Though death and mortality is an inevitable part of our lives it seems like both the society with its culture and the individual in some way repress death. This study was set to explore how and why the individual holds back thoughts on his/her own death and in which way society affect the individual’s repression of death-thoughts. Using a hermeneutic approach I have interviewed five informants about death and thoughts about death in everyday life. Also for the analysis of the empirical material a hermeneutic approach was used, and the works of Bauman, Giddens, Heidegger, Fromm and May served as a theoretical starting point. The findings reveal that society influences the individual’s thoughts about death and that the individual’s fear of death comes out of the fear of one owns body being in some sort of suffering just pre death. The institutionalization of sick persons and dead bodies is part of the medical culture and can explain the fact that the individual sees the bodily death as more frightening than human mortality itself. Even the way persons want to be remembered by survivors is part of the evidence of our society’s and culture’s objectification of the human body and death.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-335).

No description available.

This thesis provides a theoretical foundation explaining the long-standing paradox of Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneurs' highly successful economic behaviour. Combining Western and Eastern philosophies, this study examines the role of culture in prescribing beliefs and practices that affect human efforts to self-actualise, notably the motivations underlying these entrepreneurs' business practices. It applies Aristotle's notion of phronesis (practical knowledge or wisdom) to organisation studies (as suggested by Tsoukas and Cummings, 1997, and Flyvbjerg, 2006). The enquiry employs the concept of self-organising systems (drawn from complexity theory) to ground the Confucian organismic conception of the cosmos (Needham 1956). The underlying empirical study investigated Chinese entrepreneurs' strategic actions in a particular field (Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia), an environment characterised by complexity, uncertainty and social instability. Primary data was collected through extensive field interviews, developed into narrative case studies and analysed using the explanation building technique (Yin 2003) based on Confucian modelling of social interactions to explain informants' trajectories in their life course. The findings support the Confucian organismic conception of the cosmos, which emphasises the notions of complexity, continuity, irreversibility and unpredictability. When the future is highly unpredictable, people learn and progress by recourse to learned strategies that were effective in their own adaptive success in the past. Especially when facing tension or instability, the studied entrepreneurs' decision making and strategic actions were spontaneous, without explicit predetermined goals, but based on their pragmatic value judgment, phronesis (practical knowledge) of a situation and the capability of the individual actors within their social networks to control it. When faced with a higher level of instability (especially under extreme constraints), their actions were instinctively revolutionary, often requiring a jump to a new level of network with higher complexity (Holland 1998), returning them to a normal condition. The entrepreneurs' wulun-based social roles and guanxi-based social institutions legitimised all such decisions. Their strategies were therefore contextual and pragmatic, driven by the actors' instinct to enhance the survivability of the individual, family and society. Chinese culture embraced the natural state of complexity, dynamism and unpredictability of the cosmos by establishing Confucian social institutions, specifically wulun and guanxi, that are learned and practiced from an early age and subsequently internalised as habitual and dispositional practices, including in business. Wulun functions as a social control mechanism for constraining people's behaviour and at the same time allowing people to increase their ability to adapt in order to self-organise in different contexts, whereas guanxi is practiced as a strategy to create a pool of interlocking resources that provides a feedback loop promoting continuous self-actualisation and self-transformation. Identity is associated with progression and transformation; when the self is developed, the family and the larger society are also transformed. The contribution of this thesis is its integration of Western and Eastern, natural and social, complexity theory and organisation studies concepts to illuminate the relationship between the self-actualising behaviour of entrepreneurs and the cultural context within which they operate. Keywords: phronesis, complexity, Confucianism, self-organisation, self-actualisation, wulun, guanxi, pragmatism

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 23, 2010). Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 425-458). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-218) Abstract and preview also issued online.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210-221).

Women’s entrepreneurship has garnered substantial research interest over the years. The majority of the previous research investigates nascent entrepreneurship rate, while fewer studies investigate entrepreneurial intentions. This study focuses on the relationship between women's entrepreneurial intentions and institutional and personal variables. This study uses data from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and Social Institutions and Gender Index databases and covers 43 countries. Both factor analysis and linear regression methodologies are employed. The results show that if women possess higher levels of entrepreneurial skills, have lower levels of fear of failure, and greater social networks, they are more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions. However, the more women have access to land, bank loans, and property other than land, the less likely they desire to become entrepreneurs. Also, social services for women's careers and fair entrepreneurial opportunities for women do not have significant impacts on women's entrepreneurial intentions. The theoretical and empirical implications of the results are discussed.

This study aims to contribute to the broad field of research regarding changes in fertility and postponement of parenthood. To accomplish this, I combine Richard Sennett’s exposition of “the new culture of capitalism” (2006 s. 126) and one of Daoud and Larsson’s (2014 s. 52) interpretations of the sociological term embeddedness. More particularly, the present study intends to investigate whether the social institutions that, in line with Sennett (2006 s. 25, 35), promote short-termism and flexibility, have come to be internalized (i.e., embedded) in the way women relate to the long-term investment of making a parental debut. The data consist of statements derived from eight semi-structured interviews with women aged between 20 and 28. The interviews executed to answer the following questions:   • How can we understand the way young Swedish women, without children, relate to committing parental debut?   • Which factors do young Swedish women, without children, emphasize regarding a possible parental debut?   Although the results were not unambiguous, there are indications that women choose, or have chosen, to postpone their parental debut due to ambivalence regarding making long-term commitments. Another result was that a possible parental debut not always is considered as a priority to other aspects. This included education and career, as well as the ability to be “free” and make self-sufficient decisions. To a certain extent, this rationale and reasoning were prevalent regardless of age and occupation, which was positive concerning the generalizability of the results. On the other hand, it was also clear that other aspects were considered important, which stresses the importance of taking the theoretical context into account.   A suggestion is that further research should enlarge the number of survey units to increase the possibility to generalize the results. Furthermore, my opinion is that prospective research should take this kind of institutional approach into account in the attempts of understanding other trends and phenomena in society.