Energy policies which maintain and extend nuclear energy are often opposed by anti-nuclear movements. Ambitious plans for developing nuclear energy in Russia, constructing a first nuclear plant in Poland, and lifting the ban on nuclear energy while allowing the replacement of old reactors in Sweden are examples of such energy policies. In contrast to the massive anti-nuclear movements of 1970-1990s, recent anti-nuclear movements are not organized as national protest campaigns. This thesis examines repertoires of anti-nuclear movements in the alleged “Nuclear Renaissance” period.   Repertoires of anti-nuclear actions are analyzed from the perspective of discursive and political opportunities of anti-nuclear movements. Discursive opportunities are enabled or hindered in the ordering of nuclear energy discourses, making messages and actions of social movements legitimate or illegitimate. While discourses of anti-nuclear movements are complex, official discourses of nuclear energy featuring arguments about profitability, energy security and environmental security in connection to nuclear energy development, resonate more with broader socio-political developments. Ordering of discourses is established in such a way that expert rhetoric becomes a standard approach for discussing nuclear energy, while references to emotions and subjective matters are unacceptable. Political contexts of anti-nuclear movements provide opportunities for environmental NGOs, one kind of actor in anti-nuclear movements, to pursue nonconfrontational strategies and engage in institutional channels, where they can contribute their expert knowledge. Concurrently, another actor in anti-nuclear movements, local anti-nuclear groups, on the one hand, share argumentative structures with environmental NGOs, and, on the other hand, attempt to mobilize local population and organize local protests. Due to limited opportunities for attention from the national media and focus on local issues, local protests are not featured in the national media, which is crucial for national protest actions. The differences in repertoires between these two kinds of actors and absence of actors opting for mass engagement provide insight into repertoires of anti-nuclear movements as a whole. This thesis demonstrates how discursive opportunities of social movements, which result from competing discourses of movements and their counter-agents, and political opportunities structure repertoires of actions of these movements. / Energipolitik som upprätthåller och utökar användandet av kärnkraft motarbetas ofta av antikärnkrafts­rörelser. Exempel på sådan energipolitik är de ambitiösa planerna på att utveckla kärnkraft i Ryssland, att bygga ett första kärnkraftverk i Polen, och att häva förbudet mot kärnkraft samt möjliggöra utbyte av gamla reaktorer i Sverige. I motsats till de massiva antikärnkraftsrörelserna under 1970-1990, är de nya rörelserna inte organiserade som nationella protestkampanjer. Denna avhandling undersöker vilka olika handlingssätt antikärnkrafts­rörelserna i den påstådda "Nuclear Renaissance"-perioden använder. Antikärnkraftsrörelsernas olika sätt att agera analyseras ur diskursiva och politiska möjligheter. Diskurser av antikärnkraftsrörelser är komplexa, när officiella diskurser om kärnkraft möter argument om lönsamhet, energisäkerhet och miljösäkerhet i samband med kärnkraft utveckling, anknyter den mer till en bredare socio-politiska utveckling. Diskurser etableras på ett sådant sätt att expertretorik blir en standardiserad metod för att diskutera kärnkraft, medan hänvisningar till känslor och subjektiva frågor är oacceptabla. Det politiska sammanhanget ger möjligheter till miljöorganisationer, en typ av aktör inom anti­kärnkrafts­rörelsen, att bedriva nonconfrontational strategier och engagera sig via institutionella kanaler, där de kan bidra med sin sakkunskap. Samtidigt som en annan aktör, lokal antikärnkrafts­grupper, å ena sidan dela argument med miljöorganisationer, men å andra sidan försök att mobilisera lokalbefolkningen och anordna lokala protester. Eftersom lokala protester inte visas i nationella medier får de begränsade möjligheter till medial uppmärksamhet, något som är avgörande för nationella protestaktioner. Skillnaderna i sätt att agera mellan dessa två typer av aktörer och frånvaro av aktörer som väljer massengagemang ger insikt i de olika handlingssätt som används av antikärnkraftsrörelser som helhet.

Preschool teachers talk about different action repertoires A qualitative study on conflict management   Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka förskollärares tal om handlingsrepertoarer vid medlandet i en konflikt. De frågeställningar studien utgår ifrån är; Vilken handlingsrepertoar ger förskollärare uttryck för utifrån givna konfliktsituationer?  Vilken barnsyn framträder i förskollärares resonemang kring konfliktsituationer? Vilket stöd ges barn som ofta hamnar i konfliktsituationer? Studien kommer även belysa teoretiska ramverk och begrepp. Vi har valt våra teoretiska begrepp utifrån tidigare forskning i studiens litteraturöversikt för att kunna analysera resultatet. Utgångspunkten är Gloeckler och Cassells (2012) olika perspektiv;  problemlösning med barn och problemlösning för barn. Våra teoretiska begrepp är kategoriserade under varje perspektiv. Begreppen är följande lågaffektivt bemötande, barns perspektiv, det kompetenta barnet, barn som medmänniskor, högaffektivt bemötande, barnperspektiv, begränsa barn. Avslutningsvis presenterar vi begreppet livsvärld som vi anser är applicerbart på båda perspektiven. Metoden vi valt att använda för vår insamling av empiri är intervju, med vinjettmetoden som utgångspunkt. Studien visar urval av undersökningsgrupp, hur genomförandet av insamlingen av empirin gick till samt studiens validitet och reliabilitet. Studien visar även hur  processen för bearbetning av empirin och analys har gått till. Presentation av de för- och nackdelar beskrivs i metoddiskussionen. Genom våra teoretiska begrepp; problemlösning med barn, problemlösning för barn, hög och lågaffektivt bemötande, barns perspektiv, barnperspektiv, barn som medmänniskor, begränsa barn, det kompetenta barnet och livsvärld, har vi analyserat empirin och framställt den. Studien belyser svaren på våra frågeställningar i resultat och analysdel.

Orientador: Jair Lopes Junior / Resumo: O advento de políticas públicas educacionais contíguas à perspectiva da educação inclusiva em território nacional, contribuíram para o aumento de matrículas nas escolas de classe comum de alunos com Transtorno do Espectro Autista (TEA) e a presença desses alunos implica distintas responsabilidades nas práticas dos docentes. É nesse contexto que o presente trabalho se debruça e define seu objetivo geral, a saber, investigar condições de mediação do trabalho docente na Educação Infantil, considerando a sala de aula com inclusão de alunos com TEA, que poderiam favorecer à consecução de objetivos preconizados pelos documentos oficiais que orientam processos de escolarização neste período da educação básica. O estudo caracteriza-se como estudo de caso, explicativo e de caráter qualitativo. O local da pesquisa deu-se em uma escola pública da Educação Infantil de uma cidade do estado do Amazonas e contou com uma professora participante. O percurso metodológico foi planejado em 3 Fases, sendo a Fase 1 referente ao contato com a escola, entrevista inicial (Roteiro 1 – R1) com a participante, ambientação em sala de aula e registro das aulas em vídeos. A Fase 2, dividida em 3 Etapas, caracterizou-se como a fase de intervenção através de discussões na elaboração do planejamento de dois temas com a participante. Na Fase 2 – Etapas 1 ocorreu a apresentação de episódios à participante, apresentação da análise da pesquisadora (registros das ações da professora e das interações com seus aluno... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The advent of educational public policies contiguous with the perspective of inclusive education in the national territory, contributed to the increase in enrollment in schools of common class of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and the presence of these students implies different responsibilities in the practices of teachers. It is in this context that the present work looks at and defines its general objective, namely, to investigate conditions of mediation of teaching work in Early Childhood Education, considering the classroom with the inclusion of students with ASD, which could favor the achievement of objectives advocated by official documents that guide schooling processes in this period of basic education. The study is characterized as a case study, explanatory and qualitative. The research took place in a public school of Early Childhood Education in a city in the state of Amazonas and had a participating teacher. The methodological route was planned in 3 phases, with Phase 1 referring to contact with the school, initial interview (Script 1 - R1) with the participant, setting in the classroom and recording of classes on videos. Phase 2, divided into 3 stages, was characterized as the intervention phase through discussions in the planning of two themes with the participant. In Phase 2 - Steps 1, episodes were presented to the participant, presentation of the researcher's analysis (records of the teacher's actions and interactions with her students in a tea... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

This PhD thesis builds on the current trends in the research on entrepreneurship and gender, which pay attention to the fact that women are being excluded from or ignored by the entrepreneurship research and that female entrepreneurship is studied and assessed from a male perspective and no attention is paid to important contexts which affect the situation of entrepreneurs. With regard to this criticism, the focus is on the embeddedness of entrepreneurship in various contexts. In order to approach this issue I use the institutional perspective and I look for relations with formal and informal institutions in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The research deals with entrepreneurial couples as it is possible to look into their entrepreneurial embeddedness in the domestic context. The aim of the thesis is to provide a micro-insight into the construction of role distribution in the domestic and work area and show how these constructions are justified by cultural repertoires. I look into the negotiation of roles in heterosexual couples by the method of qualitative interviews which I carried out with each of the partners individually. Thanks to his method it is also possible to study the suppressed voices in the couple (more often female than male). I analysed the data using the social constructivist...

This study examines the indigenous environmental justice conflict in settler-colonial Ecuador, aiming to contribute to a nuanced understanding of how environmental justice can be achieved regarding ways in which the conflict is expressed by indigenous peoples. The analysis departs from political articulations, worldviews, and deployed action repertoires to confront hegemonic power. The focus is on the following indigenous social movements: CONAIE, Mujeres Amazónicas, and Alianza Ceibo. The theoretical framework expands on conflict transformation theory, utilizing decolonial theory to provide greater contextualization. Based on a qualitative content analysis of indigenous communications, this thesis aims at highlighting an alternative understanding of environmental justice with transformative, decolonial abilities. The subsequent comparative analysis of action repertoires outlines how these manifest the movements’ strategical aims during EJ conflicts. The thesis concludes with outlining an alternative environmental justice formulation and a set of action repertoires deliberately deployed to achieve conflict transformation and environmental justice.

School consolidation, which involves closing one or more schools and combining them into a single school, is a common phenomenon in rural Appalachian communities due to out-migration and lack of funding for public schools. When school consolidation occurs, the local school may be closed, or students from other communities may be bused to the school. Community residents, however, do not always agree with the decision to consolidate their local schools. When this disagreement occurs, residents may choose to participate in organized resistance activities to show their opposition, make their voices heard to local politicians and the media, and seek an alternative to the proposed consolidation. This case study of school consolidation in one rural Appalachian county seeks to document and analyze the struggle in which community residents engaged in an effort to prevent local schools from being consolidated. Data was collected in the form of semi-structured interviews conducted with members and sympathizers of a resistance organization called TOPS. TOPS was formed in 2001 to oppose school consolidation, but its members were not successful in keeping their local schools open. Many schools in McDowell County have been consolidated or are scheduled to be consolidated in the near future. For example, Big Creek High School, which was at the center of many consolidation debates, will be closed in 2010. Its students will be bused to a new, consolidated high school. I conducted interviews during fall 2006 and spring 2007 to determine community members' grievances concerning consolidation, to establish a narrative of their struggle against state government officials, and to provide a basis for analyzing the movement's failure to achieve its goals. I used these interviews, along with TOPS' documents, local newspaper articles, and literature from other anti-consolidation efforts, to examine possible reasons why TOPS was not successful. Social movements literature, particularly the concepts of framing and repertoires of contention, formed the theoretical basis of this analysis. / Master of Science

The subject of this dissertation is Swedish upper secondary pupils’ reception of novels read as part of their literature instruction. The main purpose is to study and compare the reading of female pupils with that of male pupils and to analyze to what extent attention is paid to their private reading experiences in the literary teaching. What strategies do the students use to interpret and discuss fiction? And what is the relationship between their private reading habits and the way fiction is studied at school? Consequently, the subject field of this qualitative study concerns not only teenagers’ private reading habits, but also gender related issues, school adjusted reading routines and didactic matters. Reading at school differs in many ways from the pupils’ private reading habits, but there are also differences regarding the students’ attitudes towards reading as such. There proved to be certain diversities between the reading habits of boys and girls. The boys read in general less than the girls, and many boys were interested in reading adventurous and exciting stories. The girls were more into reading realistic novels, and to them it was important that they could identify with the characters. Many pupils responded personally to their reading. Instead of reflecting on the meaning of a text and comparing it to other texts or phenomena of the surrounding world, their reception confined itself to categories like “boring” or “exciting”. Merely a few students included a more profound literary analysis in their responses. An important aim of literature instruction must be to broaden the pupils’ literary repertoires and to make them improve their reading skills. This study shows that to achieve these improvements the students must feel involved, which means that literature instruction must be adapted to the literary cultures of both boys and girls.

In the 300 years since the magazine originated, this mass medium has become synonymous with women and their worlds. Today, publications for, by and about women still dominate the global magazine market, and the selection and circulation of women’s magazines increase annually – indicative of the popularity of this mixed medium of information, instruction and entertainment. Since the 1980s, academics from different human sciences branches, such as Joke Hermes and Marloes Hülsken in the Netherlands and Angela Gough-Yates, Margaret Beetham, Ros Ballaster and Marjorie Ferguson in the United Kingdom, have proven the academic worth of women’s magazines, by using them as information sources about women’s social knowledge, positions and roles, their relationships and consumer behaviour in (amongst others) historical, sociological, psychological, mass media and women’s studies research. In South Africa, however, academic research on women’s magazines is still largely unexploited: apart from a few dissertations, information is mostly limited to single paragraphs in larger mass media studies. Magazines for black women have, for example, not been researched yet. In this study, South African and Dutch magazines from 2006 are studied as sociocultural journals: accounts or collections of the major trains of thought representative of a specific context and time frame. When magazine content is viewed as the textual distillation of the shared consciousness or culture of a particular audience, and discourse as ways of acting and thinking underlying this shared consciousness, magazines, by drawing on different discourses, report on the norms, values and habits particular to a specific era – yielding information that can be applied in reconstructing images of reality. This study aimed to research, within the context of current women’s magazines, the way in which women’s presence in the career world is accepted and legitimised as standard practice, and to explore the influence of the pursuit of a career on other female roles. It was assumed that the range of ‘superwoman’ roles (career woman, mother, wife, homemaker, lover, friend …) resonates in the ‘work discourse’ – and that all women experience similar frustrations, fears, dreams and expectations, irrespective of linguistic, cultural and socio-economic factors. A selection of sixteen magazines – two issues each of four South African and four Dutch magazine titles, aimed at diverse readerships – were singled out as primary research material. Magazine content was subsequently submitted to close reading, in order to examine as closely as possible the approaches towards women’s deployment in the career world, as made evident in the text. Theoretical concepts from mass media studies, cultural studies, discourse analysis and feminist criticism underpinned the identification of textual patterns, leading to the establishment of links between text and reality and meaningful interpretations of eventual findings. The results indicated that the work discourse in all the examined magazines is informed by three interpretative repertoires – that ultimately determine the way in which this discourse is developed and maintained, both in the magazine content and in everyday life. When the findings resulting from the textual analysis of the work discourse represented in these magazines were compared with actual statistics on the career world, it became obvious, however, that magazine content does not necessarily reflect reality – but that internalising the ambitious, larger-than-life dream aspects contained between a magazine’s covers is precisely the aspect from which readers derive pleasure and satisfaction. / Dissertation (MA (Afrikaans))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Afrikaans / unrestricted

This is a thesis in marketing concerned with entrepreneurship in established firms and the discursive practices that take place within a perspective of strategic entrepreneurship. The study of discursive practices in this context assumes a concern with how different aspects of entrepreneurship are produced and consumed by people in text and talk. Strategic entrepreneurship can be seen as an organisational form of entrepreneurship. The latest contribution within strategic entrepreneurship tends to focus on opportunities and advantages in organisations as two processes that need to be considered and managed jointly. In this thesis, I have studied the discursive practices of how scholars position strategic entrepreneurship through an enhanced literature review and by means of a close analysis of assumptions made within strategic entrepreneurship, but also by studying two firms and their discursive practices of constructing opportunity and advantage positions. The results have then been analysed with reference to discourse theory and previous research within entrepreneurship based on European traditions that builds on the linguistic turn. By conducting an empirical study of two firms, I have studied discourses in use, and how they are produced by people. In so doing, two main findings emerge in the discussion of the empirical results: 1) Opportunity and advantage positions emerge in social interaction and are co-constructed. 2) Opportunity and advantage positions are constructed by the use of multiple discourses, on different levels of discourse and for different functions. The main purpose of the thesis is to enhance the understanding of entrepreneurship in established firms and the activities labelled as strategic entrepreneurship. In addressing the purpose, seven theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to research emerge in areas of strategic entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship and the enterprising self.

In the body of knowledge surrounding ADHD there is a power struggle regarding which interpretations and perspectives should prevail. Representatives from various scientific disciplines and professions write and publish articles about the diagnosis based on their respective points of view. These articles are the focus of this thesis. Among other things it can be seen in these examined articles that, the prevalence of ADHD is higher amongst established bodies of social care, and that there is a lack of knowledge regarding the diagnosis in social systems such as schools and social services. Our aim with this study is to highlight how professionals within the Swedish contemporary field of knowledge surrounding ADHD create significance and meaning of the phenomenon. Based on Jonathan Potters discourse analysis, we focus on how ADHD is described by professionals in contemporary Swedish articles about ADHD and also on how these descriptions become valid and credible in these texts. The approach used in our case has been article analysis, based on Potter's rhetorical toolbox that includes both theory and method in one. ADHD is widely presented in the articles with descriptions ranging from a cultural disease constructed by prevailing social climate to being a genetic abnormality. Using various rhetorical strategies it is possible to establish totally different groups of interpretative repertoires as all true. In this thesis, we also discuss the possible consequences of these various explanations and constructions within social work and society at large.