For future generations to maximise their capability to operate within technologically driven economies, it is critical to foster computer abilities at every level of the schooling process. Teachers are central to this process. Yet, for many teachers, the need to integrate computer use in their teaching is threatening and overwhelming. This thesis argues that, given the rapid rate of technological change, skills-based approaches to computer education inadequately prepare teachers for a career of continued technological change. Effective computer education for teachers requires more than skills training. It involves changes in attitudes, values and beliefs that provide confidence for ongoing learning. Furthermore, it involves learning to adapt to change, to be flexible, intuitive and above all persistent. It requires the fostering of teachers who know how to be self-directed and independent in their computer learning, rather than those dependent on structured routines or guidelines. This thesis is the ‘story’ of an action research initiative underpinned by a belief in the importance of approaches to computer education which foster lifelong computer learning. It traces the journey of a reflexive process of change and iterative development in the teaching of an educational information technology (computer) unit to pre-service teacher education students. Over a period of three years (1999-2001) I pursued a central research question, namely: How can I develop my teaching practice to better facilitate the development of capable computer users? The research explores the distinction between a ‘competent’ and a ‘capable’ computer user and trials a range of teaching and learning approaches that aim to facilitate the development of capable computer users.From this constructivist research and teaching process a multidimensional approach to computer education emerged, founded on metacognition and reflection. This approach is demonstrated to offer many advantages over a skills-focused approach. This thesis maps the complexity of the computer learning and teaching context, arguing that simplistic approaches to teaching will produce narrow and limited learning outcomes. Rather, a holistic approach is proposed, one that moves beyond the development of computer competency toward a longer term vision of facilitating computer capability. It is argued that the role of the computer ‘teacher’ is to foster reflective awareness and develop a learning environment that can assist computer learners to become comfortable existing on the ‘edge of chaos’.This research supports previous studies which indicate the important role of computer self efficacy and the influence of factors such as perceived usefulness, anxiety, support and frequency and duration of use. However, the research also documents the unpredictable influence of these factors on individuals’ resultant approach to computers and challenges dichotomous interpretations of such factors. Appropriate attribution is also shown to be a major influence on computer capability, as are factors such as help-seeking, motivation and goal-setting, although again, these influences are non-linear. It is argued that computer capability cannot be ‘taught’ but, rather, computer educators should look to creating environments where its emergence can be facilitated. The metacognitive computer learning context developed and explored through this research is one such approach.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The overarching objective of this thesis is to investigate and examine several contemporary IC theories and how they are utilised in practice so that understandings of the IC concept can be developed, in order to answer in part the main research question of “How does IC in action influence organisations?” The content of the thesis is based on a review of IC from both a theory and practice perspective and four empirical papers that examines IC theory as it is implemented in practice. In combining these papers into a coherent piece of work, a critical research perspective, as outlined by Alvesson and Deetz (2000), has been utilised as the theoretical framework. The term ‘critical’ is used in this thesis not to find fault with contemporary theory and practice of IC but rather to examine and question the application of IC theory into practice. The end result of doing so is the narrowing of an identified gap between IC theory and practice. A ‘critical’ analysis of IC in action is justified because the development of the concept of IC parallels that of ‘critical’ theory in that both have evolved from changing conditions in society as technology and the proliferation of knowledge that have fundamentally altered the conditions under which organisations operate. The overarching findings of the thesis are based on three outcomes of critical research being insight, critique and transformative re-definitions. Insight into IC is developed by examining contemporary IC frameworks as they have been applied. Critique is developed by putting to the test the implications for organisations as a result of implementing these contemporary IC frameworks. Last, transformative re-definition is achieved by opening a discourse on the impact of implementing IC practices so that academics and practitioners can develop critical, relevant and practical understandings that begins the process of change and develops practical managerial skills. More importantly this thesis identifies how the development of tools to reduce ‘causal ambiguity’ about how intangible resource help create (or destroy) value has the potential to raise the profile of IC as a strategic management technology. But from the wider view of the critical perspective, it is not the intention of this thesis to prescribe specific formulae for the measuring, management and reporting of IC, nor does it intend to further develop theory. So while the individual papers may proffer that certain avenues proved productive in developing insights, critique and transformative re-definition, these avenues are not offered as the preferred way of investigating IC. More specifically the goal of a critical perspective is to open a discourse. The opprurtinity for academics and practitioners to engage in discourse is enabled by the thesis’ focus on the issues identified by highlighting the gap between IC theory and practice. Furthermore, each of the included papers offers the opportunity for further discourse by way of the opportunities that remain for future research. Additionally, the thesis achieves exemplifies a number of different approaches to conducting research into IC practice that puts to the test particular aspects of IC theory in order to develop insights and understandings of IC in practice. As the empirical material only examines a fraction of contemporary IC theory there is scope for further research and thus discourse into the implementation of IC theory into IC practice. This future research should not be constrained by a particular method of research as exemplified in the variety of methods employed to gather the empirical material for the papers which stretches along the continuum of qualitative and quantitative research. This too provides an avenue of for future discourse.

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is a unit that manages the most critically ill, complex and unstable patients in the hospital. As a result, the ICU is characterised by a high degree of clinical and organisational unpredictability and uncertainty. In Western discourse, uncertainty is often portrayed as problematic, and as something to be controlled and reduced. This research challenges this discourse by examining the productive relationship between certainty and uncertainty in the work practices of ICU clinicians, and subsequently, how intensive care clinicians utilise uncertainty to construct order in a highly unpredictable work environment. To understand how order can coexist with ICU’s unremitting unpredictability, complexity theory is used to frame this investigation. This research engaged an emergent, interventionist methodology, deploying multiple methods. Using ethnography, video-ethnography, and video-reflexivity, this research relied on clinicians’ participation in the construction and analysis of video data of the ICU clinicians’ work practices. This resulted in clinician-led practice change in the ICU. This research suggests that methods need to be deployed adaptively in order to deal with the complexity of ICU, in addition to the moment-to-moment emergence of events that require the researcher’s own work plans to be revisited. Moreover, in order to gain traction with, and understand highly complex and changeable environments, the researcher needs to also enter and experience uncertainty herself. Using complexity theory as its analytical tool, this research shows an inseparability of uncertainty and certainty in the ICU which is labeled ‘un/certainty’. Three main conclusions emerge from this research. First, un/certainty predominates in intensive care, and due to this, ordering is a process rather than a final state. Un/certainty is at the heart of the adaptive practices that clinicians enact. These adaptive practices are highly interconnected to the changes that the ICU environment may require, and thus produce a dynamic order in the unit. Second, the researcher herself, in order to come to terms with the complexity and un/certainty of the ICU environment must also enter un/certainty in order to gain traction with the ICU environment: unpredictability and complexity cannot be studied from a neat and disengaged distance. Third, the presence of un/certainty in the ICU can be significant and enabling rather than disabling for clinicians in their ongoing pursuit of dynamically ordering practice. The contribution of un/certainty to frontline practice is as a central driver to managing change and complexity. Therefore it should be positively revalued by health services researchers, policy makers and clinicians alike.

The decentralized Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) is a powerful formal model for studying multiagent problems where cooperative, coordinated action is optimal, but each agent acts based on local data alone. Unfortunately, it is known that Dec-POMDPs are fundamentally intractable: they are NEXP-complete in the worst case, and have been empirically observed to be beyond feasible optimal solution.To get around these obstacles, researchers have focused on special classes of the general Dec-POMDP problem, restricting the degree to which agent actions can interact with one another. In some cases, it has been proven that these sorts of structured forms of interaction can in fact reduce worst-case complexity. Where formal proofs have been lacking, empirical observations suggest that this may also be true for other cases, although less is known precisely.This thesis unifies a range of this existing work, extending analysis to establish novel complexity results for some popular restricted-interaction models. We also establish some new results concerning cases for which reduced complexity has been proven, showing correspondences between basic structural features and the potential for dimensionality reduction when employing mathematical programming techniques.As our new complexity results establish that worst-case intractability is more widespread than previously known, we look to new ways of analyzing the potential average-case difficulty of Dec-POMDP instances. As this would be extremely difficult using the tools of traditional complexity theory, we take a more empirical approach. In so doing, we identify new analytical measures that apply to all Dec-POMDPs, whatever their structure. These measures allow us to identify problems that are potentially easier to solve on average, and validate this claim empirically. As we show, the performance of well-known optimal dynamic programming methods correlates with our new measure of difficulty. Finally, we explore the approximate case, showing that our measure works well as a predictor of difficulty there, too, and provides a means of setting algorithm parameters to achieve far more efficient performance.

In the context of a growing social complexification, projects have evolved in the pastdecades from simple endeavours to complex and uncertain undertakings. Consequently,project complexity has emerged as an important research direction, and recently severalproject complexity frameworks have been suggested. However, little research has beendone in this area and there has been no study on the relationship of project complexity,in its holistic sense, and the risk of delay. Therefore, the study investigates the intricaterelationship between project complexity and project delay. The research is conducted inthe context of Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP) implementation projects,which are inherently complex and often record delays. The study has a qualitative nature and adopts an inductive approach. Nine ERPimplementationprojects have been studied in order to answer the research question.Several sources of evidence (semi-structured interviews and questionnaires) have beenutilized to ensure the credibility of the research findings through triangulation. The study contributes to the research field by verifying and augmenting the existingframeworks on reasons for project delay, complexity categories and their interplay. Itwas identified that complexity in a holistic sense represents a necessary condition forproject delay. Moreover, the study showed that although ERP projects are oftenconsidered to be technically complex, their complexity stems mainly from ‘subjective’(or perceived) and ‘uncertainty’ complexity dimensions. Finally, the conceptual modelof Eden et al. (2005) was modified to reflect the findings of the study.

According to the theory of NPcompleteness, many problems that have important realworld applications are NPhard. This excludes the possibility of solving them in polynomial time unless P=NP. A number of approaches have been proposed in dealing with NPhard problems, among them are approximation algorithms and parameterized algorithms. The study of approximation algorithms tries to find good enough solutions instead of optimal solutions in polynomial time, while parameterized algorithms try to give exact solutions when a natural parameter is small. In this thesis, we study the structural properties of parameterized computation and approximation algorithms for NP optimization problems. In particular, we investigate the relationship between parameterized complexity and polynomialtime approximation scheme (PTAS) for NP optimization problems. We give nice characterizations for two important subclasses in PTAS: Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (FPTAS) and Effcient Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (EPTAS), using the theory of parameterized complexity. Our characterization of the class FPTAS has its advantages over the former characterizations, and our characterization of EPTAS is the first systematic investigation of this new but important approximation class. We develop new techniques to derive strong computational lower bounds for certain parameterized problems based on the theory of parameterized complexity. For example, we prove that unless an unlikely collapse occurs in parameterized complexity theory, the clique problem could not be solved in time O(f (k)no(k)) for any function f . This lower bound matches the upper bound of the trivial algorithm that simply enumerates and checks all subsets of k vertices in the given graph of n vertices. We then extend our techniques to derive computational lower bounds for PTAS and EPTAS algorithms of NP optimization problems. We prove that certain NP optimization problems with known PTAS algorithms have no PTAS algorithms of running time O(f (1/Epsilon)no(1/Epsilon)) for any function f . Therefore, for these NP optimization problems, although theoretically they can be approximated in polynomial time to an arbitrarily small error bound Epsilon, they have no practically effective approximation algorithms for small error bound Epsilon. To our knowledge, this is the first time such lower bound results have been derived for PTAS algorithms. This seems to open a new direction for the study of computational lower bounds on the approximability of NP optimization problems.

This dissertation examines the nexus of complexity theory and peace education and its implications for developing educational praxis that engages with the demands of global complexity. In this thesis, I argue that as societies become more globalized and complex (global complexity) there is an onus upon education to adapt its methods so people can understand the workings of these processes better and further develop the ethical and creative resources needed for responding to system dynamics effectively. My central thesis is that the most appropriate way to do this is to use methods that are congruent with the subject matter of global complexity - that is to align one's pedagogy with one's subject area. This dissertation therefore investigates the situated and contingent responses of peace educators working in the field to the challenges and opportunities that arise when attempting to adapt to local/global dynamics. It utilizes ethnography, narrative inquiry, and autoethnography and draws its data from interviews with over 50 educators in India, Japan, and the US. This research demonstrates that when engaging with global complexity, peace educators adapt both their ontological understanding and methodological orientation in ways congruent at times with the insights of complexity theory. While this understanding can be at odds with mass educational methodologies, this tension also is a touchstone for peace educator's creative formulation of novel praxis in response to the demands of global complexity. This dissertation thus examines some of the possibilities for learning within complex knowledge production systems and highlights the need for further research into the dynamics and processes at play within global educational 'networks'.

To help contemporary couples successfully navigate the 21st Century’s individualistic, diverse, multicultural, global, postmodern relationship environment, individual, couple, and family counselors, marriage therapists, couple therapists, family psychologists, relationship coaches, marriage educators, counselor educators, and other helping professionals need to understand and promote the positive, strengths-based, holistic, and wellbeing development of couple relationships to help them succeed and flourish in the long- term. This qualitative, narrative, visual autoethnography explores the researcher’s own experience of the culture of her 27-year long soul mate relationship with her partner through the lens of Positive and Holistic Couple Relationship Development Theory (PHRDT), its 7- phase Soul Mates Model, including encounter and dating, commitment, intimacy, building a life, shadow and adversity, renewal, and completion, resulting in the metaphorical development of the philosopher’s stone or gold of the philosophers, and its 12 positive relationship development principles. The study also explores the meanings derived from 8 alchemical pictograms associated with the Soul Mates Model’s 7 phases, which of the 12 positive principles played out in her relationship, and the effectiveness of her and her partner’s deliberate efforts at positive relationship building, as well as how these experiences may inform her teaching and practice. Based on the findings, which include the recall of fourteen years of spiritual, psychic, and visionary encounters with her partner before they met, the researcher concludes that she and her partner are not only soul mates engaged in the soul mating process, but also twin souls, linked together by an unfathomable bond that has helped them develop intimacy, remain bonded through adversity, and flourish as a couple in the long-term. Additionally, the researcher concludes that the Soul Mates Model and 8 alchemical pictograms are useful mythopoeic tools to explore the positive and holistic development of the couple relationship, that all 12 positive principles played out in her relationship, and that the process of soul mating may be taught to others with help of strategic positive, holistic, and mythopoeic interventions, yet that twin- soulship cannot be taught. She thus concludes that soul mates can be grown, yet twin souls must be born.

Despite rapidly burgeoning diversity in the Canadian workforce, and demonstrable gains to be made as a result of increasing inclusion, organizations still struggle to create meaningfully inclusive workplaces. The traditional diversity management model has largely failed to fix this longstanding problem. A variety of research has identified successful strategies for increasing inclusion across disciplines such as social psychology, critical management studies, systems theory, and universal design. However, these overlapping strategies, as well as the commonalities of underlying structure, go unseen due to ideological and disciplinary siloing. Working from a foundation of theoretical pluralism, I present two linked ideas in this paper. First, I propose and justify a shift in language from the counter-productive <italic>diversity management</italic> towards <italic>meaningful inclusion</italic>. Second, using multi-disciplinary research I identify successful, broadly-applicable strategies for enhancing meaningful inclusion in the workplace, and describe an <italic>inclusion matrix</italic> of best practices that creates a practical road map organizations can use to enhance meaningful inclusion.

Due to the exponential growth of the dimension of the space of tensors V_(1)⊗• • •⊗V_(n), any naive method of representing these tensors is intractable on a computer. In practice, we consider feasible subspaces (subvarieties) which are defined to reduce the storage cost and the computational complexity. In this thesis, we study two such types of subvarieties: the third secant variety of the product of n projective spaces, and tensor network states. For the third secant variety of the product of n projective spaces, we determine set-theoretic defining equations, and give an upper bound of the degrees of these equations. For tensor network states, we answer a question of L. Grasedyck that arose in quantum information theory, showing that the limit of tensors in a space of tensor network states need not be a tensor network state. We also give geometric descriptions of spaces of tensor networks states corresponding to trees and loops.