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Abstract The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) currently enjoys the status of being the leading predictive tool for testing user acceptance of new technologies. Despite IS researchers and practitioners holding the model in high esteem, this study exposes some of its limitations when applied to a study of shop-floor users in South Africa. In search of an alternative theory explaining why these users so openly embraced the new information system, it emerges that the Critical Social Theory (CST) of Jürgen Habermas provides the most relevant insight. The use of the CST perspective reveals how these users view the new system as a potential means with which to achieve emancipation from their otherwise dreary existence as product inspectors. This thesis argues that this emancipatory potential offered by the new system played a major role in its successful acceptance. / Dissertation (Magister Commercii (Informatics))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Informatics / unrestricted

This study is positioned within existing debates about the meaning and role of academic literacy, how it shapes and then frames the academic and professional writing practices of business students. It explores relationships between literacy, individual writers and the academy. It goes beyond merely locating these relationships, pointing more to the need to understand how particular student and staff groups within the faculty describe academic writing practices, and in turn act upon these descriptions. Current formulations of academic literacy reflect a heavy emphasis by academic and professional communities on the commodity value of 'literacy skills'. This happens despite the fact that not much is known about the details and current culture of literacy practices in Australian universities, and how these are inflected by different disciplinary areas and cross-cultural factors. Given the divergent applications of literacy that exist across the business professions, there remains a distinct lack of consensus over the meaning of literacy in business higher education communities. Institutional responses reflect this lack of consensus, and are expressed as inflections around a perceived 'crisis' in tertiary literacy standards. Business and professional faculties, while simultaneously embracing the economic and policy imperative underlying mass education, are seen to remain scornful of the service obligation this brings. Implicit in current understandings of academic literacy are the taken for granted connections between basic literacy, reading and writing, schooling, education and employment. These connections underwrite the relations of institutional arrangements, everyday practices, policy construction, and the conditions for student evaluation in the faculty. This study begins from where literacy is located 'bodily', and provides in the first instance a content analysis which explicates and presents student discussions on various ways of thinking about, framing and reframing academic writing. The project then turns to contemporary literacy theory for an explanation of how a community discourse of 'academic literacy' is conceived, produced and in turn reproduced. Contemporary literacy theory has embraced three theoretical frameworks in its move away from a traditional uni-dimensional view of literacy, namely critical social theories, discourse and textual studies, and ethnographic research methodologies (Smith 1988). This trinity of frameworks is used in the second instance to examine a series of interviews with student writers. This data makes visible the means by which institutions value certain literacy practices over others, practices which support the naturalized world of writing required by the faculty and its professional communities. Dominant literacy practices are identified, and interpretive procedures from the field of Ethnomethodology are used to account for the ways in which discourses on academic writing both reflect and produce social and community realities. Theories of discourse are used to examine the social construction of student writing practices within this local faculty community by identifying the attributes and assumptions that are attached to different community members to account for aspects of writing practice. The key to understanding academic literacy practices is found in explication of the social processes and practices that organise the 'everyday' world of the business faculty. This project discloses how the subjective world of academic literacy is organised, and how this form of organisation is articulated 'to the social relations of the larger social and economic process' (Smith 1988:152). In the strict context of this study, this means being able to disclose for certain groups of student writers, how their situations and literacy practices are organised and determined by social processes outside the scope of their 'everyday' world. This process of discovery requires the researched to actively construct 'local' referents as categories and concepts which, when applied to a faculty context, can form an observable, local practice as a dialectic 'between what members do in tending the categories and concepts of (an) institutional ideology' on academic writing (Smith 1988:161). The interpretive practices students use to analyse literacy practices bring academic literacy into being. The outcomes of the study show that the relationships between literacy, the individual and the academy are currently explained and understood in terms of the connections that can be made between existing professional and academic community discourses. Here the concept of a 'literacy crisis' resides. It is expressed through informant talk as a perceived fall in academic literacy standards. Informant debate on what has caused this decline is generally expressed through two key positions. One of these holds a rhetorical view of literacy as a somewhat natural and procedural outcome of the higher educational process, positioning literacy within an oppositional framework of deficit cultural and linguistic models. A second view evokes a competitive agenda of limited and limiting academic and professional opportunities. Behind these arguments and their rebuttals, lie assumptions about the 'literate' person as a member of the faculty. In arguing that research into the field of academic literacy has concealed a student sub-text, this study argues that literacy has been constructed, implemented and investigated from the perspective of the institution. It follows that academic literacy can be better understood as a socially constructed and signifying space, one which includes opportunities for students to create their own powerful identities as writers and as members of professional and faculty communities. This project bridges many aspects of student experience, with the major focus upon that which has been excluded by the absence of students from the making of the topics and the relevance of the discourse. For this compelling reason, this project has direct relevance to teachers, researchers, fieldworkers and policy-makers involved in the overlapping fields of literacy and higher education.

Upon identifying the multifaceted and disparate array of ever-changing environmental informants to architectural discourse, one is confronted with how to unite this dialogue in meaningful ways to current modes of thought and action. The question gains more significance as our knowledge of the greater environmental domain becomes more systemic and complexly heterogenic, while at the same time, approaches to the issues have proved to be progressively more reductivist, disconnected, overtly abstracted or theorized, and universally globalized in regard to multifaceted and content-rich human particularities in situ. This research focuses on the implications and applications of Critical Environmentalism (CE) to propose a corresponding epistemological framework to wide-ranging socio-environmental complexities occurring across architectural endeavors, primarily within urban and community developments as comprising the greatest number of intersections between human constructions and the greater environmental domain. CE addresses environmental issues reciprocally emerging across numerous disciplines and theoretical stances and fosters critical and systemically collective approaches to knowledge integration, amalgamating multiple stakeholder perspectives within an interconnective and operational goal of creative communal development and betterment of the human condition in relation to environmental concerns. Situating the environment (Umwelt) as an interconnecting catalyst between divergent points-of-views, CE promotes a multi-methodological, co-enabling framework intended to foster increased ethical and participatory dynamics, communal vitality, co-invested attention, and productive interchanges of knowledge that cultivate an overall quality of knowing and being within the intricacies of the greater domain. As such, it engages broader definitions for architecture within its social community, significantly embodied and epistemologically co-substantiating within a shared, environmental life-place. Fundamentally a hermeneutic standpoint, this investigation elucidates conceptual connections and mutual grounds, objectives, and modes-of-operation across knowledge domains, initiating an essential, socio-environmentally oriented framework for architectural endeavors. In this, it brings together common threads within critical social theory and environmentalist discourse to subsequently promote distinct interconnective components within a framework of socio-environmental thought for architecture. The research then provides case examples and recommendations toward stimulating progressive environmental initiatives and thus increased capacity to improve existing epistemic conditions for architecture, urban design, and community development within the broader scope of Critical Environmentalism.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The purpose of this research study is to develop and describe a model to enhance the empowerment professional nurses to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression. Depression is a prevalent psychiatric disorder that despite its increase worldwide, often goes undetected or inadequately treated. The biomedical model's reductionist and dualistic approach proves to be inadequate for nursing practice to address depression and calls for the examination of a multifaceted holistic approach. A multifaceted holistic approach views disease as having multiple causes that are amenable to multiple therapeutic interventions. Despite research evidence about the effectiveness of such an approach, an in-dept literature search did not reveal the availability of such a model to enhance the empowerment of professional nurses to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression. The research question that emerged was: • How can professional nurses in the Western Cape be empowered to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression? The assumption is that this question was necessary to address. To realise the purpose of this research study, the following objectives were formulated: • To explore and describe the self reported attributes needed by professional nurses to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression. • To explore and describe how these self reported attributes can be facilitated in the work environment. • To propose a model to enhance the empowerment of professional nurses to promote the recovery of people who have been diagnosed with depression. • To develop guidelines for the operationalisation of the model. The theoretical framework for this research study was adopted from the Critical Social Theory. The research design and method used was qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual in nature. The research was done in two phases. In phase one the researcher did semi- structured interviews with a purposive and convenient sample of fourteen (14) professional nurses who were working in the Cape Town Metropolitan area and the West Coast. Each interview was transcribed from the tape recordings, verbatim and open coding was used to identify and analyse the content. In phase two the model was designed based on the findings of phase one. The six components, namely goals, concepts, definitions, relationships, structure and assumptions as described by Chinn and Jacobs, were used to develop the model. The guidelines for critical reflection as described by Chinn and Kramer were used to evaluate the model. A purposive sample that consisted of a group of psychiatric nurse specialists was asked to validate the model during a group discussion. As a result of their daily interaction with people who have been diagnosed with depression, professional nurses identified increased workload, lack of professional development and a lack of organizational support as barriers to implement the identified attributes support, positive approach, interpersonal skills and awareness of structure to promote the characteristics of the recovery approach. After the data analysis an empowerment model that would support professional nurses to promote a recovery approach in their working environments was developed. To ensure trustworthiness, Lincoln and Guba's model was used throughout the study. Ethical considerations were maintained throughout this qualitative research study.

This dissertation is about the changing imaginations of academic social work in an increasingly entangled world. Broadly, my subject area is the history and philosophy of social work, with an emphasis on engagements with critical social theory. More specifically, my research explores questions of discipline, generation, and critical social theory in the Anglophone Canadian context as a means to better understand how shared perceptions of the possible and the desirable are “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988). To do so, I trace and theorize changing perceptions through a survey of educators, and through integrative interdisciplinary and philosophical knowledge work considering various dynamics of disciplines in general and social work in particular. Evoking my own generational standpoint, I raise as a collective disciplinary problematic the canonization of second generation critical social theories, and the need to engage in the collective work of disciplinary reflexivity on, and accountability to, the ways in which the conditions of existence and possibility of critical academic social work are changing over time. Methodologically, I elaborate a reparative historical practice through a slightly different genre or style of writing. This is a feminist strategy, one roughly within the (generational) turn towards showing what one combines and assembles and learns through engaging with the world as a means to invite further speculative and imaginative work. This strategy is also a means to begin to imagine a “post-expert,” “post-good” and “post-progress” social work, not because knowledge and intention do not matter, but because these organizing referents have each achieved a level of saturation in what they can produce in the world. As such, this dissertation contributes some of the conditions of intelligibility necessary for the collective work of imagining and reimagining something akin to justice or improvement through social work after the fall of so many left and liberal progress narratives. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This research explores changing understandings of how social work in the Canadian state context imagines and intervenes in the world. My focus is on academic social work as both educator and knowledge producer, because the university is where some ideas and practices are refined and reproduced so that they can in turn be shared more broadly. Findings include the noteworthy influence of the university on the ideas and initiatives that do gain traction, as well as a generational structural to perceptions of the possible and the desirable. Overall, this research contributes a range of resources—historical, theoretical, empirical and speculative—to the collective work of imagining and reimagining social work for a changing world.

Thesis advisor: Paul Gray / Thesis advisor: Paul Schervish / The current economic crisis resembles a type of "critical situation" wherein everyday assumptions and routines sustaining hegemonic ideologies and their corresponding forms of social power are prone to be disrupted (Giddens 1987). Such situations provide opportunities for the relative strength of such hegemonies, and how they are effectively restored and/or challenged, to be uncovered. In undertaking this study I sought to discover the social and economic implications and lessons MBA students associate with the current economic crisis and how they frame and rationalize such perceptions. In so doing, I further aimed to uncover specific ideological processes they perform in preserving and/or challenging conventional tenets of liberal capitalism. I reexamine the sociological concept of ideology in reference to the empirical data, and test the capacity of Giddens' (1979, 1984) and Mannheim's (1949) combined methodologies in uncovering interconnections of consciousness, ideology and agency. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 MBA students from five universities in Boston, and used a combination of grounded theory and theory testing to analyze the data. Findings reveal not only the specific content comprising hegemonic notions of what constitutes economic and social reality among respondents, but also reflect how ideology functions as a holistic process of social and self understanding and how it reproduces, and is reproduced by, the performance of agencies within particular corporate and educational structures. I argue that the tenets espoused and enacted by many respondents reveal a stark challenge to future social change. Even amid the current crisis -the largest since the Great Depression -most respondents acknowledge that this event had little impact on how they view their professional vocations or the macro economic system. This finding not only speak strongly to the rigidity of conventional tenets underscoring our liberal capitalist culture, but also implies the urgent need to reconsider how our educational institutions should play a greater role in challenging conventional notions of reality espoused so fervently by burgeoning business professionals. I further argue that critical, systematic evaluations of consciousness and ideology should take a more substantial role in the social sciences in determining the restraints and possibilities for social change. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Over the last ten to fifteen years, prostitution policies in England have grown increasingly welfarist in tone, stressing the relative victimhood and vulnerability of women who sell sex. This thesis explores important facets of these emergent narratives. Using a qualitative multi-method approach, it investigates the manner in which 21 policy-actors and seven policy documents - principally originating from the English prostitution ‘policy subsystem’ - interpret and represent prostitution. From a methodological perspective, generated findings are explored through the dual interpretative frameworks of critical discourse analysis and sociological frame theory. These frameworks require that localised narratives be contextualised within, and explained by reference to, broader discursive and cultural conditions. In deference to this, findings are situated within rich bodies of academic literature which commentate on, promote and critique various political philosophies, ideological discourses, and critical social theories, such as (neo)-liberalism, a number of feminisms, and Bourdieusian sociology. More specifically, this thesis explores the way 21 policy actors, and four of the selected policy documents, represent the subjecthood of women who sell sex. It approaches this endeavour via discussions of vulnerability, subjectivity/choice, and gender. Here, it concludes that actors and documents draw on, and contribute to, a plurality of complimentary and contradictory ideological discourses, to interpret and represent certain facets of a woman in prostitution’s ‘self’. Substantively, it suggests that - whilst there is a broad consensus regarding the importance of the internal individualism of women who sell sex, and the instrumentality of externalities with regard to shaping her social spaces and ability to choose - questions of gender remain highly contested. Thereafter, this thesis explores the way the same policy-actors, and three distinct policy documents, discursively include/exclude prostitution from violence against women and girls (VAWG) narratives. It begins by exploring how documents and actors define violence in generic terms, and to what degree they adhere to a feminist sociological model when explaining the aetiology and causality of VAWG. It then discusses how prostitution’s relationship to VAWG is framed, and inclusion/exclusion is justified. Here, it concludes that whilst there is a general commitment to the feminist sociological model of VAWG, the question of whether or not prostitution should be included beneath its auspices is highly contentious – pitting classically oppositional coalitions of actors against one another and creating intramural disputes within coalitions themselves. Drawing these strands together, concluding chapters explore framing dynamics. In total, this thesis offers a number of contributions to the fields of prostitution and VAWG policy studies. It demonstrates that while debates in the English prostitution policy subsystem frequently appear to be comprised of two bitterly oppositional ‘advocacy coalitions’, the two groups share multiple areas of ideological consensus, at least with regard to how they understand prostitution. Indeed, more often than not, coalitions differ principally with regard to their prognostic frames and their judgments of material prevalence. In turn, this disrupts extant literature on advocacy coalitions, which suggests that policy-actors organise themselves into groups by reference to their core belief systems, whilst showing a willingness to compromise on secondary considerations. These areas of consensus by no means suggests that matters are straightforward, however. Indeed, this thesis provides evidence that many facets of the prostitution debate are nuanced, complex and ambivalent – that actors entertain and promote contradictory narratives, that coalitions suffer intra-mural fractures over discursive fault-lines, and that framing preferences are strategically engaged. With regard to the last point, this thesis makes a significant methodological contribution to the field of discourse analysis, insofar as it explores the manner in which respondents can be represented as both formed through, and active users of, discourse. It does so by bringing two distinct discourse theories/methods into dialogue with one another. Over and above this, this thesis seizes upon the theoretical opportunities presented when original findings and extant academic scholarship are used to elucidate and develop one another. Most notably it deploys the work of critical social theorists, Martha Fineman and Pierre Bourdieu, to explore new ways in which the harms of prostitution can be conceived.

Esta pesquisa foi realizada com o objetivo de investigar como crianças com idade entre três e quatro anos reagem a situações cotidianas, durante o brincar, apresentando manifestações potencialmente preconceituosas. Para tanto se propôs adaptar a escala do fascismo (escala F) para situações que representam o cotidiano de forma lúdica, o que permitiu identificar elementos que denotam o preconceito já em crianças. A pesquisa foi realizada em uma escola da rede privada de ensino do município de São Paulo, com crianças de idades entre três e quatro anos, com as quais o pesquisador realizou um momento de observação lúdica no qual as crianças interagiram livremente com bonecos que representavam diferenças entre cor de pele e de presença ou ausência de deficiência, e um momento de aplicação de situações problema representadas de forma lúdica e que tiveram a intenção de avaliar os aspectos investigados na escala F. Os sujeitos da pesquisa também estiveram divididos em agrupamentos de crianças que estudavam com crianças com deficiência em sala de aula e agrupamentos que não estudavam, com o objetivo de identificar possíveis diferenças no padrão de respostas dada a relação com a inclusão da criança com deficiência no ambiente escolar. Os resultados avaliados a partir do referencial da Teoria Crítica da Sociedade apontaram para a uma baixa pontuação numa escala de manifestação de atitudes que denotam o preconceito em crianças com idade entre três e quatro anos e pode-se concluir que essa idade é um momento propicio para se aplicar intervenções com vistas a minimizar os efeitos do preconceito, embora indique a continuidade de pesquisas sobre a formação do preconceito que incluam o elemento lúdico em crianças desta faixa etária / This research aims at investigating how three- and four-year-old children react to everyday situations, during play time, showing potentially prejudiced behavior. We propose adapting the fascist scale (F-scale) to everyday situations represented in a ludic way, which allowed us to identify prejudiced elements in children. This research was developed in a private school in São Paulo, with three- and four-year-old children. During the study, the researcher observed the children as they played with dolls (which could have different skin tones, presence or absence of malformation) and as they were presented with problematic situations in order to be analyzed based on the F-scale. The subjects of the research were also divided into two groups those who had classmates with special needs and those who did not. Our objective was to identify possible differences in the response pattern regarding the inclusion of children with special needs in the classroom environment. The results were analyzed based on the Critical Social Theory, pointed to a low score on a manifestation scale of attitudes that denotes prejudice in three- to four-year-old children. We might conclude that, at this age, it is a favorable moment to intervene aiming at lessening prejudice effects. Moreover, it also indicates that research on prejudice formation along with ludic elements should continue to be done with children of that age

According to several studies, there have been improvements in adolescent sexual behaviour; declining adolescent pregnancies, fewer adolescents having more than one sexual partner, and an increasing numbers of adolescents using contraceptives. Notwithstanding these improvements, there are concerns regarding adolescents’ sexual health including adolescents’ limited knowledge of sexual health issues, high rates of sexually transmitted infections and the need to eliminate barriers to adolescent sexual health services. The purpose of this study was to explore adolescents’ perceptions of the facilitators and barriers to the promotion of healthy sexuality of adolescents living in PEI. A qualitative descriptive design guided by CST and a socio-ecological framework was used to explore participants’ perceptions. Six female high school students, 16-18 years of age, participated in a face-to-face semi-structured interview followed by a second face-to-face follow up interview. Seven themes emerged from the data that was analyzed through thematic analysis: The Illusion of Accessible Resources; Risky Behaviours; Peer Pressure Alive and Well in High School; Cyberbullying; Parental Influence on Adolescent Decision Making; Inefficient and Underutilized School Health Resources; and Inefficient and Underutilized Community Health Resources. While it is evident that some promotion of healthy sexuality of adolescents is occurring in PEI, more investigation and development is needed to better support adolescents with comprehensive school services including guidance and education. The results of this study can be used to guide this future development.