Talent Management (TM) is of growing interest within academia and in the strategic HRM literature in particular. Despite many attempts to study TM from different perspectives, it remains an ambiguous and elusive concept that is difficult to define and hence challenging to explore and address. Studies on TM are based within Western contexts and therefore it is questionable whether TM models and theories are transferable to other nations and contexts. This research examines the nature of TM in the Middle Eastern context of Oman, from the perspective of Institutional Theory. Through a qualitative, multiple case-study approach, data was collected from four banking and petroleum-sector organisations through semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that the different influences of institutional pressures (e.g. nationalisation, competition, organisational characteristics) have significantly shaped TM in these organisations. The findings show that TM effectiveness and sustainability depends upon a range of factors including: generational differences, employee expectations, the role of expatriates and national culture. Thus, TM and its approach has to be understood and framed within the context of institutions which interact with organisational characteristics; this shapes the way in which the organisations define their TM approach in order to seek legitimacy, business continuity and effectiveness.

Ce travail de recherche retrace la rivalité des puissances occidentales au Liban entre 1940 et 1958, qui découle d’un affaiblissement progressif de ses anciennes puissances colonisatrices, la France et la Grande-Bretagne. Nous essaierons de dérouler au cours de cette étude le nouvel ordre imposé au Moyen-Orient. Nous analyserons la manière dont les États-Unis ont cherché à supplanter les anciennes puissances coloniales.Pour la période suivante, de 1947 à 1958, qui voit au Moyen-Orient un bouleversement politique majeur avec la fin des Mandats, la création de l’État d’Israël et la montée du nationalisme arabe, nous nous pencherons sur l’apparition sur la scène moyen orientale d’une nouvelle superpuissance, l’Union soviétique. Nous détaillerons la position du Liban vis à vis des alliances, de la crise de Suez et de la cirse libanaise de 1958. Nous essaierons d’apprécier dans quelles mesures elles ont contribué à accélérer la chute des anciennes puissances colonisatrices supplantées par les deux nouvelles super puissances.Dans ce nouveau contexte, le Liban apparaîtra au cœur de ces événements, dépassé par les enjeux et tiraillé par l’opposition interne entre musulmans pro nassériens et chrétiens pro-occidentaux. Nous verrons notamment comment, pour contrer l’influence soviétique au Moyen-Orient après la crise du canal de Suez, Eisenhower remania sa politique dans la région profitant de la perte d'influence franco-britannique.Nous arriverons à la conclusion que ces dix années apparaissent comme déterminantes dans l’histoire de la rivalité américano-européenne au Moyen Orient et tout en dessinant un affaiblissement définitif des autres puissances occidentales, scellé par l’échec de Suez, elles déterminent pour la décennie à venir, jusqu’en 1967, les règles du jeu de cet Orient complexe… / This research, traces the rivalries, between the year 1940 and 1958, amid the Western powers within Lebanon, which is the result of the gradual weakening of their former colonial powers, France and Great Britain. Through this study, we will expose the new order imposed on the Middle East, and we will analyze how the United States sought to supplant the former colonial forces.Furthermore, during the years 1947 to 1958, the Middle East witnessed a major political upheaval with the end of the mandate, the establishment of the State of Israel, the rise of Arab nationalism and the rise of a new superpower in that region: the Soviet Union. Moreover, we will specifically detail the causes and consequences of the Suez Canal crisis and we will try to assess its extent on the accelerated collapse of the former colonial forces, superseded by their two new challengers. In the light of these events, Lebanon will appear overwhelmed by the challenges, and torn by the internal opposition between pro-Nasserite Muslims and pro-Western Christians. It will be shown in detail how, to counter the Soviet influence in the Middle East after the Suez crisis, Eisenhower reshuffled his policy in the area, taking advantage of the decreasing influence of France and Great Britain.Eventually, we come to the conclusion, that the decade spanning from 1947 to 1958 is decisive to the history of the US-European rivalry in the Middle East, where the weakening of all other Western powers is definitive, and where the rules of the game, in the extremely complex region, became determined for the following decade.

This study explores six English as a foreign language students in an English content-based course of critical thinking delivered via distance at the Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) in Iran. Framed within cultural-historical activity theory, the study seeks to shed light on the complex nature of students' course-related activities with a particular focus on contradictions that underlie any human activity. The construct of contradictions provides a theoretical lens to understand the complex web of relationships among a number of elements in the course taking activity situated in a cultural-historical setting beset with political controversies, technological challenges, and demands of the bilingual curriculum of the university. To capture the complex nature of contradictions, the study employed a naturalistic methodology and relied primarily on in-depth interviews with the participants, observations of their online behaviors, and the artifacts that student participants produced by the end of the semester. The findings indicate that most participants had multiple activity systems within the course environment, some of which were oriented towards academic and others non-academic objects. According to the data and theoretical interpretations, most participants had primary, secondary, and quaternary contradictions. Most primary contradictions had the nature of use and exchange value, which in practical terms indicates the orientation towards genuine learning or earning a grade. Primary and quaternary contradictions led to many secondary contradictions. Furthermore, it transpired that content-based instruction pushed the participants to engage actively in actions oriented towards improving English even for the participants who did not have the object of improving English. Among many other findings are detrimental consequences of contradictions that are traced back to the persecutions of BIHE students, faculty, and staff.

The central theory guiding my research is that interstate conflict, at least as covered in mass media, leaves residual cultural attitudes that can shape the political context in which elites formulate policy. Specifically, U.S. interventionism in the Middle East has given rise to fundamental hostilities, founded on misguided biases, that shape involvement in the region today. I focus on one step within that broader theory, to test it empirically: the hypothesis that anti-Muslim stereotypes, when activated, will shape an individual’s foreign-policy preferences. I begin by considering competing accounts that link 1) ethnocentrism or 2) targeted stereotypes with support for the use of military force in the Middle East. After careful review of the group-based and social-identity theories that undergird the two accounts, I synthesize them. My more-complete theory can be summarized as: Someone will exhibit an ethnocentric response toward an out-group when negative stereotypes about the group combine with an individual’s in-group identity to result in perceived threat. Applying the logic of that hypothesis to Muslims and American foreign policy, I argue that, for American whites, Muslims are uniquely situated to be perceived as realistic and symbolic cultural threats to their core national identity because they may differ in terms of ethnicity, culture, and religion. Mass media portray Muslims as violent and encourage Americans to evaluate them in terms of such cultural dissimilarity. On the other hand, Muslims present little identity threat to blacks, whose core in-group identity typically revolves around their status as a racial minority in the United States. Even blacks who identify with the nation will not view Islam as incompatible with their national identity because that identity is typically not predicated on looking, living, or believing a certain way. I develop these ideas into testable hypotheses and investigate how anti-Muslim attitudes shape opinion about important contemporary Middle East issues. Using survey and experimental data, I find compelling evidence linking anti-Muslim attitudes – among whites – to support for using military force (rather than diplomacy) against Iran and against Islamists. Those attitudes also predict opposition to accepting Syrian refugees. Finally, I turn from this narrative of negativity to argue that the anti-Muslim stereotypes many citizens bring to bear when forming judgments of Middle East policy can be shifted. I base this optimistic expectation on media framing theories, which suggest that issue frames can shift opinion when they emphasize strong and credible arguments. After constructing frames from debate statements during the 2016 Presidential Election, and an original frame that affirms counterstereotypes of Muslims, I expect and find evidence that strong frames emphasizing the obligations of American identity and factual counterstereotype-affirming information can shift those who oppose accepting refugees to more moderate positions. Broadly, my research offers a theoretically-grounded schematic for how stereotypes and identity construction operate together cognitively to shape public opinion. My methods offer leverage to those endeavoring to explain how these idea elements shape opinion in other issue domains. I also divulge important nuances about how specific actors (i.e., whites) propagate a cycle of anti-Muslim attitudes, warfare, and terrorism. I contribute to rivalry theory in international relations by explaining how cultural biases shape an enduring rivalry of the grandest scale: the perpetual U.S.-Middle East conflict. My framing research offers both academic and practical contributions by providing evidence on behalf of existing theory and by suggesting how media and political elites – by describing issues in unbiased ways – could knock off course the perpetual cycle of American interventionism, retaliatory terrorism, and resulting anti-Muslim stereotype generalizations.

This thesis is an exploration of hospitality, sharing and acclimation within a studio art practice as a means of fostering consideration of others. I employ a practice whereby I disrupt the typical gallery context, and through the production and dissemination of consumable items from the Middle East, I examine how resources can be used, valued, and shared to accommodate various and unspecified others and provide opportunities for crossing thresholds of guest and host relationships.

In the Middle East real estate industry, 46% of projects fail in terms of strategic dimensions. Based on the dynamic capabilities approach and contingency approach, the purpose of this exploratory multiple case study was to identify the successful strategies project leaders used to improve the alignment of projects with business strategy. Data were collected from 7 Skype semistructured interviews with real estate construction project leaders from 3 real estate organizations ranked among the top 10 in the Middle East. Public organizational documents were used for methodological triangulation. A thematic coding approach was adopted following a nonlinear sequential process that involved four stages: (a) reading and preparing the collected data, (b) coding, (c) abstracting the codes into conceptual categories, and (d) identifying the themes' relationships and patterns and creating a thematic map. The 4 themes identified were the (a) flow of strategy, (b) governance of projects during the development phase, (c) governance of projects during the delivery phase, and (d) measurement of project performance and strategic success. The results confirmed the idiosyncratic nature of the selected contexts and the need to increase some dynamic capabilities' dimensions. The contribution of this study to positive social change includes improved community lifestyle and environmental quality.

This dissertation examines a cycle of Hollywood films that spans over a decade, and which engages with and privileges a historical and geopolitical framework to address America's encounters and confrontations with the Middle East. At one level, these films map the 9/11 terrorist attacks onto various sites and histories that signify a contentious relationship between the Middle East and the United States (including Islamic fundamentalism, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the struggle over oil). In doing so they incorporate and absorb elements from other media (the Internet, television, journalism) to augment and authorize film's signifying capacities. At another level, and in tension with this dispersal, these post-9/11 films regulate and manage these histories through the generic and narrative mechanisms of the action, conspiracy or combat film. If these films privilege a discourse of investigation and expertise that postulates scientific neutrality, and even a technologized view of the Middle East, they alternately mobilize trauma and victimization discourse to delineate, prioritize and redeem the American male body. In addition, the construction of the Middle East in post-9/11 Hollywood cinema in terms of space (vis-à-vis the emphasis on cartography, geography, and surveillance technologies) and time (real time, instantaneity, pastness), plays a central role in the strategies and practices that have contributed to the production of knowledge about the region since 9/11. Focusing primarily on post-9/11 American intelligence and military narratives, this study explores what is at stake in the cinematic struggle to accommodate, but ultimately, recast history in light of U.S.-Middle East relations.

The main goal of the present study was to develop an Arabic adaptation of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI, Form Y, Spielberger, 1983). In addition, cultural and linguistic influences on the experience and expression of anxiety were assessed. The American STAI and fifty initial Arabic items were administered to 286 university students at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. The American STAI was also administered to 336 university students at the University of South Florida. Item and factor analyses were conducted on responses of the calibration sample to obtain the final set of Arabic items, which was validated using the responses of the validation sample. In conducting item selection and validation of the Arabic STAI, internal consistency coefficients for subscales, corrected item-total correlations, alpha coefficients if-item-deleted, item-factor loadings, and theoretical meaningfulness were all used as criteria for selection of the best 10 Arabic items to be included in each subscale of the STAI: S-Anxiety Absent, S-Anxiety Present, T-Anxiety Absent, T-Anxiety present. The two-factor solution for the Arabic STAI yielded a simple solution with two distinct factors: Anxiety Present and Anxiety Absent for each of S-Anxiety and T-Anxiety, lending more support to the theoretical distinction of state and trait anxiety. Lebanese students reported significantly higher anxiety levels than their American peers on S-Anxiety Present, T-Anxiety Absent, and T-Anxiety Present, S-Anxiety and T-Anxiety of the American STAI. For S-Anxiety Absent, scores for the Lebanese sample were lower than American students but did not reach significance levels. S-Anxiety Absent and T-Anxiety Absent subscales assessed lower levels of anxiety rather than the higher levels of anxiety assessed by S-Anxiety Present and T-Anxiety Present. Females tend to experience and express higher levels of mild and severe anxiety symptoms as compared to males in both samples. Factor analyses of the American STAI for the American and Lebanese samples revealed similar two and three- factor solutions. For each of the State and trait subscales, three factors emerged: Anxiety Absent, Worry, and Emotionality factors, denoting the importance of cognitions and feelings in the experience and expression of anxiety.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire began to crumble due to external wars and internal rebellions dating from about 1908. Due to European influence at the end of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire lost much of its territory in 1919, including Palestine and Syria, comprised of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Iraq. The European powers incited rebellion among the Middle Eastern peoples to the end of aiding their cause in the portions of the war fought in the Middle East. In return, they promised the Arabs independent nations; in the Treaty of Versailles, the regions were indeed freed from Ottoman rule. The European Allies, however, considered it their responsibility to guide these fledgling independent states; aided by the conclusions of the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement, as well as preexisting assumptions of the inadequacies of the newly-formed nations to effectively self-rule, the League of Nations decided to create a mandatory system, dividing the regions between Britain and France. Syria and Lebanon fell under French control, and despite the outward appearance of good intentions on the part of the French and British, they were quite imperious in their role as mandatory powers. The Europeans, under the guidance of Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France, carved the region into nations that did little to reflect the ethnic and cultural divisions of the region. Dissenters from the Arab world were quickly dealt with, as in the case of Faysal, who argued for the unity and independence of Syria and Lebanon; he eventually lost and was forced to leave Syria, but became the first king of Iraq under British mandate. Popular opinion in Europe tended towards the idea of Arab nations being less civilized, and many nations were more concerned with the status of Germany than with developing an unprejudiced policy towards the Arab nations. Thus those in control of the mandate quickly fell back on old assumptions and past experiences with the region. In this way, inequalities developed that would prove to have a profound impact on regional politics.

Cette thèse s'intéresse aux films américains réalisés en réponse à l'implication de l'armée nationale au Moyen-Orient depuis le début des années 2000. Elle cherchera à prouver que ces films sont intrinsèquement différents de ceux réalisés aux États-Unis en réponse à des conflits antérieurs.L'étude historique du cinéma de guerre américain montre qu'il a traversé un processus qui l'a conduit à partir d'un cinéma qui considère les guerres américaines comme des guerres obligatoires vers un cinéma qui considère les guerres américaines comme des guerres de choix, provoquées par une addiction : l'addiction de la société américaine et surtout des hommes américains au combat. Contrairement aux films sur la guerre du Vietnam, les nouveaux films ne pointent pas un doigt accusateur vers un élément particulier, tel qu'un mandat spécifique d'un certain président, mais vers toute la structure de la société américaine et surtout vers sa tête, le père américainAinsi, le cinéma sur la guerre en Irak est beaucoup plus percutant dans ses messages sur le lien entre la société américaine et son militarisme, davantage encore que le précédent cinéma de guerre, qui avait déjà été très critique de l'armée et la société américaines. / This thesis examines American films which were made in response to US military involvement in the Middle East, since the beginning of the 2000s. It will seek to prove that these films are different than those made in the United States in response to previous conflicts. The historical study of American war cinema shows that it has undergone a process of evolution - from a cinema which views American wars as those of necessity, to a cinema which views American wars as wars of choice. Lately, it has gone even further than that – birthing films which present American wars as events caused by the American society, in order to fulfill the needs of the people who head it - fighting-addicted American men. This process can be said to have expanded the subjects dealt with by the American war cinema.Thus, the cinema about the Iraq War is much more poignant than representations of past wars, in its messages about the connection between American society and its militarism. It manages to surpass all previous war cinema, which in itself had been the most critical towards American army and society.