Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät--Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1991. / Bibliogr. p. 299-318.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Chicago. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Texte remanié de: Th. Ph. D--London university. / Bibliogr. p. 291-296. Pagination en 2 séquences.

When applied to the Gulf region in general and Kuwait more specifically, the rentier state theory stipulates that the political relations between state and business are determined by the rent. Thus, business essentially ceases to represent a strong political force and withdraws from the formal political field in exchange for wealth provided by the state. However, the evidence from Kuwait’s recent history suggests that there is great variation between the patterns of political engagement in Kuwait’s merchant families. Some families have been continuously active in the country’s parliamentary politics and political field more broadly; their political action has not always been pro-government and, in general, the merchant community in Kuwait still possesses powerful means to negotiate government distribution patterns and to influence political decisionmaking. Thus, the main research question posed in the Thesis is the following: why do we observe merchants’ active political engagement in Kuwait counter to the prediction of the rentier state theory, and what can explain the variation of merchants’ political activity? The Thesis will analyse and compare Kuwait business politics along the dichotomies of passive versus active engagement and voice versus loyalty towards the government. Through this analysis I will define the factors which explain why some merchant families engage in parliamentary politics, while others do not, and why at times the merchant community allies with the opposition, and at others with the government. I will further examine what impact this political engagement by business has on the country’s economic reform policies. The analysis will establish that, although rent matters, the political action of business in Kuwait and its variation is defined by the country’s semi-parliamentary political system, while factors such as rent-seeking, ascriptive features, relations with the ruling powers and the changing nature of the country’s political field are essential intervening variables.

The scholarship on Sino-African relations has been too pre-occupied with China’s behaviour and impact on Africa and paid little attention to the role played by African actors, contexts and processes of governance. This thesis addresses this deficiency through an examination of the interaction between Kenyan state and non-state actors in the relationship with China. In doing so, it focuses on how such interactive relation is mobilised and negotiated through Kenyan ‘agency’, and how it constitutes a means of building national capacity in domestic as well as foreign policy, paving the way for a less dependent and more sustainable developmental nation. The thesis adopts a state-society approach which combines macro (national)-, meso (sectoral)- and micro-(issue-specific) level dynamics within a single country case study. Such complex and differentiated design helps to reach a nuanced understanding of actor agendas and mobilisation strategies within specific systems of governance. The cases are grouped into three main sectors, i.e. trade, healthcare and education, cutting across trade and aid type of engagements between a variety of Chinese and Kenyan actors. Negotiations are mainly characterised by strategies of contestation and cooperation domestically and with the Chinese. Passivity, contrary to the mainstream literature, is more rarely observed. The thesis demonstrates that the factors that contribute to Kenya’s control of the relations with China should not be identified in the state’s aggregate power, or the sum of state’s resources, but rather are situated within the context and the structure of the specific negotiations. The ability to safeguard interests is then determined by the ability of Kenyan actors to guarantee conformity of specific negotiation processes to the prevailing system of norms and practices as understood and legitimised by Kenyans.

Conventional wisdom holds that ethnic nationalism is incompatible with politics of compromise and reconciliation in conflict-ridden societies. This dissertation provides empirical evidence to the contrary by examining the revision of Greek unionist nationalism in Cyprus, under the transformative leadership of former Cypriot president Glafkos Clerides. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the development of various manifestations of nationalism in the Greek Cypriot community, highlighting particularly the limitations hindering the development of a civic form of nationalism in the island. The second part of the dissertation focuses on Clerides’ liberal brand of ethnic nationalism and argues that the former Cypriot leader provides an insightful example of how liberal nationalism can be combined with policies of compromise and peace building, informing relevant literature, which has provided considerable theoretical insight but lacks sufficient empirical evidence. Based on the work of Yack (2012) and others (Beissinger 2008; Kymlicka 1996), this dissertation argues that while several myths and certain significant limitations hindered the development of Cypriotism, Clerides’ liberal brand of ethnic nationalism was able to facilitate reconciliation and accommodate federalism in Cyprus. To support this argument, the dissertation relies on the hitherto unpublished archive of Democratic Rally and personal interviews with Clerides and several of his associates and critics. Specifically, it demonstrates how Clerides’ transformative leadership led to the revision of Greek unionist nationalism in the post-1974 era. Coming to terms with the intransigent ethnic ‘unionist’ legacy of the Right, historically associated with the goal of union with Greece, Clerides led the way to the revision of Greek nationalism and was the first to endorse federalism in the Greek Cypriot community. Yet Clerides’ political transformation did not aim at abandoning nationalist sentiments and symbols. His perception of a federal state as a multinational entity, allowed him not to undermine the two national communities of the island in its effort to promote a single Cypriot polity. In this context, the linkage of a federal solution with the accession of Cyprus to a federal Europe became a key component of his policy for the solution of the Cyprus problem. In view of current negotiations, the political legacy of Clerides can be informative for stakeholders, both inside and outside the island.

This thesis seeks to establish a framework for examining why certain contexts have proven conducive to the politicisation of religious identities. Prevalent scholarly approaches have treated politicised religious (or religio-political) movements chiefly as a ‘bottom-up’ reaction to the effects of modernisation, including secularism and capitalist development. In the Turkish case, the dominant narratives have placed religio-politics within the context of an ‘authoritarian’ or ‘assertive’ state secularism and have explained the rise of Islamism as a reaction or/and a product of democratisation. These approaches take for granted the notion of a ‘secular state’ versus a ‘religious society’. In contrast, ‘religious majoritarianism’ implies a more complex and intertwined relationship between state, religion and society. It refers to a political structure according to which a religiously demarcated group’s dominance and monopoly over political and economic resources is legitimated on the basis of its numeric majority within the nation. This thesis suggests that the degree to which the Turkish nation-state became religious majoritarian was determined by the extent to which (i) majority–minority boundaries were defined along religious lines during the late Ottoman period and (ii) the way these became reflected in state institutions subsequently. This institutionalisation then triggered long-lasting path-dependent effects leading to the persistence of religious delineations within the community and influencing the nature of political and economic competition. In sum, the resurgence of religiopolitics under the AKP party should be understood not as a break with a secular pattern of state-building but as a path-dependent process occurring within the longer-term dynamics of nation-state building.

The success of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's (HKSARG) e-government initiatives is dependent on the government employees' acceptance and use of the underpinning information, internet and communication technologies (IT). Unfortunately, only a few empirical researches have been conducted to investigate the drivers of IT usage in government workplaces.To predict IT usage, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been tested and demonstrated its predictive power in various contexts. But it does not provide guidance to managers because Davis grouped the antecedents to the TAM constructs as "external factors" so as to focus on the main part of the model and to keep it robust. Hence, these factors are the ultimate drivers that determine the users' behaviors.This research aims to improve the explanatory power of TAM by identifying and including resistance to change (RTC) as a relevant external factor with the assistance from Max Weber's Theory of Bureaucracy (TB). To test the augmented TAM, an email questionnaire survey to 700 randomly selected HKSARG IT users was conducted. Additional information was gathered from senior management to validate the survey results. The results show that the IT users in HKSARG are not valuing usefulness and ease of use of IT in the same manner as employees in most other contexts. In addition, the results confirm that RTC is a relevant and strong external variable to TAM. In line with theories, HKSARG employees, as a whole, tend to have above average level of resistance to change. But statistical test results also revealed that there are heterogeneous behavioural groups within HKSARG. Specifically, younger or more educated users are more willing to change. The existence of these groups has both practical and managerial implications for implementing change.In particular, it is argued that the government should not be viewed and understood monolithically. A better strategy for management to implement change is to target the younger or more educated users first for piloting and to build up sufficient user mass and exert peer pressure to older or less educated users for a more successful implementation of IT across all staff. Because of the weaknesses of the established policies, the HKSARG has an undesirable structural composition (high percentage of older and less educated employees) in the face of change. To tackle the high level of resistance to change, it is suggested that continuous training is a must. Moreover, the training packages should be tailor-made for various groups in the civil service to suit their specific needs and to enhance their capabilities. In the long term, it is recommended that the human resources management policies should be reviewed and modified with an aim to adjust the structural composition of the civil service toward a more change ready workforce. In addition, more research on the characteristics of the public sector is required for a better understanding of the real nature of these large bureaucratic organizations.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / International ranking systems provide are an opportunity to higher education institutions (HEIs) to establish a global reputation. However, seeking that recognition comes at a significant cost. By focusing on particular indicators in the ranking systems, HEIs and governments may neglect other aspects of higher education. When choosing certain indicators over others, policymakers are confronted with an opportunity cost when allocating resources to improve rank. The nature of this cost and the relative importance of the indicators remain unclear. This study seeks to (1) contrast the policy pressures from international rankings against regional dialogues on higher education policy , (2) determine interaction between the ranking indicators of HEIs in Continental Europe, East Asia, and the Anglo-Saxon world, (3) reveal the relative importance of indicators as predictors for the overall rank of HEIs in these regions , (4) provide suggestions as to how HEIs could implement strategies to improve their standings in the rankings, and (5) consider how these findings from the ranking systems compare with regional trends in higher education policy dialogue. / 2031-01-02

This thesis presents an alternative to prevailing understandings of politics in East Timor in the period 1999-2009. Employing the language of state-building, dominant views posit that the new nation’s ‘crisis’ in 2006 is attributable to a ‘weak state’, arguing that substantial constraints on ‘human development’, a legacy of either the Indonesian period or failures of UN state building, presented insurmountable challenges to ‘capacity building’ which hampered the development of a public administration and other arms of the state. A closely related body of analysis attributes the causes, passage and resolution of ‘crisis’ to actors from the political elite. In this view, intraelite conflict foreclosed the possibility of the crisis’s early resolution, and attributed crisis to bad ‘policy-making’. A second perspective posits that a crisis was the result not of a weak state, but of the disempowerment of a strong civil society, that through ‘networked governance’, a legacy of the resistance network against Indonesia, can be relied on to rule. This thesis suggests that the remarkable uniformity of these analyses can be explained by their having: a) largely overlooked pre-1999 politics; and b) used a liberal perspective in which both abstractions and technical solutions (rule of law, capacity building) are assumed to be able to ‘correct’ ‘problems’ leading to ‘crisis’. This thesis proposes an explanation for contemporary politics found not solely in crisis or peace, but in the past. The postcolonial state is examined through the lens of colonial power relations, in terms of the extent and limits of modern ‘bio-power’. Successive chapters examine health and hygiene, the inculcation of norms and dispositions, family and habitat, and monetization. These themes are related back to state formation across the 20th century, and moreover, to an evaluation of life and death, processes evident throughout the practices of contemporary politics, including being significant in the institution of the postcolonial state. A key site of this power across time has been ‘missionary power’, embedded and semi-autonomous from the colonial state, rather than the Catholic Church per se. The manifold limits of colonial bio-power are identified not only as being a result of the paucity of material resources of the state, therefore, but also colonial ambivalence over subjects, durable relations between (and divergent representations of) missionaries and indigenous authorities, and contradictions between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, all of which are shown to play out in contemporary politics. Through this analysis, the thesis reveals an alternative interpretation of East Timor since 1999, and offers possibilities for considering politics in other postcolonial contexts.