This work traces the relationship of individual persons to national economic phenomena associated with consumer finance. The work follows the assemblage of individual consumer credit/debt agents through credit reporting and credit scoring, through to the aggregation of these agents in student loan-backed securitization and credit ratings. The work focuses on the unique technico-cultural constructions produced when human subjects are operatively conjoined to other related discursive and material objects, including related legislation, private corporations, and governmental bodies. The work explores how these unique constructions form stable networks connecting individuals to larger socio-economic settings: networks at once revealing the profoundly distributed nature of both ‘agents’ and their ‘agency,’ and at the same time intimating alternative approaches to questions of individual and collective agency outside the agent/structure dichotomy. The work concludes by addressing the place of this research in consumer finance generally, and the role of consumer finance in contemporary US economics broadly.

Organic farming has often been described as a single unified entity. Further, this unified praxis is often discussed as an alternative approach to agriculture and as a particular social and environmental movement. There has been increasing acknowledgement in academia that there are many different organics, or versions, or knowledges of organic, but what this means to individual farmers and farms remains to be explored. This is the point of departure for this work. This is an interdisciplinary project situated at the intersection of human geography, cultural anthropology, and political science, informed by and engaged with actor-network theory and visual methodologies. My methods include ethnographic participant observation, interviews, and photovoice. For this project I visited 17 small-scale organic farms in southern British Columbia. My findings indicate that different ideas, opinions, and narratives of organic abound, but most importantly that reconciling difference and nostalgia amid vast change was an overwhelming theme for the farmers and farms in this project.

The increasing importance of media, especially digital media, in society has been studied widely, from identity formation to activist movements. In international relations studies digital media’s impact has focused considerably on public diplomacy 2.0. This focus has caused a more holistic view of digital diplomacy to be neglected. This study explores how digital media’s impacts as a part of mediatization are seen within the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. Semi-structured interviews with 11 officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were conducted. These led to the creation of three thematic fields. The first one looks into how the agency of the Ministry is seen to be impacted by digitalization. The second section looks into how community building is seen as essential. And the third part investigated how the ministry evaluates the impacts of digitalization on other ministries of foreign affairs in the light of its own experience. The finding is that the ministry is expanding into a new digital sphere and that in the process of so doing the Ministry is not a tabula rasa, but it mirrors the cultural and political context of the country within the online sphere.

Införande av en HR Shared Service-organisation syftar till att omfördela HR-funktionens personalarbete och separera det administrativa personalarbetet från det strategiska. Med hjälp av ny teknologi kan HR administration flyttas över till HR/IT-system och HR-arbetet kan i större utsträckning ske via självservice som hanteras av ledare och medarbetare i organisationen. Den senaste tidens forskning kring HR Shared Service och det nya sättet att leverara HR-service visar att gamla sampels- och handlingsmönster fortfarande lever kvar mellan ledare och HR-medarbetare. Uppsatsens syfte är att undersöka hur HR Shared Service har införts på ett Telekom företag och vilka konsekvenser det fått för ledarna på företaget. Den empiriska undersökningen har genomförts med en kvalitativ metod i form av 11 intervjuer med ledare och projektdeltagare för införandet av HR Shared Service-organisationen. Tre deltagande observationer genomfördes med avseende på hur ledare söker information på HR-portalerna. Actor Network Theory (ANT) är ett perspektiv som används för att analysera hur människor och teknik sammanbinds i ett nätverk vid teknologiska och organisatoriska förändringar. Resultaten visar att införandet av Shared Service-organisationen har medfört en positiv utveckling för ledarna efter ett antal år. Förkortade handläggningstider och lättillgänglig information och support gav en effektivisering i det administrativa arbetet. Vidare framkommer att informationen på HR-portaler inte alltid är anpassad efter ledarens behov, vilket ger en osäkerhet i ledarskapet. Gamla samspelsmönster mellan ledare och HR Managers har i stor utsträckning omdirigerats till HR Shared Service. För att ledaren ska kunna utföra sitt HR-arbete och ledarskap på ett tillfredsställande sätt måste HR-service vara lättillgänglig, HR/IT-system lätta att använda samt att innehållet på HR-portaler ska vara verksamhetsanpassat. Det handlar om en kontinuerlig översättningsprocess mellan HR och ledare för att öka förståelsen för ledarens och verksamhetens behov både ur ett socialt och tekniskt perspektiv.

I report on the findings of an inductive, interpretive multiple-case study of organizational cross-cultural adaptation and answer the question of how foreign companies can overcome the challenges of fitting into their host environment. Based on in-depth interview data from nine Chinese firms operating in the United States, I explore the content and drivers of firm-level cross-cultural adaptation. The emergent framework demonstrates a dynamic and comprehensive process at the firm level, involving a multilevel and multidimensional adaptation to fit through social networking. The identified patterns of adaptors reveal the link between cross-cultural adaptation and functional fitness of firms in a foreign environment. The study also identifies the boundary conditions of the cross-cultural adaptation of foreign firms. In addition, the study highlights the previously underserved aspect of functional fitness in a foreign environment and its essential role in influencing a firm’s overseas performance.

The adoption of Korean children has played a significant role in the practice of intercountry adoption in Australia since the 1970s and represents the majority of overseas born children adopted into Australia. Its influence on policy and practice is explored in this thesis through the Queensland experience. From its outset the adoption of children from overseas has been characterised by polarised perspectives and vested interests. Actor Network Theory, the theoretical lens through which this phenomenon is viewed, allows for the exploration of controversies and multiple perspectives that have featured in over thirty years of Korean intercountry adoption practice in Australia. This thesis aims to identify which actor networks were influential in the emergence, diffusion and continuation of Korean intercountry adoption; and to explore the translations, an important concept in Actor Network Theory, and the tactics used by these networks to spread particular discourse to meet network goals. The methodology is qualitative and approaches Korean intercountry adoption as a case study. The data corpus, collected from 2004 to 2007 comprised text and interviews. Text included Queensland government archival records; submissions provided to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services Overseas Adoption in Australia 2005 and public hearing transcripts; parliamentary documents; media reports; computer-mediated communications such as internet sources and email discussion groups. Interviews were conducted with key stakeholders from interest groups and organisations with administrative roles in intercountry adoption practice in Australia. Korean intercountry adoption has proved influential in developing expectations concerning how intercountry adoption should be practised in Australia. Three actor networks, proponent, opponent and nonpartisan were identified during the diffusion and continuance periods. Actor Network Theory helped understand how the proponent network became dominant in the Australian context. A number of highly effective tactics have been used to expand and increase the influence of the proponent network through translations. However, a number of threats to continuation such as the growth of the opponent network and the promotion of Korean domestic adoption have emerged. Actors have responded to these threats in a number of ways. Detours have been proposed by proponent actors to help them reach their goals though these may bring unintended consequences. An Actor Network Theory perspective reveals the important role of the Internet; helps understand how controversies are created and perpetuated; how intercountry adoption has become politicised in Australia; and highlights the risks to child centred and knowledge based practice that politicisation brings. The significance of this study lies in the insights provided by exploring power interrelationships between actor networks and how these shape particular phenomenon, in this case, Korean intercountry adoption. Intercountry adoption in Australia is poorly understood at a macro level as are the controversies surrounding it. Its practice has been heavily influenced by the interests of the dominant network with scant attention to research in the local context. Actor Network Theory that allows for the inclusion of human and nonhuman actors such as the Internet has proven useful for developing contemporary understandings of such a complex, global phenomenon. These understandings provide opportunities for individuals, groups and governments to address controversy in ways than do not contribute to its perpetuation and to refocus their attentions on the factors that contribute to the relinquishment of children in the first instance. This thesis highlights how politically driven agendas that serve the interests of one network can marginalise voices that bring more complex understandings to the intercountry adoption phenomenon. An Actor Network Theory analysis exposes the lack of investment by governments, organisations and individuals in community programs and services that address the causes of child relinquishment and empower Korean families and communities to seek their own solutions.

The dominant view in the information systems (IS) and software engineering literature is that the application of a rigorous pre-investment evaluation methodology is the key to ensuring the selection of the best IS projects ?? that is those with the highest expected value for the organisation and with the highest probability of success. While the literature is replete with methodologies that take a narrow view of IS evaluation, there is insufficient attention given to the evaluation process itself and to what constitutes successful IS evaluation. Whilst some within IS argue that the development of more elaborate evaluation methodologies, especially calculations of costs and benefits, is necessary for the advancement of the field, many report that it is not methodologies as such that need improvement. What is missing is an understanding of IS evaluation processes in practice and how organisations can adopt and apply evaluation methodologies so as to improve these processes. This thesis aims to provide in-depth knowledge of IS evaluation processes in practice and re-conceptualise the notion of the IS project proposal, the evaluation process and evaluation methodology that reflect the needs and critical issues in practice. These aims are achieved by conducting an in-depth case study of IS project evaluation processes in a company with a history of high success rates of its IS projects ($3 billion worth of successfully delivered IS projects in the past few years). By adopting Actor-Network Theory as a philosophy, approach and theoretical lens to the investigation of IS project evaluation processes in the case company the thesis demonstrates that: a) IS project proposals are dynamic, evolving and relational entities that become ??focal?? objects around which the actor-networks of aligned interest tend to emerge; b) that the evaluation process both creates an IS project proposal and its assessment within a core actor-network within which multiple business realities are enacted and continually negotiated; c) the evaluation methodology plays an important role of an actant (a non-human actor) by acting from a periphery of the core actor-network of an IS project proposal evaluation d) the evaluation methodology acts on behalf of management to regulate communication within actor-networks, ensure that company strategy is effectively implemented and that different IS Project Proposals are consistently presented in a mutually comparable manner; e) by defining a series of processes (steps), inscription aids (inscription forms, norms and rules) and mandated checkpoints the evaluation methodology engenders the evaluation process as ??science??; f) by allowing a degree of freedom in conducting the evaluation processes the methodology is also enabling the evaluation processes to emerge as ??art?? thus stimulating creativity and innovation, and finally, g) by balancing the science and the art of IS project proposal evaluation, the methodology is enabling, assisting and inspiring numerous actors in taking on ??journeys?? of IS project proposals and evaluation and thereby making a difference in their business environments. The thesis makes important contributions to knowledge in the IS discipline. Theoretically, the adoption and use of ANT revealed that the IS Project Proposal is not dormant but rather active, and key to the IS evaluation effort. The IS Project Proposal has thus been re-conceptualised as emerging, relational and dynamic. This thesis also makes a contribution to the re-conceptualisation of the evaluation methodology as being multi-purpose and active as it defines the ??science?? and enables the ??art?? in IS evaluation. The thesis also makes a number of contributions to practice, firstly by showing that documents in IS evaluation are not simply ??outputs?? that are archived away, but are active and are used to attract the right stakeholders. Secondly, it reveals that the ultimate success of the IS Proposal relies on finding a balance between the science and the art in IS evaluation and that the evaluation methodology can play a key role in promoting this balance.

Open access (OA) to scholarly publishing is encouraged and enabled by new technologies such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, their standards and protocols, and search engines. Institutional repositories (IR) as the most recent technological incarnations of OA enable researchers and their institutions to make accessible the outputs of research. While many OA repositories are being implemented, researchers are surprisingly slow in adopting them. While activists promote OA as emanating from the ideals of scholarship, others revile OA as undermining of scholarly publishing's economic base and therefore undermining quality control and peer review. Change is occurring but there are contested views and actions. This research seeks to increase understanding of the issues by addressing the research questions: "How and why is open access reassembling scholarly publishing?" and "What role does introducing an open access institutional repository to researchers play in this reassembly?" This thesis contributes to answering these questions by investigating two IR implementations and the research communities they serve. The research was conducted as an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) field study, where the actors were followed and their relations and controversies explored in action as their landscape was being contested. The research found that central to our understanding of the reassembling of scholarly publishing is the agency emerging from the sociomaterial relations of the OA vision, IR technology and researchers. Being congruent with the aims of scholarship, and also being flexible and mutable, the OA vision enrols researchers to enact it through OA IR, thus transforming scholarly communications. This is counteracted by publishers aligned with the academic reward network within traditional publishing networks. In this delicate choreography the OA IR, its developers, researchers, university administrators and policy makers are merging as critical actors with their more or less congruent vision of OA enacted in their network. The comparative ANT account of the two IR life stories shows how such enactment depends on the degree to which different OA visions could converge, enrol and mobilise other actors, in particular institutional actors, such as a mandate, in transforming researchers' publishing behaviour. This thesis contributes to a novel and in-depth understanding of OA and IR and their roles in reassembling scholarly publishing. It also contributes to the use of ANT in information systems research by advancing a sociomaterial ontology which recognises the intertwining of human and material agency.

The adoption of Korean children has played a significant role in the practice of intercountry adoption in Australia since the 1970s and represents the majority of overseas born children adopted into Australia. Its influence on policy and practice is explored in this thesis through the Queensland experience. From its outset the adoption of children from overseas has been characterised by polarised perspectives and vested interests. Actor Network Theory, the theoretical lens through which this phenomenon is viewed, allows for the exploration of controversies and multiple perspectives that have featured in over thirty years of Korean intercountry adoption practice in Australia. This thesis aims to identify which actor networks were influential in the emergence, diffusion and continuation of Korean intercountry adoption; and to explore the translations, an important concept in Actor Network Theory, and the tactics used by these networks to spread particular discourse to meet network goals. The methodology is qualitative and approaches Korean intercountry adoption as a case study. The data corpus, collected from 2004 to 2007 comprised text and interviews. Text included Queensland government archival records; submissions provided to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services Overseas Adoption in Australia 2005 and public hearing transcripts; parliamentary documents; media reports; computer-mediated communications such as internet sources and email discussion groups. Interviews were conducted with key stakeholders from interest groups and organisations with administrative roles in intercountry adoption practice in Australia. Korean intercountry adoption has proved influential in developing expectations concerning how intercountry adoption should be practised in Australia. Three actor networks, proponent, opponent and nonpartisan were identified during the diffusion and continuance periods. Actor Network Theory helped understand how the proponent network became dominant in the Australian context. A number of highly effective tactics have been used to expand and increase the influence of the proponent network through translations. However, a number of threats to continuation such as the growth of the opponent network and the promotion of Korean domestic adoption have emerged. Actors have responded to these threats in a number of ways. Detours have been proposed by proponent actors to help them reach their goals though these may bring unintended consequences. An Actor Network Theory perspective reveals the important role of the Internet; helps understand how controversies are created and perpetuated; how intercountry adoption has become politicised in Australia; and highlights the risks to child centred and knowledge based practice that politicisation brings. The significance of this study lies in the insights provided by exploring power interrelationships between actor networks and how these shape particular phenomenon, in this case, Korean intercountry adoption. Intercountry adoption in Australia is poorly understood at a macro level as are the controversies surrounding it. Its practice has been heavily influenced by the interests of the dominant network with scant attention to research in the local context. Actor Network Theory that allows for the inclusion of human and nonhuman actors such as the Internet has proven useful for developing contemporary understandings of such a complex, global phenomenon. These understandings provide opportunities for individuals, groups and governments to address controversy in ways than do not contribute to its perpetuation and to refocus their attentions on the factors that contribute to the relinquishment of children in the first instance. This thesis highlights how politically driven agendas that serve the interests of one network can marginalise voices that bring more complex understandings to the intercountry adoption phenomenon. An Actor Network Theory analysis exposes the lack of investment by governments, organisations and individuals in community programs and services that address the causes of child relinquishment and empower Korean families and communities to seek their own solutions.

There are two ways of understanding assemblages of humans and non-humans inspired by actor-network theory (ANT): consolidation and fluidification. ANT argues that both subjects and objects take shape as a result of assemblages of numerous heterogeneous ingredients. There is, however, some disagreement over how these subjects and objects travel far and endure while staying the same. On the one hand, ‘consolidation’ suggests that heterogeneous materials should be consolidated into networks so that the integrity of assemblages remains while subjects and objects relocate. On the other hand, ‘fluidification’ suggests that fluid-like adaptation may be more feasible, although the integrity of subjects or objects may be at stake. The thesis investigates this tension between the two modes of assemblage via a historical and ethnographic study of milkfish farming in Taiwan and an examination of unsuccessful efforts to export them to mainland China. This study first explores the mutual formation of milkfish and milkfish farming and argues that not only are the physical characteristics of milkfish shaped alongside the socio-technical transformation of the milkfish assemblage, but the fish also act as an agent involved in the shaping of milkfish assemblage. Secondly, this study draws attention to how an industrial version of milkfish as a bulk commodity takes shape as well as how it is enacted so that it becomes the dominant reality for milkfish. It is argued that, paradoxically, this version of reality is maintained through fluidification, in which human actors compromise with enacted multiplicities of milkfish. Thirdly, this study turns to the milkfish export scheme. Set up under the auspices of the Chinese government in 2011, milkfish were exported to Shanghai. But milkfish failed to find a market in Shanghai, and so the export scheme was terminated in 2016. This study first reveals that the material characteristics of ‘ready-made’ milkfish are not easy to integrate into local ways of cooking and eating. Moreover, the fish are excluded from adaptation, while the scheme was adapted in practice to suit the requirements of various other actors brought together by the scheme. This thesis suggests that the lower the demand for milkfish in China, the higher is the need for such an export scheme in Taiwan, but that such a scheme will most likely take the form of continued ‘consolidation’, keeping the export of unsalable fish going while bringing minimal changes to the status quo of milkfish assemblage. Overall, this study of milkfish argues for the co-existence, in tension, of consolidation and fluidification. That is, neither mode of assemblage is in opposition to nor replaceable by the other. The implications for material politics of this study include not only a need to make visible the work of ‘purification’ that keeps both subjects and objects apparently separate from one another, and from others within each realm, but also a need to highlight efforts to erase other possible modes of assemblage, in which the formation of objects and of object-oriented collectives are embedded differently.