What is a sports agent and what does a sports agent do? This is described in the thesis, through an explanation of the different functions and characteristics. It is also discussed how to use these functions and characteristics in the best way so that the sports agent can reach success. The complex concept “success” is also discussed so that it is adapted to this thesis and the profession of sports agents. Furthermore, the thesis contains recommendations of how to be successful in the sports agent business.

This project is primarily exegetical in nature and aims to provide a rational reconstruction of the concept of moral responsibility in the work of Immanuel Kant, specifically in his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (GR), and Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR). It consists of three chapters – the first chapter interprets the concept of freedom that follows from the resolution to the Third Antinomy in the CPR. It argues that Kant is best understood here to be providing an unusual but cogent, compatibilist account of freedom that the author terms meta-compatibilism. The second chapter examines the GR and CPrR to interpret the theory of practical reason and moral agency that Kant develops in these works. This chapter concludes by evaluating what has been established about Kant’s ideas of freedom and moral agency at that point in the project, identifying some problems and objections in addition to providing some suggestions for how Kantian ethics might be adapted within a consequentialist framework. The third chapter argues that, for Kant, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions (in addition to a compatibilist definition of freedom) that must obtain for an individual to qualify as responsible for her actions.

This research examines institutional transformation of the board of directors in Canada to a collaborative model in which the board, in addition to its monitoring function, provides a service role by acting as a sounding board to management and providing advice and counsel to management on strategic issues. This thesis also examines how director search, likely initiated by the ‘Enron’ scandals, led to some boards adopting a new model of practice that directors deemed more efficacious and possessing legitimacy, bringing together the old and the new institutionalism in institutional change processes. Legitimacy was drawn from guidance from a professional association for directors that outlined how boards could become strategic asset to the firm that was consistent with a stewardship model of governance that saw boards collaborative with management. It is also argued in this thesis that following the Enron scandal, directors searched for a model of practice that would be more efficacious such that their fears of liability were reduced. In searching for and adopting a new model of practice, the collaborative board, it is also argued that adoption requires coupling to the technical core (enacted), as opposed to symbolic, if it is to be effective. This research studies directors and senior management of public firms of the TSX Composite by way of survey methods. The findings provide support that the board is evolving in Canada to a new collaborative model and that the model of practice appears to be enacted (coupled) as opposed to symbolic (decoupled). Further, the results did not find that collaborative boards are impaired in their monitoring function and support is found that the board’s monitoring role may actually be enhanced. These results are discussed as well as future research directions and limitations of the study.

The contemporary North American believes that you can purchase happiness. We search in boxes labeled new and improved, looking for products that are forever bigger, stronger, and faster. We want these things because they will make our lives easier, make us look prettier, and bring us social acceptance. It is our social insecurities that blindly drive this lifestyle. Happiness cannot be sold, and we have become mindless in our consumption. It is in the heart of the suburban world where you can find the beginning of the end. It is the North American shopping mall. We created it as means to meet our demands for more convenient access to stores and services. Its design was manipulated, unapologetically perfected, and rigorously overproduced. The mall has replaced our town squares and main streets with fields of asphalt, yields of the same giant signs, neon lights and brand names. The public realm has been privatized and commercialized. The zombie apocalypse is upon us. The shopping mall stands among us as the reanimated corpse of the dead downtown and represents the loss of great space. Through horror films and personal inflection, a biography of the mall, and a literary dissection of its contemporaries, this thesis examines the misconceptions of North American public spaces through the shopping mall and branded culture. This thesis rediscovers the practise of creating great space through an architectural discourse of the Humbertown Shopping Centre. We desperately need spaces for the living. I argue for public spaces that serve no commercial intent, but rather nourish our desires for authentic human interaction.

<p>This thesis is a small scale in depth exploration into the perceptions of power held by eight Muslim women residing in the Cape Town Metropole area. Using a Qualitative Feminist approach the study aimed to explore and shed light on the multiple ways in which Muslim women negotiate, construct and co-construct agency, power and authority in their everyday lives. This study also sought to explore whether Muslim women who appear independent or empowered actually feel in control of their own lives / and how their ability to make choices is mediated by intersecting identities such as race, class, age, etc. The research highlights a number of emergent themes in which discussion of the women‟s views around education, finance, reproductive responsibilities, patriarchy, etc. takes place and also explores the ways in which the women contest and resist traditional cultural norms in their everyday experiences. Furthermore this study also sought to create a space where the researcher focused and refocused her gaze on the theoretical and epistemological aspects of her chosen method of enquiry in order to interrogate its merits and limits. Upon reflection the researcher also acknowledges that, similar to the participants, she also holds contradictory views on some of the issues discussed.</p>

In this dissertation, I examine relationships between gender and agency in the works of Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskells position within discussions of nineteenth-century feminisms has long been a subject of debate, and her celebration of and focus on femininity, womens lives, and the domestic sphere of nineteenth-century womanhood is inevitably crucial in critical analyses of her work. I argue that Gaskells take on gender is a more sophisticated one than has been recognised. In her fictional depictions of the agency and power of women and men, as well as in commentary from her correspondence and her biography of her friend and contemporary woman author Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell conceives of the traditionally feminine sphere of influence as more conducive to action than the masculine realm, where notions of authority and responsibility paradoxically place limits on individual ability and agency. These ideas are further complicated in Gaskells work by an awareness of the constructed or unfixed nature of gender, a conscious recognition of gender roles as not essentially tied to sex difference but rather as fluid, mutable, and primarily utilitarian.<p> My argument situates Gaskells position contextually, with reference to contemporary nineteenth-century discussions of the roles and expectations of men and women. It is organised in terms of the thematic focus of her novels, with chapters on industry and class relations, fallen women, religion and marriage, and home and family. Within this framework I suggest a progression in the complexity of Gaskells thinking both chronologically and in the shift of focus from topics that are centered in masculine spheres of power, such as the economic, political, and religious, to those that are firmly ensconced in the feminine domestic realm of the personal home and local community. I end with a discussion of The Life of Charlotte Brontë and Gaskells thoughts on female authorship, concluding that Gaskells locating of agency in the feminine is a means by which she can promote alternative ways of being and recognize that diverse ways of seeing the world and ones own identity or position within it are essential in order to create and maintain effective societies.

The work I have created during my time as a graduate student is a reflection of the dialogues I have engaged in with other artists and acquaintances both in and outside of the academic arena. Stylistically this work is derivative of my involvement with graffiti, Tattooing, and underground comics. I have developed the icon of the rider to represent the agency and responsibility of myself as an artist in reflecting these various contexts.

Many previous studies suggest that agency costs and information asymmetry are signifi-cant factors that affect the relationship between the investment expenditures of firms and the availability of cash from internal operations. Some other studies show that dividing firms in terms of the degree of ownership concentration further explains the relationship. However, the findings of previous studies are not consistent suggesting that other firm characteristics may be affecting the results. We propose that additional attention to the nature of ownership control of firms may explain the inconsistency. In this study, we examine the investment behaviour of family-controlled firms, institu-tion-controlled firms and widely-held firms. We distinguish between these three kinds of firms as they represent different levels of market imperfection. Therefore, we expect diverse investment behaviours among the three groups. Compared with family-controlled and institution-controlled firms, widely held firms have dispersed ownership structures. The greatest weakness of a widely-held ownership structure is the lack of shareholder monitoring due to the unmatched benefit and cost of control for small shareholders. The existence of at least one large shareholder will reduce the agency costs and asymmetric information. On one hand, enhanced monitoring will decrease the waste of free cash flows by managers. On the other hand, large shareholders are willing to spend time and effort to collect more information on management performance or to estimate the firms investment projects and thus reduce the information asymmetry. Both family-controlled firms and institution-controlled firms have large shareholders. However, whether or not the shareholders are playing an active monitoring role is still an important issue. From the point of aligning the interests of managers and shareholders, the family-controlled group is superior to the institution-controlled group as family-controlled firms generally assign influential positions to family members whose focus is in line with that of the family group. Even though a non family member may be appointed as the manager, the level of monitoring is significant given the high ownership concentration by the family. On the other hand, significant family ownership may lead to agency costs of its own. The main disadvantage of owner-managers is that they may lack the expertise to manage their firms although their position in the family may make it natural for them to be the manager. Another advantage of the family-controlled firm is that the family may divert company resources for its own benefit despite the presence of a manager who may or may not be a family member. Essentially, the family and the manager can all collude to spend on perks and personal benefits at the expense of minority shareholders. Therefore, as we move from widely-held to institution-controlled the level of agency costs may decrease but as we move further into higher control, as may be suggested by family ownership, the level of agency costs may increase again. Although previous studies have noticed the influence of ownership structure, no analysis has been carried out to explore the investment behaviour of firms controlled by the three differ-ent kinds of shareholders. Our first motivation is to fill this gap. Splitting our sample into three representative groups enables us to study the financing constraints and investment behaviour of firms that are family-controlled, institution-controlled, and widely held. The focus of this study is on Canadian firms. The Canadian evidence is worth particular attention because the Canadian business environment is similar to the US business environment in terms of legal, regulatory, and market institutions but it is similar to European or Asian firms in terms of ownership structure. Therefore, a study of Canadian firms can provide a useful and rational assessment of the investment behaviour of firms that follow the ownership structures of Europe and Asia but operate in a business environment and institutional setting similar to those of the US. Further, a large number of Canadian firms have controlling shareholders and a large proportion, approximately 60%, of Canadian firms can be categorized as having concentrated ownership structure. Among the firms with concentrated ownership, over 1/3 of them can be dis-tinguished as family-controlled. This dataset provides an ideal setting to study the investment behaviours of firms according to the nature of their controllers. Our results illustrate that the intensity of investments of widely-held firms is higher than the intensity of investments of concentrated ownership firms and that the intensity of investments of widely-held firms is positively and significantly affected by the availability of funds from internal sources. In contrast, for concentrated ownership firms the intensity is positively and significantly affected by the availability of growth opportunities. These observations suggest that in comparison with the concentrated ownership firms, the widely-held firms face higher levels of financing constraints and exhibit less value maximizing behaviour. However, once we separate the family-controlled firms from the institution-controlled firms, we find that the investment expenditures of the family-controlled firms and the institution-controlled firms are not significantly different in terms of their dependence on internal cash flows or on the market-to-book ratios. We also find that widely-held firms tend to invest in projects that payoff quickly. This preference may be the result of these firms desires to ease their external funding constraints by generating funds internally.

This research examines institutional transformation of the board of directors in Canada to a collaborative model in which the board, in addition to its monitoring function, provides a service role by acting as a sounding board to management and providing advice and counsel to management on strategic issues. This thesis also examines how director search, likely initiated by the ‘Enron’ scandals, led to some boards adopting a new model of practice that directors deemed more efficacious and possessing legitimacy, bringing together the old and the new institutionalism in institutional change processes. Legitimacy was drawn from guidance from a professional association for directors that outlined how boards could become strategic asset to the firm that was consistent with a stewardship model of governance that saw boards collaborative with management. It is also argued in this thesis that following the Enron scandal, directors searched for a model of practice that would be more efficacious such that their fears of liability were reduced. In searching for and adopting a new model of practice, the collaborative board, it is also argued that adoption requires coupling to the technical core (enacted), as opposed to symbolic, if it is to be effective. This research studies directors and senior management of public firms of the TSX Composite by way of survey methods. The findings provide support that the board is evolving in Canada to a new collaborative model and that the model of practice appears to be enacted (coupled) as opposed to symbolic (decoupled). Further, the results did not find that collaborative boards are impaired in their monitoring function and support is found that the board’s monitoring role may actually be enhanced. These results are discussed as well as future research directions and limitations of the study.

This project is primarily exegetical in nature and aims to provide a rational reconstruction of the concept of moral responsibility in the work of Immanuel Kant, specifically in his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (GR), and Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR). It consists of three chapters – the first chapter interprets the concept of freedom that follows from the resolution to the Third Antinomy in the CPR. It argues that Kant is best understood here to be providing an unusual but cogent, compatibilist account of freedom that the author terms meta-compatibilism. The second chapter examines the GR and CPrR to interpret the theory of practical reason and moral agency that Kant develops in these works. This chapter concludes by evaluating what has been established about Kant’s ideas of freedom and moral agency at that point in the project, identifying some problems and objections in addition to providing some suggestions for how Kantian ethics might be adapted within a consequentialist framework. The third chapter argues that, for Kant, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions (in addition to a compatibilist definition of freedom) that must obtain for an individual to qualify as responsible for her actions.