The genesis of this research initiative is situated in a very challenging and troubling period in my career as an associate dean in a public post-secondary educational institution - a time during which I led our first significant initiatives into costrecovery program delivery. This mission gave rise to contentious issues about our values as educators and about bureaucratic norms that were being challenged. The issues cried out for discourse and values based decision making about what and how we "ought" to be as an institution. Instead, too often, power differentials and bureaucratic imperatives played the central roles in decision-making processes about this new form of programming. Fundamental questions of goodness and justice were left unresolved and often even un-discussed. The events of my practice form the "object of study" in this research as I seek both an understanding of why the experience was thus and also how it might have been otherwise. Through the work of Jiirgen Habermas I explore the difficult problem of achieving social order, grounded in moral agency, in a world characterized by divergent values and perspectives. I discover hope and potential promise in his conceptually proceduralistic approach to the task of social coordination. Examining my experiences in light of Habermas' notions of social coordination, I find some possible explanations for these events and some concepts that offer hope for new approaches to governance and administration. There remain, however, very real and complicating barriers to the ideal posited by Habermas - barriers located in the complexities of human behaviour and interpersonal relationships. Seeking better ways of understanding those barriers and of responding to their impact, I turn to Hannah Arendt and Susan Bickford whose work provides insight into the personal and interpersonal dimensions of human action in creating just communities. Examining my practice experiences through their conceptualizations yields additional insights about what occurred and why, offers guidance about my own actions, and affords a new appreciation of my own complicity in the events as they transpired. The result is new ways of understanding power, discourse, and moral agency - and therefore of understanding my role in educational leadership. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

The aim of this study was to investigate how Swedish drug policy is shaped at a municipal level, regarding problems and solutions for housing contributions for people with addiction and dependence problems. The study was conducted through a qualitative method in the form of a document study. The documents that were examined consisted of the national guidelines for support and care for people with addiction and dependence problematics, produced by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. Furthermore, three regulatory documents from three different Swedish municipalities were examined. The collected data from each document were then analyzed using thematic analysis. The thematic analysis produced themes within the data, which in turn became the results of the study. The results of the study shows that there are some similarities between national and municipal level regarding the problems and solutions that are presented. However, there are also distinct differences. The conclusions of this study are that the regulatory documents appear, to some extent, to have been influenced by the National Board of Health and Welfares recommendations. At the same time, the differences in the data may imply that the municipalities are entitled to form policies based on local problems and solutions to these problems. Thereby the final conclusion of the study is that Swedish drug policy do influence policies at municipal level, but that the deviations that can be found in the local regulatory documents indicate that the municipalities to some extent are independent of national policies.

This dissertation studies the history of philanthropy in the San Francisco Bay Area between the 1940s to the 2010s through the experiences of the foundation managers, professors, and attorneys, who collectively oversaw the distribution of philanthropic wealth for the region’s donors. This dissertation argues that foundation managers and a range of other non-donor professionals were critical to the formation of organized philanthropy in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1940s, which in limited but vital ways redistributed wealth to organizations that provided social welfare services. In the austere decades of the late 20th century, however, philanthropic intermediaries created new models of giving that, in appealing to affluent people, narrowed the purpose and reach of foundations, while expanding the ability of donors to set conditions on their giving. In tandem with larger political and economic changes, the disruption of philanthropy in the San Francisco Bay Area—the creation of donor-centric modes of giving that appealed to the norms of high-tech and financial moguls—helped produce a local nonprofit sector more reflective of the interests of wealthy donors rather than those in need.

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