<p> A dichotomy within U.S. organizations needs attention. Society has labeled millennials as a narcissistic people who have entitlement issues and lack the competencies necessary for globalization. Millennials are firing back with a desire for purposeful work. Meanwhile, the cohort is employed in the workforce with this stigma and experience challenges promoting into executive leadership roles. </p><p> The purpose of this study is to understand the challenges that millennials face being promoted to executive leadership roles. The literature review explored the top U.S. organizations to discover what sets them apart in distinction. The findings determined that the most successful organizations followed three guided principles of (a) investing heavily in people, (b) valuing diversity inclusion, and (c) providing guidance in holistic leadership practices that promote emotional literacy.</p><p> Fifteen millennial leaders were interviewed using a phenomenological methodology. Four research questions guided the study to address challenges, practices, strategies, measuring success, and recommendations. Findings from the study resulted in 849 characteristics and 58 themes.</p><p> Three overarching challenges in addition to three overarching consequential lived experiences were interpreted through the data. Millennial leaders used holistic learning strategies, authentic leadership characteristics and ethical leadership practices to overcome challenges. Growth, meaning, and value were the three overarching desires that measured their success. Three overarching leadership themes emerged that recommended future aspiring leaders be authentic, purposeful and virtuous. Indeed, the millennials will birth virtuous leadership practices in U.S. organizations (McKenzie, 2017).</p><p> The data revealed a series of personality traits and practices that coincide with the competency skills necessary for executive leadership and considered most important for success. Key findings discovered a common theme in the discussions on the benefits of feedback for leadership success. The crux of development for millennials is to resolve their definition of purpose and meaningful work, and then develop learning opportunities that support organizational outcomes. McKenzie (2017) postulates a T.E.A.M. (Teaching Empathy and Mindfulness) framework that uses the &ldquo;U&rdquo; and &ldquo;I&rdquo; in TEAM to facilitate purpose through positive psychology. The leadership model is guided by teaching empathy and mindfulness with the utilization of best practices, strategies, and measurements of success highlighted in the study.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation examines perceptions of purpose in family foundations and the impact of differences in those perceptions on family foundation board composition/function and on grant making activities. One of the primary decisions facing the donor who creates a private foundation relates to governance. Here, the donor arguably faces a deeply personal choice: to what extent should the donor&rsquo;s family be involved? Related to this choice is the question of the degree of focus on the mission-related aspects of the organization or the family-related aspects of the organization. This dissertation explores whether family foundation trustees view family purposes and social impact purposes as meaningful for the foundation they represent and whether trustees differ with regard to the degree to which they emphasize one or the other. If family foundation trustees do meaningfully differ in this regard, what difference does an emphasis on family or social impact purposes make on board composition, grant making focus and stability, similarity to one&rsquo;s peers, and other factors? Through a combination of survey, interview, and review of publicly available material, this dissertation explores this question for a sample of family foundation trustees in two Midwestern states. Eugene Tempel, Ph.D., Co-Chair Leslie Lenkowsky, Ph.D., Co-Chair</p>

Coordination, as the act of managing interdependencies between activities, is one of the central research issues in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Our thesis is that the design of coordination mechanisms cannot rely on the principled construction of agents alone, but must also rely on the structure and other characteristics of the agents' task environment. For example, the presence of both uncertainty and high variance in a task structure can lead to better performance in coordination algorithms that adapt to each problem-solving episode. Furthermore, the structure and characteristics of an environment can and should be used as the central guide to the design of coordination mechanisms, and thus must be a part of our eventual goal, a comprehensive theory of coordination, partially developed here. Our approach is to first develop a framework, TAEMS, to directly represent the salient features of a computational task environment. The unique features of TAEMS include that it quantitatively represents complex task interrelationships, and that it divides a task environment model into generative, objective, and subjective levels. We then extend a standard methodology to use the framework and apply it to the first published analysis, explanation, and prediction of agent performance in a distributed sensor network problem. We predict the effect of adding more agents, changing the relative cost of communication and computation, and changing how the agents are organized. Finally, we show how coordination mechanisms can be designed to respond to particular features of the task environment structure by developing the Generalized Partial Global Planning (GPGP) family of algorithms. GPGP is a cooperative (team-oriented) coordination component that is unique because it is built of modular mechanisms that work in conjunction with, but do not replace, a fully functional agent with a local scheduler. GPGP differs from other previous approaches in that it is not tied to a single domain, it allows agent heterogeneity, it exchanges less global information, it communicates at multiple levels of abstraction, and it allows the use of a separate local scheduling component. We prove that GPGP can be adapted to different domains, and learn what its performance is through simulation in conjunction with a heuristic real-time local scheduler and randomly generated abstract task environments.

Various approaches to the problem of inexplicable body pain exist. According to Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, physical pain resists language by returning it to its original state, crying, before language is learned. Pain is projected in crying because suffering has no referent, and thus cannot be given objective reality in words. This viewpoint frames the problem of communicating pain as a struggle between doubt and certitude, and not as an intellectual challenge. Other theorists describe how referents are created to explain the phenomenon. Most theories on physical suffering are rooted in the dualistic conception of mind and body. The body is seen as a complex machine for apprehending reality whereby mind and body are inextricable. The dualist view born of modernity posits reason as the translator of sensation. In this way only an interpretation arrived at through reason—in other words, subjected to the discourses of power—can hold. For our analysis we take these conflicts—the division between human suffering and the rationalizations of it—as our starting point; however, we propose that all interpretations, beyond requiring that pain or disease have a biological, social, religious, philosophical or other justification, entail an ethical approach. This is because all knowledge wishing to do justice to both the physical and spiritual aspects of pain and disease requires an ethos. Only an ethical position that accounts for relationships with the other can interpret and understand suffering. Our study relies on Emmanuel Levinas' theories on alterity and the constitution of the subject. Levinas argues that pain gives alterity its impact. Disease and pain confront us with our own mortality. In that uncertainty, alterity is expressed. In this framework, we consider nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish American and Peninsular texts and how disease and physical pain are represented.

We still have a limited understanding of the factors leading to the large differences in educational attainment in the developing world. This empirical study attempted to gain a better understanding of educational attainment in developing countries by examining social factors in order to determine whether or not family- and community-based social capital affect Vietnamese students' educational attainment during the on-going renewal (doi moi) process in Viet Nam. The research design combined quantitative and qualitative methods in order to understand the complex factors associated with students' educational attainment. I conducted a survey in 360 households of six villages in the Me Linh district, Vinh Phuc province, Viet Nam, from March to September 2001. In addition, I used strategies to capture a range of ethnic, gender and rural variations. Descriptive statistics together with model testing from the surveys of households, teachers and community members, along with interpretive data from informal discussions and focus group interviews, situated the empirical analyses in a socio-cultural context. This study's central hypothesis is that family and community social capital increases students' educational attainment. The study examined the three types of capital within the family: financial capital, human capital and social capital. Using the logistic regression model I found that the mother's and the father's educational levels and the interaction between parents and children positively influenced the school attendance of children. The analyses of variances (ANOVA) also indicated that family social capital is important to the process of educational attainment, i.e. school attendance and educational achievement. Family social capital, combined with financial and human capital, has added a great deal to the educational attainment for children in Me Linh district. This study goes beyond the traditional status attainment model which concentrates heavily on socioeconomic status. Given the context of the current renewal in Viet Nam, social capital formation was found to be context specific in this study. Significantly, interpretive data revealed that poor children in rural areas of Viet Nam encountered a variety of problems related to economic constraints, household responsibilities, culture, and inadequate support on the part of schools and communities at large. Some of the problems identified were: rising cost of education, lack of access to educational resources, and irrelevance of education for ethnic minority children. This research offers several recommendations, such as: (1) Reinforcing the partnership web of family, community and family through educational policies; (2) Narrowing the gap between children from poor and non-poor families in their access to educational resources; (3) Developing strategies to improve the quality of education for all children in Viet Nam, especially for ethnic minority children.

Using Indigenous epistemology blended with qualitative methodology, I spoke with forty-five Indigenous people about navigating the problematic processes for multiple American Indian identities within different contexts. I examined Indigenous identity as the product of out-group processes (being invisible in spite of the prevalence of overt racism), institutional constraints (being in the unique position where legal identification validates Indian race), and intra-ethnic othering (internalizing overt and institutionalized racism which results in authenticity policing). I find that overt racism becomes invisible when racist social discourse becomes legitimized. Discourse structures society within the interactions between institutions, individuals, and groups. Racist social discourse becomes legitimized through its normalization created within social institutions--like education, media, legislation, and family. Institutions shape social norms to make it seem right to enact racial violence against, and between, Indigenous Peoples, using stereotypes, racist labels, and laws that define "Indian" race by blood quanta. Ultimately, Indigenous Peoples can reproduce or contest the legitimized racism of Western social norms. Therefore, this work explores the dialectical and reciprocal relationship between notions of structure and agency as represented in negotiations of Indigenous identity.

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This thesis explores the experiences of the health care system for East African refugees in Boston. I argue that refugee experiences lie on a spectrum ranging from inadequate to exceptional, and that by exploring what makes care both a negative and positive experience for refugees it may be possible to better serve the community. I conceptualize these experiences using the metaphor of a rope bridge: at the beginning, refugees are stuck in a formal structure that limits their movements and agency; throughout the middle, they are forced into a liminal space in which both their identity and experiences are made ambiguous; on the far end of the bridge; they have mitigated the deleterious effects of structural violence and liminality through practices involving selective acculturation, resilience, and self-verification. My participants reported being dissatisfied with the bureaucratic barriers to health care they encountered and with the power imbalances they felt when interacting with clinicians. They also spoke about the encounters they had with clinicians that made them feel listened to, cared for, and empowered. Much of the distinction between good and bad care relied on whether the patient felt like they were respected by their doctor, and whether they felt like they had a say in their own care and treatment. Due to the limited nature of this endeavor, further research is recommended on: 1) the role of memory in recovery; 2) liminality as it applies to the resettlement experience; 3) maintaining and bolstering the assets that allow refugees to mitigate the effects of structural violence; and 4) in what ways the health care system is working for refugees, and how those can be expanded upon.

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No description available.