• Refine Query
  • Source
  • Publication year
  • to
  • Language
  • 1
  • Tagged with
  • 3
  • 3
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Negotiating the powers : everyday religion in Ghanaian society

Graveling, Elizabeth January 2008 (has links)
Engagement with religion has recently become an important issue to development theoreticians, donors and practitioners. It is recognised that religion plays a key role in shaping moral frameworks and social identities, but little attention is paid to how this is played out in everyday life: the focus remains on ‘faith communities’ and ‘faith-based organisations’ as unified bodies. This thesis uses ethnographic methods to examine how members of two churches in rural Ghana are influenced by and engage with religion. Rather than viewing religion simply as (potentially) instrumental to development, it seeks to approach it in its own right. It challenges the rigidity of categories such as ‘physical/spiritual’ and ‘religious/non-religious’, and the notion of ‘faith communities’ as discrete, unified entities with coherent religious cosmologies. Insights from witchcraft studies and medical anthropology indicate that spiritual discourses are drawn on to negotiate hybrid and continuously changing modernities, and people tend to act pragmatically, combining and moving between discourses rather than fully espousing a particular ideology. Residents of the village studied appear to inhabit a world of different but interconnecting powers, which they are both, to some extent, subject to and able to marshal. These include God, secondary deities, juju, witchcraft, family authorities, traditional leaders, biomedicine and churches. Relationships with both spirits and humans are ambivalent and each of these powers can bring both blessings and harm. Religious experience is fluid, eclectic and pragmatic as people continually enter and exit groups and marshal different powers simultaneously to protect themselves from harm and procure blessings. Approaches by the development world seeking to engage with religion and to take seriously local people’s interests and viewpoints should thus be wary of oversimplification according to traditional Western social science categories, and be underpinned by an understanding of how religious discourses are interpreted and enacted in people’s everyday lives.
2

Le pouvoir des économies de petite taille en Amérique du sud à leur insertion internationale / The power of small size economies in south america on international insertion : a special focus on Bolivia

Cordova Pozo, Kathya 18 March 2011 (has links)
Depuis les années 60, l'Amérique Latine avait accueilli les suggestions des organismes économiques internationaux (OEIs) sur la façon de réussir le développement. Dans les années 70, les Nations Unies ont suggéré la politique où les pays pourraient définir indépendamment leur propre politique nationale et internationale pour atteindre leur développement. Cela n'a pas fonctionné en raison de l'interdépendance croissante (de quoi ?); donc, dans la deuxième moitié des années 80, le Consensus de Washington a remplacé cette politique. Le Consensus de Washington disait que, la globalisation favorise le multilatéralisme dans la mesure où un pays ne peut pas prendre unilatéralement des décisions qui affecteront d'autres pays. Et même que cela paraît-t il vraisemblable, il signifierait que le libre-échange doit régner en maître et au-dessus des actions des Etats, éliminant tout entrave aux échanges et aux investissements à l'étranger. Selon la Commission des Nations Unies pour le Commerce et le Développement (CNUCED), « la production internationale est devenue la caractéristique structurale centrale de l'économie mondiale ». Une plus grande liberté de commerce et une large ouverture aux mouvements de capitaux, pourrai mener les nations sous-développés à la croissance économique comparable à celle des pays riches. En conséquence, beaucoup de pays latino-américains qui avaient rejoint entretemps le néolibéralisme proposé par le Consensus de Washington en 1989, ont ainsi mise en place des mesures visant à réduire les entraves au commerce : ils ont ouvert leurs marchés aux capitaux étrangers et suivi plusieurs des indications des OEIs ; le but étant le développement par l'internationalisation. Des économies nationales rejoignent ainsi un réseau du commerce international, d'investissement et de crédit où le commerce devait apporter le développement. Les OEIs ont indiqué que la taille du marché national n'importe plus si un pays se focalise sur de plus grands marchés internationaux. L'internalisation des normes de Consensus de Washington était difficile pour les SSE parce que les règles de ce consensus les ont pris en tant que groupe « d'une taille unique, ouvert, juste, établie sur le terrain d'une régulation non discriminatoires » approchez pour la multilatéralisation du commerce et du développement. Cependant, les SSE n'ont pas tiré profit de ces mesures car ils ne faisaient pas le poids des puissances au point d'influencer les règlements du libre échange et de la libéralisation de l'investissement directe étrangère (ou IDE). Ils n´ont pas la capacité ni le pouvoir de changer la structure des normes à l'intérieur des OEIs, où les politiques et les lois internationales sont suggérées sans prendre en considération des privilèges particuliers ni les besoins propre à chacun. Cette marginalisation dans la scène internationale accentue les problèmes économiques et sociaux qui sont à l'origine de l'agitation sociale constante et mettent en péril la stabilité de leur gouvernement. Plusieurs chercheurs et gouvernements ne perçoivent pas ces vrais problèmes et ne peuvent pas ainsi prévoir des mesures proportionnées pendant les négociations internationales. Le pire est que, les EPT ne connaissent pas eux même leur faiblesses et comment les évaluez. Avec cette thèse, nous voulons explorer la capacité d'insertion des EPT sur la scène internationale. De ce fait, la thèse est divisée en deux parties : dans la première partie, nous analyserons pourquoi après plusieurs années de multilatéralisme proposé par les OEIs, aucune amélioration en termes de l'internationalisation et du développement de certains pays sud-américains n'a été constaté ; mais au contraire, il y a eu un accroissement de la pauvreté. Nous pensons que c'est le fait que la scène internationale a été ordonnée seulement par les plus grandes économies laissant de côte la majorité des pays en voie de développement et leurs besoins. / Since the 60s, Latin America has been hearing the suggestions of International Economic Organizations (IEOs) on how to reach development. In the 70s, the United Nations suggested the politics of development, where the countries could define independently their own national and international politics to reach development and be equally rich. This did not work due to the increasing interdependence; therefore, in the second half of the 80s, the Washington Consensus replaced this policy. The Washington Consensus claims that globalization promotes multilateralism and does not allow countries to take unilateral decisions because they affect others and are being affected by other countries' decisions as well. Although this made a lot of sense, it would mean that the free market prevailed over the actions of the government, eliminating all barriers to trade and to foreign investments. According to the United Nations Commission for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), "International production has become the central structural characteristic of the world economy”. A greater freedom to trade, plus the opening of capital flows, could lead the underdeveloped nations to economic growth showing as a sample the rich countries. Therefore, many Latin American countries joined the neoliberalism that was proposed by the Washington Consensus in 1989, reduced trade barriers, opened up their markets to foreign capitals and followed many of the indications of the IEOs in order to find development through internationalization. National economies are linked together by a network of trade, investment and credit and this link is supposed to bring development. The IEOs said that the national market size does not matter anymore if a country focuses on larger international markets. Internalizing the Washington Consensus norms was difficult for Small Size Economies (SSE) because the rules of this Consensus took all the countries as a group of a unique size and established on common and non discriminatory rules to approach multilateralization. However, the SSE had no part of the cake and no power to influence the regulations of free trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization. The same, they do not have the capacity or power to change the norm structure inside the IEOs (where policies and international laws are suggested) that could take them into account with particular privileges according to their specific needs. This marginalization in the international arena is believed to have accentuated economic and social problems that now keep them in constant social turmoil and put in risk their government's stability. Several researches and governments do not perceive this problem and cannot foresee adequate reactions in international negotiations. Worst, SSE do not know themselves what are their weakness and how to asses them. With this thesis, we want to explore the power of SSE on international insertion. For this, the thesis is divided in two parts. The problem that we want to analyze in the first part is why after several years of multilateralism proposed by the IEOs, internationalization and development did not improve for some of the South American countries increasing poverty. It seem that the reason lies in the fact that the international arena was only ruled by the largest economies leaving aside to the majority of the developing countries and their needs. This is why we wanted to explore (main goal) under what circumstances multilateralism and the Washington Consensus was applied, which were the options to improve the situation within multilateralism and what was the impact of multilateralism as proposed by the IEOs in terms of internationalization and development.
3

Boundary management in ICT-enabled work : exploring structuration in information systems research

Salamoun Sioufi, Randa January 2013 (has links)
ICTs have enabled increased mobility and created a new era of workplace connectivity. Due to changes in work organization, global operations, increased mobility, and the new opportunities they are creating; work requires more coordination, more travel and a higher frequency of boundary spanning. ICTs have infiltrated into the personal life of individuals, while similarly, having an increasing impact on how organizations manage their workers‘ work-life balance. This research investigates the work boundary negotiation process in ICT-enabled work.Using an in-depth case study supplemented with visual data, this thesis studies the case of Sigma, an international consulting firm, that serves clients located in a large geographical area. It explores how consultants exhibiting mobile work practices, use ICTs to negotiate work boundaries. It draws on the structurational model of technology and complements it with the boundary object construct. The utilisation of this combined approach allows further understanding of work boundary negotiation.The research reveals that some ICTs as technological artefacts are boundary objects bridging between different groups of actors, crossing work boundaries, and allowing actors to negotiate their work boundaries while challenging traditional boundaries. Thus, allowing consultants to use their ICTs (specifically their smartphone) to negotiate their work boundaries on a need to basis. The boundary negotiation process (as revealed by the structuration process) is the means by which consultants try to make the most out of existing social structures – in this case specifically domination – in their organizational context. The ICT becomes a source of power and is mainly used to manifest domination over available resources. Consultants use them to maintain control over their life, increase their legitimacy and convey that they are professional experts. ICTs allow consultants to continuously redefine their work boundaries which become dynamic, fluid and contextual; the research reaffirms the sociotechnical nature of work boundaries.The thesis also develops a conceptual model of work boundary negotiation that conceptually illustrates how boundary negotiation is the outcome of the structuration process and the negotiation of existing structures of domination, legitimation and signification.

Page generated in 0.0745 seconds