One of the significant problems investigated by social scientists in recent years is the question of how power is used in the community. The presence of power has generally been taken for granted; with the main research and analytical effort being concentrated on identifying and explaining the actions of those members of the community, i.e., the leaders, who are thought to possess power. Their ability to operate effectively within the community is generally interpreted as a reflection of their use of power, i.e., their ability to impose their will upon others, with or without having to overcome direct or indirect opposition in the process of doing so. Such studies as have been carried out have usually been conducted in communities which are easily identified as communities, such as a city or a town. There are, however, other types of communities, one of which is the ethnic community or sub-community. Ethnic communities, such as those generally found in Canada, are a result of the desire of the members of specific ethnic groups to continue to share some or all of their activities with people of the same origin. In such communities the actions of the leaders may be based on several factors, none of which is comparable to the power which leaders in other types of communities may possess or are believed to possess. Extensive field work was conducted in the Icelandic ethnic community in the Greater Vancouver area, beginning in the fall of 1965 and continuing for some three years. Data was gathered initially through interviews with the members of this community and subsequently by direct observation of and participation in the activities of this community and its leaders. The analysis of the data obtained indicates that the leaders of such a sub-community do not and cannot relie upon an ability to impose their will upon others. Put in other words, the leaders of such a sub-community lack power. Their ability to operate effectively is largely a result of the fact that their actions vis-a-vis the community are restricted to those which will receive voluntary support from the members of the community. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

Health and social policies identify empowerment as a guiding ideal for health promotion, yet there is little theoretical understanding of youth empowerment. The need for theory to guide practice and research in working with youth in a health promotion context led to this grounded theory study to develop a theory of youth empowerment. A community health nurse acting on BC Ministry of Health's adaptation of the World Health Organisation's Healthy Cities Initiative initiated a community organising project in an inner city community of Vancouver, which merged with the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation Blueprint for Youth Services policy. The study was based on 32 months of participant observation where the researcher was a co-facilitator of a community organising effort aimed at engaging youth in identifying their quality-of-life issues, and developing and implementing their solutions. Of the ,123 youth entering the process, 66 attended at least three meetings of which 18 demonstrated ongoing commitment to the community action process. Partnering between adults and youth as the process of empowering youth emerged as the core category in the analysis, comprised of two sub-processes, Creating an Empowering Environment for Youth and Becoming Empowered. An empowering environment allowed youth to take responsibility in a welcoming social climate with enabling support from adults. The adults demonstrated their belief in the capacity of youth to act in the community, expected youth to take responsibility, cared for youth, and offered encouragement through acting-with interactions with young people. Youth felt welcome and participated in the process, taking responsibility for voicing, decision making and action on their qualityof- life issues. The adults transferred the power to youth by giving up their responsibility for voicing, decision making and taking action. By taking responsibility and acting in the community with enabling support, the youth became empowered by controlling the process and incrementally developing their competence, self-esteem, confidence and understanding, which cultivated their belonging to the community. Participating in an empowering process enhanced their development and set in motion a social change process that raised the consciousness of adults and influenced organisational practice. The theory identifies youth empowerment as an ecological construct and a capacity-building process. / Medicine, Faculty of / Population and Public Health (SPPH), School of / Graduate

Drawing on insights from feminist scholarship and gender studies, this thesis offers a new reading of selected medieval German texts with a special emphasis on the negotiation of gender and power. All three parts of the thesis demonstrate how the use of modern theories helps us to re-examine a medieval text's implications and ethical values, and to reconsider traditional views of the text. Part One focuses on the discussion of gender boundaries. Didactic and fictional texts, such as Thomasin von Zerclaere's Der welsche Gast and Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst, show that violations of gender boundaries and the questioning of the traditional power relationship between the genders are crucial to the textual negotiation of masculinity and femininity. As I demonstrate in Part Two, the unequal relationship between men and women is especially important for the system of male homosocial bonding underlying medieval society. Examples of the physical and symbolic exchange of women and their favours are offered by didactic texts, such as Marquard vom Stein's Der Ritter vom Turn, and fictional texts, such as the Nibelungenlied. Aspects of this exchange are not solely related to medieval marriage practices, but are also reflected in courtly rituals, such as "frouwen schouwen" (watching the ladies). The importance of the conventionally beautiful female body as an object of exchange becomes obvious in Part Three, where I examine encounters between Christian knights and women defying the norms of feminine beauty. Here I focus on female figures that are defined as "doubly Other": both in their relationship to the masculine Self, and in their relationship to the ideal of medieval Christian femininity. Texts such as Wolfdietrich B and Der Strieker's Die Konigin vom Mohrenland show how the negotiation of gender and power assumes a new dimension in light male encounters with Wild Women, heathen women, "supernatural" women and old women, where the male partner often has to struggle to uphold his privileged masculine position. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

Orientador: Ediogenes Aragão Santos / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-07T23:22:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Matos_IzaltoJuniorConceicao_M.pdf: 8768470 bytes, checksum: ce39bb31deffa95ec6c0e5c5420ff535 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Mestrado / Filosofia e História da Educação / Mestre em Educação

In recent years, considerable interest has been stimulated concerning potential conflicts of interest between a company's management and their independent auditors. Many researchers examined the association between corporations who changed their present auditors, and factors such as auditor's opinion on the financial statements, management changes, mergers, financial distress, etc. Some of these research efforts resulted in findings that were inconsistent with each other. The current research was therefore undertaken with the objective of developing a theoretical model of auditor change process and to explain the justification for considering certain specific factors that may be present in an auditor-client relationship. The research design and the methodology for analyses were developed on the basis of the theory on power conflicts found in political science literature and by the use of Wrong's power model on authority relationship. Sources of power such as the size of an audit firm, size of a corporation, the stock exchange membership, the ability of an auditor to qualify the opinion on the financial statements, the ability of the management of a corporation to terminate the audit contract following the issue of a qualified opinion, and change of a corporation's CEO were identified and converted into independent variables. Data were collected from secondary sources on a sample of 200 corporations, 100 companies that had changed their audit firm at least once during the period 1983-85, and 100 corporations that did not change their audit firm during this period. The resulting data were analyzed using the MDS-ALSCAL procedure and logit regression with maximum likelihood estimators. The findings of this research support the power model and its relevancy to the study of auditor-client relationship. The variables, client size, stock exchange membership, and audit firm size were found to have a significant association with corporations who changed their audit firms. However, the variable, change of CEO, was not found to be a significant cause of audit firm changes.

After the Cold war, most African countries have strived to be democratic States by accommodating the idea of liberal democracy. Although these countries adopt this kind of system of governance, most of them do not adhere to the tenets which this type of democracy ascribes. The political systems in most African countries are organised and based on what is referred to as politics of identity. This is where the set up of political institutions is based on interest groups with an ethnic, religious or any peculiar identity configuration. The practice of identity politics based on ethnic, religious or merely any identity, leads to exclusion of some segmental groups from the governance system in most African countries. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2011. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / nf2012 / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

The research problem of this thesis is an examination of inter-bureau power relations. A modification of Max Weber’s classical ideal type bureaucracy is the conceptual model to which sociological analysis is made. An empirical examination of the variance between the conceptual model and data collected in the field is analyzed in order to illustrate inter-bureau power relations. The analysis of the conceptual model is based upon three assertions. They are: (1) inter-bureau power relations are based upon coercion and not cooperation; (2) normative standards that are established by the administrators of the bureaucracy are differentially enforced; and (3) goals that are established by the administrators of the bureaucracy are subject to distortion. Participant-observation and casual interviewing techniques were the methods employed to collect data pertaining to the nature of inter-bureau power relations over a nine month period. The research problem lent itself to a qualitative approach in that the data were largely subjective and required recording over a period of time. The data collected were primarily a result of participant-observation conducted while an employee of the bureaucracy studies. Additional information was collected and analyzed from documents related to the functioning of the bureaucracy. Permission was sought and received, from the bureaucracy and related organizations studies, to use the data collected. This study found that the Weberian styled conceptual model, representing the authority hierarchy of the bureaucracy studied, was theoretically based upon cooperation, rationality, logic and equalitarian principles. Maintaining the Weberian styled authority hierarch had become ideology to the administrators of the bureaucracy. The existence and operation of this particular hierarchy was made to matter of public record, thus satisfying the political aspects of public accountability. However, it was found that there were other organizational hierarchies that the administrators of the bureaucracy utilized in performing the operation functions of the bureaucracy. For the purposes of this thesis the “other” authority hierarchies were known as working models. The authority hierarchies of the working models seems to be operationally based upon the concepts of coercion, differential enforcement of normative standards, and distortion of administrators’ goals. A unique characteristic of the working models was that they were quasi-secret, and virtually no public records were kept of their existence of operation.

The formation of elites is an essential and common phenomenon of human society, both in the past and present. Elites are individuals with superior power, substantial resources, and the ability to influence other members. Depending on the sources and practices of power, the elite stratum may be divided into several groups. Scholars have studied the process of elite formation, identifying triggers that may lead to the emergence or development of elites. All of these triggers involve interactions between elites and others, often from different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, elite formation is also a process of constant intercultural interaction. Under this premise, the dissertation poses two interrelated questions: How did elites utilize different cultures to foster their power? And, how were elites affected when they used cultures as their tools to gain power? During the Bronze Age (ca. 1300–350 BCE), the lower Yangtze region is believed to be the homeland of two states, Wu and Yue. Positioned as the “periphery” of the Zhou political and cultural spheres, the histories of the two states are recounted in the historical texts from the Zhou perspective. However, the region’s diverse and vibrant local culture, coupled with the presence of affluent tombs, suggests that the region has history that was not recorded in the transmitted texts and thus warrants comprehensive study. Furthermore, elites in the region borrowed cultural elements from various cultural zones, including the Zhou, to sustain their power, rendering the region a good case study to explore the aforementioned questions. Numerous archaeological excavations of mounded tombs, kiln sites, and mining and smelting sites supply the primary material for the project. Statistical analyses unveil the general cultural landscape of the region and elucidate the process of elite formation. Stylistic and contextual analyses further suggest how elites connected with commoners in the local society, their elite colleagues inside the region, and their allies of diverse cultural backgrounds through proto-porcelain and bronzes. The study suggests that initially, there were several elite groups scattered throughout the region. After competition and integration, the number of elite groups in the region was reduced to two, and each had access to different resources and strategies for communicating with others. The elites residing in the Taihu-Hangzhou Bay area adhered to local funerary practices and further engaged with the local society as fashion leaders in the development of new utensils through their partial control over the ceramic production. The elites who occupied the northwestern part of the region, the Ningzhen area, used their better access to bronzes from the north and created a mythical and possibly supernatural image to gain support from the locals. In terms of the two elite groups’ cross-cultural contact with the outside world, both seemed to have connections with northern elites, especially in Phase IV (ca. 550–350 BCE). Since the local elites had frequent intercultural contact, they inevitably acquired foreign practices and cultural elements that might distance them away from local traditions. However, they would not be completely alienated from the local society because they maintained interactions with people from their homeland. While such a hybrid is not uncommon in cultural contact scenarios, what the project emphasizes is the intricate process of balancing, and possibly dilemma, experienced by elites: while their primary goal is to utilize all the available resources to grow their power, they must also skillfully balance local followers and their foreign allies.

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The relationship between marital negotiation strategies and various context and outcome factors are examined using responses from 249 women and men. Multiple regression analysis confirmed significant links between context factors and negotiation strategies. Self-esteem was important in explaining degree of reliance on some types of negotiation, as was emotional interdependence and perceived past cooperativeness of the marital partner. Training in communication skills did not affect women's style of negotiation but was significant for men. The strategy of simply telling the spouse what is wanted or needed was more important to reaching agreement and having a sense of fairness about the outcome than were strategies like bargaining, reasoning or threatening. These findings are discussed within a theoretical framework that gives consideration to negotiation as a process important to understanding marital power. / Ph. D.