Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2008. / "December 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-270). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D. (Pharmacy)) - Rhodes University, 2009.

Thesis (Ph.D. (Education)) - Rhodes University, 2009.

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study attempts to explore aspects of the textual representation of Magadien Wentzel, the main character of The Number, a work of literary journalism by Jonny Steinberg. It sets out to respond to the following two central research questions: Firstly, what narrative decisions does Jonny Steinberg make in the text of The Number to convey aspects of the reality he experienced in relation to his main character, Magadien Wentzel; and secondly, what effect do these decisions have on the reader? As literary journalism is a genre with fluid boundaries and therefore various definitions, the thesis first presents the challenge of definition and lays out a broad history of the genre in its attempt to situate The Number as a work of social documentary and of literary journalism in South Africa. Taking realism as its theoretical point of departure, this study aligns itself with the view that there exists an independent, extra-textual real-world and that knowledge of this real-world can be produced and shared. In doing so, realism presents itself as a literary form associated with art that cannot turn away from harsh aspects of human existence – a characteristic mirrored by Steinberg’s (and thus his character’s) major themes. By means of a textual analysis which seeks to interpret aspects of Steinberg’s narrative decisions in his text, this study uses tools of literary realism, namely the empirical effect and the character effect, in its exploration. This research, conducted within the qualitative research paradigm, is informed in particular by the assumption that there exists an implicit communicative contract between author and reader which leads to narrative trust, seen as an indispensable quality to the non-fictional reading experience. In the case of Steinberg and The Number, this study finds that the writer’s representation of a particular reality relies to an important degree on the level of trust he is able to inspire in a reader. This is pertinent because, being factual, non-fiction demands that a reader not only imagine a world other than their own, but that they believe it too. One of the ways in which Steinberg enables a reader to trust his representation of his particular reality is by overtly placing his literary and authorial concerns alongside his reportage of Magadien Wentzel, the main character of The Number. This distinctive narrative approach results in a modification of the reader’s traditional contract with the writer, forged by the text between them, to one in which the text unites the reader with both Steinberg as narrator and Magadien Wentzel as character. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie poog om aspekte van die tekstuele voorstelling van Magadien Wentzel, die hoofkarakter in The Number, 'n werk van literêre joernalistiek deur Jonny Steinberg, te verken. Dit probeer om die volgende twee sentrale navorsingsvrae te beantwoord: Eerstens, watter narratiewe besluite neem Jonny Steinberg in die teks van The Number om aspekte van die werklikheid wat hy ervaar het met betrekking tot sy hoofkarakter, Magadien Wentzel, oor te dra, en tweedens, watter effek het dit op die leser? Aangesien literêre joernalistiek 'n genre is met vloeibare grense en daarom verskeie definisies, probeer die tesis eerstens die uitdaging van definisie te beantwoord. Daarmee lê dit ook 'n breë basis van die geskiedenis van die genre in sy poging om The Number te situeer as 'n sosiale dokumentêr en as literêre joernalistiek in Suid-Afrika. Met realisme as teoretiese vertrekpunt, vereenselwig hierdie studie hom daarmee dat 'n onafhanklike, ekstra-tekstuele regte wêreld bestaan, en dat kennis van dié “regte wêreld” geskep en gedeel kan word. So representeer realisme hom as 'n literêre vorm wat verband hou met die kunste, en wat sigself nie kan afwend van die harde aspekte van die menslike bestaan nie – 'n kenmerk wat deur Steinberg se hooftemas – en daarom ook dié van sy hoofkarakter – weerspieël word. Deur middel van 'n tekstuele analise wat poog om aspekte van Steinberg se narratiewe besluite in sy teks te interpreteer, gebruik hierdie studie aspekte van literêre realisme, naamlik die empiriese effek en die karakter-effek, in sy ondersoek. Hierdie navorsing, wat binne die kwalitatiewe navorsingsparadigma uitgevoer is, is veral geïnformeer deur die aanname dat daar 'n implisiete kommunikatiewe kontrak tussen die skrywer en die leser bestaan wat lei tot narratiewe vertroue, gesien as 'n onmisbare element van die nie-fiksie-leeservaring. In die geval van Steinberg en The Number het hierdie studie bevind dat die skrywer se voorstelling van 'n bepaalde werklikheid tot 'n belangrike mate berus op die vlak van vertroue wat hy by die leser genereer. Dit is belangrik, want synde feitelik, vereis nie-fiksie dat 'n leser nie net 'n wêreld anders as hul eie voorstel nie, maar dat hulle ook daarin kan glo. Een van die maniere waarop Steinberg 'n leser in staat stel om sy voorstelling van sy besondere werklikheid te vertrou, is deur die plasing van sy literêre en outeursbesorgdheid direk langs sy reportage van Magadien Wentzel, die hoofkarakter in The Number. Hierdie unieke narratiewe aanslag het ’n modifikasie van die leser se tradisionele kontrak met die skrywer tot gevolg, ’n kontrak wat gewoonlik deur die teks tussen hulle gesmee is, en wat verander in een waarin die teks die leser met beide Steinberg as verteller en Magadien Wentzel as karakter verenig het.

This study determined how stakeholders of heritage attractions apply strategic management for their business planning and development. A conceptual framework for strategic heritage planning was created and applied within the case of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The framework provided a new way of interpreting whether effective strategies were used within the heritage management sector. In addition to offering a lens to view policy planning, the framework led to a stakeholder analysis determining who was governing the heritage sites within thecity. The literature review revealed that studies about planning for heritage are neither prescriptive nor descriptive. Instead, they commonly reviewed challenges in planning with valuation, policy learning, implementation and maintenance for safeguarding sites. The new conceptual framework was created based on the gaps, challenges, issues and recommendations presented in the literature for heritage preservation. Each stage is operational and can be used as a guide for good practice or as an audit instrument. Critical realism was the most appropriate research approach because the study was practical and investigated how stakeholders process policy planning in the heritage sector. This study used purely qualitative methods and considered the stakeholders' experiences to give meaning to the situation. Purposive sampling was used and the questions created for the semi-structured interviews focused on stakeholder involvement throughout the phases of the framework. Accordingly, the Interview questions focused on assessment, creation and implementation of policy. Nine stakeholders were interviewed who were directly involved in the policy planning for heritage in Plovdiv. Document analysis was also used assessing the planning strategies highlighted in the Municipal Policy Document for Plovdiv 2014-2020.In terms of the strategic planning and development process of the heritage sites, the findings revealed that managers pay more attention to the assessment and 3 creation phases rather than the implementation phase. With regards to stakeholder involvement, the research showed that few of them were involved at certain stages of the process due to the hierarchy of governance. Academic andmanagerial recommendations are further discussed in the study.

The wide and enduring educational disparities between European and Asian heritage New Zealanders on the one hand, and indigenous Māori and Pacific Islanders on the other, have been a national education policy priority for some time. Such is the degree of focus on ethnic inequalities that very little attention is devoted to sources of privilege and disadvantage related to socio-economic status (SES) and gender, despite international scholarship showing that both of these profoundly influence experiences of schooling. The current study explores the ways in which SES, ethnicity, and gender influence students’ experiences of learning mathematics in New Zealand schools. Mathematics is a ‘gatekeeper’ subject for a range of highly lucrative career pathways dominated by European and Asian heritage men, making access to mathematical success a social justice issue with powerful material consequences. This thesis describes a mixed methods study of 425 Year Nine (age 13-14) students in three New Zealand state secondary schools, which investigated • the relationships between SES, ethnicity, gender, and success in mathematics, • cultural ideas about what types of people have mathematical ability, and • the effect of ability grouping on attainment disparities. European and Asian students had higher mathematics attainment than Māori and Pacific students. Pacific students reported enjoying mathematics despite their low attainment, whereas Māori students had very negative attitudes towards mathematics. Consistent with international studies, girls had lower confidence than boys in their mathematical abilities, despite having equal attainment. Interview data suggested that these differences in perceptions of mathematics were related to cultural ideas of mathematics as a ‘brain’ activity and therefore a natural fit for socially privileged men. Such ideas were further reinforced by ability grouping, which provided successful students with additional enrichment and withheld from low-attaining students the intellectual challenges that could have facilitated a shift to more successful learning trajectories.

Background: Access to safe and nutritious food is a universal right, which is essential for well-being. Food security exists when “all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious foods to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. Despite a call by global leaders to ensure food security and eradicate food insecurity, food insecurity remains a serious public health concern in Canada. While public health nurses are ideally situated to advance this public health priority, they have been conspicuously absent from important research and decision-making tables where work to address these inequities take place. This is the impetus for this study. Purpose: To explore how public health nurses engage in work to address food insecurity. The study uncovers the dynamic interplay of structures, processes, and agency that enable and constrain public health nurses work. An understanding of the sociopolitical contexts of public health helps to strengthen public health nurses’ engagement in food insecurity thereby contributing to health equity in Canada. Methodology: A holistic qualitative case study approach informed by the tenets of critical realism was used to guide this study in Nova Scotia. Primary data sources were 19 individual interviews and a review of 33 documents. Data were transcribed verbatim. Data analysis was guided by Framework Analysis and matrix construction. The trustworthiness of data was ensured through Lincoln and Guba’s criteria for qualitative studies. Findings: Four major themes include: 1) Framing Food (In)Security, 2) The Role of Public Health Nurses; 3) Navigating the Terrain of Food Insecurity; and 4) Resources to Advance Food Insecurity Work in Public Health Nursing Practice. Discussion and Implications: The dynamic interplay among leaders with differing ideologies and organizational culture has an impact on health equity agendas and subsequently on public health nursing engagement in work to address food insecurity. Capitalizing on a “clash of cultures” is associated with effective community food security outcomes. We must continue to illuminate the tensions among public health nurses and other stakeholders as well as address issues of power relations both within and external to the public health system. Conclusion: Public health may benefit greatly from building capacity of public health nurses’ to engage in both upstream and downstream food insecurity work.

In this thesis, I view the global Fashion System in terms of hybridity, with the intention of developing a theoretical understanding of a sustainable fashion system. I explore a perpetuated micro-scale activity – getting dressed each day – as a driver of the fashion system. Thereby aiming to help in redefining and clarifying the dynamics of fashion as a complex social-ecological system, to inform of risks and opportunities towards sustainable fashion. This project has two strands; Firstly, a theoretical understanding of fashion as a social-ecological system emphasizing social and abstract representations. Secondly, an action-oriented research approach for understanding how the frameworks applied in a science-business collaborative project relate to sustainable fashion and how that affects their work. For this, I draw on Critical Realism as meta-theory, where the real world consists of both material and non-material stratified layers.  Dividing the fashion system in four stratified layers; physical, material interaction, socio-economic and culture, allows the bridging of theory and practice. I argue that three concepts hybridity, modernity and fashion are essential for visioning a future sustainable fashion system and that key social-ecological resilience theories are limited for weaving them together. I found that transformations towards sustainable fashion cannot be reduced to merely socio-technical solutions, as individual’s everyday perpetuated activity of getting dressed is linked to global negative environmental impacts. In the science-business collaborative project, key challenges were identified: inadequate amount of time, and absence of knowledge regarding the fashion industry and fashion theory as well as absence of critical reflections. Finally, I found that the concepts of affordances provide a useful link between human, ‘things’ and the abstract entities created through the value chains of the fashion system. Thus, I propose that affordances could be developed as a tool linking sustainability science, design studies and economic business models, enhancing knowledge in science-business collaborations.

Innovation is widely seen as a basis for competition and knowledge plays a key role in underlying its effectiveness in the present economy which is knowledge-based. The innovation process is highly complex and uncertain; it is fraught with ambiguity, risks, errors and failures. How organisations respond to these downsides is not well reflected in the literature. They are often placed in a black box and left empirically unexplored. This researcher attempts to penetrate this box with an exploratory empirical study consisting of two research phases rooted in positivism. In Phase 1, a questionnaire survey is carried out with error management culture, organisational learning and knowledge management as antecedents of innovation effectiveness. The survey data collected are deductively analysed to test these four constructs. In Phase 2, the same data are inductively explored to determine the factors underlying innovation effectiveness. From deduction, knowledge management is found to be the sole antecedent of innovation effectiveness, affirming the importance of knowledge to innovation. From induction, autonomy and trust are found to be key factors underlying innovation effectiveness. Their attributes in this study are collaboration, knowledge sharing and control (for autonomy) and behaviour, relationship and reciprocal faith (for trust). The contributions from this study are – (a) an empirical confirmation on the importance of knowledge to innovation and (b) the derivation of autonomy and trust as key factors underlying its effectiveness. In addition, it contributes to research methodology with an exploratory integration of deduction and induction as complimentary modes of inference to facilitate the understanding of complex subjects like innovation. As a positivist research does not answer the causal how and why of innovation, it is recommended that future research on a similar topic moves to critical realism as a philosophical realm when an ontological dimension can be added to the epistemological exploration posited in positivism as found in this study.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) has become a rapidly advancing domain of enquiry and holds a place in policy makers consideration around the globe. Opportunities have been regarded as critical in SE, but are often portrayed in abstract and unspecified ways. Research on this topic remains relatively scarce, theory building is not yet established and integrated, and the dearth of empirical studies further constrains theoretical development in SE. Researchers have thus called for more exploration and a comprehensive theoretical understanding of SE opportunities. The purpose of this study is to explore SE opportunities through empirical investigation and theoretical development. As an exploratory study, this study addresses two broad research questions: (1) What are SE opportunities? And (2) How do they emerge? To answer these questions, I draw on the broader entrepreneurship literature which provides two main alternative explanations: opportunity discovery (nexus theory) and opportunity creation (effectuation theory). While the discovery/creation debate is still ongoing, recent theoretical advancement has shown a possible path of forwarding entrepreneurial opportunity research, suggesting that research should incorporate structure and agency simultaneously in studying opportunities. Following this path, this study contributes to SE opportunity research by providing a comprehensive understanding of SE opportunities, it also helps address the discovery/creation debate in the context of SE. To make this contribution, this study first adopts critical realism as a research philosophy as well as methodology. Critical realism incorporates the effects of both structure and agency through its ontological assumptions of three domains of reality, while providing an explanatory framework to assess competing theories. Second, this study selects China as a context for empirical study. As a relation-oriented society, China provides a useful context for studying the causal relations between the social structure (guanxi) and SE opportunity. China s institutional context and fast growing social enterprise sector also provides a promising setting for exploratory research on SE opportunities. Based on critical realism, I used a three-step qualitative multi-case study to develop an explanatory framework in which guanxi and social capital theory provide theoretical explanations of the social structure and its causal powers, which lead to SE opportunity emergence in China. Data were collected from 45 interviews with Chinese social entrepreneurs, their employees and other key stakeholders in 36 organisations in Beijing, Hunan Province and Shanghai. My research findings show that SE opportunities develop in all of the three domains defined by critical realism. In the domain of empirical a world of human experience of social events a SE opportunity can be described as discovered, created, or as both discovered and created. In the domain of actual the social events under study a SE opportunity consists of three internal and necessary constituents: unjust social equilibrium (USE), social entrepreneurs beliefs (SEB), and social feasibility (SF). In the domain of real deeper structures, causal powers and mechanism that produce the social event the emergence of SE opportunities can be seen as the result of a resource acquisition and mobilisation mechanism whereby USE, SEB and SF are identified or formed through social entrepreneurs social capital embedded in guanxi. Building on these findings, this study concludes with a theoretical framework that offers a comprehensive explanation of SE opportunity emergence in China. This study is the first attempt to apply critical realism to the study of opportunities in the context of SE in China. It contributes to the SE and general entrepreneurship literature by developing a theoretical framework of SE opportunity emergence that provides an alternative explanation for the existence of discovery and creation opportunities, and by extending our theoretical understandings of some key concepts of SE. This research further provides an example of the use of qualitative methods to apply critical realism in SE and general entrepreneurship research, which contributes to the development of relatively rigorous research design and research methods in studying complex social events.