This thesis provides a qualitative research of asylum seeking of unaccompanied children in Sweden. Children who find themselves traveling borders without company of a family member are in a very vulnerable position. In this thesis, the experience of unaccompanied children undergoing an asylum process in the Swedish jurisdiction is presented and the consequences of this process are also presented. With the creation of territorial boundaries embodied with an institution of state sovereignty, unaccompanied children finds themselves in a position of statelessness which produces a situation of rightlessness as they find themselves outside their own territories. This research suggests that, the territorial system provides great examples of unaccompanied children in a situation of statelessness even when they find themselves inside a new community. Even in this new state they do not automatically gain access to the community, instead through migration system, they must undergo investigations and procedures to prove that they have the rights to belong to that current community, a procedure that contributes to stress and other negative factors to the health of these children. From the findings of the interviews with unaccompanied children undergoing the process of seeking asylum and also unaccompanied children in hiding, it is seen that the asylum seeking process in the condition of unaccompanied children is characterized by the paradoxical system of national states, territorialism, totalitarianism, state sovereignty and an effort of maintaining human rights. The suggestion is that, the paradigm of territorialism and state sovereignty deprives unaccompanied children from what one in the Arendtian sense would call the right to have rights. As their journey to a new community starts off as a position of statelessness and with a 50% chance of returning back to that position. Their position slowly emerges from unaccompanied children, to a stateless adultescence and lastly to a forgotten undocumented adult.

This study investigates employees' perceptions of diversity and its impact on the workplace, as perceived by employees themselves. The focus will specifically be on external diversity factors such as culture, race and gender and to what extent these factors can possibly be linked to differences in perceptions of the influence of diversity in the workplace. We know that equality and diversity programmes should be aligned with an organisation's core strategic objectives. Not only is this alignment critical to achieving equality and diversity goals, but it also enables organisations to benefit from the business opportunities that diversity offers. To better understand the role and importance of diversity and gain insight into social systems, quantitative measures of diversity were examined by means of questionnaires. A major consideration for managers is the wide scope of behaviours, attitudes, and values of the diverse staff across socio–cultural boundaries, which are bound to affect organisational processes. Thus, it is crucial for managers to distinguish how staff of different socio–cultural backgrounds could be interacting within the organisation, and identify how perceptual effects may be manifested in multicultural group relationships. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

This thesis explores the relationship between food and identity. Drawing on the concept of ‘gastro-anomie’, or ‘food normlessness’, it asks how individuals’ make sense of food and eating in the context of an increasingly globalised and complex food economy. Through a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a small number of individuals living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the thesis outlines participants’ everyday attitudes toward food and eating practices. It concludes that individuals actively seek out and ultimately find meaning through their food consumption practices. Consciously aware of the problems associated with the global food economy, the participants in this study used their food choices as a way to reflexively carve out their identities. Their bodies provided a powerful medium through which they engaged in these efforts.

Demandingness-based objections to utilitarianism and other consequentialist moral theories constitute the most important problem facing moral philosophers today. In this Thesis, I offer an explanation of what makes the demandingness objection compelling, namely, that utilitarianism alienates us from the projects and goals that define us as individual human beings (normally taken to be a separate objection). This suggests that solving the problems demandingness considerations present involves carving out a space for these projects and goals alongside the demands of a consequentialist morality; thus, we have two nearly independent sources of normative reasons, and the real question is how they interact. Various suggestions for answering this question are considered and rejected. I also discuss how Alastair Norcross’ scalar utilitarianism “solves” the demandingness problem, what the costs of this solution are, and how it might be integrated into a theory concerning the aforementioned interaction.

This study investigates employees' perceptions of diversity and its impact on the workplace, as perceived by employees themselves. The focus will specifically be on external diversity factors such as culture, race and gender and to what extent these factors can possibly be linked to differences in perceptions of the influence of diversity in the workplace. We know that equality and diversity programmes should be aligned with an organisation's core strategic objectives. Not only is this alignment critical to achieving equality and diversity goals, but it also enables organisations to benefit from the business opportunities that diversity offers. To better understand the role and importance of diversity and gain insight into social systems, quantitative measures of diversity were examined by means of questionnaires. A major consideration for managers is the wide scope of behaviours, attitudes, and values of the diverse staff across socio–cultural boundaries, which are bound to affect organisational processes. Thus, it is crucial for managers to distinguish how staff of different socio–cultural backgrounds could be interacting within the organisation, and identify how perceptual effects may be manifested in multicultural group relationships. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

The decline thesis proposes that political participation among young people has declined steadily and alarmingly since the 1960s. New research proposes that young people have not been simply abstaining from political participation but that they have been engaging in new or alternative forms of participation like demonstrating, signing petitions and expressing themselves politically in the market. This paper asks two questions---who are these alternative participators and what explains why they have turned to these new forms? The results indicate that young people engage with alternative forms of political participation more than they engage with more traditional forms like joining political parties and lobbying Congress. Furthermore, the results show that the theory of postmaterialism does explain in part what leads some young people to participate in these alternative forms more than others.

This thesis aims at explaining the forms and styles in which the phenomenon of alienation found expression in Turkish novels, particularly in the 1970s. For this purpose, three novels of the decade are chosen for in-depth analysis since they are considered to be most representative examples. It was important to question how these three novels have ascribed significance to the existing conditions of alienation. Therefore, the specific discussion of this thesis dwells on whether these novels offer any alternative approach or whether there is any possibility of such an alternative. Thus, the analyses of the characters in the novels are based on their designation as they experience the adverse consequences of the phenomenon of alienation. In spite of the fact that the novels differ among themselves in their particular approach to alienation, there is a general attempt to designate a sense of consciousness that is not totally effective in overcoming negative consequences of this phenomenon.

This thesis studies Peter Shaffer&rsquo / s use of time as a technique for creating alienation effect. In order to provide the audience with a questioning role, Shaffer primarily employs historical and mythical past as elements of pastness in the Brechtian sense. Shaffer also innovatively contributes to the formation of alienation effect with spatial time achieved through the coexistence of past and present. Distancing the audience in time, the playwright leads them to adopt a critical viewpoint so that they can question and reflect upon the psychological and metaphysical themes such as search for worship, existential disintegration and the eternal conflict between reason and instinct in his plays The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Yonadab, and The Gift of the Gorgon.

This thesis purports to make two contributions to understandings of biotechnology. First, it presents a novel framework through which to view biotechnology as a complex series of fundamentally social and politically economic mediations rather than a decontextualised collection of technical and scientific phenomena. Second, the thesis presents a method for analysing contemporary discourses about biotechnology within this framework. The framework presented in the first content chapter of the thesis identifies what I see to be the four primary mediating "movements" that are central to seeing Biotechnology as Media: Alienation, Translation, Recontextualisation, and Absorption. The next chapter explicates these movements more fully using a combination of social practice and discourse theory. Using these four movements and the mediation framework as a guide, I then critically analyse a corpus of seventy two exemplary texts (approximately 700,000 words) about contemporary biotechnology. Mediation, in the sense I use it here, is not concerned with one particular media form or technology. Rather, it focuses on the process of mediation as the movement of meanings (Silverstone, 1999). I argue that seeing biotechnologies as mediations can provide a deeper and more critical understanding of how ways of seeing, being, acting, and describing (discourses) associated with contemporary biotechnology are moved from micro- and macro-biological and scientific contexts into the everyday lives of citizens and ecosystems. In particular, such a view highlights the forces and voices that currently determine the path and substance of political-economic movements in biotechnology and, consequently, how everyday perceptions of biotechnology are shaped or silenced in processes of mediation. A core assumption of the thesis is that processes of mediation are not neutral. Rather, they are always inherently interpretive, politically economic, and ethically significant. Any mediation involves "filtering" processes via which "content" is transformed into a form that is appropriate for a given medium by persons who have control over the medium, and by the nature of the medium itself. This applies as much in laboratory and scientific contexts as it does in the contexts of mass consumption, whether in newspapers, policy papers, movies (such as Gattaca), or consumer goods. The same is true in the mediation of biotechnology: there are technological and discursive restrictions on what and who can "contribute to" and "come out" of biotechnology and also what is construed as being a valuable and desirable outcome of biotechnology research and development. The three central analysis chapters of the thesis outline firstly how biotechnology can function as a time-based medium for the reproduction of already powerful discourses on, for example, the role of technology in human development and the consumer market as the moral medium between generators of new technologies and their "consumers". I identify exemplars of how the history of biotechnology and mediation (movement) is expressed in the corpus. This is followed by a more concentrated analysis of the ethical and social significance of the key "official" mediations presented in the corpus. I focus in particular on how the predominant policy evaluations of biotechnological mediations expressed in state, national, and international policy documents construct a "virtuous cycle" of product development that will ostensibly "deliver the benefits" of biotechnology to all citizens who, in the corpus, are framed predominantly as "consumers". The final chapter of the thesis reflects on the significance of biotechnology at the macro level of social practices and systems. Apart from its direct function as a technical medium for alienating hitherto inalienable aspects of life, such as configurations of DNA, and turning them into products for sale, I argue that, as a suite of mediating movements, biotechnology has the potential to effectively, and for the most part invisibly, mediate our more general understandings and experiences of ourselves, of other species, and of the world we live in. More specifically, I argue that biotechnological mediations actively, and often forcefully, promote a narrowing of the range of evaluative resources on offer to the general community, and indeed to biotechnologists themselves. Biotechnological mediations can therefore be described as part of a broader movement away from conditions of heteroglossia or dialogue (multi language, multi voice) toward conditions of monologia (one language, one voice). The thesis concludes with an important question: if we can identify these narrowing effects or mediations of biotechnology by using techniques such as Critical Discourse Analysis and by seeing biotechnology in a mediation framework, what can we do to interrupt them and generate movements that are more generative of heteroglossic and socially responsive ways of seeing, being, and acting? I offer a number of responses to the question in the conclusion.

Long term ocean cruisers are self defined as people who have accepted, adopted or chosen a cruising lifestyle, who live aboard their own sailing vessels, have independent means, are self sufficient and have been away from their port of departure for an extended period of time. As a group, cruisers, constitute a subculture (Macbeth, 1985). Why do people choose to adopt a cruising lifestyle? Using the principles of grounded theory analysis, this study found that cruisers were motivated by a variety of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations as well as by their social background and status in society. Cruisers were motivated by a need to escape the pressures and constraints of their home society as well as to pursue a lifestyle which offered freedom and a sense of personal control, a need to add some adventure or challenge to their lives or to fulfil a dream. They were also motivated by relationship commitments and a desire to travel and experience new cultures, people and settings. Their age, gender, family life cycle stage, education, income and former lifestyle pursuits also motivated them. In setting about and maintaining the fulfilment of their motivations, cruisers exhibited personal agency in their choice to move from a life in the centre of mainstream western societies to one in the margins. Overall, cruisers were found to be social actors who exhibit agency and self governance in decision making as to whether or not to maintain a sense of 'connectivity' with and without various social settings. Cruisers' responses to feelings of anomie and alienation in their home societies, to their feelings of under or non-actualisation at the individual level, and to their need for belonging with a partner activated these people to make choices and decisions regarding the negotiation and direction of their own social realities. Based on the cruisers who participated in this study, such agency and self governance can be described as 'empowered connectivity'. Empowered connectivity is the action of exhibiting agency in order to achieve connectivity with the space in which an individual currently finds her or himself. It can be both a holding on to and a letting go of connections. Empowered connectivity is not a 'theory' per se, but rather a generic representation of a process that accounts for 'plurality, multiplicity and difference'(Tong 1989) in the actions of both women and men as they negotiate the spaces they choose to occupy. Moreover, this study informed by the interpretive social sciences paradigm and, a 'feminist methodology’ enabled an indepth understanding of cruising women's experiences to be counterpointed against cruising men's experiences. Subsequently, cruising women became subjects in their own right rather than'other’. Further, the interpretive social sciences paradigm and 'feministmethodology' emphasised the need for tourism research, in particular, to use bothernic and etic perspectives in data collection and analysis. This ethnographic study of cruisers was conducted between 1985 and 1999 on theeastern seaboard of Australia. The study involved participant observation, semi-structured indepth interviews and self-completion questionnaires relating tosociodemographics, vessel inventories, budgets and touristic experiences.