The University of Natal has a Schools Liaison team that is responsible for undergraduate Students Recruitment. Recruitment activities are, however, not restricted to the Schools Liaison team. There are special programmes funded in part or wholly by corporate partners. These partnerships have placed additional demands on the recruitment function which is served by using special recruiters. Certain faculties have also chosen to make use of specialised recruiters in the form of Public Relations Officers. The presence of more than one group of individuals involved in Students Recruitment creates problems, more especially because the various groups of recruiters operate mainly within the same target market. The coming together of the conflicting and competing goals coupled with the parallel and independent recruitment drives of competing faculties, negatively affects the synergy that could be beneficial to the recruitment function. The focus of the study is on using systems thinking methodologies to engage stakeholders in a process that assists the University in creating a Student Recruitment Model that allows the various recruiters to pursue their various goals without harming the larger organisational goal and fragmenting the organization. The objective of this study is to use the Soft Systems Methodology as a tool aimed at developing a viable Student Recruitment model. This dissertation uses systems thinking methodologies to examine stakeho1der interests and concerns and attempts to bring all these together within a consolidated framework that should make up the viable Student Recruitment Model that serves the various interests within a single system. A number of lessons learnt during the process are highlighted and discussed in the last section of this study. The said lessons are considered valuable in the future as new demands arise and the organisation needs to modify its recruitment model. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

Teacher educators at the University of Canterbury, College of Education, like all teacher educators in Aotearoa New Zealand, have ethical, legal, and moral obligations in relation to Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty is an agreement that was signed in 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and representatives of independent Māori hapū (sub-tribe). The failure of the Crown to uphold the Treaty plus the colonisation of New Zealand has held wide-ranging ramifications for Māori, including a negative impact on Māori education. Policy guidelines both at a national level and locally at the University of Canterbury provide requirements and guidelines for teachers and teacher educators in relation to the Treaty. The aim of many of these guidelines is to address equity issues in education and to support Māori ākonga (students) to achieve success as Māori. This thesis draws upon data from interviews with five teacher educators from the University of Canterbury, College of Education to explore their understandings of the Treaty and how these understandings inform their practice. A qualitative research approach was applied to this study. Semi-structured interviews were used and a grounded theory approach to the data analysis was applied. Three key themes arose from the data and these provided insights into the teacher educator participants’ understandings of the Treaty, how they acquired Treaty knowledge and their curriculum decision making. Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory approach was used as a framework to situate how the teacher educators’ understandings of the Treaty have developed. Critical theory and concepts associated with critical pedagogy underpin this research. Critical pedagogy highlights the importance for teacher educators in New Zealand to have an understanding of the historical and contemporary complexities of educational issues related to the Treaty.

Violence is considered to be one of the most critical and threatening global problems plaguing the world today, leaving a trail of devastating consequences to societies, economies, cultures, families and individuals (Desjarlais & Kleinman, 1997). Adolescents who grow up in a context of violence learn distorted ways of thinking, acting, living and interacting. Aggressive tendencies and violent behaviour become internalised and adopted as acceptable ways to resolve conflict situations. Chronic, continuous exposure to violence results in physical, psychological and emotional disturbances, such as depression, anxiety, lowered self-confidence, sleep disturbances, decreased attention and concentration spans. This study addressed the form of violence known as community violence, i.e. violence that children experience within their communities (either as witnesses or as victims). This study investigated the effects of this negative environmental experience and investigated potential mediating and moderating variables that could influence the harmful effects of such experiences. The variables considered as mediating and/or moderating variables were social support and self-esteem. The theoretical framework adopted for this study was Bronfennbrenner’s Bioecological Systems theory. This framework provides a theory through which the interaction of the variables of this study can be explained and understood. This study is part of a larger study which explored community violence, hope and well-being, therefore secondary data was utilised. The sample consisted of 568 Grade nine learners and data was collected through the administration of a questionnaire compiled through the combination of five scales: the Children’s Hope Scale, the Recent Exposure to Violence Scale (REVS), the KIDSCREEN-52, social support scale and Rosenberg’s self-esteem scale. The data was analysed through regression and multiple regression. The results of the study found that neither social support nor self-esteem were mediators and only social support functioned as a moderator variable. / Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych)

Pedagogiskt ledarskap leder till utveckling. Detta antagande ligger som grund för denna studie som fokuserar på rektorers pedagogiska ledarskap i relation med medarbetare. Många lärare upplever arbetsbördan för stor och så även rektorer. Detta visar på en organisation som inte mår riktigt bra. För att skapa utveckling som leder till att fler stannar i organisationen behöver skolutveckling ske utifrån kärnverksamheten, undervisningen. Medarbetarnas bild av organisationsutveckling behöver synliggöras. För att fokusera på skolutveckling och pedagogiskt ledarskap utifrån medarbetarnas perspektiv har jag fokuserat på relationen mellan rektor och medarbetare.  Interaktionen dem emellan kan skapa utveckling, något som är grundläggande i skolans värld. I denna undersökning har organisationsforskning och skolforskning bearbetats och analyserats tillsammans med empirin.  Empirin är samlad genom olika slags intervjuer som har sin grund i de systemteoretiska och Socialkonstruktivistiska teorierna. Dessa har även legat som grund för den analys av empirin som gjorts. Empirin visade att relationen mellan rektorer och medarbetare är god och att rektorerna utför ett pedagogiskt ledarskap. Den visade också att relationen inte användes för att utmana och utveckla medarbetarnas undervisning. Relationen var snarare till för att skapa trygghet, stabilitet och förtroende. Det pedagogiska ledarskapet som utfördes var på organisationsplan, som underlättade för medarbetarna att utföra sitt arbete. Men detta påvisades inte. Förväntningar mellan medarbetare och rektorer uttalades sällan och medarbetarna var omedvetna om rektorns ansvar för deras utveckling.   Slutsatserna är att rektorerna står för den trygghet och tydlighet som organisationen i övrigt saknar, vilket bidrar till att de inte kan vara utmanande. Om organisationen skulle stå för stabilitet skulle rektorerna kunna stå för variation och utmaningar. Relationen mellan rektorerna och medarbetarna är subjektiv vilket gör att förväntningar som annars skulle kunna ställas på en objektiv rektorsposition inte ställs. Samma sak gäller motsatta led. Att rektorerna inte ställer krav på sina medarbetare med hänsyn till deras situation. Det är en ständig balansgång mellan subjekt och objekt, men en distans till professionen skulle hjälpa organisationen att utvecklas. Dessutom kommuniceras inte det pedagogiska ledarskapet mellan rektorer och medarbetare, vilket bidrar till att det osynliggörs. / Educational leadership leads to development. This assumption is the basis for this study, which focuses on the principals educational leadership in relationship with employees. Many teachers feel the burden too great and so even principals. This indicates an organization that does not feel really good. In order to create development that will lead to more stops in the organization needs school development must rest on the core business, teaching. Employee image of organizational needs visibility. In order to focus on school improvement and educational leadership based on the employees' perspective, I have focused on the relationship between the headmaster and staff. The interaction between them may create development, which is essential in the world of school. In this study, organizational research and educational research processed and analyzed with the empirical data.   The empirical data is collected through various interviews that are rooted in the system theory and social constructivist theories. These have also been the basis for the analysis of empirical data gained. The empirical data showed that the relationship between principals and employees is good and that principals perform an educational leadership. It also showed that the relationship was not used to challenge and develop their employees' tuition. The relationship was rather to provide security, stability and confidence. The educational leadership were performed on the organizational chart, which made ​​it easier for employees to do their work. But this was not detected. Expectations between employees and principals were spoken rarely and employees were unaware of the principal's responsibility for their development.   This concluds that principals are responsible for the security and transparency of the organization in general lacks, which helps that they can be challenging. If the organization would stand for stability would headmasters able to stand for variety and challenges. The relationship between the principals and the employees is subjective allowing the expectations that could otherwise be imposed on a principal objective position is not reset. The same applies to the opposite point. The principals do not require their employees with respect to their situation. It is a constant balancing act between subject and object, but a distance to the profession would help the organization evolve. Additionally communicated not pedagogical leadership between principals and employees, which contributes to the rendered invisible.

Despite the widely hailed success of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy it was apparent by the mid-2000s that beneath the veneer of stability lay a country facing serious social and economic challenges. The employment and labour market participation rates were uniquely low among emerging markets. Protest action against the state had reached levels last encountered in the volatile 1980s and early 1990s. The budget and current account deficits had reached unsustainable levels. By its own admission the government realised that the country was not recording GDP growth rates necessary to make dramatic inroads into poverty, unemployment and inequality levels. A number of analysts and commentators therefore came to question the future stability of South Africa’s political system. Trade unions and some Cabinet ministers routinely described unemployment as a “ticking time bomb”. The Chairman of the Institute of International Affairs wrote in Business Day that he could predict when South Africa’s “Tunisia Day” would arrive. The respected Economist newspaper ran a front page feature on what it called South Africa’s “downhill slide”. Former President FW de Klerk warned that South Africa was approaching a precipice. Clem Sunter, South Africa’s most renowned scenario planner, upped his prospects that South Africa may become a failed state. Global ratings agencies downgraded South Africa citing the fear that government policy could not meet popular demands. Amidst such speculation it is vitally important that the prospects for instability be investigated and determined, not via opinion or speculation, but rather against a sound body of theory. This task is complicated by the fact that the feared instability may only occur at a point in the future. The theory must therefore be applied via a methodology capable of overcoming the weak track record of political science in accurately anticipating major shifts in political systems. This problem statement will be addressed by showing that complex systems theory holds the key to a series of units of analysis via which the stability or instability of any political system can be objectively determined, compared to any other political system, and tracked over time. Secondly that there are scenario planning methodologies that can overcome the uncertainty inherent in the futures of all complex systems and thereby the poor track record that political scientists have in anticipating dramatic future changes in the systems they study. When combined into a single complex systems/scenario model, these theoretical and methodological points of departure will allow the long term prospects for stability or instability of any political system to be accurately and objectively determined. / PhD (Development and Management) North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

Despite the widely hailed success of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy it was apparent by the mid-2000s that beneath the veneer of stability lay a country facing serious social and economic challenges. The employment and labour market participation rates were uniquely low among emerging markets. Protest action against the state had reached levels last encountered in the volatile 1980s and early 1990s. The budget and current account deficits had reached unsustainable levels. By its own admission the government realised that the country was not recording GDP growth rates necessary to make dramatic inroads into poverty, unemployment and inequality levels. A number of analysts and commentators therefore came to question the future stability of South Africa’s political system. Trade unions and some Cabinet ministers routinely described unemployment as a “ticking time bomb”. The Chairman of the Institute of International Affairs wrote in Business Day that he could predict when South Africa’s “Tunisia Day” would arrive. The respected Economist newspaper ran a front page feature on what it called South Africa’s “downhill slide”. Former President FW de Klerk warned that South Africa was approaching a precipice. Clem Sunter, South Africa’s most renowned scenario planner, upped his prospects that South Africa may become a failed state. Global ratings agencies downgraded South Africa citing the fear that government policy could not meet popular demands. Amidst such speculation it is vitally important that the prospects for instability be investigated and determined, not via opinion or speculation, but rather against a sound body of theory. This task is complicated by the fact that the feared instability may only occur at a point in the future. The theory must therefore be applied via a methodology capable of overcoming the weak track record of political science in accurately anticipating major shifts in political systems. This problem statement will be addressed by showing that complex systems theory holds the key to a series of units of analysis via which the stability or instability of any political system can be objectively determined, compared to any other political system, and tracked over time. Secondly that there are scenario planning methodologies that can overcome the uncertainty inherent in the futures of all complex systems and thereby the poor track record that political scientists have in anticipating dramatic future changes in the systems they study. When combined into a single complex systems/scenario model, these theoretical and methodological points of departure will allow the long term prospects for stability or instability of any political system to be accurately and objectively determined. / PhD (Development and Management) North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

This thesis explores the influences of social networks and social support on the literacy engagement of 7 high school students from a multicultural, multilingual, and economically disadvantaged urban neighborhood in a large, diverse North American city. Specifically, this study describes (1) students’ social networks and social literacy interactions; (2) the types of social support the network relationships provide for participants’ literacy; and (3) the ways in which this socioliterate support might affect participants’ literacy engagement. Guided by Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1992/2005), at three times during an 18-month period the 7 participants completed social network maps and interviews, checklists about their reading and writing choices, and retrospective interviews about their reading and writing practices on self-selected texts. These data were analyzed on the basis of Tardy’s (1985) typology of social support and the tripartite model of engagement proposed by Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris (2004), then individual case reports were created for each participant. For cross-case analysis (Stake, 2006), the individual reports were compared across similar, predetermined themes. Two primary conclusions are supported by the data and analysis: These adolescents received varying amounts and types of socioliterate support from certain members of their social networks, particularly teachers and family members, and this support positively influenced their literacy engagement when they were facing difficult or uninteresting tasks. The study provides an understanding of the relationship between social support, motivation, and engagement in single literacy events, including proposed relationships between these three concepts, as well as perspectives on the role of technology in adolescent social network formation and on the sources from whom adolescents seek literacy-based social support. The study describes pedagogical spaces that can provide and activate such literacy support and suggests topics for future research relating to adolescent literacy, socioliterate networks and support, and literacy engagement.

This study described the play experiences of daughters who were caregivers to their mothers with multiple sclerosis (MS). The experiences of four Canadian-Caucasian women aged 19-26 were captured using phenomenological methods of individual and focus group interviews, field notes, and artefacts. Three themes with supporting sub-themes emerged: (a) being a good daughter, (b) blurred relationship boundaries, and (c) encumbered play. Caregiving for their mothers was part of being a good daughter. Excessive caring duties changed their roles from being daughters to caregivers and contributed to feelings of maturity over peers. Their mother-daughter relationship boundaries were blurred and the participants wished to spend more time as daughters. Play, although sometimes limited, was highly valued and provided an escape from caregiving. Using family systems theory to interpret the findings, it was concluded that support for families living with MS would release children from caregiving duties so rounded childhood play could be experienced.

Cells are able to function and survive due to a delicate orchestration of the expression of genes and their downstream products at the genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolic levels. Since metabolites are ultimately the causative agents for physiological responses and responsible for much of the functionality of the organism, a comprehensive understanding of cellular functioning mandates deep insights into how metabolism works. Gaining these insights is impeded by the fact that the regulation and dynamics of metabolic networks are often too complex to allow intuitive predictions, which thus renders mathematical modeling necessary as a means for assessing and understanding metabolic systems. The most difficult step of the modeling process is the extraction of information regarding the structure and regulation of the system from experimental data. The work presented here addresses this "inverse" task with three new methods that are applied to models within Biochemical Systems Theory (BST). Alternating Regression (AR) dissects the nonlinear estimation task into iterative steps of linear regression by utilizing the fact that power-law functions are linear in logarithmic space. Eigenvector Optimization (EO) is an extension of AR that is particularly well suited for the identification of model structure. Dynamic Flux Estimation (DFE) is a more general approach that can involve AR and EO and resolves open issues of model validity and quality beyond residual data fitting errors. The necessity of fast solutions to biological inverse problems is discussed in the context of concept map modeling, which allows the conversion of hypothetical network diagrams into mathematical models.

Relay networks and cooperative transmission have spurred considerable interest in recent years, promising performance improvements in, e.g., system capacity, robustness and transmission rate. In this thesis, the focus is on the so-called half-duplex relay channels, where in the system, a source node wants to transmit a message to a destination node and a relay node can potentially assist this transmission. The relay is said to be half-duplex in the sense that it cannot transmit and receive at the same time within the same frequency band. It is natural to categorize the potential relaying schemes (operations of the relay node) into two kinds. The relay can either decode the message of the source node, or it can process its received signal without decoding. The thesis investigates various schemes of the second kind and they are termed as ``relaying schemes without decoding.'' The first part of the thesis is devoted to the approach of instantaneous relaying. The instantaneous relaying schemes belong to the relaying schemes without decoding, where the relay node is implemented by a deterministic single-variable function. Both linear and non-linear functions are investigated and it is demonstrated that the functions with sawtooth-like shape give higher achievable rates than other functions investigated. Furthermore, the work is extended to half-duplex multiple-access relay channels, where an extra source node is present. For such channels, the relay's operation is ``instantaneous'' in the sense that it is represented by a deterministic function of two variables. Essentially, the function handles the received signals from the two source nodes, combining them together and transmitting the combined signal to the destination node. Novel functions based on the Archimedean spiral mapping and sawtooth-like functions are proposed and demonstrated to perform well, using achievable rate regions and achievable sum rates of the two source nodes as figures of merit. In the second part of the thesis, the class of relaying schemes without decoding and with memory is investigated, where for such schemes, information theoretic source and channel coding with long codewords is used at the relay node. The two predominant schemes of such kind are the so-called compress-and-forward (CF) and quantize-and-forward (QF) schemes. The achievable rate results of the two schemes and some of their variants are derived for static channels. Furthermore, under the assumption of slow fading channels, with transmitter channel state information (CSIT) not available at the source and relay nodes, outage probabilities, expected rates as well as diversity--multiplexing trade-offs (DMT) of the respective schemes are derived and compared. In addition, to compensate for the loss due to the absence of relay CSIT, a finite-resolution feedback link from the destination node to the source node is designed for the CF and QF schemes to provide the relay node with partial CSIT, and thus, the performance of the respective schemes can be improved. Lastly, the thesis considers the problem of lack of relay CSIT from another viewpoint. The concept of hybrid digital-analog coding, as is first investigated in source-channel coding, is adapted and applied at the relay node. Such relaying schemes are termed hybrid digital-analog relaying schemes and their performance in terms of expected rate is studied. It is shown that the hybrid schemes significantly outperform the conventional digital-only (e.g., the CF scheme) and the analog-only schemes (e.g., the so-called amplify-and-forward scheme). / QC 20110222