dangerous others, than the identification of intimate and illegible populations, the playing out of racialized notions of danger and the ethno-nationalist uncertainties of the nation-state. In this context, collective anxieties and insecurities may be brought about not by the scale or magnitude of security threats, but by the perceived incapacity and protective impotence of the state. This thesis contributes to the anthropology of conflict and violence, the anthropology of Israel/Palestine and urban anthropology more generally. It points towards ways in which anthropology may meaningfully contribute to and enter dialogue with security studies, and argues in favour of an ordinary approach to the analysis of conflict and security.

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at the Wits business school University of the Witwatersrand June 2016 / Despite the increased work on emotions in organizations, there is a lack of research on the impact of feeling bored in managerial decision-making contexts. Feeling bored was defined, and an expansion to the Hybrid Process Decision-Making Model was proposed. Using this revised definition of feeling bored and the Expanded Decision-Making Process Model, an empirical study with retail middle managers was conducted to examine the relationships between feeling bored and decision-making competence and the role of personality. Results found that feeling bored has a significant negative association with middle managers’ confidence levels, risk perception and decision rules. Results confirmed that personality plays a moderating role in the relationship between feeling bored and decision-making competence. Most notably, the personality trait learning neutralizes the negative effects of feeling bored on decision-making competence, whereas the personality trait sociability has a varied effect depending on which end of the valence/arousal continuum feeling bored is experienced. Limitations to the study, and practical implications for retail organizations, middle managers and for future research, are outlined / MB2016

Over the past couple decades, intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have become popular in education. ITSs are effective at helping students learn (VanLehn, 2011; Razzaq, Mendicino & Heffernan, 2008; Koedinger et al, 1997) and help researchers understand how students learn. Such research has included modeling how students learn (Corbett & Anderson, 1995), the effectiveness of help given within an ITS (Beck et al, 2008), the difficulty of different problems (Pardos & Heffernan, 2011), and predicting long-term outcomes like college attendance (San Pedro et al, 2013a), among many other studies. While most studies have focused on ITSs from a cognitive perspective, a growing number of researchers are paying attention to the motivational and affective aspects of tutoring, which have been recognized as important components of human tutoring (Lepper et al, 1993). Recent work has shown that student affect within an ITS can be detected, even without physical sensors or cameras (D’Mello et al, 2008; Conati & Maclaren, 2009; Sabourin et al, 2011; San Pedro et al, 2013b). Initial studies with these sensor-less affect detectors have shown that certain problematic affective states, such as boredom, confusion and frustration, are prevalent within ITSs (Baker et al, 2010b). Boredom in particular has been linked to negative learning outcomes (Pekrun et al, 2010; Farmer & Sundberg, 1986) and long-term disengagement (Farrell, 1988). Therefore, reducing or responding effectively to these affective states within ITSs may improve both short- and long-term learning outcomes. This work is an initial attempt to determine what causes boredom in ITSs. First, we determine which is more responsible for boredom in ITSs: the content in the system, or the students themselves. Based on the findings of that analysis, we conduct a randomized controlled trial to determine the effects of monotony on student boredom. In addition to the work on boredom, we also perform analyses that concern student modeling, specifically how to improve Knowledge Tracing (Corbett & Anderson, 1995), a popular student model used extensively in real systems like the Cognitive Tutors (Koedinger et al, 1997) and in educational research.

This observational study surveyed the engagement of fifth-grade gifted students who spend the majority of their academic day in a general education classroom. This study looked at students in a K-6 public school district in Southern California. This study was a qualitative study with some quantitative data to confirm observational findings. The methods included observations, observational notes, audio and video recordings. After the observations the recordings were reviewed to assure the observational notes accurately portrayed the actions of the target students. The measures included student surveys, observational data via the Behavioral Observation of Students in Schools instrument, and teacher interviews. The short response portion of the student surveys and the teacher interviews were coded and analyzed for common themes. The research questions that dictated the direction of this study included: Is student engagement altered by use of differentiated curriculum, if so is it increased or decreased with more appropriate assignments for gifted students? Do students put forth the same effort with more complex assignments as with easier assignments? Do fifth-grade gifted students show signs of a lack of student engagement? Further research may include expanding the study to include more students from various school districts to ascertain if the findings are consistent with other groups of students.