Online Communities of Practices (CoPs) is emerging as a major form for knowledge sharing in this era of information revolution. Due to the advancement of technology and ease of internet access in every part of the world, people began to get more and more involved in online CoPs to share knowledge. The defining characteristic of a Community of Practice is the interaction between members in order to jointly determine and embrace goals, eventually resulting in shared practices. Crucial to the success of a Community of Practice is the engagement between community members. Without engagement, a Community of Practice can not share knowledge and achieve its negotiated goals. To that end, there is a need to examine, why do people engage in an online discussion, what role domain experts play to keep on-line discussion alive and how to develop a ''right intervention'' to maintain and stimulate participants for engagement in on-line community. This thesis studied eight Communities of Practices that are being deliberately formed to facilitate knowledge sharing in the online community and describes an exploratory study of knowledge sharing within Communities of Practices (CoPs) by investigating eight CoPs ¿Start up Nation, All nurses, Young Enterpener, Teneric, SCM Focus, Systems Dynamics, Mahjoob and Alnj3 CoPs. The CoPs under investigation shared the following characteristics: permanent life span, created by interested members (i.e. bottom-up rather than top-down management creation), have a high level of boundary crossing, have more than 700 members who come from disparate locations and organizations, have voluntary membership enrollment, high membership diversity, high topic¿s relevance to members, high degree of reliance on technology, and are moderated. Data were gathered on the eight CoPs through online observations and online questionnaire survey. Results show that in each of the case study the most common type of activity performed by members of each CoP was sharing knowledge, followed by socialsing. Regarding the types of knowledge shared, the most common one across all CoPs was practical and general knowledge. The types of practical knowledge, however, varied in each CoP. The study also discovered that storytelling extensively enhances knowledge transfer and participants¿ interpersonal communications in eight communities under investigation. What were also notable in this study were the stories discussed in a CoP remains in the archive, what are more likely to generate interest and curiosity on the topic among inactive members who ultimately facilitates knowledge transfer. In this study it is also evident that successful topics with successful conclusion (in terms that the original query was answered) will not necessary get high responses and vice versa. An analysis of selected topics in the eight case studies has shown that some successful topics have few replies and vice versa, where many topics ended with open conclusion or they were unsuccessful in terms that the original query was not answered satisfactory. Therefore, it is not necessary that successful topic will get high number of responses as there are some successful topics which have limited number of replies. Overall, it is found that, topic may play a major role in the success of online discussion. It is observed in the study that members normally use short messages rather long messages and usually discusses more than one topic within one thread. Practical implications for knowledge sharing in online communities of practice were discussed, along with some recommendations for future research.

This thesis explores the ideological role of metaphor in British governmental discourses on ¿social exclusion¿. A hybrid methodology, combining approaches from Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and cognitive theories of metaphor, is used to address how social exclusion and other metaphors are deployed to create an ideologically vested representation of society. The data consists of linguistic metaphors identified from a 400,000+ word machine-readable corpus of British governmental texts on social exclusion covering a ten year period (1997- 2007). From these surface level features of text, underlying systematic and conceptual metaphors are then inferred. The analysis reveals how the interrelation between social exclusion and a range of other metaphors creates a dichotomous representation of society in which social problems are discursively placed outside society, glossing inequalities within the included mainstream and placing the blame for exclusion on the cultural deficiencies of the excluded. The solution to the problem of exclusion is implicit within the logic of its conceptual structure and involves moving the excluded across the ¿boundary¿ to join the ¿insiders¿. The welfare state has a key role to play in this and is underpinned by a range of metaphors which anticipate movement on the part of the excluded away from a position of dependence on the state. This expectation of movement is itself metaphorically structured by the notion of a social contract in which the socially excluded have a responsibility to try and include themselves in society in return for the right of (temporary) state support. Key systematic metaphors are explained by reference to a discourse-historical view of ideological change in processes of political party transformation. / BISA and CSV

The purpose of the study is to gain an overview of the prevailing vocal register vocabulary in Sweden today and to examine how the existing pluralism has a positive or negative impact. There is currently a diverse narrative surrounding vocabulary, and new vocal discourse trends have influenced the conversation about vocal register terminology.The vocabulary taught in higher music education will shape future narratives, prompting the question of whether voice instructors at academies of music believe that the wide range of vocabulary can influence vocal instruction and which discourses these instructors consider relevant.

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This study seeks to identify discourses on ethnic minority children in the preschool system of Copenhagen, and in extension investigate what consequences the discourses have to the “subject position” of the children. The study includes a small-scale qualitative study of Copenhagen institutions based on the collection of three semi-structured interviews with preschool pedagogues. Additionally, the “Inclusionguide” from the municipality of Copenhagen have been included to strengthen the analysis. The material has been analysed using a range of theoretical concepts of Michel Foucault. Based on the analysis, the thesis identifies several elements, which permeates discourses surrounding ethnic minority children. The thesis concludes that discrepancies between the institutional sphere and the family sphere can cause the children be categorised as “wrong” or “abnormal” according to the discourses reproduced in the institutions. Furthermore, the thesis suggests that discourses are based on dualistic assumptions and controlling power relations, and are problematic to challenge.

<p>Twenty-nine of the some 900 fragmentary Scrolls recovered from the caves off the northwest shores of the Dead Sea were penned in the Aramaic language. It is generally agreed that this cross-section of Aramaic literature among the predominantly Hebrew collection derives from before and beyond the scribal community that lived at Qumran. Whether or not the Aramaic texts constitute a cohesive collection, however, is an ongoing debate. While their compositional origins are unknown, this dissertation avers that enough common traits exist among the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls to indicate an inherent unity in the group. Paramount among these traits is the pervasive usage of the dream-vision in a constellation of at least nineteen Aramaic writings.</p> <p>This study advances our understanding of the Aramaic texts by exploring the dream-vision as a literary convention from two interrelated perspectives. Part One maps out the major compositional patterns of dream-vision episodes across the collection. Special attention is paid to recurring literary-philological features (e.g., motifs, images, phrases, idioms, etc.), which suggest that pairs or clusters of texts are affiliated intertextually, tradition-historically, or originated in scribal circles in close proximity. Part Two articulates three predominant concerns advanced or addressed by dream-vision revelation. It is argued that the authors of these materials utilized the dream-vision (i) for scriptural exegesis of the patriarchal traditions, (ii) to endorse particular understandings of the origins and functions of the priesthood, and (iii) for historiography by creating <em>ex eventu </em>revelations of aspects or all of world history. In tandem these two components affirm the centrality of the dream-vision to the thought world of the Aramaic texts as well as demonstrate that this revelatory <em>topos</em> was deployed using a shared stock of language in order to introduce a closely defined set of concerns.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No / The recent turn to Lacan’s work in critically-oriented Organization and Management Theory signals a welcome focus on one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers. This article introduces Lacan’s thesis on gender, making a case for its importance for understanding organizations. We discuss two contrasting receptions to Lacan’s Seminar XX, from pro- and anti-Lacanian feminists, offer our own interpretation which can be summed up as a Lacanian inspired parody of the phallic signifier, and argue that Lacanian theorists should turn Lacan’s ideas back upon them/ourselves to question critically our own positions. Further we review Lacan’s seminar XVII and its analysis of four dominant discourses—the university, the master, the hysteric and the analyst. The advantages of the discourse of the hysteric for a Lacanian politics of gender, enabling us to undo our arguments from outside of our own gender and identity, are then identified. We thus advocate conceptual and empathetic (hysterical) bisexuality for critical scholarship within organization studies that already, perhaps unawares, is hysterical. This allows us to avoid, as much as possible, slipping into the frozen and sterile discourse of the master.