This study undertook to examine factors potentially contributing to a high rate of attrition experienced on the National Higher Diploma in Emergency Medical Care (EMC) at the Witwatersrand Technikon. The sample group consisted of students currently registered for the EMC course who wished to participate. The total group consisted of 53 students (n=53), 30 of which were first year students, eight were second year students and 15 were third year students. Using the 16 PF and SSHA as assessment tools, this study assessed the role of personality and study habits and attitudes on academic achievement on this course. Initial Kruskal-Wallis analyses of the scores for the three-year groups on a selected number of factors from these instruments showed no significant statistical difference between the groups. Subsequent analyses were consequently performed on the whole group. Five factors were found to be significant in relation to academic achievement on this course. These included abstract, verbal reasoning, levels of anxiety, levels of extraversion, work methods and year level of study. Of the personality factors, two are in accordance with findings of previous research. The findings of this study included comments and recommendations for amendments to the current National Higher Diploma EMC selection procedure. / Dissertation (MA (Counselling Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Psychology / unrestricted

The purpose of the study was to investigate the intermediary role that opinion leaders can play in the dissemination of agricultural technologies among the rural farmers in Lesotho in order to bridge the gap between extension and the farmers. A structured questionnaire was administered to 200 randomly sampled maize farming households, representing a 20 percent sample, from three villages in the Qeme area, namely Ha Mohasoa, Ha Pita and Ha Jimisi. Opinion Leadership was measured on the basis of number of nominations within and beyond the sample. The research findings confirm the importance of opinion leadership, which exists among both male and female farmers, but varies according to the degree of influence (number of nominations). Thirty-nine percent qualified based on influence as opinion leaders, but the strong opinion leaders were between 6 – 10 percent. Of the various personal and environmental factors that were assumed to have influence on opinion leadership, only some but not all actually had influence. The factors having influence were age, marital status, gender, farming efficiency and exposure to mass media. Factors having no influence were formal education qualifications, scale of farming operation and the reliance on farming as a source of income. Competence and accessibility appeared to be key dimensions of opinion leadership. However, in the study area, accessibility – was formal to be a precondition for the effective flow of information – was not a constraint. Ninety percent of all opinion leaders were, for example, assessed to have a high or very high accessibility. This accessibility was influenced by friendship, and gender, but social status appeared to have no bearing on it. Physical accessibility was also an important factor, which was emphasized by the finding that 85 percent of the strongest opinion leaders resided within a distance of less than 2km from the followers. In general, the opinion leaders were of a polymorphic type and seem to be consulted over a wide variety of subjects or commodities. Although there were indications of the stronger opinion leaders being more involved in reciprocative consultations, this tendency was much less pronounced than what has been found among white commercial farmers in South Africa (Düvel, 1996). Based on the similarities of findings of this study and those of Adupa&Düvel (1999) on small scale farmers in Uganda, it was recommended that more research should be conducted to interrogate and exploit the use of opinion leaders in the diffusion of information and innovations in Lesotho. / Dissertation (MSc (Agric))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / unrestricted

This dissertation is an attempt to examine the political implications of the ethos of self-persecution that accompanied the rise of modern man. The attempt at achieving self-transparency and to locate a final, deep 'truth' within the depths of the subject, which began in the apparently harmless search for God through acts of confession, grew into the merciless persecution of the auto-voyeuristic subject. I argue that the horror that complete self-transparency would imply, is mercifully kept at bay by the opacity of language, that makes complete penetration to the 'final' self impossible. I illustrate the possibilities of redemption from self-persecution by referring to the work of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche and the post-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida. Chapter 1 is an attempt to show that what we understand by 'the subject' is by no means static or universal, different ages and cultures developed radically different conceptions of self - alternatives that could provide the necessary inspiration for the revival of a flagging political tradition. One such alternative is self-conception in antiquity. The usage of the word 'subject' is inappropriate to refer to any pre-Christian Greek concept of self, because no single word refers to Homeric Man as a unity. Instead, Homer, who employs no non-material language, depicts parts of characters that are always more than the whole. There is not even a single word that could roughly be taken as a synonym for 'mind'. The Homeric self was an assemblage of various narratives and impressions, without an inner core or 'self', loosely held together by the broad narrative that is an individual's life. For this reason, it could offer an alternative politics to an age weary of the discipline that accompanies the rigidly defined modernist subject. I deal with the ambiguity and slipperiness of the classical subject, and illustrate its complex 'superficiality' at the hand of a number of relevant Greek concepts including <font face>splachma, poiésis, daemon, psuché, phrenes, nóós, thumos</font> and <font face>até<font>. If there was no rigid distinction between self and world in the ancient Athens, the same cannot be said of the public and private domains into which the polis was divided. Difference was spatially, not morally defined. After her horrific experience with totalitarianism in Nazi Germany during the 1930's, Hannah Arendt drew on the Greeks to show that the public space was the unique space of appearance where a public actor could show off his virtù on stage in front of his peers. Her usage of masks indicate the impersonal dimension to acting. Far from wanting to give us a theory of self-expression, she constructed a philosophy that is in many ways the opposite of the Rousseauian politics of authenticity. I explore the ways in which Arendt questioned the traditional philosophical hierarchy between the vita contemplative and the vita activa, and her re-evaluation of the activities of the vita activa, namely labour, work and action. In addition to my brief exposition on the Homeric world, I briefly examine the shift from acting to thinking man as it occurs in the Republic. I address Plato's reaction to the political decay in which Athens found itself after the Golden Age of Pericles. I argue that, already in the Republic, there are signs of a certain impatience towards the hidden, and a desire to 'bring things to the light', a desire that would never leave Western man again, but would grow into an all-consuming passion. After the hermeneutical turn we know that no literary work allows a definitive interpretation. This is especially true of great masterworks, and the Republic is no exception. Although I think that Arendt is justified in locating in Plato one of the sources for the anti-political character of our philosophical tradition, it is necessary to distinguish between 'Plato', and Platonism. Anticipating the argument put forward in chapter 4, I argue that the multivocity inherent in Plato may make him more political than Arendt initially took him to be. Chapter 2 focus on the turn inward. Augustine, through his notion of the confessing-self, seeks to formulate an ethos that does not allow everything to revert back to the self. The self turns away from the lust to dominate the world and into the depths of the soul where it seeks to fashion even the most fleeting desires in obedience to God's truth and the standards of His morality. At this stage in the development of the self, there is no question of self-transparency - the relationship to the transcendent makes it an impossibility. For all or Augustine's profound insight into depth - remembering, willing and unifying the scattered self in confession, the inner Augustine remains a battlefield. In this respect, Augustine's confessing-self inadvertently provides a beacon of warning to an ethos that demands self-transparency at all costs. In the second part of chapter 2, I compare the Confessions of Augustine with those of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Living during the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Rousseau's motives are radically different from that of Augustine in the fifth century. The revelation of self, hesitantly presented in Augustine, takes a different turn fourteen centuries later. Gone is the link with the transcendent. Augustine confessed to God, Rousseau sometimes to a filled public house, packed with enemies, sometimes merely to the shifting selves he refused to acknowledge. Augustine sought truth, Rousseau, sincerity. For Augustine the self would represent a barrier to God, Rousseau publicly created a private self. Rousseau's purpose is rather to unburden himself of shame, and to justify what he deems weak. In doing this, the 'defined self' - a self that can fall back upon himself without reference to what is perceived as a 'hostile order' - comes into being. Drawing on Michel Foucault's analysis of the 'normalizing' tendencies that characterizes much of the concrete functioning of power in modernity, I briefly summarize his critique of modern power as it operates through 'panoptic power' and confessional strategies which assert that we harbour 'deep truths' within ourselves that we must carefully decipher and follow. I then focus specifically on the concept of the 'autopticon', and how power operates at its greatest efficiency by strategies of self-surveillance. When Foucault's theoretical work is read in terms of his genealogies, his work acquires a Nietzschean profundity. In contrast to Augustine, for whom depth is the dimension of freedom, Foucault sees depth as the dimension of subjugation. It is this dimension in which the other is rooted out and the subject is constituted in terms of hegemonic norms and the standard of self-transparency. That we somehow fail to get to the 'bottom of things' by no means discourage the therapeutic society, it merely ensures the persistence of endless subjugation. But Foucault was not the first to identify the self-tortured subject. This honour belongs to Nietzsche, and his response to the naked, unmasked subject of philosophy forms the topic of chapter 3. Nietzsche's genealogy of Herkunft is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile, it fragments what was thought unified, it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself. And, one might add, it shows the folly of looking for a 'deep', liberating truth within the self when in fact, nothing but surfaces for the inscription of the social order, for the application and imposition of power exists. This is precisely what Nietzsche points to as his genealogy demonstrates the oppressive use of subjectivity as a construct of oppression in what he terms a 'hangman's metaphysics'. In addition to an analysis of Nietzsche's criticism of the modern subject, I point to his anticipation of the cure to the problem of self-transparency, namely an acceptance of the redemptive potential to be found in language. This forms the topic of chapter 4. In chapter 4 I argue that the vita lingua contains the possibility for at least a certain degree of relief from our culture of surveillance. Language, by its very opacity, makes the ideal of (self)transparency an utopian illusion. Every attempt to come to a final conclusion about a text is bound to fail. This aspect makes our linguistic engagement with the world tragic, yet at the same time allows for a merciful, messianic dimension that might save us from the horrific nihilism that the granting of the Enlightenment wish would entail. I draw again on Arendt, this time for her conception of the storyteller, to find a viable middle ground between the death of the author and the absolute author of the Romantic era that acted as a guarantee for the truth of his text. The linguistic turn certainly requires an altered conception of the self, but there is no need to sacrifice the self to an entirely autonomous and impersonal language system. In addition, I refer to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, to demonstrate the alternatives suggested by the very anti-utopian nature of language. The fact that we exist linguistically, a fact that appeared in more positivistic age as a curse, is now the very feature that saves us from the hell and obscenity of absolute (self)transparency. If language is indeed as opaque as Nietzsche, Lacan, Derrida and others have claimed, intentionality can play no determining role in the establishment of meaning. Nietzsche explicitly proclaimed the virtual impossibility of having his texts understood. To understand his texts the way Nietzsche understood them, one would have to be Nietzsche. And perhaps, one hastens to add, perhaps not even then: If this is the case, the question arises as to what a confession really reveals, and even if it does not conceal rather than reveal, makes its appearance. If the author 'disappears' behind his text, textuality appears in our time to have replaced the lost mask of antiquity and the ancient regime. / Dissertation (MA (Philosophy))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Philosophy / unrestricted

A tree is known by its fruit (Matthew 7:16), and a person’s priorities are known by reading his diary! We try so hard to be something we are not and often we succeed, … but it is only for a short moment, or maybe two… The words you and I speak become a mirror, reflecting our heart’s content to whoever wants to listen. James asks this question; “Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring?” (James 3:11 - NIV) How then, is it possible to speak peace and war from the same tongue? How could I bless and curse, all in one breath? How could I declare my love for my Lord, yet crucify him from the same heart? How could I love my neighbour with bloodstained hands? How could we declare victory in the cross at Calvary, where our Saviour died? How could we claim to be victorious in Jesus, saying that we will reign with him forever, (Rev 22: 5) and yet, as Christians, we are crucified over and over again? This is the true mystery in Christ; there is victory in defeat, there is strength in weakness, there is life after death. / Dissertation (MA (Practical Theology))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Practical Theology / unrestricted

No abstract available / Dissertation (MA (Practical Theology))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Practical Theology / unrestricted

This mini dissertation examines the personal and public challenges facing Black women in their quest for leadership in schools. Secondary school leadership remains a male-dominated arena in many schools even after a decade of democracy in the country. This is contrary to the democratic ideals of the country, which include participation in governance, social justice and gender equity in particular. This study seeks to identify the root causes of gender imbalances and to work out strategies to redefine leadership roles in schools. This study was conducted from a critical feminist perspective. It is a qualitative case study and has used individual-based interviews, focus groups and observation in collecting data. It should be mentioned that this study involved male participants as well. They are regarded as the “significant others” who have to play a critical role in re-visioning redefining leadership within their schools. A total of six women and four male participants were included in the study. Participants were purposefully selected. A consent form was sent to all the participants, covering all ethical issues of voluntary participation, confidentiality and anonymity. The major themes that emerged in the study were: · tension between the personal and the public realms · lack of institutional support · non-adherence to policy / Dissertation (MPhil (Education Management and Policy Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Education Management and Policy Studies / unrestricted

This study investigated the performance of rural local government institutions in Zimbabwe and the Beitbridge Rural District Council (BRDC) in particular, between 1993 and 2002. Specific focus was on the BRDC’s effort to enhance democratic participation and empower local communities; its performance in providing services of a local nature; and the level of performance of its management in its bid to infuse and maintain ethos of institutional excellence in the council. Interviews, questionnaires and documentary search were used as instruments for collecting data of both a qualitative and quantitative nature. Consequently, the study does not draw polarity between quantitative and qualitative dimensions of research because of the need to derive benefits from both methodologies. The analysis of data followed a similar approach. The findings of this study are that there is no sufficient community participation in BRDC affairs. Although there is a platform for community participation in the form of VIDCOs and WADCOs, officials of these committees tend to dominate the planning process and consequently, plans reflect the decisions of a minority rather than a majority. Councilors only report back to communities when they feel like and council staff are not responsive to the communities they serve. Thus, the performance of the BRDC in enhancing community participation is below the expectations of communities and this has created a strained relationship between council and the latter. On service provision, the indications are that services are not adequate to meet the demands of communities particularly in housing, recreational facilities, water and transport. Besides, the provision is not responsive to community needs. Inefficiency and ineffectiveness manifest themselves in the process. Council management is bedeviled with several forms of non-performance due to resource wastage, lack of responsiveness and a general lackadaisical attitude. One would conclude that the manner in which the council is performing indicates a lack of economic and administrative rationality in both councilors and council staff. Consequently, there is need to build the capacity of both incumbents and infuse ethos of excellence in running council affairs. This can be done through training and staff development programmes. / Thesis (DAdmin (Public Management and Administration))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / School of Public Management and Administration (SPMA) / unrestricted

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which the notion of Business Social Responsibility (BSR) has permeated the Small, Medium, and Micro Enterprise (SMME) environment in rural South Africa. It is expected that the determination of the extent of SMME BSR participation will help shed more light on this growing but highly controversial concept. The empirical investigation was preceded by a literature survey. In particular the literature review provided a discussion on the theoretical foundations of BSR that led to the identification of ethics and stakeholder theory as the two pillars upon which BSR rests. Examination of previous studies led to the identification of the community, employee, and customer related issues as key elements of SMME BSR. These elements were used to construct a measurement instrument for SMME BSR. The results of the empirical study show that the concept BSR has permeated the SMME mindset in the Greater Taung Local Municipality (GTLM). In particular it identified key factors to measure the BSR construct and shows that BSR is as much an SMME issue as it is a big business issue. Through discriminant analysis it is possible to classify SMME performance based on the determined factors. The study raises issues which when attended to might increase SMME BSR performance hence increase their contribution to socio economic development especially in rural communities. There is need for the SMME enabling environment to be improved. The level of management within SMMEs also needs to be improved. This requires policy makers to put in place extra support beyond what currently exists. There is also the need to educate businesses especially those in the rural areas on their social responsibilities. This will help create awareness of the concept not only because it is ethical but because of its business imperative. This requires commitment from the highest office of the country. But perhaps more importantly South Africa also needs a Minister for Business Social Responsibility like the UK. / Thesis (PhD (Entrepreneurship))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Business Management / unrestricted

This study focused on the pH dependant mobility of 15 trace elements in river sediments in South Africa. These river sediments originated from the Blesbokspruit (near Witbank in the Mpumalanga Province), the Crocodile River (near Hartebeespoort Dam in the Gauteng Province) and the Olifants River (near Ohrigstad in the Northern Province). A theoretical discussion on the properties of the measured trace elements and the ICP-OES technique were included in this study for the sake of completeness. Three different fractions of river sediment (smaller than 0.2 mm, bigger than 0.2 mm and unsieved) were investigated using two different leaching techniques and a digestion procedure to determine the total trace element content. The sediment was subjected to simulated pollution by trace element through the addition of standard solutions in know concentrations. These results it were evaluated to determine the possible behaviour of trace elements that is not presently present in the river sediment. The results obtained from this study were used to determine the impact that trace elements may have in the pollution of the underground water resources. / Dissertation (MSc (Chemistry))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Chemistry / unrestricted

No research has been done to date on Economic Value Added (EVA) as a performance measure for South African agricultural co-operatives. The main objective of this study is to calculate Economic Value Added for South African agricultural co-operatives. Further objectives are to determine whether co-operatives add value to their members’ interest, whether there exists a correlation between EVA performances over the years under review and between the individual groups of co-operatives. The study aims to determine EVA for the grain and oilseeds, wine, meat, timber, tobacco, fruit and vegetables co-operatives. The study further calculated EVA values for all the groups of co-operatives under changing beta-values to look at the sensitivity of EVA. EVA can be described as a value–based performance measure, an investment decision tool and also a performance measure reflecting the absolute amount of shareholder value created. Three basic inputs are needed in the calculation of EVA, namely return on capital earned on investments, the cost of capital for those investments and the capital invested in them. These three inputs are determined before the calculation of EVA can be applied. The values for the determination of these inputs are obtained from the income statements and balance sheets of the respective agricultural co-operatives. After the calculation of the EVA values for all the separate co-operatives, it could be concluded that no grain and oilseed co-operatives created value. There was only one wine co-operative which created value, five which improved from a negative to a positive EVA, three which had negative but improving EVA values. The rest of the wine co-operatives destroyed value. In the case of meat co-operatives three of the four co-operatives destroyed value, while the other one created value in the first (1998) and last year (2001) under review. The timber co-operatives created value, except for one of the three which destroyed value in 2000 and 2001. The tobacco co-operatives destroyed value over the four years under review. In the case of fruit and vegetable co-operatives, one co-operative created value, while the rest of the co-operatives destroyed value. All of the general co-operatives, as well as all the requisites co-operatives destroyed value. Averages for all the groups of co-operatives were calculated as well. Grain and oilseeds, wine, tobacco, general and requisites co-operatives destroyed value. The average of the meat co-operatives showed that this group destroyed value over the first three years under review, but created value in the last year. Timber, fruit and vegetable co-operatives created value over all four of the years under review. The average for all of the co-operatives showed that co-operatives, in general, destroyed value. From this study it becomes clear that no correlation exists between the EVA values calculated for the co-operatives over the four year period under review. There is no correlation between the individual groups of co-operatives either. This means that the EVA performance of co-operatives are not influenced by external factors, but depends on the effective management and decision-making within the agricultural co-operatives. By increasing and decreasing beta-values by 10% and 20% respectively and then recalculating EVA with these changed beta-values, the sensitivity of EVA could be determined. There were no significant changes in the EVA values after recalculating them. Most negative EVA values stayed negative and the positive EVA values stayed positive after recalculating EVA. It can be said that EVA is not very sensitive to the changing betas. / Dissertation (MSc (Agric))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / unrestricted