Cross cultural education in art museums is an interesting and complex issue. While cultural exhibitions have received attention in research, studies have usually focused on the nature of the exhibitions and have not explored the audience's understanding about culture in relationship to the exhibition. This qualitative study explores how and what First Nations cultures have been mediated by a civic art museum and negotiated by the museum audience, and the relationship between the two. Observations of the exhibition and audience and interviews with 99 adults in the museum were collected and analyzed to identify patterns and relationships. Analysis of the exhibition found the mediation of culture was distinguished by a partnership of the museum and First Nations cultures which reflected both their languages and voices. Audience responses illustrated a range of affective, factual and conceptual responses. Positive affective responses reflected the stimulation and satisfaction with learning which occurred. Visitors indicated enlightenment, exposure and revision of previously held ideas and assumptions, similarities and differences among cultures, and insight into perspectives of others. Partnership between the museum and the exhibition of masks from Northwest First Nations cultures is seen as a complex undertaking requiring reflection and examination of these two cultures. Visitor responses to the exhibition indicates learning, thinking and innumerable ways individuals construct meanings and understanding from art museum experiences.

Cross cultural education in art museums is an interesting and complex issue. While cultural exhibitions have received attention in research, studies have usually focused on the nature of the exhibitions and have not explored the audience's understanding about culture in relationship to the exhibition. This qualitative study explores how and what First Nations cultures have been mediated by a civic art museum and negotiated by the museum audience, and the relationship between the two. Observations of the exhibition and audience and interviews with 99 adults in the museum were collected and analyzed to identify patterns and relationships. Analysis of the exhibition found the mediation of culture was distinguished by a partnership of the museum and First Nations cultures which reflected both their languages and voices. Audience responses illustrated a range of affective, factual and conceptual responses. Positive affective responses reflected the stimulation and satisfaction with learning which occurred. Visitors indicated enlightenment, exposure and revision of previously held ideas and assumptions, similarities and differences among cultures, and insight into perspectives of others. Partnership between the museum and the exhibition of masks from Northwest First Nations cultures is seen as a complex undertaking requiring reflection and examination of these two cultures. Visitor responses to the exhibition indicates learning, thinking and innumerable ways individuals construct meanings and understanding from art museum experiences. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

M.Com. (Business Management) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe the level to which a target work culture based on core organizational values was shared in one lumber manufacturing plant. The organization under study perceived that their culture was a source of competitive advantage and was key to their success in safety, product quality, and labor-relations. The organization had actively managed their culture through operations management and human resource policies. The study addressed three research questions (1) to what extent were the core values of the organization shared, (2) were there any inconsistent values, and (3) did organizational members perceive their culture as helping or hurting their plant's performance outcomes. The study found eight of the nine values were shared across the organization. The values of safety and customer satisfaction were strongly shared. The value of environmental stewardship was not apparent in the organization. The organization perceived that its culture helped the mill success in key performance outcomes by promoting teamwork, participation, and communication. For the values of communication, involvement, trust, and respect there were perceptions of inconsistency between the target culture's definition of the value and its actual practice. The study provides support that culture may have an influence on organizational effectiveness. / Graduation date: 2002

This case study describes the organizational culture of a small, private Midwestern university (SPMU). Specifically, the study employs the Competing Values Framework (CVF) (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1981) and the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) (Cameron & Quinn, 1999) to diagnose overall institutional culture and identify distinctive subcultures along representative demographic criterion. The cultural diagnosis achieved with OCAI is expanded through data analysis and used to investigate and demonstrate the utility of the Three-perspective Theory (TPT) of culture offered by Martin (2002).The results of this investigation support the ability of the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) data to demonstrate simultaneously the three perspectives offered by Martin (2002): integration, differentiation and fragmentation. The integrationist bias of CVF and OCAI is shown to be overly narrow given its ability to quantitatively demonstrate multiple perspectives of culture with appropriate analysis. The intersection of OCAI data with the Three-perspective Theory is shown to expand the implementation and interpretation of both approaches to cultural investigation. This is the first time the OCAI has been used in intersection with the Martin (2002) Three-perspective Theory and the second time the OCAI has been used to test for subcultures in higher education as indicated by Paparone (2003) and available research published to date. This is the first published account of subcultural testing with OCAI in a traditional, comprehensive institution of higher education along demographic parameters. / Department of Educational Studies

M.Comm. / Many aspects of the success, or lack of success, of a business can be accurately measured. Revenues, profit and loss, return on assets, share price, price equity ratios, market share, customer satisfaction and many more aspects can be measured and often managed. Apart from the measurable something else is needed: a successful organisational culture. The culture of an organisation is often easier to experience than to describe. The objectives of this study are find a workable definition for culture, tools to measure the culture of groups and leadership skills needed to manage or change the culture of organisations. Various definitions of organisational culture and culture measuring tools are studied. The most promising definition of culture and measuring tools are put to the test in a case study to forni an opinion of the usefulness of such tools for management. Results of this study indicate that the concept culture, as described in the double s cube model, is a very useful tool for managers. It provides a quick and easy entry point to the culture management of an organization. Firstly, the tools that are available to measure culture provide results that could be used to position a company in the double s cube model. Secondly, the results of the culture measurement could be used to formulate and decide on the best course of action when it is necessary to change culture. Culture management is done by manipulating the sociability and solidarity levels in an organisation and by ensuring positive contribution of these elements to business successes. The clear leadership guidelines to achieve this manipulation could be very useful for managers. By using the concept of culture, managers could establish competitive advantages for their businesses. Culture management could be the secret key to open a situation whereby it is possible to improve business performance and at the same time create an environment where people are happy to achieve these goals.

The purpose of this study is to determine (1) whether current conceptual frames for understanding organization culture are adequate. This question is approached first by reviewing and categorizing organization culture literature. A case study of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is presented so as to provide a detailed empirical picture of an actual organization culture. This study revealed three separate arenas of culture at OTA: an overt, or official culture; a covert, or unacknowledged culture testified to by a majority of OTA staff; and an area between these two that can be termed ambivalent or marginal. The overt culture was composed of the objective "company line" values and was characterized as "technoscience" culture, while the covert culture, characterized as reflexive science culture, was made up of deeper level motives or attitudes held implicitly at the personal level and that derive from the dynamics of the longer term developmental life cycle of individual OTA professional staff. The ambivalent arena contained both of these elements and constituted a kind of quasi-conscious awareness that both the other arenas of culture exist. The majority of OTA staff testified to the covert culture, indicating that a reflexive science approach was the one that actually energizes their research practice, rather than the traditional technoscience approach espoused officially by analytical research organizations such as and including OTA. The covert culture seems to be a major factor in OTA's success as a research organization in that it facilitates the meshing of the staff's personal development cycle with the agency's mission. / Ph. D.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Thesis (MPhil (Journalism))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / Adolescent girls’ passage to womanhood is frequently exposed to a vast array of media products. Mass communication products have become educational devices, guiding young women towards an understanding of femininity and all its accompanying intricacies. We are taught gender lessons throughout our lives, but our teen years are of special significance in this regard. In a society that is becoming all the more media saturated, advertisers are capitalising on different desires and ideals that are being constructed in the media. Initially, only adult women were targeted, but these days a number of mass media products aimed specifically at young women have opened up a whole new market. Until a few years ago, South African teenage girls had only women’s magazines aimed at adult women to refer to. These days, however, a number of teen magazine titles exist locally. The aim of this study was to look at teen magazines as an example of texts that are aimed specifically at adolescent women. More specifically, the study looked at the discourse on femininity within the pages of the text – what is the magazine in essence saying about womanhood? To take the research one step further, it was decided to look at how readers of the magazine engaged and negotiated with the text in order to inform their own understanding of femininity. The goal of the study was to determine how the discourse on femininity played out between the text and the reader. Combining quantitative and qualitative elements, the study was located within a cultural studies framework and referred to Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model as a representation of the communication process. It was found that the magazine under scrutiny had twelve specific thematic categories that were most prominent. It was found that the femininity encoded in these texts revolved around consumerism, fashion and boys. The study found that the readers taking part in focus group research possessed a sufficient amount of educational “cultural capital” to be able to resist the dominant messages encoded in the texts, yet they seemingly chose not to. This study also indicated that the femininity that was constructed in the studied text did not take the greater South African context into account, and that it served to entertain readers from higher LSM groups rather than all South African girls.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education