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The notion that each state in the international system approaches matters of war and peace somewhat differently because they each possess a unique strategic culture is not a new or obscure one – but it nevertheless remains controversial. While some scholars dismiss the utility or practicality of examining states’ cultures when seeking to explain or predict those states’ patterns of strategic decision-making, even amongst those who accept that we should pay attention to cultural differences between states when carrying out strategic analysis there remains a frustratingly eclectic range of offerings from scholars regarding how best to do so. In short, significant uncertainty remains regarding both whether strategic culture should be used as an analytical tool and, if it is so utilized, how one should go about doing so. This thesis therefore explores the concept of strategic culture in great detail, both theoretical and empirical. The opening three chapters examine why the more traditional rationalist/materialistic theories should not exclusively dominate strategic analysis, then the various existing strategic cultural offerings are considered and critiqued and, finally, a new conceptual model for strategic cultural analysis is proposed which draws from the hitherto largely neglected psychological and sociological literature. Both of these fields, it is submitted in Chapter 3, have spent more time and effort developing ways of understanding and analyzing culture than the field of IR has to date, and therefore the models and methods debated and developed in these fields should, it is argued, be ‘imported’ into IR to drive further strategic cultural research. The thesis then moves in the following six chapters to consider Australia’s strategic culture. The purpose of this part of the thesis is two-fold: first, it illustrates how the model offered in Chapter 3 works and, by implication, suggests how scholars may go about applying it to other cases. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the latter six chapters explore the twists and turns of Australia’s substantive strategic decision-making over the course of the last century or more, thereby explaining how Australia’s strategic history can be understood from a cultural perspective. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-15 11:17:19.326

With origins in the South Bronx area of New York in the early 1970s, hip-hop culture is now produced and consumed globally. While hip-hop activities can be varied, hip-hop is generally considered to have four forms or “elements”: DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling, and graffiti. Although all four elements of hip-hop have become a part of many youth work initiatives across the globe, public debate and controversy continue to surround hip-hop activities. Very little research and literature has explored the complexities involved in the assembling of hip-hop activities in youth work sites of practice using these hip-hop elements. This study attends to the gap in hip-hop and human service literature by tracing how hip-hop activities were assembled in several sites of youth work activity in Christchurch, New Zealand. Actor-network theory (ANT) is the methodological framework used to map the assemblage of hip-hop-youth work activities in this study. ANT follows how action is distributed across both human and non-human actors. By recognising the potential agency of “things”, this research traces the roles played by human actors, such as young people and youth workers, together with those of non-human actors such as funding documents, social media, clothing, and youth venue equipment. This ethnographic study provides rich descriptions or “snapshots” of some of the key socio-material practices that shaped the enactment of hip-hop-youth work activities. These are derived from fieldwork undertaken between October 2009 and December 2011, where participant observation took place across a range of sites of hip-hop-youth work activity. In addition to this fieldwork, formal interviews were undertaken with 22 participants, the majority being youth workers, young people, and youth trust administrators. The ANT framework reveals the complexity of the task of assembling hip-hop in youth work worlds. The thesis traces the work undertaken by both human and non-human actors in generating youth engagement in hip-hop-youth work activities. Young people’s hip-hop interests are shown to be varied, multiple, and continually evolving. It is also shown how generating youth interest in hip-hop-youth work activities involved overcoming young people’s indifference or lack of awareness of the hip-hop resources a youth trust had on offer. Furthermore, the study highlights where hip-hop activities were edited or “tinkered” with to avoid hip-hop “bads”. The thesis also unpacks how needed resources were enlisted, and how funders’ interests were translated into supporting hip-hop groups and activities. By tracing the range of actors mobilised to enact hip-hop-youth work activities, this research reveals how some youth trusts could avoid having to rely on obtaining government funds for their hip-hop activities. The thesis also includes an examination of one youth trust’s efforts to reconfigure its hip-hop activities after the earthquakes that struck Christchurch city in 2010 and 2011. Working both in and on the world, the text that is this thesis is also understood as an intervention. This study constitutes a deliberate attempt to strengthen understandings of hip-hop as a complex, multiple, and fluid entity. It therefore challenges traditional media and literature representations that simplify and thus either stigmatise or celebrate hip-hop. As such, this study opens up possibilities to consider the opportunities, as well as the complexities of assembling hip-hop in youth work sites of practice.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:12:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2432.pdf: 1214872 bytes, checksum: b6c6371e06aa916b362c8a96e4ec0f8d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-11-12 / Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais / Considering that Freudian reflection about culture belongs entirely to the field of psychoanalytic investigation, as do neurosis or the facts of normal individual psychism, this work intends to verify how such reflection points out to the formulation and consolidation of metapsychologic notions. In order to do so, we will focus on sublimation, death pulsion and superego concepts, once they are crucial concepts of solidarity among these two reflections: metapsychology and theory of culture. In the same way, we aim at contributing to a more precise outlining of metapsychology meaning. / Partindo da idéia de que a reflexão freudiana sobre a cultura pertence plenamente ao campo da investigação psicanalítica, tanto quanto as neuroses ou os fatos do psiquismo individual normal, este trabalho propõe-se a verificar de que forma essa reflexão incide sobre a formulação e a consolidação das noções metapsicológicas. Para tanto, nos concentraremos nos conceitos de sublimação, pulsão de morte e superego, por se tratarem de conceitos exemplares da solidariedade entre essas duas reflexões: metapsicologia e teoria da cultura. No mesmo movimento, visa-se contribuir para uma circunscrição mais precisa do sentido da metapsicologia.

Der Internet-Boom am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts wurde von zahllosen Veröffentlichung begleitet, in denen Auswirkungen der globalen Vernetzung auf Kultur und Gesellschaft, auf öffentliches und privates Leben beschrieben wurden. Die Dissertation geht der Frage nach, wie dieses ungeheure Ausma§ kultureller Produktion zu erklären ist. Welche kulturellen Strukturen scheinen durch diese Diskursproduktion durch? Es geht um Freilegung von Produktionsbedingungen, unter denen kulturelles Handeln erst möglich wird. Als Zentrum der untersuchten Aushandlungsprozesse wird die Idee der Vernetzung in den Blick genommen. Diese entfaltet sich zwar erst seit den 90er Jahren in voller Breite, reicht historisch aber weiter zurück, im Falle des Internet bis in die 60er. Sie wirkt dabei restrukturierend auf Diskurse, soziale Gruppierungen oder die Organisation von Zeit und Raum. Vernetzung ist damit eine Wahrnehmungsdimension, die sich, katalysiert durch das Internet, zu einem kulturellen Paradigma ausgeweitet hat. / The Internet-Boom of the late 20th century was escorted by countless publications, describing the effects of a global network on culture and society, on public and private life. The thesis searches for explications for this enormous degree of cultural productions. What kind of cultural structures are revealed by this discourses? What are the conditions of cultural productions? The centre of the research is the idea of networks and meshes. Although the diffusion of this idea attained its peak in the nineties, its historical roots are to be found in the sixties. It structures discourses, social groups or the organisation of time and space. Catalysed by the Internet, networks have evolved from a dimension of perception to a cultural paradigm.

With the advent of knowledge-intensive economies, plus the ever-accelerating development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), organisational knowledge has become the key driver of an organisation's value and ultimately, an important source of an organisation's sustainable competitive edge. Thus, numerous organisations have started to invest heavily in establishing knowledge management systems (KMSs). Subsequently, they wish to access knowledge from individuals in order to enhance their acquisition of knowledge and ultimately transform this into organisational knowledge. Even though existing research studies have evidenced extensively the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of individuals' knowledge-sharing behaviour in organisations from diverse perspectives (e.g. organisational behaviour, sociology and psychology), individuals still seem inclined to hoard their knowledge, rather than share it with others in organisations. To this end, this research aims to investigate and identify essential elements related to individuals' knowledge-sharing behaviour within the complex context of the virtual organisation of Taiwanese Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs), comprising the whole system of Taiwanese Farmers' Associations, by integrating multilevel perspectives of individuals in organisations (the micro-level), workplace networks in organisations (the meso-level) and organisational culture (the macro-level).

The present dissertation provided an insight of the organizational culture and the innovative behavior of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in the early stages of the innovation process. The method Culture Types of Organizations certified that the investigated SMEs possessed a distinctive family culture, and in addition an innovation cul-ture at the company headquarters. By using the social research method Grounded Theory the so called theory "Innovation kultivieren" was developed. This theory consists of three process stages. The first process stage "Mindset geben" is about defining and anchoring new innovative company's values. The second process stage "Innovation organisieren" defines the organizational responsibilities and last but not least, the third process stage "Innovation strukturieren" delivers various accompanying soft skill factors to improve the innovation culture of companies.

The aim of this essay, As only the deceived one can love, is to investigate the city character in the book Mina drömmars stad (City of dreams) by swedish author Per Anders Fogelström. I will do this by using narratology and making a narrative analysis of the city as a protagonist, with help from Jimmy Vulovic’s Narrativanalys (”narrative analysis”) and Claes Göran Holmberg’s & Anders Ohlssons Epikanalys – En introduktion (”epic analysis – an introduction”). All of these three theorists use the narratological tool-box of Gérard Genette, and I will use his tools in this essay as well. By doing this I will try to point out what this kind of personification of the city does to the story, and how it affects the readers point of view. One of the steps of the narrative analysis is to seek for information about the protagonist in its own environment, to see if there are any hidden clues about the identity of their character. In his book A universe of the mind – A semiotic theory of culture, Jurij M. Lotman writes about the semiosphere of the home, and how the ultimate place to seek for details about someone’s character is in someone’s home environment or surroundings. He demonstrates his thesis by analyzing the meaning of different homes in Michail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Even if I try to read the city as a main character in City of dreams, it is inevitable that the city is also a stage, a scene and the environment where the story takes place. In the end of my analysis I will look to the environment of the city to try to draw conclusions about who this city of dreams really is.