Thesis (D. Min.)--Western Seminary, Portland, OR, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-137).

Η σχέση μεταξύ των επιστημόνων της υγείας και των ασθενών-πελατών αυτών διαρκώς εξελίσσεται και έχει συγκεντρώσει το ενδιαφέρον της διεθνούς βιβλιογραφίας. Οι ασθενείς είναι αυτοί που καθορίζουν την επιτυχία ή αποτυχία του συστήματος της υγείας. Για το λόγο αυτό γίνονται προσπάθειες ώστε να ανιχνευτούν οι πεποιθήσεις τους όχι μόνο για τις υπηρεσίες που τους προσφέρονται αλλά και για τους παρόχους των υπηρεσιών αυτών. Στόχος της εργασίας αυτής της ήταν να μελετήσει την σχέση μεταξύ των ασθενών-πελατών και του φαρμακοποιού στο σύγχρονο φαρμακείο. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, εξετάζεται κυρίως η ενσυναίσθηση του φαρμακοποιού και κατόπιν η επικοινωνία με τον φαρμακοποιό και η εμπιστοσύνη σε αυτόν. Επίσης διερευνάται η ικανοποίηση των ασθενών-πελατών. Για την διεξαγωγή της παρούσας έρευνας διαμοιράστηκε ανώνυμο ερωτηματολόγιο το οποίο συμπληρώθηκε από 113 άτομα. Οι συμμετέχοντες κάλυπταν όλες τις ηλικίες και έγινε προσπάθεια να βρίσκονται σε διάφορες περιοχές της Ελλάδας. Τα αποτελέσματα της έρευνας έδειξαν ότι γενικά ο Έλληνας φαρμακοποιός διαθέτει ενσυναίσθηση και την εφαρμόζει στην καθημερινότητα του για την αποτελεσματική επικοινωνία με τους πελάτες του. Ακόμα βρέθηκε ότι η εμπιστοσύνη στον φαρμακοποιό είναι υψηλή. Οι ασθενείς-πελάτες εμφανίζονται ιδιαίτερα ικανοποιημένοι γενικά όσον αφορά τις συναλλαγές τους στο φαρμακείο. / --

Batticaloa district on the Eastern coast of Sri Lanka has been one of the most disrupted and devastated areas of the island since civil war began in the early 1980s. Ethnically and culturally diverse, the Eastern province has been under the control of different military actors, the Sri Lankan army, the Indian Peace-Keeping Forces, and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), however, none maintained full control of the Eastern areas until May 2009 when the Sri Lankan Army successfully defeated the LTTE. Exploring the lives of Tamil communities in Batticaloa, this thesis examines the ways in which people make sense of an ‘everyday life’ shaped by conflict. Following the idiosyncratic journey of the researcher through the uncertain environment of escalating conflict and the aftermath of the tsunami, it builds up a larger picture of life, moving between accounts of everyday violence and suffering and more sustained dwelling on the particular people who are actively making it possible to endure by investing in a more humane future. In areas such as Batticaloa, where violence frames the past, present and foreseeable future, resistance in some shape or form has become a way of life. As Foucault (1976, 2003) maintains, violence which is embedded in social and material structures can create an environment where power and control saturate the routines of the ordinary, making its existence appear ‘normal’. However, from this way of life, what may emerge beyond the more obvious signs of violence, is the fact that people do keep pushing forward. Integral to this is the importance of risk, hope, and trust, which, woven through the interactions of daily activity, mark out what is possible and what is not. The chapters in this thesis, explore individuals who, in the spaces between accepted understandings of ordinary and extraordinary, work around the various controls and constraints to forge habitable spaces in which relations of trust and support can be strengthened and the future can be imagined. Starting with a focus on the relationship between personal narrative and history, I trace the experiences of a woman living through poverty, displacement, and loss. From this I suggest that it is the paradoxical existence of violence, risk, fear, friendship, and trust as worked through the endurance of daily interactions that is integral to understanding the texture of everyday life. Therefore, I argue that what can on the one hand look like a hopeless and negative picture of militancy and violence, can also, contain within it, fragments of hope and survival, captured for example, in the work of local people to reclaim space. I also deal with the complexities of the research experience in a violent environment and look at the strategies that people employ to negotiate and minimize risk in contested and militarized spaces. The second part of the thesis examines the meaning of the everyday and the ordinary through the experiences of a widow and group of fishermen, and thus challenges conventional academic writing which relates ‘normalcy’ in violence prone-areas to peace and productivity. Overall, these chapters argue that a capacity for hope, for building trust, safety, and peace, however fragile and tentative, is as much an integral part of a conflict situation as the more obvious capacity for fear and silence.

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This research introduces a framework for explaining why managing family members create a shared understanding of caring and being cared for with their nonfamily employees, called ‘Social Reciprocity'. Applying an embedded case study design, using grounded theory method, this research adds to the understanding of the social mechanisms of internal stakeholder management in family firms, which have been largely ignored. The emergent framework proposes that the ability of family members to build trusting relationships with employees, based on cognitive and affective trusts contributes to the creation of social reciprocity. Affective trust, in particular, has a direct and moderating role in the creation of social reciprocity on emotional and instrumental level. The moderating role of affective trust is considered a valuable finding; since it emphasizes the role of trust as a meta theoretical concept. The developed framework suggests that affective trust initiates a social learning process that leads to a positive attribution bias, i.e. an automatic positive attribution of managing family members' actions as being based in benevolence and genuine care. Furthermore, social learning in the form of trust network reproduction emerges as contributory to the diffusion of social reciprocity to lower hierarchical levels. Analysis of data demonstrates that employees with little direct interactions with managing family members develop trusted weak ties to managing family members, with similar levels of cognitive and affective trust. This finding is particularly valuable as it challenges traditional network theory, which argues for frequent personal interaction to be necessary in creating trust ties. This thesis contributes to theoretical and methodological knowledge in several ways. First, it advances understanding of the social dynamics and mechanisms of internal stakeholder engagement in and SME family firm context. Second, the developed framework demonstrates the importance that concepts form multiple disciplines such as psychology, social psychology and sociology have on the development of theories in management research. Third, trust network reproduction and upper network stability emerged as causal mechanisms of potentially meta theoretical value that may have applicability on a wider range of topics in management research. Lastly, this thesis demonstrates the value of grounded theory in developing theory in management research.

This thesis attempts to identify the philosophy, key questions and priorities behind the trust laws of Jersey and Malta. By wide accord, the Jersey law has served as a model in many ways to its later Maltese counterpart. This affinity is placed against the similar background of either jurisdiction, which embraced, to varying degrees, both the Civil Law tradition and Common Law influence. The analysis is advanced through the different moments of the trust, from its creation to termination. Nevertheless, the underpinning focus and thrust is on the civilian identity of either trust. It considers whether, and how far, the fundamental Civil Law concepts and language play a defining role in their civilian configuration. The question is asked whether the creation of the trust and the duties of a trustee can possibly be classified as obligational or contractual, or maybe something else. The nature and character of the beneficiary’s rights are also reviewed. The overarching role of good faith and civil responsibility, along with their extent of interaction with traditional Equity fiduciary duties, are weighed, an assessment naturally following from the civilian flavour attributed to the trusts. The conceptual overlapping between the Roman-Civil law fiducia, and related figures such as the mandat prêt-nom, with the Equity fiduciary duties, is assessed. The role, even if subsidiary, of civilian unjustified enrichment, remains an ever-present relevant factor. Sham trusts and simulatio, the Pauline fraud and legitim are considered in the context of the civilian identity of these trusts. The discussion then engages with the other strand of the thesis, being the role of the governing law, as the ‘mind’ behind the trust legislations assessed. The discussion engages with the question whether the trusts fall on the side of respect for the ‘autonomie de la volonté des parties’ or on other policy determinants behind the law.

Purpose: The relationship between context and e-governance has been gaining a significant momentum in academic circles due its social and technical complexities. There are many challenges posed by the disparity between the context and the system when it comes to e-governance in developing countries. This research aims to reveal more successful adoption of e-governance initiatives and exposes factors that hinder its implementation. We develop a conceptual framework showing the reciprocity between the context and the system or what is termed “Context-System Gap”. Therefore, this research will study the appropriateness of the context and its influence on the system and the influence of the system on the context. The purpose of this research is to explore the factors that enable successful e-government adoption in Lebanon, where e-governance is still at its initial stage. Most empirical research and theories on the implementation of e-governance in developing countries remain at the macro-level and miss out on the complexities of the context of deployment and the role of the gap between the citizens and the government. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an empirical model differentiating between the electronic context and the electronic system and shed a light over a new gap, government-citizen gap, in the adoption of e-government. Design/methodology/approach: Following previous research on e-government services adoption, this study uses several technology use and acceptance models and literature to examine the elements behind the adoption and use of e-government services in Lebanon from citizen and government perspectives. The research strategy is a quantitative method approach employing questionnaire. Quantitative data will be collected from e-government users (citizens) and statistical tests will be conducted in order to examine the relation between variables. Practical implications: The findings are useful for policy-makers and decision-makers to develop a better understanding of citizens' needs. The proposed model can be used as a guideline for the implementation of e-government services in developing countries. Originality/value: This study is the only one to examine the dimensions influencing citizens’ adoption of e-government technologies in developing countries using a unified model merging context and system elements.

abstract: This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate between each two users. The whole trust checking process is divided into two steps: local checking and remote checking. Local checking directly contacts the email server to calculate the trust rate based on user's own email communication history. Remote checking is a distributed computing process to get help from user's social network friends and built the trust rate together. The email-based trust model is built upon a cloud computing framework called MobiCloud. Inside MobiCloud, each user occupies a virtual machine which can directly communicate with others. Based on this feature, the distributed trust model is implemented as a combination of local analysis and remote analysis in the cloud. Experiment results show that the trust evaluation model can give accurate trust rate even in a small scale social network which does not have lots of social connections. With this trust model, the security in both social network services and email communication could be improved. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

This thesis analyzes the English National Trust’s interpretation of the making and reception of Stowe Landscape Garden. Specifically, this is a critique of the Trust’s narrative of nationalism, which is overlaid by the use of romantic interpretive themes. Arguably, Stowe’s first contribution was the combination of expressions of nature through landscape with architectural and sculptural monuments of Englishness. The National Trust, however, has combined interpretations of multiple landscape gardens across a century, thus blurring its actual significance. Stowe has been lumped into a jumbled framework of anachronistic landscape commentary much based in the literature of reception. The use of receptive history as fact to define concepts like ‘Englishness’, ‘Landscape Garden’, and the ‘Picturesque’ only further aid the unsustainable development of the historical landscape. Stowe is recognized as the most extensive extant landscape garden to exemplify contributions by the first four designers in the medium: Vanbrugh, Bridgeman, Kent, and Brown. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s place-making role in the history of English landscape, much derided by the proponents of the Picturesque, found its first expression at Stowe from 1740 to 1751. Thus, Stowe’s Brownian dominant landscape, of which the bones are still largely intact, should be used as the designated period of interpretation. In this way, the National Trust could fulfill a modern desire for connection to nature, and with greater specificity, diversity and transparency in historical accounts, expand the accessibility of ‘Englishness’ in the form the consummate national landscape garden.

Churches are always already in crisis. In this study, I take the current crisis of churches as a point of departure in order to offer a critical and constructive account of church as open(ed) community. In conversation with Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) - a conversation which concentrates on a hermeneutical-constructive rather than a historical-critical retrieval of his interdisciplinary thinking - I argue that the communities which constitute church need to be elasticised in order to engage the 'finite other' (the creature) and the 'infinite other' (the creator). My study counters common characterisations of the current crisis of churches in which diversification is interpreted as the reason and de-diversification is interpreted as the response to crisis. In these characterisations, churches are closed off against the 'other'. In three parts which examine the controversial but connected concepts of 'religiosity', 'community', and 'identity', I suggest that the sociological closure against the finite other and the theological closure against the infinite other are connected. Taking trust as a central category, I argue that both the finite other and the infinite other are constitutive of church. Trust opens identity to alterity. Thus, I advocate a turn in the interpretation of the identity of Christianity - from identity as a 'propositional possession' to identity as a 'performative project'. The identity of Christianity is 'done' rather than 'described' in the practices of church. Church, then, is a 'work in movement', continually constituted through the encounter with the finite and the infinite other in Jesus Christ. My study contributes to ecclesial practices and to reflections on ecclesial practices in the current crisis of churches through the elasticisation of ecclesiology. It retrieves Troeltsch's interdisciplinary thinking for the controversies which revolve around the construction of community today, opening up innovative and instructive approaches to the investigation of the practices of Christianity past and present.