This thesis responds to the question 'how can sovereign wealth funds manage ambiguity in their decision-making so as to implement substantive long-term investment programmes?' The rapid growth of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) over the past decade, due largely to booming commodity prices, has inspired optimism among many for their potential to contribute to the sustainability goals of society. SWFs are unconstrained by many of the factors that have kept pension funds from realising their potential as long-term investors and so they are well placed to make significant investments in sustainable projects with positive externalities such as infrastructure and to act as effective monitors of corporate behaviour. But many obstacles stand in the way. At the institutional level, transparency has replaced tight financial market regulation, resulting in entrenched short-termism. At the organisational level, many problems facing long-term investors are too complex to fit into traditional models of decision-making. Decentralisation is necessary to respond to this complexity but it conflicts with the coordination necessary to achieve economies of scale and scope. There may not even be an ideal outcome to coerce or incentivise agents to achieve. Taken together, these problems are understood in this thesis as ambiguity, which results from differences in interpretation and irreconcilable conflict. In contrast, most governance frameworks focus on problems of uncertainty and risk, due to missing information. This thesis has three aims. The first is to reframe the governance challenge for longterm investing in terms of managing ambiguity. Second, this thesis aims to reconcile ambiguity with legitimacy that depends on expert decision-making and provides one right answer to a clearly specified problem. Third, it provides specific examples of how ambiguity, if managed, can improve decision-making. That is, ambiguity forces us to engage with subjective reality but also provides us with a framework to do so. Ambiguity can act as a built-in adaptation mechanism to hold a coalition of diverse interests together in a rapidly changing environment, to identify synergies where others see only trade-offs and to overcome collective action problems. These constructive properties of ambiguity are explored in the four substantive chapters of this thesis, alongside specific recommendations for changes to SWF governance structures to transcend barriers to long-term investing. The first half of the thesis focuses on the earlier stages of the investment process and draws on specific examples of two SWFs. Chapter III investigates ambiguity in the Alberta Heritage Fund's inter-generational equity mandate. If managed in the form of self-reflexivity, ambiguity can contribute to overcoming the time inconsistency problem in the context of sub-national resource wealth funds. Chapter IV focuses on the irreconcilable conflict in the Norwegian Fund's ethical investment policy. It argues that agents use their discretion to interpret the policy and, in doing so, are able to align it more closely to the Fund's long-term investing mandate. The second half of the thesis extends consideration to long-term investors more broadly. Chapter V explores the delegation of shareholder engagement to portfolio managers to leverage synergies in an investment management firm. It finds that introducing ambiguity into incentive design can overcome the multi-task incentive problem. Chapter VI brings concepts explored in earlier chapters to bear on its analysis of a new market for public infrastructure assets. It argues that ambiguity provides the space necessary to bring diverse actors together to transcend collective action problems and create new institutional arrangements to support a more efficient market structure. Taken as a whole, this thesis is optimistic that, as those claiming to have the one right answer are increasingly proven wrong, ambiguity will earn its rightful place in the study and practice of finance.

High rates of turnover and the limited tenure of directors of nursing (DONs) in long-term care creates instability in the nursing workforce and the quality of care provided. Organizations, industry, and stakeholders have made little progress to change this turnover crisis. The purpose of this quantitative study, guided by organizational role and social exchange theories, was to determine if there was a difference in levels of affective organizational commitment and intent to stay mediated by leader-member exchange in long-term care DONs with different levels of role conflict and role ambiguity. The key variables were measured with the Role Questionnaire, Leader-Member Exchange Scale 7, Affective Commitment Questionnaire, and the Intent to Stay Scale. DONs were recruited via e-mail and social media, and 126 participants completed the surveys with 42 experiencing high role conflict and 13 experiencing high role ambiguity. Results revealed no differences in the levels of affective organizational commitment or intent to stay between DONs with high versus low levels of role conflict or role ambiguity. However, role ambiguity and leader-member exchange, but not role conflict, significantly predicted a DON's affective organizational commitment and intent to stay. Future research could consider the levels of role conflict and role ambiguity experienced by the DON and the tenure of the DON and the effect on the quality of resident care provided. The results of this study could impact positive social change by being used to advocate for role clarity and improve relationships with leaders to increase DON tenure, which would improve nurse workforce turnover and the quality provided in long-term care.

L’objectif de cette thèse est de présenter quatre essais en économie comportementale et expérimentale sur prise de décision dans le risque et l’ambiguïté. Le premier essai présente une synthèse et un point de vue sur la représentativité des résultats expérimentaux en matière de préférences : préférences sociales et préférences concernant le risque et le temps dans les pays développés ainsi que dans les pays en voie de développement. Le deuxième essai explore expérimentalement l’effet du risque et de l’ambiguïté sur le comportement de recherche d’emploi en horizon infini. Les résultats montrent qu’en risque et ambiguïté, les salaires de réservation sont inférieurs aux valeurs théoriques et diminuent au cours du processus de recherche. De même, les sujets se comportent comme des agents neutre à l’ambiguïté. Le troisième et quatrième essai étudient l’effet du contexte social et la corrélation des paiements sur les attitudes face au risque et à l’ambiguïté respectivement dans le domaine de gain, perte et le domaine mixte. Les résultats montrent que l’introduction du contexte social a un effet significatif sur les attitudes face au risque dans les trois domaines. Néanmoins, la corrélation des risques a un effet sur les attitudes face au risque seulement dans le domaine mixte. Les attitudes face à l’ambiguïté varient selon le domaine. De même, la corrélation des paiements diminuent l’aversion à l’ambiguïté. / The objective of this thesis is to present four essays in behavioral and experimental economics on decision-making under risk and ambiguity. The first essay presents a synthesis and a point of view on the representativeness of experimental results regarding individual preferences: social preferences and risk and time preferences, in developed countries as well as in developing countries. The second essay explores experimentally the effect of risk and ambiguity on job search behavior in an infinite horizon. The results show that in risk and ambiguity, reservation wages are lower than the theoretical values and decrease during the search process. Similarly, subjects behave as ambiguity neutral agents. The third and fourth essay examine the effect of the social context and the correlation of payments on attitudes towards risk and ambiguity respectively in gain, loss and mixed domain. The results show that the introduction of the social context has a significant effect on attitudes towards risk in all three domains. Nevertheless, the correlation of risks has an effect on risk attitudes only in the mixed domain. As for ambiguity, ambiguity attitudes vary across domains. The correlation of payments decreases ambiguity aversion.

Empirical research exploring the complex phenomenon of job burnout is still considered to be in its infancy stage. One clearly established stream of research, though, has focused on the antecedents of the three job burnout components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment. In particular, situational characteristics have received a great deal of attention to date. Four situational factors: (1) role ambiguity, (2) role conflict, (3) quantitative role overload, and (4) organizational support were included in this analysis to test their significance as predictors of job burnout. Another set of antecedents that has received far less attention in job burnout research is personal dispositions. Individual differences, most notably personality traits, may help us understand why some employees experience burnout whereas others do not, even within the same work environment. Four personality characteristics: (1) self-esteem, (2) locus of control, (3) communal orientation, and (4) negative affectivity were included to test their significance as predictors of job burnout. An on-site, self-report survey instrument was used. A sample of 149 human service professionals employed at a large government social services department voluntarily participated in this research. The main data analysis techniques used to test the research hypotheses were canonical correlation analysis and hierarchical analysis of sets. While role ambiguity showed no significant associations with any of the three job burnout components, the remaining situational factors had at least one significant association. Among all the situational characteristics, quantitative role overload was the strongest situational predictor of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, while organizational support was the strongest situational predictor of personal accomplishment. The personality predictor set as a whole showed a significant relationship with each of the job burnout components, providing strong proof that dispositional effects are important in predicting job burnout. Among all the personality characteristics, negative affectivity was the strongest personality predictor of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, while communal orientation was the strongest personality predictor of personal accomplishment. Comparisons between the personality and situational predictor sets revealed that personality characteristics were the stronger predictor for all three of the job burnout components. No interactions among the situational and personality predictors proved significant.

Studying the societal and spatial implications of dirt and its inherent out-of-placeness brought forth a heuristic exploration of heterotopic spatial qualities within the realm of architecture. Taking on the metaphorical role of dirt, the prison is juxtaposed with its societally defined counterpart, the museum. An architectural form began to take place via the implementation of interpretations and a general ambiguity derived from the strange merger of the two ‘counterparts’. The Prison of Stained Acceptance questions and tests boundaries of acceptance within societal stigmatization of otherness, furthermore, inquires the efficacy of out-of-placeness on humanity indoctrinated into a defined good/clean and bad/dirty. With a focus on humaneness and egality, the prison tests the possible outcomes within the occurrence of power shift – from a governing/guarding body to the inmates and architecture. The heterotopic nature of the proposal perhaps raises more questions than it answers, however, it became imperative to sprout a debate within its eclecticism. Rather than defending a direct conclusion this thesis focuses on provocation and thought.

This article deals with the communicative uses of the printed wrap cloth kanga. Specifically I will show how the kanga is constituted as a communicative sign and is at the core of ambiguation processes that are pervasive to this communicative genre. Because of its high degree of ambiguity the question arises whether we can, for communication by way of kanga, still speak of communication in any sense. In my opinion, we can only do so if it is possible to analyze the communication process within existing models of communication. Starting from the hypothesis that the kanga indeed has communicative potential communication is understood as social interaction, whereby the focus is not solely on meanings in a pragmatic or semantic sense, but rather on social meaning, i.e. the negotiation of relationships between the interactants in an area of tension between individual, social and cultural interests (within which meaning in a linguistic sense does play a role, too) (Anderson & Meyer 1988, Burgoon et aL 1996). This will be shown in the fust part of the analysis. In the second part of this article I will describe and explain the role of the medium kanga within this process of ambiguation. This article is based on material collected during two field periods in 1994/ 1995 and 1996 in Mombasa and, from 1995 onwards, in various archives in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Since 2016 the external communication of the Swedish international development cooperation agencys (Sida) has been governed by the ‘Strategi för informations- och kommunikationsverksamhet, inklusive genom organisationer i det civila samhället, 2016–2022’. Government investigations have shown that the strategy leaves room for divergent interpretation due to abstract formulations and ambiguous objectives. Several researchers have studied How ambiguous strategy is interpreted by organizational members. However, there are no studies that, beyond the scope of profession-related factors, examine Why the interpretationsappear in any given way. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to analyze the interpretation process of an ambiguous strategy, by examining how cognitive, social and structural factors affect how employees at the communication units of Sida and Sida Partnership Forum interpret, and (consequently) enact the 'Strategy for information and communication activities 2016-2022 '. Based on the idea of accumulative understanding, the thesis theoretical framework consisted of Eric Eisenberg's Strategic Ambiguity, Abdallah & Langley's dimensions of the strategy process, and Hall's encoding/decoding model for communication. We used a combination of strategy documents and semi-structured interviews to answer the research questions through an interpretive discourse analysis. Ascertained organizational discourses were linked back to the theories of Strategic ambiguity and encoding/decoding to draw conclusions from chosen theoretical perspective. We found that organizational socialization, governing signals and actors as well as formal structures for strategy planning caused divergent interpretations and perceptions of the InfoCom-strategy. We also found that how the employees interpreted the InfoCom strategy affects how it was enacted in their work. Since the strategy does not offer clear directives, the enactment seems to differ depending on the employee's position at Sida or SPF.

L'objectif ici est de repenser la question du politique et du théâtre, en se situant au-delà de la problématique de l'engagement. à partir d'un corpus contemporain incluant «les barbares sont arrivés» de Stasiuk, «invasion!» de Khemiri, les oeuvres de Vinaver et de Crimp, il s'agit de repenser cette question à travers l'angle de l'ironie, en tant qu'élément central d'une conception élargie de la parodie. Cette dernière prendrait alors pour objet non seulement une œuvre ou un genre, mais aussi, et surtout, la cité, à travers les «façons de parler» et les discours qui circulent dans l'espace public. La parodie sera donc considérée comme un travail sur l'énonciation, une décontextualisation et une recontextualisation de l'énonciation, et c'est dans ce sens que l'ironie sera considérée comme son élément central: l'ironie apparaît avec l'écart qui se pose entre le contexte et l'énonciation, avec des mises en contact incongrues entre des éléments jugés inconciliables. elle pose un point de vue détaché et discordant, met en œuvre une déstabilisation propre au comique, interpelle et provoque un travail de réception, engendré par une perte de l'évidence et une remise en question de ce qui « va de soi ». C'est ce geste qui s'avère subversif: L'ironie et la parodie invitent chacun à aller au-delà de ses représentations, à repenser ses certitudes, minent de l'intérieur l'autorité et la stabilité des discours dominants, sans pour autant énoncer des vérités simplificatrices. Elles investissent cette potentialité théâtrale qui rend possible la distance, donnent lieu à une imitation non soumise, décalée, décentrée de la cité, ce qui induit une présence du politique dans ces dramaturgies. / Our purpose is to establish the specificity of recent publications (1990 – 2009) identified as the “theatres of speech”, and based upon a worldwide corpus. These plays shape a new political dimension for theatre through ambiguity, considered as an opening for several interpretations, mutually incompatible. In opposition to the vast majority of political theatre works of the XX century, the authors selected in the present corpus refuse to control the outcome of their work on the reader or audience member, or to orientate his/her interpretation in one direction. Ambiguity, in irony and parody, generally causes two kinds of reception: the naïve one, based upon agreement (approval, belief, or fascination), in a context which makes it discordant, or, on the other side, the critical one. The political dimension of these plays appears in the opportunities given to the reader or audience member to question, all by himself, the kinds of manipulation (such as strategy of speech or narration), their effects, as well as the reception habits which make them efficient. These works can then contribute to reduce the impact of manipulation forms based upon habits of naïve reception; hence reduce the action range of strategies based on a “scheme of domination” (Rancière). However, no certainty exists that such opportunities will be used by the reader or audience member. The new political dimension lies in the fact that its visibility is deliberately connected to the singular encounter between the play and each reader or audience member.

In the attempt to let it speak its own name, authors of fiction have since the turn of the 20th century developed increasingly nuanced representations of madness. Such complicated productions of literary madness, I suggest, can be understood in terms of a rich fusion of philosophical inquiry and narratology. Through a reading of László Krasznahorkai’s novel War and War, I highlight how madness is staged as a form of extreme alienation resulting from a process of anticommunicative monologic speech. Building from Paul Buchholz concept of verbal nihilism, I argue that the protagonist of Krasznahorkai’s novel is engaged in an unsustainable process of creative unmaking that leads to madness and his suicide. Further, as enabled by Krasznahorkai’s use of narrative ambiguity, my analysis will also shed light on some of the ways that literature can engage with the theoretical and philosophical traditions of the problem of madness. Though some critics would argue that the novel’s extratextual footprint is suggestive of an attempt at reaching out to a community of outsiders, my analysis argues that the text’s overall trajectory of creative unmaking points to their identity as ultimately empty signifiers.

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