The origin of this thesis can be traced back to a deceptively simple question that struck me when reading Hegel for the first time: What, if anything, can be made of human freedom when we live in a world that has a profound impact on who we are and what we do? Unhappy with the way existentialist reactions to Hegel characterized freedom as our ability to step out of our world and determine our identity through our own decisions and will, but nevertheless inspired by Heidegger’s depiction of human agents as always already in the world, this thesis answers the aforementioned question by turning the existentialist conception of freedom on its head: that is, instead of characterizing freedom as detached decisionism, I argue that freedom is a function of our ability to recognize and respond to the disparate demands our world places upon us. Specifically, and unlike Heidegger’s existentialist interpreters, I read Heidegger’s account of authenticity as a case of engaged-agency in which we clarify the possibilities others make available and then act accordingly. There is, however, a certain limitation to this interpretation of human agency: namely, that treating freedom as an active response to the wants and needs of others binds the agent to possibilities present in her current situation and therefore fails to capture the kind of freedom we associate with cultural transformation or artistic creativity. Hence, this thesis addresses a second set of questions: What conditions make historical change possible? And how is it that artists are able to alter the world? In response to the first query, I turn to Heidegger’s claim that we are in truth and in untruth as well as his discussion of Gelassenheit to argue that the play between the possibilities present in a particular culture and those that are excluded by it along with a release from our present activities create the conditions for cultural transformation. In reply to the second question, I examine Heidegger’s account of the happening of truth and show how thinkers and artists are able to reveal the possibilities concealed in their culture through the creative use of language. Finally, I contend that the freedom associated with cultural transformation and artistic creativity is also a form of responsibility insofar as the success of a given transformation depends on others recognizing that transformation as valuable and thus worthy of their support.

This thesis is about psychological constructions underpinning intentional action to improve well-being by people in a neighbourhood on the urban fringe of Bamako, Mali. There is a large deficit in the theorisation of psychological elements of agency and empowerment in the development literature. Instead empowerment is generally defined as a favourable opportunity structure, as choice or as the distribution of power. Further still, the examination of the psychological literature reveals a lack of empirical research related to non-Western contexts and development policy. In view of this, I present the results of an empirical study using the inductive mixed methods to examine the central factors contributing to initiatives people undertake to improve personal and collective well-being. Informants articulated that the psychological concepts of dusu (internal motivation) and ka da I yèrè la (self-efficacy) were most important to their purposeful agency. The empirical analysis is divided into three parts and based primarily on qualitative data, enriched by quantitative analysis. Firstly I will examine the concepts of dusu and ka da I yèrè la, which are characterised as having an instrumental and intrinsic significance to people’s purposeful agency. They were also characterised as important factors in supporting local social development initiatives. Secondly, I will show how these psychological concepts were not related to the agent’s socio-economic characteristics or decision making ability, rendering both variables weak proxies for measuring psychological agency. Instead I found that measures of intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy are more viable for evaluating psychological agency. Thirdly, however, whilst dusu and ka da I yèrè la are important to people’s agency and the social development of the neighbourhood, they cannot be viewed as a silver bullet to social development in Kalabankoro Nerekoro. Specifically, in the examination of collective purposeful agency in group work (associations), the functioning of groups is impacted by the internal dynamics within the group, causing sometimes breakdown of the group. Further still, gender and age norms as well as capability deprivation and conflicting world views all thwart the ability of associations to achieve their goals. I underline that agents cannot always succeed in the pursuit of their well-being goals, even though they demonstrate high levels of psychological agency unless structural inequality at the micro, meso and macro levels of Malian society are addressed. Through this empirical study, this thesis will contribute the closing of the gap between psychological and development literatures as well as work towards developing measures of psychological agency.

This thesis offers an analysis of labour relations and social space in the tea gardens of north-east India. Existing literature provides us with an understanding of how the plantations operate as economic spaces, but in so doing they treat workers as undifferentiated economic beings defined only by their class identity. Space, however, has to be animated to be meaningful. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews I explore the plantations as actual lived spaces where people are bound by and resist constraints. Multiple intersecting identities play out within these social spaces making them ethnic, religious, and caste spaces in addition to being gendered. Focusing on these intersectional identities, I demonstrate how region, ethnicity, party affiliation, caste, religion are played out and how they are invoked at certain points by the women workers. The articulations of identity not only determine a sense of belonging or non-belonging to a space but also how one belongs. Within the physical sites of the plantation, I examine how the women perceive these spaces and how, in moving between ideas of home/world, public/private, these very binaries are negated. The strict sexual division of labour primarily in the workplace but also in the household and villages inscribe the physical sites with certain gendered meanings and performances. The women negotiate these in their everyday lives and shape these spaces even as they are shaped by them. Conditioned by gender norms and the resultant hierarchy their narratives can be read as stories of deprivation and misery, but looking deeper their agency can also be uncovered. The lives of my research participants show how the social spaces within which they operate are not static; in spite of spatial controls there are the many minute acts of resistance through which the women work the existing restraints to their least disadvantage. Focussing on the minute acts of insubordination, deceit and even confrontation I elucidate how the women made use of the relations of subordination to pave spaces of resistance and sometimes even of autonomy. Furthermore, not all acts of agency are minute or unspectacular. I map instances of highly visible, volatile and aggressive protests apparently challenging the accepted social codes within which they function. In expressing themselves, the women use the available political repertories of protest in forms of strikes, blockades, street plays, etc. Through these instances of activism they appropriate and become visible in the public realm and challenge the accepted ways in which social spaces and norms play out. Despite their articulate nature, these protests usually seek to address immediate demands and do not escalate into social movements. Also while volatile in action, the protests seek legitimacy within the accepted gender codes that operate in their everyday life in the plantation.

The purpose of this study is to examine the ways in which preschool teachers’ organization of the physical and social environment both restrict and enable children's free play. Specifically, we want to understand how these forms of organization has an impact on children’s agency. To reach this aim we conducted a case study to examine the organization of the physical environment in preschool rooms where free play takes place, and the actions children take in these rooms. We focused in particular on the teacher’s role in this organization. The study is based on observations and interviews of teachers from a rural preschool with 14 children aged 3-4 years. Interview transcripts and field notes were subjected to a content analysis. We found that the teachers have a vision that the environment should be in constant change and therefore want a diversity and variation in the material. It also became apparent that teachers distinguish between “good” and “bad” forms of play, and that these distinctions play a role in how the teachers evaluate children’s free play and the organization of free play spaces. In addition, it became evident that certain rooms and material were conducive to certain types of play. The results showed for example, that teacher´s ideas of good play and the use of closed doors and gates became an infringement on children´s agency. Conclusions of this study were that through the environment the teachers have designed and the materials they have chosen, their control of free play and children´s agency is always present.

Drawing on Butler’s (1990, 1997) concept of performativity and the new materialist work of Barad (2007), Coole and Frost (2010), Pickering (1993), and others as a theoretical framework, this dissertation presents three articles that demonstrate the new ways to envisage the agency of human, nonhuman, and material bodies in the educational environment by examining the discursive, performative, and material practices of six Latina aspiring educational leaders. Guided by Gee’s (2014) critical discourse analysis methodology, the first article examines how my participants were constrained from moving toward their career goals and how they subverted constraints as they moved towards their goals. The second article aims to show how these women use performative, material, and discursive agency to position themselves as viable leaders in their school districts. The third article provides an argument for using posthumanist and new materialist concepts as a new way of understanding women’s leadership ontology by drawing on two examples from my broader study with aspiring Latina educational leaders.

This thesis analyses key documents from the United Nations Security Council (the Council) meetings during the period of 1999 to 2001. This thesis maps out the shift in the discourses that occurred within the Council, when adopting United Nations Security Council’s resolution (UNSCR) 1325. Moreover, this thesis argues that the nodal point ‘Civilians’ has become gendered by being replaced by the concept of ‘Women’. This thesis argues that UNSC is misrepresenting female agency within the discourses, which has contributed to a gendering of the concept of civilians. Sexual violence, defined as a wartime weapon, has also been part of the construction of stereotypical gender binaries, which has constituted a representation of women as either victims or saviors within the discourses. It becomes evident that the notion of female agency as for example independent, empowered or strong has been neglected. The discourse theory provided by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is applied in order to map out the existing discourses within the Security Council meetings. The aim of this study is to acknowledge the importance of that women have been and still are being excluded from the ontology of war. Furthermore, when the role of women in war is described, it is in relation to constructed stereotypical gender binaries.

<p>This study examines the representation of "conscience" in English literature, theology, and political theory from the late fourteenth century to the late seventeenth. In doing so it links up some prominent conceptual history of the term, from Aquinas to Hobbes, with its imaginative life in English narrative. In particular, beginning with William Langland's <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> and moving through texts in the "<italic>Piers Plowman</italic> tradition" and on to John Bunyan's allegories and polemics, I explore what I call the "satiric" dimensions of conscience in an allegorical tradition that spans a long and varied period of reform in England, medieval and early modern. As I argue, conscience in this tradition is linked up with the jolts of irony as with the solidarities of mutual recognition. Indeed, the ironies of conscience depend precisely on settled dispositions, shared practices, common moral sources and intellectual traditions, and relationships across time. As such, far from simply being a form of individualist self-assurance, conscience presupposes and advocates a social body, a vision of communal life. Accordingly, this study tracks continuities and transformations in the imagined communities in which the judgment that is conscience is articulated, and so too in the capacities of prominent medieval literary forms to go on speaking for others in the face of dramatic cultural upheaval.</p><p>After an introductory essay that examines the relationship between conscience, irony, and literary form, I set out in chapter one with a study of Langland's <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> (ca. 1388 in its final version), an ambitious, highly dialectical poem that gives a figure called Conscience a central role in its account of church and society in late medieval England. While Langland draws deeply on scholastic accounts of <italic>conscientia</italic>--an act of practical reason, as Aquinas says, that is binding as your best judgment and yet vexing in its capacity for error and need for formation in the virtues--he dramatizes error in terms of imagined practice, pressing the limits of theory. A long, recursive meditation on how one's socially embodied life constitutes distinctive forms of both blindness and vision, Langland's poem searches out the forms of recognition and mutuality that he takes a truth-seeking irony of conscience to require in his contemporary moment. My reading sets the figure of Conscience in <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> alongside the figure of Holy Church to explore some of these themes, and so also to address why the beginning of Langland's poem matters for its ending. In chapter two I turn to an anonymous early fifteenth-century poem of political complaint called <italic>Mum and the Sothsegger</italic> (ca. 1409) that was written in response to new legislation introducing capital punishment for heresy in England. In Mum I show how an early "<italic>Piers Plowman</italic> tradition" gets taken up into a rhetoric of royal counsel and so subtly, but decisively, revises aspects of Langland's political and ecclesial vision. In a final chapter moving across several of John Bunyan's works from the 1670s and 1680s, I show how Bunyan conceptualizes coercion in terms of the state and the market, and so defends a "liberty" of conscience that resists both Hobbesian assimilations of moral judgment to the legal structures of territorial sovereignty and an emergent market nominalism, in which exchange value trumps all moral reflection. In part two of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan draws surprisingly on medieval sources to display the forms of mutuality that he thinks are required to resist "consent" to such unjust forms of coercion.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis investigates how A-level students (aged 17-26) in and around Kampala, Uganda, manage uncertainties in their present lives and futures. There are large discrepancies between international and national discourses on education, the students’ ambitious hopes and dreams, and the realities they witness. The research’s main source of data are 63 semi-structured interviews with high school students of various socio-economic backgrounds in four different schools. The thesis provides an analysis of the tactical agency the students display while negotiating with discourses, networks and steep competition. The main argument of the thesis is that uncertainty can be a productive force, and tactical agency necessary to navigate an African urban space at present.

The importance of health and quality health care in people’s daily lives is widely recognised. Physicians play a key role in delivering quality health care and improved patient outcomes. However, the evidence regarding physicians’ decision making and their perception of quality of health care delivery and its influencers is inconclusive. The overall aim of this thesis is to increase the understanding of quality in health care delivery and the factors that influence it from a physician’s perspective. This aim is fulfilled by conducting three interlinked research projects. The first research project comprises a systematic review of the literature that identifies the factors, contexts and theoretical underpinnings influencing physician decision making. The synthesis of 160 studies reveals two main categories of influencing factors. The first is ‘Contexts’, which refers to the set of circumstances or facts surrounding a particular event or situation. The second category is ‘Interventions’, which are the techniques, processes or actions introduced to create changes in how physicians make decisions while performing their clinical duties. Although extant literature provides ample evidence on factors influencing physician decision making the link to quality in health care is under researched. In the second research project, the author explores how physicians construct quality of health care delivery by means of investigating 162 clinical cases with 27 repertory gird interviews that yield eleven key constructs representing a classification of physicians’ conception of quality. The third research project examines physicians’ perceptions of enablers and barriers to quality in health care delivery, employing semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate that physician’s effort in delivering quality health care is largely influenced by factors affecting behavioural control (freedom to act). This research makes five contributions to knowledge. First, a novel classification of factors influencing physician decision making when prescribing is developed, providing new understanding of the link between these factors and quality of health care. Second, the systematic review shows an innovative application of factor analysis to structure the findings of a complex phenomenon. Third, the study presents a new conceptualisation of physicians’ construction of quality in health care. Fourth, the research provides a categorization of physicians’ perceived enablers and barriers to quality health care and the mechanisms by which they operate. Finally, this research develops a theoretically-grounded and empirically-informed conceptual model that incorporates three hitherto separate domains: agency, planned behaviour, and decision theories. This model provides a new integrated lens to better understand the complexities influencing quality in health care delivery. This study also makes two significant contributions to practice. First, the findings have helped initiate a transformation in the pharmaceutical industry’s business model, evolving from business-to-person to business-to-business. Second, the findings serve as a catalyst to drive organizational changes at Norway’s largest emergency hospital. As a result, a national debate was initiated, involving the Prime Minister and Minister of Health, on how hospital emergency care can best be provided at a national level.

In the next five-to-ten years, Generation Y (born between 1979 and 1994) will be the largestgroup in Chinese firms. This generation is better educated and has unique characteristics.However, most of Chinese firms still employ a classic control system in management process.We argue that unless companies take MCSs as a package and consider HRM in the wholemanagement process, they cannot reduce the agency conflict with highly-educated Generation Yemployees. In order to reduce the agency conflict, the key thing is to identify the motivationsamong highly-educated Generation Y. This research firstly reviews the extrinsic and intrinsicmotivations based on the relevant studies. Then through the in-depth interviews with HR andmiddle managers, we find the special opinions of HR and middle managers in Chinese firms.After that, we design a questionnaire and conduct a survey. Our study identifies that themotivation scales among the Chinese highly educated Generation Y are different from those inthe theoretical studies, and the most important scale for Generation Y is Reward, Personal fit andSelf-fulfillment. Besides, the 1980s and 1990s groups have significantly different requirementsfrom the work environment. Our research indicates that companies should take the ten scales ofmotivations into consideration in the whole process of management control, and supervisorsshould know the motivations of their employees, thereby avoiding misunderstanding.