There is a revolutionary change in the world of work that impacts on the individual, work and society. The future of work suggests flexibility, boundary less communities and change in work, as we know it today. As the world of work changes from a worker intensive industrial society towards an automated information society, the retention of technological advantages e.g., human, intellect and knowledge capital is no longer assured. Employers struggle to retain their valuable high technology employees due to a general shortage of experienced candidates and aggressive recruitment tactics by others in the high technology arena. The purpose of this study is to investigate specific retention factors that induce organisational commitment and can thus increase the retention of high technology employees. High technology industries operate in volatile market and experience accelerating growth and rates of change. High technology employees are educated, have a strong preference for independence and hold a large portion of the organisation's intellectual capital. A core belief in human resources is to retain and develop employees to obtain a competitive advantage. In order to retain these valuable employees it has become necessary for organisations to transform from using an employee controlling to a more employee commitment driven strategy. To gain employees' commitment to the organisation and increase retention, the employer needs to identify which retention factors induce organisational commitment. Compensation, job characteristics, training and development opportunities, supervisor support, career opportunities and work/life policies were identified as the top six retention factors in the content analysis done on high technology literature. Organisational commitment has been defined as a mindset, which ties the individual to the organisation. Different forms and foci of organisational commitment are discussed with the approach developed by Meyer and Allen's three component model (1991). The consequences of organisational commitment benefit the organisation in terms of increased job performance, intention to stay, increase in attendance, loyalty, decrease in turnover, greater creativity, more co-operation (particularly across discipline specialities), more volunteerism and more time devoted to productive work on behalf of the organisation. This study focused on a 100% South African owned telecommunications company based in the Gauteng province. A questionnaire was developed and a population of 94 telecommunications professionals, technicians and associated professionals were selected to investigate the influence of various identified retention factors on organisational commitment. The statistical analysis of the data culminated in a regression analysis that measured the significance and the strength of the relationship between the identified retention factors and organisational commitment. The main conclusions were that compensation, job characteristics, supervisor support and work/life policies were significantly related to organisational commitment. On the other hand, in this study training, development and career opportunities were not related. High technology organisations are not just interested in the retention of employees but also creating a mutually beneficial interdependence with employees. The identified retention factors might serve as a means to demonstrate the organisation's support for, or commitment to, their employees and in turn cultivate a reciprocal attachment by employees. Employees' organisational commitment is related to their belief that the identified retention factors are motivated by the desire to retain good employees and to be fair in the treatment of employees. Future research needs are discussed. / Dissertation (MCom (Human Resources Management))--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Human Resource Management / unrestricted

This study examines the impact of rapid and multi-faceted change (both domestically and inter-nationally over the past four decades) on the Dutch Reformed Church. 2 February 1990 is taken as a water shed date in the history of South-Africa: a speech in parliament of former president FW de Klerk put South-Africa on a course of fundamental change in all spheres of society. The research problem deals with loss the Afrikaans community experiences as a result of societal change. The result of change and loss is long-lasting, collective grief. Grief is defined as the nor-mal, spontaneous reaction to change and loss. Unresolved grief and nostalgia saps a lot of energy and tends to turn a congregation’s attention to itself, thereby contradicting the sound reformed ecclesiology. There is no appropriate practical theological theory to help congregations address unresolved grief. Change, loss and grief are made focus points for theological reflection and empirical study. The guiding hypothesis states that efforts to build up the local church are more likely to succeed, once the “black holes” of unaddressed grief have been dealt with by a collective and on-going process of mourning. Mourning is defined as an intentional and courageous process of letting go of different losses. It is hard work, but the result of deliberate mourning is growth – and eventually a more appropriate, new identity. Unresolved grief causes congregations to get stuck in survival mode, in stead of reaching out to the nations with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Mourning is an antidote (Hamman 2005:35). The research model of G Heitink (1993) is employed to generate fresh practical theological thinking on the research problem: that congregations fail to live according to their missional identity. The hermeneutical cycle explores the “new” practical theology in the framework of a post-Einstein epistemology, as well as the theory of building up the local church in the framework of an ecosystemic meta-theory. The hermeneutical cycle is concluded with the study of contemporary theories of loss, grief and mourning. The empirical cycle reports the results of a qualitative empirical study in three local congregations of the Northern Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church. A rich description is given of 31 respondents’ experience of loss and grief in the new South-Africa. It is established that unresolved grief indeed impacts negatively on efforts to build up the local church. The strategic cycle searches for practical theological wisdom and for a theory that can guide congregations to more productive responses to change and loss. The research boils down to twelve strategic suggestions for local congregations on how to make collective mourning a normal and on-going part of their ministry. The study concludes with the hypothesis that practical theology can serve the church by developing a theory that integrates intentional mourning and grief work as a necessary and normal aspect of ministry. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Practical Theology / unrestricted

Notre société est de plus en plus présente sur le Web. En conséquence, une grande partie des événements quotidiens a vocation à être numérisée. Dans ce cadre, le Web contient des descriptions de divers événements du monde réel et provenant du monde entier. L'ampleur de ces événements peut varier, allant de ceux pertinents uniquement localement à ceux qui retiennent l'attention du monde entier. La presse et les médias sociaux permettent d’atteindre une diffusion presque mondiale. L’ensemble de toutes ces données décrivant des événements sociétaux potentiellement complexes ouvre la porte à de nombreuses possibilités de recherche pour analyser et mieux comprendre l'état de notre société.Dans cette thèse, nous étudions diverses tâches d’analyse de l’impact des événements sociétaux. Plus précisément, nous abordons trois facettes dans le contexte des événements et du Web, à savoir la diffusion d’événements dans des communautés de langues étrangères, la classification automatisée des contenus Web et l’évaluation et la visualisation de la viralité de l’actualité. Nous émettons l'hypothèse que les entités nommées associées à un événement ou à un contenu Web contiennent des informations sémantiques précieuses, qui peuvent être exploitées pour créer des modèles de prédiction précis. À l'aide de nombreuses études, nous avons montré que l'élévation du contenu Web au niveau des entités saisissait leur essence essentielle et offrait ainsi une variété d'avantages pour obtenir de meilleures performances dans diverses tâches. Nous exposons de nouvelles découvertes sur des tâches disparates afin de réaliser notre objectif global en matière d'analyse de l’impact des événements sociétaux. / Our society has been rapidly growing its presence on the Web, as a consequence we are digitizing a large collection of our daily happenings. In this scenario, the Web receives virtual occurrences of various events corresponding to their real world occurrences from all around the world. Scale of these events can vary from locally relevant ones up to those that receive global attention. News and social media of current times provide all essential means to reach almost a global diffusion. This big data of complex societal events provide a platform to many research opportunities for analyzing and gaining insights into the state of our society.In this thesis, we investigate a variety of social event impact analytics tasks. Specifically, we address three facets in the context of events and the Web, namely, diffusion of events in foreign languages communities, automated classification of Web contents, and news virality assessment and visualization. We hypothesize that the named entities associated with an event or a Web content carry valuable semantic information, which can be exploited to build accurate prediction models. We have shown with the help of multiple studies that raising Web contents to the entity-level captures their core essence, and thus, provides a variety of benefits in achieving better performance in diverse tasks. We report novel findings over disparate tasks in an attempt to fulfill our overall goal on societal event impact analytics.

Die Dissertationsschrift führt im Gegensatz zu bisherigen Ansätzen im Zusammenhang mit der Energiewende einen Perspektivwechsel hin zur gesellschaftlichen Berücksichtigung herbei. Bisherige Szenariostudien richteten ihren Fokus auf die technische Machbarkeit sowie einzelne Kosten- und Umweltaspekte, wie in der Voranalyse gezeigt wird. Die Gesellschaft spielt in diesem Fall eine sekundäre Rolle. Statt einer Berücksichtigung im vorab geschalteten Entscheidungsprozess werden so häufig erst im Anschluss Zeit und Aufwand in die nachgelagerte Überzeugung der Bevölkerung investiert. Der in der Arbeit verfolgte Ansatz setzt konsequent darauf, gesellschaftliche Präferenzen und Barrieren vorab in die Entscheidungsfindung einzubeziehen, damit Entscheidungen selbst nachhaltig Bestand haben. Dazu werden repräsentative Telefonbefragungen genutzt, mit denen einerseits die Präferenzen der Bevölkerung, andererseits die Grenzen der Akzeptanz in Form der Zahlungsbereitschaft ermittelt werden. Erst im Anschluss daran werden Szenariorechnungen durchgeführt, um energiepolitische Handlungsoptionen auch quantitativ bewerten zu können. Bei der anschließenden Gegenüberstellung von gesellschaftlichen Barrieren und Modellergebnissen werden jedoch auch die Grenzen dieses Ansatzes vor Augen geführt: So kann eine aus Bevölkerungsperspektive erwünschte Handlungsoption (hier der Braunkohleausstieg) auch an politischen und rechtlichen Schranken scheitern.

Foreign policy of Trump's administration: Withdrawal from the Paris Accord through the lens of two-level game theory Abstract Foreign policy of President Donald Trump has been a point of enquiry of many scholars so far. In the literature, we can observe a great diversity in opinions that attempt to explain his motivations in certain specific foreign policy actions. The main focus of this diploma thesis is laid on the withdrawal from international treaties, namely the Paris Accord from 2015. In this idiographic case study, we utilize the theory of two-level games by Robert Putnam which enables us to analyze the link between the domestic level of the decision to withdraw the international treaty. By identifying veto players in the U.S. political system, more concretely in its environmental policies, we were able to uncover the underlying notions behind the decision. Veto players in our case were the Congress with Republican and Democratic party, electoral impetus covering the general public opinion and new actors entering the public debate (private companies and states). Alternatively, we described the President's and his administration distinctive motivations. The thesis provides a new insight into the politics of the decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord. As per our findings, the electoral impetus is...

The environment has become the center of attention in recent years. The world is at the brink of several interrelated ‘green’ crises: environmental degradation, climate change, peak oil, food crisis, and various natural disasters. Hence, there is a viable threat to society. This essay aims to explore the significance of the environment for societal collapse—with a Western world city focus. The method of choice is a literature-based critical instance case study. In this thesis, the environmentally focused collapse theories of Jared Diamond and Clive Ponting are tested on the empirical example of the city of New Orleans, USA. In 2005, New Orleans was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina. As a result, 80% of New Orleans was flooded, almost 1,800 people lost their lives, and the infrastructural systems suffered lengthy breakdowns. Consequently, the supply of basic services such as water, food, sewage, electricity, heating, communications, transportation and shelter was severely compromised.   The study shows that in the specific case of New Orleans, the underlying reasons for collapse cannot be explained by ‘green’ collapse theories alone. In fact, poor wetlands management was the only environmental issue of importance. Contributing causes were various managerial flaws (including lack of financing) on all levels in terms of emergency prevention, preparedness and response, as well as long-term structural implications for social justice. Thus, the environmentally related theories of Diamond and Ponting do not prove a perfect match. Instead, the collapse of New Orleans had better been explained by a ‘root cause mix’ theory, which takes political, economic, social and environmental aspects into consideration. / Miljöfrågor har hamnat allt mer i fokus de senaste åren. Världen står på tröskeln till ett flertal miljörelaterade kriser: miljöförstöring, klimatförändring, peak oil (oljeproduktionstoppen), global matkris samt diverse naturkatastrofer. Detta medför sammantaget ett allvarligt hot mot samhället. Examensarbetet syftar till att belysa miljöns betydelse för samhällskollaps – med fokus på den västerländska staden. Den metod som tillämpas är en litteraturbaserad fallstudie. I uppsatsen testas Jared Diamonds och Clive Pontings miljöinriktade teorier om samhällskollaps på det empiriska exemplet New Orleans, USA. År 2005 ödelades New Orleans av orkanen Katrina. Så mycket som 80 % av staden drabbades av översvämning, 1 800 invånare omkom och hela infrastrukturen bröt samman. Katastrofen fick därmed allvarliga konsekvenser för grundläggande samhällsfunktioner som försörjningen av vatten, livsmedel, avlopp, elektricitet, värme, kommunikationer, transporter samt boende.   Studien visar att miljöorienterade teorier om samhällskollaps inte fullt ut kan förklara grundorsakerna till det sammanbrott som skedde i New Orleans. Den enda miljörelaterade orsaken av betydelse var inadekvat skötsel av våtmarkerna. Bidragande faktorer var istället bristande politisk styrning (inklusive otillräcklig finansiering) på alla nivåer vad gäller förebyggande, beredskap och hantering av kriser, samt långvariga strukturella hinder för social rättvisa. Slutsatsen blir därför att varken Diamonds eller Pontings miljöinriktade teorier träffar helt rätt. För större träffsäkerhet, borde New Orleans’ sammanbrott förklaras med en teori som förutom miljöfaktorer även innefattar politiska, ekonomiska och sociala aspekter.

There are directives for how public procurement should be conducted, in terms of quality,price, non-discrimination, transparency, equal treatment, reasonable requirements and how environmental, social and labor law considerations should be taken into account. Public procurement must also solve societal problems with the aim of achieving the global goals, but despite these guidelines, environmental ethical problems still remain for how a purchaser should prioritize and evaluate between the social, ecological and economic responsibility in public procurement. The purpose was to investigate whether environmental ethics could make a significant contribution in highlighting and understanding the environmental ethical challenges, conflicts, gaps and considerations that public procurement faces and provide answers to how public procurement should ethically value different tenders in order to be able to choose the supplier that makes the greatest social, ecological and economic benefit to society with the aim of achieving the global goals. The conclusion is that doctor Olle Torpman's environmental ethical sub-issues make the ethical challenges, as conflicts, gaps and considerations that public procurement faces visible and comprehensible. The application of the ethics of sustainable development, specified by professor Mikael Stenmark, solves the environmental ethics problems and shows that an environmental ethics theory makes a significant contribution when it comes to providing answers to how public procurement should ethically value the social, ecological and economic responsibility in public procurement. The procurement authority has been commissioned by the government to amend the law on public procurement so that it is in line with the new climate law. I hope that this thesis can provide an environmental ethical perspective on public procurement. Keywords: sustainable purchases, sustainable public procurement, environmental ethics, evaluate sustainability in purchasing, sustainable development goals, public procurement shall solve societal problems.

According to Skolverket, the Swedish school has two missions: conveying knowledge and teaching values. These values are taught through the common principles (värdegrund) and instruct students about democratic values and human rights. However, Skolverket also reports that students lack such knowledge. Therefore, this essay aims to create a module with the main purpose of formulating and teaching the common principles, by using Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, a text with the ability of presenting ethical issues whilst also making the reader respond to them. To achieve this, the values of the common principles will be extracted with the help of virtue ethics, which creates a conjunction with the book, where three topics are selected: sexism, gender identity and societal transformation. Virtue ethics, representing the common principles, together with Adichie’s definition of African feminism inform the analysis of sexism and gender inequality in the book and show how they are prevalent and extensive. Societal transformation is conceptualised and investigated through the use of narratology. Sexism and gender inequality are located in the horizontal plane of an arena, where the vertical expansion of narrative levels creates the urge for societal transformation. Such an expansion is made possible by an implied author, which provides the effect needed for reader inclusion. As such, Welcome to Our Hillbrow is described to entail an ethical challenge, that forces a responsible reader to emerge. Issues of sexism and gender inequality are then used together with the arena of societal transformation to construct a module in English 7, where students may themselves become reasonable readers through a process of critical self-reflection, a vital part of virtue ethics. This is done by employing Socratic and deliberative dialogue and an affective-humanistic approach, which together promote democratic values and human rights.

Aim: The aim of the study was to explore foreign-born immigrants' experiences of information from Swedish societal actors. Method: A qualitative method with four semi-structured interviews were conducted with students studying SFI (Swedish for immigrants) in a small municipality in Sweden. Data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Results: The data analysis identified six categories; The communication paths from the social actors vary, different social actors' ways of communicating and how different obstacles limit the understanding of information, they need to use different types of support to understand information, education creates the conditions for understanding and there is a variation in how they want the information to be adapted. The study's findings highlighted that foreign-born immigrants are a heterogeneous group, with individual conditions, resources, and experiences. Conclusion: To reduce the unequal gaps in health and ensure that all people receive the information they are entitled to, societal actors must design the information in an appropriate, cultural, and relevant way for foreign-born immigrants. Information adapted for everyone, it is a prerequisite for good and equal health

In our highly digitalized society, the dependence on digital solutions and systems is integral to the function of society. While digitalization has brought numerous benefits, it has also exposed society to vulnerabilities, making it susceptible to cyberattacks. The structure of vital societal functions, involving private subcontractors and long and digital supply chains. Along with the cooperation between public and private entities having inherent weaknesses it has created a vulnerable system. As vital societal functions bear the responsibility for public services and the protection of the personal information in their possession, it is crucial that they remain open to critical examination. Due to the complexity of cybersecurity and closely related subjects, the media plays an important role in conveying a nuanced depiction of the hacker attacks and establishing important connections to closely related discourses. This is essential for fostering critical examination and public debate, especially considering the assumed limited prior knowledge of the public. This thesis examines in what way cyberattacks against vital societal functions are portrayed in the Swedish media discourses and what connections to closely related discourses are being made. The focus is specifically on New Public Management, Public-Private Partnership, and Digital Supply Chains. Through a discourses analysis using an analytical framework inspired by Carol Bacchi, this thesis concludes that cyberattacks against vital societal functions are represented in a simplified way. The vital connections to other discourses are few and weak, resulting in a content-poor discourse that possibly hinders both critical examination and a public discussion on the subject.