Bibliography: pages 96-108. / The period immediately after entering the teaching profession is of the utmost importance to beginner teachers. This is a moment when beginner teachers learn how to become competent in the classroom. More often than not, beginning teachers are generally expected to assume full responsibility of professional teachers from the first day they report to school. In this regard, the transition from being student teachers to qualified teachers is seen as unproblematic. The beginner teacher is seen as totally prepared to face the reality of teaching. However, literature on professional development indicates that beginner teachers experience a kind of "reality shock" in their first professional year. This research study explored the concerns and problems experienced by beginner teachers during their first years of teaching, at three historically different high schools in Cape Town. A literature survey investigating the realities and conditions of beginner teachers in their workplaces - both local and international was conducted. Furthermore, existing research concerning beginner teachers' professional growth was reviewed to shed light on the research area. A qualitative methodology was adopted in order to facilitate an in-depth understanding of the beginners' experience. Given the qualitative nature of my research topic, which dwells in-depth with people experiences, I found it convenient to use unstructured interviews as a means of collecting data. Unstructured later discussed.

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The goal of this thesis is to describe a compare selected open source tools for mass linux server administration. In the first part, the tools are described, including their principles and internal architecture. The next part follows with the comparison of these selected tools using several groups of comparison criteria. The main contribution of this thesis is the actual comparison of software tools of this type. The method chosen to fulfill the goal of this thesis is literature search and custom practical testing of these tools.

We live in a world of rapid change. Nowadays, there are virtually no organisations that haven’t been affected in one form or another by changes in their environment. The professions, which have for centuries been sheltered against change, are under increasing and complex environmental pressures and as a consequence are experiencing considerable change and uncertainty. The overall pressures have been increased competition, more demanding and sophisticated clients, succession issues, deregulation, technological advancement and globalisation. These have acted upon sectors, which are encumbered with conflicts of interests caused by the nature of the partnership organisational structure and a compromised self-regulation based on the traditional professional culture. Marketing has an important role to play as the organisation’s interface with the environment. It is a “boundary-spanning organisational function through its constant interface with the external environment at large and with customers, competitors and channel members in particular” (Varadarajan, 1992, p.340), as well as with the various groups within the organisation. The key role attributed to the marketing function is as a tool designed to maximise efficiency. Marketing has been very reluctantly adopted as a management tool by the professions. This thesis addresses the barriers to acceptance and implementation of marketing within professional service firms, given the intensity and complexity of environmental pressures they have been subjected. The research has focused on two of the traditional liberal professions, accountancy and law, through the study of the way marketing is perceived, understood and practiced within the organisation of seven accountancy and seven law firms. A theoretical model has been developed and refined providing the explanation for the barriers to marketing within the professional service organisation. The findings based on analysis of the professionals’ perceptions have demonstrated that these barriers can be seen as a result of an organisational conflict between the need for response to contingency pressures and the internal and external institutional isomorphic pressures of maintaining professional legitimacy with the implications of forfeiting organisational efficiency. The findings indicate that change within the professional organisation only takes place if subjected to contingency pressures and, in general, it is slowed down due to the institutional barriers of the professional partnership. The study has revealed that professionals are torn between the pressures of change and the need for respectability and maintenance of the status quo, which is evidence of the conflicting contingency and institutional pressures at play. The Marketing Champion has been proven to be a powerful driver for change in terms of initiating and leading the process. The review of perceptions of the concept and role of marketing within professional service firms has revealed generational differences, misconceptions and outright conflict leading to resistance in its introduction and application, although professionals have individually practiced a wide variety of marketing activities in their pursuit of gaining and maintaining clients. There has been conspicuous resistance to the acceptance of marketing as a management tool across the professional organisation. The main barriers to implementation have been identified as the professional partnership structure and the professional culture. Understanding on how marketing has being practiced within the professional organisation researched has been considered important in establishing the nature of the response to contingency and institutional forces. The research has been focused on the level of importance given to marketing as a strategic tool as opposed to the traditional tactical, communications mainly tool. The research has again shown that those firms who had a Marketing Champion, used marketing in a far more strategic manner.

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Bibliography: pages 87-99. / The aim of this study is to describe and critically analyse the experiences and challenges facing first-year principals in secondary schools in the Cape Town Metropolitan Area. The study focuses on the impact of change and reform on beginner principals, the problems that arise as a result; coping strategies of beginner principals and the support available to them. While the emphasis is on analysing the issues and drawing out implications, the study begins to identify those solutions and training needs which beginner principals see as useful. Many of these principals are products of the rationalisation measures of 1992/3, and the restructuring of education. This process has included the emergence of elements of School-Based Management, which follows on the history of state-aided schools in South Africa, such as the Model C schools. These elements are reconfigured in the recommendations of the Hunter Commission and the policy of the White Paper on the Organisation, Governance and Funding of Schools (February 1996). This has led to an increase in the number of beginner principals in the Cape Town metropolitan area, especially in the former House of Representative schools.

The ubiquitous nature of e-commerce demands an innovative conceptualization of consumer behaviour that responds to various cultural preferences. Culture has been identified as an underlying determinant of consumer behaviour, and this extends to ecommerce. This research investigates this phenomenon for the Egyptian consumer. This research designed a plausible, integrated framework for investigating the target phenomenon, especially for un-explored cultures. To help to identify salient components of the phenomenon, a three-study exploratory phase, that included: interviews, a survey, and card sorting sessions, was undertaken. The exploratory results highlighted the roles of trust, uncertainty avoidance, Internet store familiarity, and reputation as the main salient factors affecting the perception of the targeted group toward e-commerce. The research hypotheses were then developed based on the exploratory results. Finally, a model testing phase to empirically assess the research hypotheses through a laboratory experiential survey with 370 Egyptian Internet users was undertaken. The experiential survey results support the significant role of the Internet store’s perceived familiarity and reputation as the main antecedents of online trust. The relationship between trust and its two antecedents are found to be culturally sensitive; the high uncertainty avoidance of the consumer is found to be associated with a stronger effect of the store’s reputation on trust, and a stronger effect of store’s familiarity on trust. The research also highlights the significant effect of trust on the attitude towards and the willingness to buy from an e-commerce site. This research, by providing an understanding of the cultural drivers of e-commerce, contributes to building a theory of consumer’s cultural trust within an Internet store context. The research reports on the development of an integrated cultural trust model that highlights recommendations for expanding the adoption of e-commerce. The systematic research framework, introduced by this research, can be a robust starting point for further related work in this area.

Knowing ‘what’ to build is an integral part of an Information System Development, and it is generally understood that this, which is known as Requirements, is achievable through a process of understanding, communication and management. It is currently maintained by the Requirements theorists that successful system design clarifies the interrelations between information and its representations. However, this belief can be shown to be based on flawed assumptions, as there are persistent reports of failures, indicating that there is a gap between the theory and the practice, and that this gap needs to be bridged. A year long in-depth case study of a project group, starting with their strategy announcement and ending with the commissioning system hand-over meeting, followed the group in their ‘doing’ of the Requirements. These mundane meetings were recorded and transcribed, forming a detailed data set of ‘what-is-done’ and ‘how-it-is-done’. The developed research approach adhesively maintained the practical situation, aiming to investigate and make sense of the here-and-now actions of the scoping and defining processes that were at work. The results of the investigation led the researcher to question previous beliefs and assumptions in Requirements, because of ambiguities that were uncovered, also because there was no sufficiently distinct process found that could assuredly be labelled as Requirements. This phenomenon evoked further questioning of “how strange?”, which triggered the testing of the validity of the Requirements theory. The second stage adapted an analysis framework on decision-making in order to reveal a causal connection between the actions found in the ‘doing’ and in the stocks of knowledge that form the Requirements theory. This phase analysed the operationalization of the theory to examine its commensurate, incommensurate and defective activities. The analysis revealed the existence of other dominant processes that affect the Requirements theory, leaving it underdetermined, with no true causal connections that can be established. This led to the inevitable conclusion that the current Information Systems thinking on Requirements is on the horns of a dilemma without any prospective resolution, because of the elliptical misalignment between the theoretical and the empirical worlds.