<p> If there is a leitmotif to American criticism of the past fifty years it is that America, exceptionally, was not discovered but constructed. Those in a new world void of self-evident tradition or the conventional markers of history, the story goes, invented an organic truth to their past experience, current interests, and future intentions. They constructed cultural memory. Fiction from the early national period, critics argue, variously reflects, exposes, challenges, and participates in this hegemonic process. </p><p> This project is dedicated to another group of American writers who insisted that the land did speak: Mormon and Gentile immigrants who walked west the breadth of a new nation and in their journals described haunted rock cities and uncanny Indian massacres. In these descriptions, poetic patterns prove more powerful than manifest appearances. The complex erosion and accretion of these rock cities and these massacre stories prompts reassessment of nineteenth-century Euro-American settlers&rsquo; relationship with the land and the land&rsquo;s inhabitants and alternate interpretations of the seminal texts of American Romanticism. </p><p> In Chapter 1, I consider Idaho&rsquo;s City of Rock&rsquo;s mythical Almo Massacre in the context of Mormon prophecy, theology, and history. In this reading, I am centrally concerned with the effects of the story&rsquo;s poetics: how does the Almo-Massacre story invent and perform the nation? The Mountain Meadows Massacre, and its translation from its authentic site to the site of its mythical reenactment in the City of Rocks, is my central concern in Chapter 2. Chapter 2 reminds us that trauma narratives are never about authentic specifics of place, time, or experience but about synesthetic sense: how things feel. This sense is artifactual, and thus heritable and transportable. This revelation informs my readings of the journals of America&rsquo;s nineteenth-century overland immigrants who walked west and described not the virgin land of American myth but contested space. In Chapter 4, I turn to three of America&rsquo;s canonical nineteenth-century nation stories: Washington Irving&rsquo;s &ldquo;Rip Van Winkle,&rdquo; James Fenimore Cooper&rsquo;s <i>The Last of the Mohicans </i>, and Mark Twain&rsquo;s <i>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn </i>. In these stories, the world-as-felt matters as fully as the world-as-seen. </p>

<p> Good leadership is arguably important to the success of any organization, nation, or people. Research over the last 50 years indicates that transformational leaders are desirable and that such leaders can be developed. This research assessed whether and to what extent the protagonists in <i> Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire</i> and <i>Mockingjay: The Final Book of the Hunger Games,</i> Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, respectively, demonstrate the four characteristics of transformational leadership: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration.</p><p>

The strategic management literature makes frequent references to the need for directing the firm's responses to <u>perceived</u> opportunities or threats in the environment. The purpose of this study is to determine if the top executives from different firms view an important environmental development differently, in terms of it being an opportunity or threat, and, if so, do these perceptions relate to organizational factors and to personal characteristics of the top executive? A model is proposed and includes organizational strategy, organizational structure, executive locus of control and behavioral response repertoire. Fourteen operational hypotheses are formulated. Thirty-six top executives of firms in the metalworking machinery and equipment industry are polled for their opinions of flexible manufacturing systems (PMS) developments. PMS refers to technology that is only now becoming available and consists of the integration of computer facilities and robotics mechanisms. Predecessors of PMS include numerically controlled machinery (NCM), computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacturing (CAM). The effect of locus of control on PMS perceptions is not analyzed because of measurement problems. Correlation analyses reveal that organizational strategy, some aspects of organizational structure, and certain characteristics of the top executive are related to PMS perceptions at close-to-significant levels. Cluster analysis is applied to the data on strategy and structure to identify groups of firms on the basis of the similarity in their strategy-structure features. Executives' perceptions of PMS are compared across groups, and certain combinations of strategy type and structural characteristics relate to more opportunistic perceptions, although not at significant levels. The results of the statistical findings are discussed and an interpretation offered. Suggestions for future research on strategic issue perceptions are proposed. / Ph. D.

The main problem posed in this thesis is an epistemological one to do with what counts as knowledge in the organisation/management and management accounting areas of scholarship. This question arose regarding discrepancies between an original text, Burns and Stalker's The Management of Innovation (1961, 1966, 1994), and longstanding representations in the mainstream literature. The discrepancies were between the largely objectivist representations focussing on the relationship between organisation structure and environmental contingency, while omitting subjectivist factors and organisational processes, also significant in Burns and Stalker's analysis. The analysis in this thesis is concerned with two main questions: the similarities and differences between The Management of Innovation and mainstream representations; and explanations for these, particularly for the differences. The analytical framework is critical realist theory underpinned by an Hegelian dialectical methodology, looking at phenomena from different perspectives with inconsistencies addressed by a more holistic analysis. This thesis is based on a non-linear, multi-angled approach, which examines each of the two questions from different perspectives through two dialectical circles. A detailed analysis of Burns and Stalker's work and mainstream representations enabled clarity regarding the different foci in the two sets of texts. The absenting of human factors and organisational processes in much mainstream scholarship was found to extend beyond representations of Burns and Stalker's work to orthodox scholarship more widely, despite strong and persistent critiques from within the field. The dialectical opposition constructed between objectivist and subjectivist factors was investigated further and linked to attitudes regarding the commensurability of different approaches in the social sciences, particularly in the organisation/management and management accounting fields. It is suggested that this opposition is based on a particular view of science and scientific method. A broader interpretation however shows that science is also influenced by researchers' subjectivities. This has led to an argument for the complementary, more holistic approaches already present in the field becoming more widespread in the interests of more sustainable and emancipatory knowledge.