Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

This thesis takes as its subject Polish families who migrated to Edinburgh after Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004. It analyses the families’ post-migration trajectories and experiences, and investigates how these are influenced by factors relating to Polish history and culture, by features particular to the post-accession migration wave and by families’ individual characteristics. Theoretical approaches are drawn from a range of academic disciplines including, reference group theory, literature relating to gender-division of paid work and child-care, and ‘mobilities’ theory, and these approaches are all employed in exploring the factors that influence family members’ integration, employment and lifestyles and their plans for the future. This qualitative study focuses on the experiences of thirty families living in and around Edinburgh in the two years from 2009 to 2011, and combines a variety of methods in data-collection and in analysis. Families were interviewed twice with a year lapse between interviews, couples were interviewed jointly and conversational interviews were supplemented with questionnaires. These design features enable analysis of change over time, provide insight into family-dynamics and generate a range of forms of data. In analysis the combination of thematic coding of interview transcripts with Qualitative Comparative Analysis, allows in-depth exploration of experiences at the individual and family level to be positioned within the context of trends and patterns observed across the whole group. The study finds that the families fall into distinct types according to particular key characteristics and migration strategies, and that the different family types are linked to different experiences of life in Scotland and plans for the future. Younger migrants who arrived independently, decided to stay and later started families are found to be embarking on new careers and making use of the greater flexibility of the employment market in the UK to enact their preferred division of work and childcare. In line with previous research findings, for families whose oldest child is preschool age, school start date in Poland is identified as critical in limiting the period in which parents feel the decision about whether to return can be made. Parents who migrated with school-age children because of financial hardship in Poland are highlighted in this study as a previously under-researched post-accession migrant group; among these families most parents within the study group are found to have been considering permanent settlement at the time of migration and to be maintaining this intention; their decision to stay is particularly influenced by concerns about the difficulties that they anticipate their children would encounter in re-entering the school system in Poland and about their own reduced ability to re-enter the labour market there after de-skilling in employment in the UK. Parents who migrated to take up professional work in the UK are identified as possessing the highest levels of ‘motility’, that is, capacity to make use of mobility generally; among the study group these parents are found to have the most varied options and future plans and to be those who indicate the greatest likelihood of leaving the UK in the short term.

The study takes servant-leadership and attempts to find if there is an equivalent concept in management. Leadership and management have been extensively compared and contrasted in research and theory and while there are divergent views of exactly what each entails, others hold the view that they might be equal and complementary. The research design follows a positivist philosophy. An instrument that measures distinct leader, manager and professional role preferences is used to check the discrete operation of three contexts among a sample of members of the accountancy profession. The instrument is derived from contextualising pre-developed and pre-tested servant-leadership measuring instruments. Items from the role preference map instrument are added together with demographic details to come up with a meta-instrument adapted for the study. After validating it through pilot-testing, the instrument is applied in real-world research. The research was conducted among a sample of professional accountants working in 28 countries across four continents in organisations with over 82,000 employees. Statistical analysis, employing; analysis of variance, correlations, frequencies, significances, means, variances and tests of scale reliability was performed on both the data and the instruments. The research found clear and reliable servant-leadership-type behaviours exhibited across the three discreet roles and contexts of leader, manager and professional. Some professional accountancy courses are delivered across many countries in the world. The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) is one such professional accountancy body that offers qualifications on a global scale. However, as accountants originate from, and practice in diverse cultures and economies around the world they are trained by institutes like ACCA from a common syllabus that has elements of management as a subject. Servant-leadership is a type of leadership that is theorised to be humanistic and spiritual rather than rational and mechanistic. Management practice on the other hand needs rationality and contains some mechanistic elements in typical management functions like coordinating and controlling. The implication is whether servant-leadership attributes can be exhibited if professional accountants contextualise themselves as leaders, managers or professionals. The study focuses on the profession of accountants and tests the operation of servant-leadership behaviours from the manager, leader and professional contexts using pre-tested servant-leadership scales and applying them in specific leader and manager contexts. This approach is new in its treatment of servant-leadership in this fashion. A further original approach is the use of the accountancy profession. This treatment of instruments from other fields like psychology and sociology is new.

In Jane Austen’s Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey there is a central theme of finding a marriage partner from economic, social and love perspectives. The focus of this essay is to look from a materialist feminist perspective at how these factors influence the characters’ marital matches. I have also looked at how love as a sought after ideal in marriage conceals the social and economic factors’ influence. The novels all discuss how women’s marginalized economic position forces them to marry. Social factors such as women’s need to find a husband and their expected domestic role have also had an influence. Love works in the novels to support the oppression of women by justifying marriage and concealing women’s unequal role in society.

Security models using access control policies have over the years improved from Role-based access control (RBAC) to newer models which have added some features like support for distributed systems and solving problems in older security policy models such as identifying policy conflicts. Access control policies based on hierarchical roles provide more flexibility in controlling system resources for users. The policies allow for granularity when extended to have both allow and deny permissions as well as weighted priority attribute for the rules in the policies. Such flexibility allows administrators to succinctly specify access for their system resources but also prone to conflict. This study found that conflicts in access control policies were still a problem even in recent literature. There have been successful attempts at using algorithms to identify the conflicts. However, the conflicts were only identified but not resolved or averted and system administrators still had to resolve the policy conflicts manually. This study proposed a weighted attribute administration model (WAAM) containing values that feed the calculation of a weighted priority attribute. The values are tied to the user, hierarchical role, and secured objects in a security model to ease their administration and are included in the expression of the access control policy. This study also suggested a weighted attribute algorithm (WAA) using these values to resolve any conflicts in the access control policies. The proposed solution was demonstrated in a simulation that combined the WAAM and WAA. The simulation's database used WAAM and had data records for access control policies, some of which had conflicts. The simulation then showed that WAA could both identify and resolve access control policy (ACP) conflicts while providing results in sub-second time. The WAA is extensible so implementing systems can extend WAA to meet specialized needs. This study shows that ACP conflicts can be identified and resolved during authorization of a user into a system.

The aim of this study was to examine what roles media gave women and men during the civil war in Syria. It focuses on what the Swedish news television (TV4) chose to show to the public. With the use of a qualitative analysis and tools like Fairclough CDA (critical discourse analysis) and feminism theories, this study discovered that TV4 gives stereotypical roles to the genders. Women are portrayed mostly as victims and are sourced for how the war affects them and their family. Men, on the other hand, are seen as active and warrior-like and speak to how the war affects their people beyond just their family and personal situation. These gender rolls are common, however, this analysis also relived TV4 publicizing some strong and powerful women as well.

The gender portrayals study aims to understanding how the roles of men and women are portrayed in magazine advertisements. This has been an issue investigated over the past decades as companies try to achieve a higher level of sales of their products and services and the gender issue influences in how this companies plan one advertising program or another. However, there is a debate among authors: some of them believe that advertising reflects what is already on society and others express that advertisers use the most convenient reality to sell their products. Thus, it makes us wonder what is the actual truth behind this debate. This thesis tries to answer the question of how men and women are portrayed in advertising campaigns. There are several studies on gender portrayals across countries but none that compares France, Spain and Sweden. This thesis tries to fill this gap.   The study is conducted following Hofstede framework that classifies countries whether masculine or feminine, and is completed by analyzing the data gathered from four magazines of these three countries. We classified this data following Courtney and Lockeretz classification scheme and analyzed the data obtained with theories of some other authors.   The results of this thesis show that males were dominant among working roles while females were in non-working roles. The findings might not add a huge contribution to this field of study but may be used as guiding tool for further research.

The essence of American women’s struggle to play sports at a competitive level is that for decades the power structure of American professional and scholastic athletics simply didn’t think they should be allowed to play. The various institutions governing athletics of all levels sought first to prevent women from participating in sports at all and later to keep women athletes segregated and barred from playing on men’s teams or competing against them. They have justified this discrimination by citing various outmoded ideas of women’s mental and physical abilities, their perceived frailty, and the erroneous belief that keeping women athletes segregated from men provides a more suitable and more enjoyable athletic experience for both sexes. This report and the accompanying video, Outlaws Rising, examine the legacy of gender inequality in sports and its impact on the Austin Outlaws, a women’s tackle football team. / text

This essay discusses how female and male characters are represented in the novel Peter & Wendy by J.M Barrie from 1911 and the Disney version Peter Pan from 1953. Jane Sunderland’s models on social gender are used as a substructure to help clarify how the characters are portrayed as individuals, in relation to other characters and through their own actions and speech acts. The essay shows that there is a major difference in how male characters are portrayed compared to the female characters and that every character of the story lives up to what seems to be socially constructed gender roles.