ABSTRACT A descriptive correlation study design, directed within the conceptual framework of Kanter’s (1977, 1993) Structural Theory of Organizational Behavior, examined mental health nurses’ perceptions of empowerment and job satisfaction. Empowering work settings are both necessary and critical since nurses need to be empowered to fulfill their role within the standards espoused by the nursing profession and to meet the challenges of a dynamic and evolving healthcare system that is flooded with service delivery demands. Empowerment within the workplace can result in job satisfaction which is essential given that empowerment and job satisfaction can lead to positive outcomes such as, quality patient care and professional autonomy. Furthermore, nurses’ job satisfaction has a significant effect on patients’ satisfaction with nursing care and overall patients’ satisfaction with their hospital care. Mental health nurses’ views regarding empowerment and job satisfaction are underrepresented in the literature. The purpose of this research was to describe the nurses’ perceptions of these variables and to further shed light on their perspectives. Fifty-five mental health nurses who were employed within an acute in-patient mental health program were recruited for the study. Four questionnaires, Conditions of Work Effectiveness, Job Activities Scale, Organizational Relationship Scale and the McCloskey/Mueller Satisfaction Scale were employed to determine nurses’ perceptions of the variables of empowerment and job satisfaction. A validation index was included to measure global empowerment. To test the first hypothesis, multiple linear regression was undertaken to determine the productive relationship of formal and informal power on perceptions of job empowerment. A Spearman’s rank-order correlation was used to assess the second hypothesis with regard to the magnitude of the relationship between empowerment and job satisfaction variables. P-values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. The hypotheses were as postulated, mental health nurses’ perceptions of formal and informal power were related to their perceptions of workplace empowerment, with formal power being more significant. Moreover, empowerment and job satisfaction were positively correlated. Similar to other research settings which were highlighted within the literature review, mental health nurses were moderately empowered and moderately satisfied within their work setting. Utilizing Kanter’s (1977, 1993) Structural Theory of Organizational Behavior as a guide can assist administrators in creating empowering work environments that can facilitate job satisfaction for mental health nurses. The presence of empowering and satisfying work conditions are vital within the specialty of mental health nursing if nursing care of the mentally ill patient is to be maximized and nurses are to reach their professional goal of providing quality patient care. Limitations to this research include the small sample size and the convenience sample methodology. Recommendations for further research involve surveying mental health nurses from other hospital sites and incorporating a qualitative viewpoint.

ABSTRACT A descriptive correlation study design, directed within the conceptual framework of Kanter’s (1977, 1993) Structural Theory of Organizational Behavior, examined mental health nurses’ perceptions of empowerment and job satisfaction. Empowering work settings are both necessary and critical since nurses need to be empowered to fulfill their role within the standards espoused by the nursing profession and to meet the challenges of a dynamic and evolving healthcare system that is flooded with service delivery demands. Empowerment within the workplace can result in job satisfaction which is essential given that empowerment and job satisfaction can lead to positive outcomes such as, quality patient care and professional autonomy. Furthermore, nurses’ job satisfaction has a significant effect on patients’ satisfaction with nursing care and overall patients’ satisfaction with their hospital care. Mental health nurses’ views regarding empowerment and job satisfaction are underrepresented in the literature. The purpose of this research was to describe the nurses’ perceptions of these variables and to further shed light on their perspectives. Fifty-five mental health nurses who were employed within an acute in-patient mental health program were recruited for the study. Four questionnaires, Conditions of Work Effectiveness, Job Activities Scale, Organizational Relationship Scale and the McCloskey/Mueller Satisfaction Scale were employed to determine nurses’ perceptions of the variables of empowerment and job satisfaction. A validation index was included to measure global empowerment. To test the first hypothesis, multiple linear regression was undertaken to determine the productive relationship of formal and informal power on perceptions of job empowerment. A Spearman’s rank-order correlation was used to assess the second hypothesis with regard to the magnitude of the relationship between empowerment and job satisfaction variables. P-values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. The hypotheses were as postulated, mental health nurses’ perceptions of formal and informal power were related to their perceptions of workplace empowerment, with formal power being more significant. Moreover, empowerment and job satisfaction were positively correlated. Similar to other research settings which were highlighted within the literature review, mental health nurses were moderately empowered and moderately satisfied within their work setting. Utilizing Kanter’s (1977, 1993) Structural Theory of Organizational Behavior as a guide can assist administrators in creating empowering work environments that can facilitate job satisfaction for mental health nurses. The presence of empowering and satisfying work conditions are vital within the specialty of mental health nursing if nursing care of the mentally ill patient is to be maximized and nurses are to reach their professional goal of providing quality patient care. Limitations to this research include the small sample size and the convenience sample methodology. Recommendations for further research involve surveying mental health nurses from other hospital sites and incorporating a qualitative viewpoint.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Club Corporation of America collaborated on a multimedia-training project, Board of Governors: The Cornerstone of a Fine Private Club. This training sought to catalogue all existing support materials and articulate key philosophical and operational systems regarding relationships between Club Managers and the club's Board of Governors, which stands as the leading administrative body for philosophical and operational issues in individual private clubs. This analysis operates on two levels of investigation: 1) a case study that provides a rhetorical assessment of the development and contents of this training system, 2) based on this appraisal, an introduction of theoretical options regarding the development of training applications. Moreover, the theoretical exhortations of Michel Foucault and Augusto Boal provide a language to encourage a different modus operandi in the field of corporate training. By articulating the concept of a "dialogue training continuum," this elucidation strives to offer an alternative when rethinking training systems and their encoded discourses. By analyzing local and institutional knowledges and how those knowledges find shape in this project, this analysis argues that establishing a system where end-users may question and reshape the philosophical discourse of the company during the context of training, the overall milieu has the ability to grow and shape-shift through legitimizing and valuing the voices of all organizational constituents. / Master of Arts

The main performance objective in an electric power grid entails timely and efficient generation and delivery to the time-varying electricity demand. As the electricity industry is witnessing proliferation of the mainstream renewables, the minute-by-minute variations in wind and solar power generation may result in temporary electricity scarcity that jeopardizes grid stability and quality of service. The evolving electricity markets are aimed at incentivizing the conventional generators to reinforce their operating flexibility. This dissertation concerns the goal of enhancing the dynamic response rates of interconnected controllable resources by means of a multi-layered fuel input control of electrically coupled heterogeneous energy conversion components. Both power engineering and large-scale control contributions are made in support of this enhancement. First, improved fuel input controls are designed to enable flexible physics-based energy conversion dynamics required by the interconnected grid. To efficiently utilize the resources load-following and regulation problems are stated. The efficacy of proposed fuel input control designs in enhancing the dynamic response rates is illustrated on IEEE 14-bus system. Second, the problem is formalized as multi-input multioutput time-varying trajectory tracking based on a decentralized spatiotemporal composite control design. The concepts of vector-Lyapunov function and singular perturbation are invoked to formalize model decompositions, over space and time, respectively. Next, the assumptions for model simplifications are relaxed and the problem of parametric uncertainty is addressed. A minimumcost resilient co-design approach is introduced for storage-sensors-communication channels in a complex electric power grid. The notion of selective strong structural fixed modes is explored as a characterization of feasible decentralized control laws for an arbitrary system realization satisfying a pre-specified structure. Finally, it is proposed that planning of generation portfolio must be driven by the objective of maintaining adequate operating flexibility in the system. The goal is to ensure sufficient ramp capacity to sustain the significant integration of intermittent renewable resources.

In the late 1980s, references to postmodernism, post-structuralism, and Michel Foucault started to appear in nursing journals. Since that time, hundreds of journal articles and dozens of books in the discipline of nursing have cited these continental-philosophical ideas—in substantial or minor ways—in nurses’ analyses of topics in nursing practice, education, and research. Key postmodern and post-structural notions including power/knowledge, discourse, the clinical gaze, disciplinary power, de-centering of the human subject as the originator of “meaning,” and the challenge to grand narratives and binary thinking—all found their place on the pages of journals such as the Journal of Advanced Nursing, Nursing Inquiry, and Nursing Philosophy and in a predominantly American journal Advances in Nursing Science among a few other periodicals. In my dissertation, I assemble this voluminous body of publications into a “field of study.” Taking a comparative approach to this field, I argue that we can understand postmodern/post-structural scholarship in nursing as characterized by a marked difference between its non-American (in this case, Australian and New Zealand, British and Irish, and Canadian) and American domains. While each domain is heterogeneous, peculiar features distinguish American postmodern/post-structural nursing literature from its non-American counterparts. I build on a recent systematic critique of so-called American “unique nursing science” and (meta)theory by Mark Risjord (2010), who surfaced the unacknowledged legacy of the logical positivist philosophy of science on contemporary American nursing conceptions of science and theory. These influences, according to Risjord, have had profound and lasting intellectual impact on nursing theoretical work manifesting in the notions of “unique science,” a caution toward “borrowed theory,” a hierarchical model of theory, the language of metaparadigms, incommensurable paradigms, and so on. These ideas and related practices of theorizing have culminated in what I call the American disciplinary nursing matrices that shape the visibility and intelligibility of alternative practices of theorizing in the discipline of nursing. I show the ways in which these matrices are consequential for how postmodern and post-structural philosophical ideas are understood, discussed, and deployed (or not) in American nursing literature; indeed, I argue that these continental ideas, vital for nurses’ ability to critically reflect on the discipline and the profession—are unintelligible as a form of nursing knowledge within the American nursing theoretical matrices. / Graduate / 2017-09-29 / 0569 / 0344

Using evolutionary and sociocultural theories, the current study examined what people consider important when entering an age gap relationship, willingness to accept a potential age discrepant partner, likelihood of entering an age gap relationship, and the importance of sex in relationships. Differences were predicted for older and younger potential partners as well as for short term or long term relationships in participants 30-50 years old. However, it seems that only men are willing to break dating norms for casual relationships, while women chose the traditional older male-younger woman relationship. For marriage, the pattern showed that participants preferred the traditional older male-younger female relationship, as well.

This dissertation explores the aesthetics of contemporary Indigenous identity— its various manifestations, simulations, hybridizations, (dis)appearances, and liminalities. It is a project about the lived experience of ancestry conceived of through narratives of shapeshifting, virtuality, sacrifice, hauntings and possession. This project is representative of a period of time in an on-going journey that began long before these first words were written…and one that I intend will continue long after this book’s completion. The methodological approach to this work is multifaceted, encompassing the fields of Indigenous philosophy, digital media art and cultural studies. It is a project comprised of several interrelated strands of theoretical speculation, philosophical inquiry and creative engagement. This dissertation is in many ways an autobiographical text—a meditation on my own Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) heritage and the spaces I occupy in the world as Onkwehonwe (an Indigenous person). At its core it is about exploring different modes of engagement with my own ancestral ‘territories’, while at the same time it endeavors to ask larger questions about collective memory, community, and cultural inheritance. In being representative of a journey, the interrelated strands of writings in this text are meant to be traversal, and are about surveying and mapping different intellectual and creative territories. This text is about crossing interdisciplinary zones of theoretical inquiry that occur at the intersection and hybridization of Indigenous and Western philosophies, contemporary First Nations performance art and post-structuralist theory. It is a work comprised of ebbs and flows, movements, refrains, and cascades of articulation that interpenetrate and cross over into one another. This text is therefore best thought of as a series of theoretical passageways—a multiplicity of thoughts and critical engagements in motion, translation and conversion. It must be said that the traversals and crossings in this text are not necessarily about establishing a synthesis between differing ideologies, philosophies or cosmologies. It is not intended to be dichotomous, but rather should be read as a remix-theory that passes in-between different fields of critical inquiry. For while on the one hand this text seeks to explore different zones of intellectual and creative proximity, it is also a work that emerges from within a multitude of contradictions and myriad incommensurabilities. / Graduate

Vibration testing of structures constitutes a crucial step in design and commissioning of engineering structures. The focus here is on simulating field conditions in a laboratory so that detailed investigations of the structural behavior under various future load scenarios can be carried out. A major enabling technology in recent years in this field of study, especially, in the context of earthquake engineering, and automotive testing, has been the development of servo-hydraulic actuation systems, which form the principal component of test facilities, such as, multi-axes shake tables for testing building structures under earthquake loads, multi-post testrigs for testing vehicles subjected to road loads, and reaction-wall based test systems for simulating horizontal effects of earthquake loads on building structures. These systems have enabled the conduct of systematic studies on simulation of nonlinear structures under transient loads, simulation of multi-component and spatially varying random loads, and combining numerical and experimental methods with a view to avoid scaling while testing small scale critical components of large built-up structures. The investigations reported in this thesis are in this area of research and are primarily aimed at exploring the potential of servo-hydraulic test systems to address a few intricate issues related to performance assessment of engineering vibrating systems. A broad-based overview of goals of experimental approaches in vibration engineering, including dynamic system characterization and performance assessment, is presented in Chapter 1. Also discussed are the brief details of vibration testing methods developed in the context of earthquake engineering (including quasi-static test, effective force test, shake table test, combined effective force and shake table test, various versions of pseudo-dynamic test, and real-time substructuring) and automotive vehicle testing (including input excitation based methods and response based methods). The discussion notes the remarkable success witnessed in combining mathematical methods and experimental techniques especially in problems of characterization of dynamic system properties. Similar success, however, is observed to be not wide-spread in the context of development of test methods aimed at performance assessment of vibrating systems. The review culminates with the identification of the following three problems to be tackled in the present thesis: (a) development of efficient experimental procedures to estimate time varying reliability of structures under multi-component earthquake loads and similar analysis of vehicle structures under spatially varying random road loads; the focus here is on achieving sampling variance reduction in estimating the reliability; (b) development of experimental procedures to determine optimal cross-power spectral density models of partially specified multi-component random loads so as to produce the highest and lowest response variance in a specified response variable; the focus here is on seismic tests of asymmetric structures under partially specified multi-component earthquake loads, and on characterizing optimal correlations between two parallel tracks which maximize or minimize the vehicle response; and (c) development of a modified pseudo-dynamic test procedure, to incorporate additional components in numerical and experimental modeling in terms of an augmented linearized variational equation, so as to assess and contain propagation of numerical and experimental errors. The subsequent three chapters of the thesis tackle these questions and in doing so the thesis makes the following contributions: (A) Inspired by the Girsanov transformation based Monte Carlo simulation method for estimating time-variant component reliability of vibrating systems, an experimental test procedure, which incorporates the Girsanov transformation step into its folds, has been developed to estimate the time-variant system reliability of engineering systems. The two main ingredients of application of this strategy consists of determination of a control vector, which is artificially introduced to facilitate reduction in sampling variance, and the formulation of the Radon-Nikodym derivative, which serves as the correction to be introduced in order to compensate for the addition of the artificial control. (B) In problems of response analysis of structures subjected to random earthquake loads and vibration of vehicles running on rough roads, it may not be always feasible to completely specify the external actions on the structures. In such situations, it is of interest to determine the most favorable and the least favorable responses, along with the models for missing information in the inputs which produce the extreme responses. The present study, again inspired by existing analytical solutions to this problem, develops an experimental procedure to characterize the optimal excitation models and associated responses. (C) In the context of PsD testing of nonlinear structure to earthquake loads, a refinement in the test procedure involving the treatment of a linearized variational equation is proposed. This has led to the estimation of the evolution of global error norm as test proceeds with time. The estimates of error thus obtained have been used to decide upon altering the time step of integration.

Despite the fact that the introduction of reserved parental leave has resulted in a success for gender equality in general, there are parties in the Swedish Parliament that oppose this reform, the Christian Democrats being one of them. The purpose of the study was therefore to study the effects of the Christian Democrats' problem presentation regarding reserved parental leave. The essay's three research questions came from Carol Bacchi's WPR-approach, which aimed to find the party's problem presentation regarding reserved parental leave, what presuppositions these where based on, and what discursive and subjectification effects this gives. The study shows that the problem where parents' freedom of choice and high sickness rates. Based on feminist poststructuralism, we could see that the presuppositions turned out to be about a constructed categorization where sexual characteristics are set against each other. Finally, the study shows that this had several discursive- and subjectification effects where alternative problem presentations were excluded, and that individuals are limited based on the framework that the discourse sets up, which subjectifies people based on gender.

This dissertation examines the flow of economic news in Africa, in order to investigate the potential existence of regional hierarchies in international news flow. The research was based on a framework of theories on international news flow. A quantitative and qualitative content analysis of a sample of news articles published in Africa Investor, African Business and Business in Africa during 2007 and 2008 was analysed. The quantitative results showed that South Africa received the highest level of coverage and was covered to a greater extent than any other African country. The qualitative results indicated that there was clear evidence of regional hierarchy in the coverage of African countries: South Africa received extensive coverage probably due to the fact that it is the largest, most advanced and influential economy in the continent. The study showed that inequality in news coverage is not only a global issue, but also a regional one. / Communication Science / M.A. (International Communication)