In this thesis I employ insights from Conversation Analysis and Embodied Cognition Theory to examine the discursive practices of a group of interactants who operate in what I describe as a group cognitive system. While studies on embodied cognition have been done on both individuals and groups involved in various concrete physical tasks and situated cognition studies have been done on many types of socially situated conversations, my aim is to combine these two theoretical frameworks to observe people’s embodied interactions in informal everyday conversation as they engage in ongoing learning processes. My research question revolves around understanding how the group’s shared cognition unfolds and how new paradigms of thought and purpose are generated in the process of their interactional practices. I employ Conversation Analysis methodology in the collection and analysis of data with attention on how learners interact with each other and their environment via verbal communication. In addition, I focus on non-verbal embodied actions as they function to form a cognitive system where new realities are mentally simulated and brought to materiality via information feedback loops.

Baby boomer employees who leave the workplace without sharing tacit knowledge create a knowledge gap within the organization. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore strategies local government leaders use to retain tacit knowledge of baby boomer employees. Six government leaders who worked in the Midwest United States participated in the study and shared their experiences and perceptions. Building upon systems theory, transformational leadership theory, and knowledge management theory, research was conducted to identify strategies to retain tacit knowledge from retiring baby boomers. Physical artifacts and participant interview data were collected and analyzed using traditional text analysis. Adjoining terms were highlighted and clusters of repeated and related words were coded into themes. Three themes emerged: (a) mentoring, (b) generational differences, and (c) lack of structured systems. Mentoring was the most critical strategy leaders used to retain tacit knowledge from baby boomer employees. Acquiring collaborative leaders who foster a knowledge-sharing environment, create a structured system for retaining knowledge, and encourage communication between multigenerational teams remained imperative to retain tacit knowledge. Implications for positive social change include taking advantage of the human capital and resources the baby boomer population characterized, and educating other government leaders to improve performance within government agencies. Other social change implications include the potential of leaders to train older workers to share tacit knowledge with new workers, and of managers to incorporate strategies to mentor new workers replacing the older workforce.

In the United States, over 10 million children under the age of 5, including half the infants and toddlers, spend time in the care of someone other than their parents. Changes in family roles and the need for dual-earner households make childcare decisions important for middle class millennial mothers. Research addressing middle class millennial mothers' experiences in choosing childcare for their infants and toddlers and their adjustment to family changes is limited. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to discover the lived experiences and decision-making processes of these mothers concerning childcare. The conceptual framework was informed by the theories of Bowlby, Bronfenbrenner, and Bandura. Interviews were conducted with 15 middle class mothers, who were 19 to 36 years old, who had a child between the ages of 6-18 months, and who had children in nonfamily care for at least 5 months. Participants from the northeastern states were recruited through social media. A combination of a priori and open coding was used to reveal emergent themes. Findings showed that the mothers balanced societal expectations and meeting their children's needs with self-gratification; also, additional financial resources were important to the participants. Emotional connections with caregivers and comfort level with the setting were the most influential elements in placement decisions. Each participant was content with her choice of childcare arrangement and confident that their children would benefit, both educationally and socioemotionally. These findings can inform early childhood practitioners of factors that contribute to mothers' decisions related to nonfamily childcare and can help educators provide millennial mothers with effective support and information systems.

Small businesses support local economies by creating jobs and providing products and services, yet 50% of them fail within 5 years and only 30% of them survive for 10 years or more. The purpose of this qualitative explanatory case study was to explore how bookkeeping strategies helped 1 small business owner to sustain business growth over time. The sample was comprised of 1 small business owner who has been in business at least 5 years, experienced success, and achieved sustainability in Wake County, North Carolina. Systems theory served as the conceptual framework for this study. The data were collected through a semistructured interview and review of company documents. Transcript review and member checking were completed to strengthen credibility and trustworthiness. Based on methodological triangulation of the data sources collected, 3 themes emerged: the accountant as an advisor, the accounting system and processes, and the relationship between owner and accountant and between accountant and employees. The findings from this study may contribute to social change by providing insights and strategies for small business owners, accountants, and academics to rethink how to approach business. Accountants with advisory and management accounting skills could benefit small business owners. Future accounting students could prepare to help small business owners by gaining advisory and management accounting skills. The data from this study may contribute to the success of small business owners' growth, sustainability, and prosperity and, subsequently, benefit their local economies.

Leadership within local police organizations should be able to, but do not, process information and create actionable strategies aimed toward proactive counterterrorism practices. This problem could lead to future terrorist attacks within the United States if police agencies do not adjust their tactics in response to growing terrorist threats. A possible cause of this problem is that leadership within local law enforcement agencies is reactive in nature and as a consequence, do not encourage officers to engage in proactive strategies. Using Easton's conceptualization of systems theory as the foundation, the purpose of this case study of a single law enforcement agency in the southwest was to explore how police leadership influences counterterrorism strategies. Research questions focused on how police leadership processed information within their organization to develop counterterrorism tactics. Data were collected from interviews with police leadership and officers, observations of policing activities, and document review of policies, directives, and unclassified reports. These data were coded and analyzed following Yin's procedure for schematic analysis. The results indicated that this agency has a successful counterterrorism strategy based on 6 organizational pillars of leading, proactive, learning, processing, policy, and communication. This study may promote positive social change by helping police leaders identify which system inputs provide the best detail for developing counterterrorism policy, and what community partnerships help police identify terrorism threats.

Stakeholders are important to the financial sustainability of a nonprofit organization; however, heavy reliance on 1 stakeholder over another can place a nonprofit organization at financial risk. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies used by 3 senior leaders of a nonprofit organization in New York who have experience with stakeholder engagements efforts. The conceptual framework used for this study comprised general systems theory and transformational leadership theory. Data were collected using semistructured interviews, and review of organizational documents and online databases. Using thematic analysis, the 4 key themes that emerged from process and results strengths were leadership involvement in engaging stakeholders, persistent promotion of the organization's mission and vision, connection with the community, and workforce engagement activities. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential to increase nonprofit leaders' understanding of practical approaches that may facilitate stakeholder engagement for improving financial sustainability, improve nonprofit leader–stakeholder relationships, and bolster philanthropic efforts to improve the economic stability of the nonprofit organization and the community.

Grounded in Bronfenbrenner's (1979) Ecological Systems Theory and through the application of cross-classified random effects models, the goal of this study was to examine simultaneously neighborhood and school influences on adolescent academic achievement and risk of obesity, as well as the moderating effects of schools on these outcomes. By examining concurrently neighborhood and school influences on achievement and risk of obesity, this study aimed to fill gaps in the social determinants literature. For example, it is unclear if where an adolescent lives or where she/he attends school has a stronger influence on academic achievement. We also do not know if schools can moderate neighborhood influences on adolescent achievement, nor do we know much about the relationships among schools, neighborhoods, and adolescent risk for obesity. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study, four research questions were investigated: (1) To what extent are neighborhood influences on U.S. middle and high school students' academic achievement moderated by school environments? (2) What are the relative influences of neighborhood and school environments on U.S. middle and high school students' academic achievement? (3) To what extent are neighborhood influences on U.S. middle and high school students' risk of obesity moderated by school environments? (4) What are the relative influences of neighborhood and school environments on U.S. middle and high school students' risk of obesity? Findings did not suggest a moderating relationship between neighborhood and school factors examined in this study. In terms of relative relationships with academic achievement, three neighborhood factors (affluence, racial composition, and urbanicity) and two school characteristics (student body racial composition and school socioeconomic status) appeared to have the strongest relationships with adolescent achievement after controlling for individual and other neighborhood and school characteristics. For adolescent risk of obesity, neighborhood affluence and racial composition had statistically significant unique associations, whereas no school factors evidenced statistically significantly relationships with risk of obesity after controlling for other factors. Results of the study were interpreted in terms of contributions to the social determinants literature, as well as recommendations for the improvement of future large-scale surveys.

New Zealand's figures for child maltreatment are consistently amongst the highest in the OECD. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what the legal system can do to protect children in New Zealand from maltreatment and why legal responses to child maltreatment often appear to be ineffectual or of limited effect. This thesis uses the theories of Luhman and Teubner to argue that the law's ability to protect children from maltreatment is limited because the legal system creates and responds to its own abstract world. This process arises from the functional requirements of the law and its operation as an autopoietic system of power that produces its own abstract knowledge about the world. The legal system's function within New Zealand society is to stabilise behavioural expectations and maintain society's coherence and it does so by reducing the complexity of subjective human existence into binary alternatives. However, this process of reducing complexity limits the way in which the law produces its knowledge about the world and controls how power is distributed within the law's abstract world to such an extent that the legal system is closed from the world of subjective experience. This closure from the world outside the legal system limits the law's ability to regulate and reform that outside world and protect the children who live within it. By identifying these limits, this thesis will contribute to an understanding of the limits of the law's ability to protect children from maltreatment and thereby improve the effectiveness of New Zealand society's attempts to protect its children.

Sharing and exploitation of information resources across a diverse organisation can confer a significant competitive advantage but also can be a substantial challenge in coordinating across structural and specialisation boundaries. This challenge reflects the difficulties traditionally associated with lateral relations, which were recognised by classical organisational theorists but are more pronounced with the emergence of information as a critical resource. Notwithstanding the benefits of information sharing across the organisation, the classical concept of specialisation remains fundamental to organisational theory; thus there is potential for friction between requirements for specialisation and coordination. This research therefore examines information management arrangements to balance specialisation and coordination in a diverse organisation. The research takes advantage of organisational and systems theory literature to appreciate complex information management requirements in terms of differentiation/cohesion and integration/coupling of organisational elements. Information management???s business and technology perspectives define the conceptual framework, within which gaps in the literature are identified and become the focus of the research. The two key research areas are the opportunities enabled by technology for business integration through collaborative decision-making and the management of organisation-wide information technology infrastructure. Collaborative decision-making is an integrating mechanism that can provide balance between specialisation and coordination contingent upon the nature of decision tasks and their organisational context. Propositions associated with an adaptive approach to collaborative decision-making were tested in laboratory experiments, with positive support for the contingency model albeit constrained by individual cognitive variances. Organisations increasingly are adopting centralised approaches to the provision of IT services, with IT governance as an integrating mechanism and a need for multiple business-IT alignments to add value according to the differentiation required by organisational elements. Propositions relating to the adaptation of IT management arrangements based upon organisational characteristics were tested using a multi- iv -discipline approach, which resulted in support for the model although practical difficulties were experienced in the action research component. This research provides a framework for maintaining effective variety of information capabilities commensurate with the diverse organisation???s mission and environment, while also exploiting the synergies and economies of shared information resources for holistic benefits.

The scheduling and Control Group at the University of South Australia has been studying the optimal control of trains for many years, and has developed in-cab devices that help drivers stay on time and minimise energy use. In this thesis, we re-examine the optimal control theory for the train control problem. In particular, we study the optimal control around steep sections of track. To calculate an optimal driving strategy we need a realistic model of train performance. In particular, we need to know a coefficient of rolling resistance and a coefficient of aerodynamic drag. In practice, these coefficients are different for every train and difficult to predict. In the thesis, we study the use of mathematical filters to estimate model parameters from observations of actual train performance.