Requirements regarding participation by the public in planning and decision making functions of Metropolitan Planning Organizations have become more detailed over the past several decades by adding more groups and individuals to the list of those who should be included in agency planning efforts. This increased emphasis on public participation in MPOs makes the design and selection of particular participation mechanisms by MPO planning staff an important subject for study. The extant literature on public participation takes a view of the planner as one who is able to interpret the existing technical, social, and political requirements of a planning task and match them with the appropriate public participation mechanism. However, this view of the planner overlooks his or her own understanding of the role of the public in agency decision making. This dissertation employs Grid-Group Cultural Theory to explore how a planner's worldview impacts their selection of particular public participation mechanisms. Data were collected using an online survey instrument and analyzed using multinomial logistic regression. Findings indicate that those planners who held a hierarchist worldview were less likely than egalitarians and individualist planners to select mechanisms that are more intensive (in their requirements for communication). In addition, the research finds that factors internal to the MPO including the budget, project schedule, political priorities, the type of projects, safety issues and agency priorities also have an impact on the mechanisms for public participation selected by MPO planning staff. / Ph. D.

America is diverse in its culture of ideas and ways of life. This makes for a complex negotiation of issue positions and justifications when attempting to resolve public issues. It is essential therefore, that organizations not only understand but also cater to and adapt to the variety of cultural expectations and interpretations that may guide their various stakeholder publics when creating messages about controversial issues. One of the most controversial issues our society faces today is affirmative action. The rationales for the different stances people take on this topic vary greatly, revealing both opportunities and barriers to resolve a long-standing, contentious political issue. This thesis describes and analyzes reactions to two 2003 Supreme Court cases that examined the University of Michigan's affirmative action admissions policies: Gratz, et al. v. Bollinger, et al. and Grutter et al v. Bollinger, et al. The cases were the first time the Supreme Court had addressed affirmative action since the 1978 Bakke case. It was also the first time that the Court would debate whether or not diversity is truly a compelling state interest and what constitutes a fair and legal process by which to achieve it. Mediated accounts of the debate were examined in order to offer insight into contemporary interpretations of a recurring issue. By looking at how the media framed the issue, policymakers, politically-involved citizens, public relations practitioners can better understand the political climate in which they work, and thereby allowing them to better craft their communication efforts. Cultural Topoi, developed from Cultural Theory was used as a lens through which to examine the complexity of American political principles in these cases and values in this changing landscape of social expectations and public policy. / Master of Arts

Published Article / There is an ongoing debate on the importance and meaning of organisational culture. Comprehending the prevailing organisational culture is crucial for organisations that need to change and/or launch new projects. This especially applies to the security industry which is constantly faced with new challenges in a national and international realm. This paper uses an anthropological approach to propose an organisational structure best suited for the private security industry. A major South African security company is analyzed in terms of the grid group (GG) or cultural theory. This framework originated in the study of anthropology, originally developed by the British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970, 1978).

This thesis explores how coach-athlete relationships are influenced within the organisational culture of a rowing club. Relational Cultural Theory and the work of Weber are used to examine how the concept of organisational culture informs understanding of coach and athlete relating. The study, covering a complete competitive season, involved an eleven month long ethnography of an elite rowing club in Great Britain. The findings demonstrate the visceral, enculturated and complex nature of coach-athlete relationships in elite sport. Relational disconnection occurred in the disenchanted organisational life, where intrinsic values were subordinated to a rational quest for efficiency, control and ultimately success, as well as traditional social ordering based on status and gender. Relationships were characterised by power over relating, distance and impersonal relations, caretaking rather than caring about, fragile trust by the athlete and trust through surveillance by the coach, where emotion was concealed and conflict avoided. However, enacting shared identities, the emotion involved in competing and the fact this was a voluntary organisation with competing values, provided an escape from simulacra of elite sport to allow for multi-value paradigm of interests. The opportunity for coaches and athletes to connect with each other based on their values and with emotion exposed their humanity and revealed the potential for relational mutuality and authenticity. The study challenges the valorised coaching and elite sport relationships and lifestyle. Implications for coaching include providing individuals with confidence to raise the issue of relationship, providing coaches and athletes with knowledge of connection and disconnection in relationship and the outcome on well-being. The need to develop a systemised approach to embedding growth-fostering relationships in the culture of high performance sport is highlighted.

The aim of this thesis is to build a paradigm to unravel the human mind’s fundamental kinship with the cosmos and its role as the vehicle of the universe’s unfolded meaning. The concept of ‘boundary’ is presented as a primary ontological force that drives, provokes and defines our thinking, consciously and subconsciously, in our attempt to achieve an understanding of self within the cosmos. It provides the hidden thread, the ‘limited concept’ that acts as a guide towards the building of this paradigm. Challenging its primarily physical interpretation, this thesis examines the concept of boundary from its genesis, imbedded in the primary moment of the birth of human consciousness within the universe, following it along its progressive complexity. Merging a primarily phenomenological with an epistemological approach by building on a number of essential evolutionary phases in our existence, through a synthesis of induction and deduction, we are confronted by how they are driven by boundary. Myth, religion, language, culture, philosophy, science, and even architecture are manifestations of humanity’s gradual attempt to understand, adapt to and transform our world and ourselves within it and in reference to it, displaying an inherent dynamic between our mind and our world. Bound in this dialectical creative opposition, our conceptualisations of the world are seen both as insights of our mind in its attempt to unravel the meaning of the cosmos, as well as the cosmos’s attempt to gradually reveal its nature within us, thus revealing their radical kinship. Ultimately, the aim is to reveal architecture and its embodied nature as a fundamental manifestation of our existence within the cosmos and to distil its message and purpose, its timeless task. Architecture is exposed as an existential medium, engaging the boundary between man and the cosmos, inviting us to read a model of the world while at the same time endowing us with our own sense of self and finally enabling us to coexist with our world in an interactive evolving equilibrium.

This thesis offers a critical interrogation of the relationship between and co-production of bodies, texts and spaces. It introduces and develops the concept of the embodied imagination through the philosophy of Spinoza and recent Spinozist thinkers as a way of informing a materialist account of the production of experience. The embodied imagination, as material and affective, can supplement a Foucauldian account of subjectivation through its ability to offer an account of experience ‘after the subject’ – of experience as the surface effects of the movement of affect through and across bodies, texts and spaces that are productive of transsubjective social imaginaries. This can contribute to a fuller account of subject production and to a formulation of embodied politics based on a political analytic of feeling. These conceptual arguments are mobilised through exemplars from ethnographic fieldwork based on the geographical concerns of landscape, embodied practice and place imaginaries. In particular, I point to specific outdoor practices, techniques and regimes that, in their imbrication in certain imaginaries, contribute to a sense of place and belonging. Through a ‘thoroughly materialist’ approach to these concerns, bodies’ involvement in material relations with other bodies and with the world are shown to be central to experience-production. I argue too that this approach can expose the relations of power that produce the very materialities of bodies, and as such can shed light on the politics of the nonrepresentational and its centrality to the production of embodied subjectivities. In doing so, a postfoundational sociology of embodied experience is formulated that operates according to a politics of radical contingency. This postfoundational perspective foregrounds an ontology of the encounter over presence: an ontogenetic account of the emergence of bodies, texts and spaces from their material imbrication in a world charged with affective resonance.

This exploratory investigation examined the relationship between states' educational standardization and voter turnout, using cultural and critical theory lenses. The study documented the problem of low voter participation and current education standardization policies. The study used a complementarity mixed-methods design with sequential quantitative and qualitative components. The quantitative component developed a tool for measuring states' levels of educational standardization, the Standardized Education Index (SEI). Data for voter age population (VAP) and voter eligible population (VEP) in state presidential elections between 2000 and 2012 were used as measures of voter turnout. A weak correlation was found between the SEI and voter turnout for VEP in 2000 and VAP in 2000, 2004, and 2008, with between 6% and 14% of variability explained. While no evidence of a positive relationship between higher levels of SEI and higher voter turnout was found, no counter argument could be established either. The qualitative component utilized case studies of exemplars of states with high SEI/low voter turnout and high SEI/low voter turnout, which were Arkansas and New Hampshire, respectively. Investigated elements were educational Administrative Rules, voting regulations, and cultural/geographic and demographic attributes. Data were compiled and compared. A binary sort, a Dichotomous Sort of Accountability Concepts, framed the critical analysis of educational standards data. Arkansas was found to be a location of standardized education and restrictive voting regulations. New Hampshire was a location of more differentiated education supporting civic engagement with easier access to voting. This study's results are a baseline for further investigation of the relationship of educational standardization to voter participation. If standards based reform has a positive effect on voter participation, then future correlation analysis will produce a moderate to strong positive relationship. If the relationship remains negative, then it will provide evidence that standards reform does not engender an informed electorate.

The aim of this master’s thesis is to identify differences and similarities, regarding security, in two goods terminals in an organisation in the transport and goods sector. In this thesis we use Cultural Theory as an analytical instrument to investigate organizational culture, as seen from a security perspective. Cultural Theory is a theory seen from two perspectives, the stable perspective and the mobile perspective. These two perspectives concentrate on different research areas. In the thesis we choose to present two representations of both perspectives. A case study was designed to collect the empirical material. Interviews were held, both with individuals and with focus groups at both terminals. The two perspectives of Cultural Theory were also implemented when we collected our material. Our analysis of the empirical material, made from the representations of the stable- and mobility perspectives of Cultural Theory, shows that both terminals have tendencies towards a hierarchical bias, but the terminal named B shows a somewhat higher degree of group – level than the terminal named A. We propose that the size of the terminals and the relationships between the employees can make a difference and can explain the higher degree of group level in terminal B, but the result of this thesis can not entirely confirm this. An analysis of factors that affect violations also shows that terminal A has a higher potential risk of fiddling than terminal B. This conclusion is also a topic that needs further research if it is to be confirmed. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The dissertation is an ethnographic study of religion as conceived and experienced by organ transplant recipients. It is also a cultural study of North America’s collective expressions of transplant as found in Christian journals, popular media, advocacy literature and public policy statements. The study finds evidence that religious metaphors and directives, cosmological figures and theological arguments, rituals, scriptures and places of worship are actively, vociferously, and consciously engaged with organ transplant discourse and with the experience of giving or receiving organs. While the transplant recipients under study cannot be considered representative (being largely advocates for transplant and almost exclusively of Christian background or affiliation), this group was articulate about the ways their new organ invoked the sacred: they described new metaphysical understandings, they spoke of a closer relationship with God, the universe and other human beings, they divulged inexplicable incidents and mystical states of being, they articulated a complex set of ethical prescripts. “Thinking how many times you should have been dead and you’re still here” was for many an imperative to “start to find out why.” I argue that these spiritual seekers traverse a 21st century terrain shaped by the practices and discourses of what Foucault termed “biopower”. The private and public production of sanctified donors and ‘redeemed’ recipients is inextricably bound to the desires of transplant professionals and government officials, and cannot hope to escape the very real commodification of the body that transplant represents. This seeming paradox of ‘the sacred in the secular’ does not make transplant’s religious constructions inauthentic or irrelevant. Religion remains an active and inventive register for the recording of potent bodily experiences of illness, loss and conditional regeneration. Further, the religious activity around transplant affords a window on emerging rites, on contemporary understandings of death and immortality, and on new conversations about miracles and morality. Circuits of biotechnology are not immune to religious influence and inflection – but, simultaneously, contemporary religious meanings, practices and experiences are indelibly shaped by our newfound ability to transplant organs.

The dissertation is an ethnographic study of religion as conceived and experienced by organ transplant recipients. It is also a cultural study of North America’s collective expressions of transplant as found in Christian journals, popular media, advocacy literature and public policy statements. The study finds evidence that religious metaphors and directives, cosmological figures and theological arguments, rituals, scriptures and places of worship are actively, vociferously, and consciously engaged with organ transplant discourse and with the experience of giving or receiving organs. While the transplant recipients under study cannot be considered representative (being largely advocates for transplant and almost exclusively of Christian background or affiliation), this group was articulate about the ways their new organ invoked the sacred: they described new metaphysical understandings, they spoke of a closer relationship with God, the universe and other human beings, they divulged inexplicable incidents and mystical states of being, they articulated a complex set of ethical prescripts. “Thinking how many times you should have been dead and you’re still here” was for many an imperative to “start to find out why.” I argue that these spiritual seekers traverse a 21st century terrain shaped by the practices and discourses of what Foucault termed “biopower”. The private and public production of sanctified donors and ‘redeemed’ recipients is inextricably bound to the desires of transplant professionals and government officials, and cannot hope to escape the very real commodification of the body that transplant represents. This seeming paradox of ‘the sacred in the secular’ does not make transplant’s religious constructions inauthentic or irrelevant. Religion remains an active and inventive register for the recording of potent bodily experiences of illness, loss and conditional regeneration. Further, the religious activity around transplant affords a window on emerging rites, on contemporary understandings of death and immortality, and on new conversations about miracles and morality. Circuits of biotechnology are not immune to religious influence and inflection – but, simultaneously, contemporary religious meanings, practices and experiences are indelibly shaped by our newfound ability to transplant organs.