This case study examined the evolution of a partnership between a middle school mathematics teacher and a university researcher around discussions on the content and teaching of mathematics. In particular, the study sought to examine the evolution of the partnership, the constraints present for the teacher and researcher, the impact of the partnership on the mathematical and pedagogical issues that arose in planning, teaching, and assessment, and the impact on the tasks that the teacher chose and implemented in the classroom. Drawing from the literature on collaborations and the emergent perspective, the evolution of the partnership occurred through three stages, determined by the content-teaching tensions. The first stage focused on the mathematics content, with the agenda being set and run by the researcher. The second stage gave rise to the content-teaching tensions as the teacher shifted the discussions from content to a focus on lesson planning and teaching. Tensions were resolved in the third stage with the teacher taking a proactive role in the discussions of lesson design and teaching. The mathematical issues in planning and teaching reflected the shift in the partnership where in the beginning the discussions focused on the mathematical content, later discussions centered on a combination of content, pedagogy, and student thinking. The assessment discussions addressed differences between the language of the curriculum and the district and state tests.The shift in the partnership can be attributed to the teacher's choice of high level mathematics tasks, the subsequent adoption of a conceptually based mathematics curriculum and the effective management of the dialectic tensions by both partners. This study illustrated that generating perturbations and effective management of dialectical tensions has the potential for a fruitful collaboration between teachers and researchers.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Människor vistas idag gärna i naturen för att må bra och friluftsliv tar allt större del i folks vardag. Friluftsliv och funktionskläder har tillsammans med diskussionen kring hållbarhet bidragit till en utveckling av hållbara och miljövänliga material i friluftsbranschen. Samtidigt sker det en växande oro gällande miljöpåverkan inom textilbranschen och den textila värdekedjan. Textilföretag i friluftsbranschen blir granskade i termer av deras textil sourcing och användningen av kemiska substanser. Problemet är hur friluftsvarumärken, återförsäljare och slutkonsumenter i den textila värdekedjan ska samverka för att kedjan och friluftsplagg ska bli mer miljövänliga och fria ifrån farliga kemikalier. Studien vill belysa ett samhällsansvar och behovet av att ställa krav mellan leden i den textila värdekedjan. Syftet är att undersöka om varumärken, återförsäljare och konsumenter kan samverka i den textila värdekedjan kring valet av miljövänliga alternativ för friluftsplagg. För att uppfylla syftet har två forskningsfrågor undersökts och analyserats genom metodtriangulering samt en insamling av sekundär teori har gjorts. Första forskningsfrågan är hur de tre leden i den textila värdekedjan förhåller sig kring miljövänliga och mindre miljövänliga friluftsplagg. Följt av fråga två kan de tre leden samverka för att justera nivån på de krav som ställs på friluftsplagg för att minska miljöpåverkan. Den primära teorin utgörs av det empiriska materialet som består av en enkätundersökning riktad till konsumenter samt mailintervjuer till fem friluftsvarumärken och två av deras återförsäljare. Studien visar att det finns en stor miljömedvetenhet hos samtliga led. Majoriteten av friluftsutövarna, varumärkena och återförsäljarna är villiga att sänka funktionskraven hos ytterplagg om det i slutändan innebär att produkten blir mer miljövänlig. För att justera kraven bör varumärkena undersöka vilka friluftsutövare som konsumerar vad samt hur produkterna används. Detta genom att återförsäljarna interagerar med konsumenterna och vidarebefordrar viktig kunskap och information till varumärkena. Studien kan dra slutsatsen att friluftsvarumärkena och deras återförsäljare har störst möjlighet till att påverka konsumtionen genom att erbjuda och “lära” konsumenten att handla rätt produkter.

The purpose of this study has been to examine how collaborations between clothing companies and fashion designers can influence their brands. Our ambition has been to describe this phenomenon by describing how collaborations can affect and influence the clothing companies’ brand identity, image and positioning. Furthermore, we want to describe how these collaborations have changed the fashion industry and what the future holds for it. We find this topic relevant since collaborations are becoming an advantage for companies in a competitive industry that is constantly in change. We have used a qualitative approach for this study, in which we have conducted seven interviews with different respondents who are related to the fashion industry or with knowledge of brand management. We choose this qualitative approach to gain a deeper understanding for our studied topic. In the final chapter we present our conclusions of this study.

In recent years, the call for business actors to be part of collaborations addressing sustainable development has become more common. There is a consensus that no single sector alone can solve the environmental problems and poverty conditions challenging humanity. However, it is not clear if these cross-sector collaborations thrive when disasters can strike any time and when some actors are richer than others. Through a series of experiments involving threshold public goods games with stochastic shocks, this dissertation contains three related papers exploring different facets of the persistence of cooperation. The experiments were conducted in Sweden, the Philippines and South Africa, countries with varying disaster risk exposures and income structures. Cooperation in the face of disaster explores the effects of different types of uncertainties on cooperation, particularly when there is a risk for repeated disasters (i.e. losses resulting from inadequate cooperation). The results show that cooperation persists when we do not know when disasters may strike (i.e. timing), as well as when there are uncertainties on what is required to avoid the disaster (i.e. threshold) and which losses will be incurred (i.e. impact). Conditional cooperation and disaster uncertainty explores the mechanism behind the persistence of cooperation, as it investigates if conditionality continues to prevail in the face of disaster. The findings show that conditionality and free-riding attenuates while unconditional cooperation accelerates. Cooperating in an unequal and uncertain world explores what happens when inequality enters the picture. The findings reveal that cooperation remains the same when there is inequality and increases in the presence of uncertainty. The effect of uncertainty is stronger than inequality, with high unconditional cooperation and low freeriding. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2015</p>

abstract: Access control has been historically recognized as an effective technique for ensuring that computer systems preserve important security properties. Recently, attribute-based access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner. However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2016

Poverty and food insecurity are common problems among low-income households in developing countries. Innovative interventions in the agricultural sector are regarded as effective in poverty alleviation and therefore food insecurity. Food insecurity is defined by London and Anupindi (2012) as a lack of access to adequate, safe and nutritious food and is closely associated with poverty. It can ultimately be addressed as part of a broader strategy to alleviate poverty, which would include enterprise-led initiatives, inclusive approaches and value chain adjustments. London and Anuipindi (2012) argued that a study hoping to demonstrate the relevance and reliability of understanding the base of pyramid (BoP) as a catalyst to interdependence–based collaboration, would address the level of agribusiness isolation and individualism, to reap the benefits of shared advantage, followed by addressing the interconnected issues of poverty and food insecurity. This study proposes that small scale farmers can benefit from interdependence-based collaborations (IBC) of key role players from the state, private sector and civil society. Consequently, this is a qualitative exploratory study, aiming to seek new insights into the application of inclusive models based on the IBC within the small farm holding, the private sector, civil society and government, and thus their impact on the capacitation of the small-scale farmer and alleviation of poverty. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / ccgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

This research covers collaborations in a studio recording environment and the interrelations between conflict and creativity. The aim was to find what the relationship between creativity and conflict is in a studio recording environment and what different ways there are of managing conflict and the purpose of this was to further the understanding of these concepts and their place, for engineers, producers and musicians to make better use of moments of conflict. A literary review was made to outline and present the key elements of collaborations in studio recording, previous research on creativity and definitions of conflict and creativity. Examining this literary review brought forward a few concepts that then came to be the base on which this study lies. An ethnographic study was conducted with the band Baron’s Court. The band was observed while recording an album and later interviewed to share their experience of the recording session and their thoughts about this topic. There were trends and patterns found in the footage from the observation and in the interviews that allowed for elaborations on how different creative approaches can impact the kind of conflict that might occur and the different ways of managing conflict. The trends and patterns were compared to the findings in the literary review.

Collaborative work across different societal and multiple sectors has historically provided innovative solutions to address community development. It continues to be a crucial focus for funders and policymakers in all areas. This dissertation sought to extend organizational communication scholarship’s contribution by examining how collaborative work manifests at the meso level by interviewing 13 key informants who facilitate collaborations in various counties of Indiana and conducting a qualitative structural analysis of the ego-networks of nine community health workers (CHWs)situated in rural, urban and rural-urban counties of Indiana). The mesolevel communicative model of collaboration (Keyton et al., 2008) was applied to do so. The findings of this study support two key theoretical implications for collaborative work from an egocentric network perspective – 1) individual or personal ties of CHWs are perceived as close communicative relationships only when complemented by knowledge and social capital attributes, 2) While diverse ideas are essential for effective collaborations, lack of trust of new people and ideas, specifically in rural contexts may create tensions which can be navigated by finding common ground through close or dense relational ties with an individual already embedded in the socio-cultural context. Additionally, this dissertation extends the mesolevel communicative model to include examining socio-cultural contexts in their examination of communicative acts in assessing collaborative effectiveness. It also furthers the qualitative structural analysis to include case descriptive to understand an actor’s social embeddedness. Lastly, practical implications for those who fund and evaluate collaborative work are presented, including training funders (on local contexts) and collaborators (on determining their success metrics as a collaborative team).

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction calls for collaboration across sectors in society as an effective way to reduce disaster risk in order to safeguard lives, human wellbeing, and development gains from potential disasters. However, the effectiveness of these cross-sector collaboration approaches has most often been studied in the context of rapid onset disasters such as floods, with less focus on slow-onset disasters such as multiple year droughts. There is also limited research on the contributions of cross-sector collaborations towards Disaster Risk Reduction in African cities. For this study, I set out to investigate cross-sector collaboration efforts contributing to drought response in the city of Harare, Zimbabwe; and how these collaborations were contributing towards fulfilling the four priority areas of the Sendai Framework. These include i) understanding disaster risk, ii) strengthening disaster risk governance, iii) investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience, and iv) enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response. In this qualitative study, I made use of purposive and snowball sampling methods to select 14 key informants from national and local government, non-governmental organisations, and civil society organisations who were directly involved in eight drought related cross-sector collaborations. I conducted in depth semi-structured interviews with these key informants between 2018 and 2019. For the analysis, I followed prior developed themes based on Bryson et al. (2006) theoretical framework to understand cross-sector collaborations. I also applied a typology of barriers and enablers developed from the literature in the analysis, and interpreted emergent themes using NVivo software. I then assessed the contributions of the identified cross-sector collaborations to the activities listed under each of the four priority areas in the Sendai Framework. The findings highlighted the socio-political and economic context of the city of Harare had seeped through and influenced the cross-sector collaborations responding to drought. They shed light on how taking advantage of widely accessible social media platforms serve to enhance collaborations. Additionally, the results highlight the importance of existing networks and relationships in enabling cross-sector collaborations to occur effectively. Most of the cross-sector collaborations occurring in response to drought were originally formed for other reasons and included drought response during the peak of the drought disaster. Collaborations were effective at contributing towards engaging communities in risk assessment and reporting at the local level (Priority 1) and ensuring continual provisioning of services (water) during and after disasters (Priority 4). I make suggestions for collaborations to consider issues of power and how these affect the effectiveness of collaborations on the ground with regards to ensuring social justice and reducing inequality. Finally, I conclude that cross-sector collaborations would be more effective in response to slow-onset disasters when they are formed and applied before the disaster is at its peak. I also suggest that the design and implementation of the cross-sector collaborations be tailor made to consider the socio-political and economic aspects of the city in their design for effective response.