The purpose of this research is to assess the function, form and content of knowledge sharing in communities of practice, social networks and the use of collaborative technologies in Third Sector community networks in the North East of England. This is a significant area worthy of detailed examination due to the acknowledged relationship between communities of practice, social networks and the use of collaborative technologies. These three domains have been examined separately by others and suggestions have been made as to relationships between them but few, if any, studies appear to have used case-based evidence to explore how these relationships add value to knowledge sharing. The research addresses the following research question: To what extent does the use of collaborative technologies in communities of practice and social networks, in the Third Sector of the North East region, add value to face- to-face knowledge sharing and how may this be measured? In order to answer the research question a qualitative holistic case study approach based upon three case studies in Newcastle upon Tyne, South Tyneside and Sunderland has been utilised and grounded theory is used to formulate theory from the observed and analysed practice of the case studies under investigation. The conclusion is drawn that when value is added to knowledge sharing it is relative to the strength of several key variables, including, reciprocity, trust, the strength of network ties and the ability to integrate the use of collaborative technologies into ongoing activities. To aid analysis of the presence and strength of these variables a working paradigm has been designed and developed. Case studies are analysed through this paradigm leading to the development of a theory of knowledge sharing in the Third Sector.

Studiens syfte är att bidra med kunskap om barns inflytande i förskolan utifrån förskollärarens perspektiv. Jag strävar efter att göra detta genom två frågeställningar: Vad innebär inflytande för förskollärare? Och, hur anser förskollärare att de skapar möjligheter för barns inflytande? För att besvara frågeställningarna skickades fyra frågeformulär ut och fyra telefonintervjuer genomfördes, samtliga riktade mot förskollärare. Materialet transkriberades sedan för att sammanställas. Studiens resultat visar att barn får inflytande i olika utsträckning beroende på situation och förutsättningar. Samtliga förskollärare strävar efter att barn ska få inflytande men det framgår även att verksamhetens rutiner, förskollärares förhållningssätt och barns åldrar kan vara hinder för detta. Den slutsats jag dragit av min studie är att samtliga förskollärare arbetar för att ge barn inflytande utifrån de förutsättningar som finns i verksamheten. Förskollärarna är medvetna om de hinder som finns och det framgår genom min studie att de använder olika arbetssätt för att försöka kringgå dessa. / The study aims to contribute knowledge about children's influence in preschool from preschool teacher’s perspective. I aim to do this through two issues: What does influence mean to preschool teachers? And, how do preschool teachers consider themselves creating opportunities for children's influence? In order to examine the issues, four questionnaires were sent out and four telephone interviews were conducted, all directed to preschool teachers. The material was then transcribed to be summarized. The results show that children receive influence in varying degrees depending on the situation and circumstances. All preschool teachers strive for children to have influence, but it is apparent that the preschool practices, preschool teachers' attitudes and children's ages may be obstacles. The conclusion I drew from my study is that all preschool teachers work to give children influence on the conditions that exist in the preschool. The preschool teachers are aware of the obstacles and I reveal through my study that they use different approaches to try to circumvent them.

This case study of the use of hospital accident and emergency records to safeguard children was triggered by Lord Laming’s inquiry into the care of Victoria Climbié, his follow up report, and government legislation since 1948. Research on the use of documentation for safeguarding children is limited, although serious case reviews consistently indicate, that across agencies, record keeping, and the sharing of pertinent information to identify patterns of maltreatment is poor. The social constructed meaning people place on hospital documentation relating to children’s safety and the perceived intentions of conveying that information within and between social environments are the focus of this research. A hermeneutic framework was used to identify how staff in A&E and other agencies perceive the use of A&E child records (birth -16 years). The investigation was in three stages (a) analysis of a purposive sample of 378 A&E children’s records, (b) a focus group with twelve A&E staff on the case study site and (c) another group with twelve members of the Local Operational Child Protection group. Colaizzi’s approach and the hermeneutic circle were the methods utilised to provide a rich description of the essential structure of the phenomenon. The results reveal that although written records are good tools for communication, records are not sufficiently child focused and risks factors are not always recognised. Consequently, the ability of the professional to provide information to safeguard children is limited. The data also highlights professional communication as the central theme, because this seemed to describe and unify the participants’ practices in a way that made sense. The findings of this study indicate that the behaviour of staff plays a crucial role in recording information. They are influenced by factors that are multi-faceted with the complexities of meanings that include social, economic, emotional, cultural, political and technical elements. A new theoretical framework to understand the complex interaction of professional perspectives within the varied situations that occur in clinical practice is proposed. This is underpinned by a constructivist epistemology. This provides an efficient method for evaluating the overall behaviour of the major components that affect documentation and communication, and highlights the recurring problems that arise from these areas when safeguarding children. Hence, this study provides an original contribution to knowledge concerning information sharing in the field of child protection. As a result of the findings of this study A&E records have been redesigned locally.

Stroke is one of the major causes of eating difficulties (EDs). It is one of the leading causes of death and disability and one of the most important factors contributing to health-care costs. There is a clear association between EDs after stroke and undernutrition, where studies have shown that structured screening of eating function among stroke patients can predict nutritional problems as well as need for subsequent institutional care. Reliable and valid instruments that can identify EDs exist, but there is lack of knowledge on how persons experience living with EDs after stroke. Stroke unit care is evidence-based and grounded in multidisciplinary collaboration and continuity of care. The overall aim of this thesis is to explore and describe EDs after stroke as represented by health care professionals in patient records (PRs) and transferred information, and as described by persons living with EDs after stroke. An additional aim is to explore methodological aspects related to the inclusion of persons with EDs and communication impairment in research studies. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used. Two studies used descriptive designs (I, II), one an explorative design (III) and one applied a methodological discussion (IV). In one of the studies PR data were used (I), in another study data were derived from three sources: PRs, screening of patients and interviews with nurses (II). Persons with EDs after stroke participated in Study III while literature, empirical data and researchers' experiences served as the data in study IV. Data were analysed by categorisation of phrases (I), content analysis (II) and descriptive statistics (I, II), by qualitative analysis (III) and by processing of literature and empirical findings in two research groups (IV). The main findings from the studies on representation of stroke care in PRs (I, II) showed that, despite that >50% of patients in Study I and all patients in Study II had EDs, there were few signs of multidisciplinary collaboration dealing with this problem. Unsystematic screening for swallowing difficulties was routine, whereas screening for nutritional risk and EDs was lacking (I, II). Multidisciplinary discharge summaries proved to have low quality and entailed little information on patients' eating ability (I). The two EDs most frequently documented were swallowing and lack of energy to complete a meal (I,II). EDs were described in vague terms (I, II). In Study II, all patients had swallowing difficulties and most patients had lack of energy to complete a meal. The electronic information transfer tool held information on eating ability for most patients (II), but the nursing staff in residential home care perceived deficiencies in that information, even identifying several EDs not reported at discharge (II). Experiences from persons living with EDs after stroke were presented in one main theme: Striving to live a normal life, including three sub-themes: Abandoned to learn on one's own (little support from health care professionals to learn to handle eating), Experiencing losses (loss of eating functions and loss of valued activities) and Feeling dependent in mealtime situations (III). One major finding from the methodological exploration (IV) is that creative approaches and suitable methods for inclusion of participants with EDs and communication impairment into qualitative studies can be found in the fields of aphasiology and learning disabilities. Another major finding from Study IV is that researchers need good communication skills as well as knowledge in neuropsychology. A general conclusion is that screening for EDs should be routine in stroke care and that a multidisciplinary terminology to express EDs must be developed to provide accurate information transfer. Health care professionals need to enhance their knowledge in nutrition and provide support to stroke patients with EDs with the goal that they can eat and perform meal-related activities in accordance with their habits before the stroke. To gain access to the experiences of persons with EDs and communication impairment researchers need to test participatory approaches when planning for inclusion of those persons.

The majority of losses that take place in a day are not large, or sad, they are built almost entirely on behaviors and systems that have nothing to do with loss. Most of these, I discovered, are the result of deliberate carelessness. The word loss is as difficult to define as truth, but its variation is what makes it so interesting and evocative. It is not, and never has been, a definition of loss that I seek: it is not enough to simply say I lost this person or that place, we must consider what is left and what can still be lost. I am interested in the moments of transition that surround loss, when something is in danger of disappearing yet is not quite gone; this work focuses not on past losses, but future moments to be preserved. There is beauty and humanity that can be revealed in fugitive moments and events, and value in their documentation.

Creating a preschool environment for learning and interaction. The purpose of this study was to investigate how preschool teachers describe the practical work that they do to design the preschool environments and how the children's learning and interaction come to be part of that process. The questions addressed in the study were: How do the preschool teachers describe their workplace learning environments? How do the preschool teachers reason about their way of developing their workplace learning environments? How does your preschool environment promote children's interests, learning, and interaction? The study is of qualitative nature and both interviews and observations have been carried out at two Reggio Emilia-inspired preschools in the southern part of Stockholm. The analysis has been examined from a design-oriented perspective. The results show that the preschool teacher's thoughts about children are important for how they shape the preschool learning environment. By continually observing how the children use the environment to interact and what they are interested in, they can, together with the children reflect and start up new projects and further develop the learning environment. The preschool teachers seek to create an inspiring, accessible and transparent environment but also one that can change long-term or short-term at any time. The preschool teachers' perceptions of children as competent and unique individuals who can be helped to reach their own special potential allows for the children to explore and become co-creators of their learning environment.

The present study aims to address the question of how vowel quality varies between rural and town-dwelling male speakers of Irish-English in South Roscommon, Ireland. Previous studies have identified four distinct varieties of Irish-English in Ireland: the Eastern, South &Western, Midland, and Northern varieties, loosely based on the political provinces of Munster, Connaught, Leinster, and Ulster. County Roscommon straddles the provinces of Connaught and Leinster, complicating the presence of phonological features associated with one of two different ‘accent regions’. The last phonological study carried out in Roscommon was by Patrick Leo Henry in 1957. While this was a promising start in assessing regional distinctions, rural ones in particular, the lack of recent studies leaves a sizeable gap that does not address modern changes in the linguistic landscape of Ireland, nor the availability of modern methods of acoustic analysis. In particular, the present study investigates the pre-nasal merging of front unrounded vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, vowel centralization, and a lower /æ/, associated with the Western variety of Irish English. Factors such as supraregionalization lead to my hypothesis that rural speakers will demonstrate higher frequency of the vowel features associated with the Western variety. To assess the frequency of certain vowel sounds, twenty participants were recorded and formant data was extracted for F1 and F2 values of the tokens. It was found that the rural speakers in Roscommon demonstrated a more prominent merger between /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, a lower [æ], and the rural speakers demonstrated an overall trend toward centralization.

This study investigates sociophonetic stress variation in the Onondaga County area of Upstate New York. I argue that five variations of stress correlate to factors of age, education level, place of residence, frequency, and analogical change. Dinkin and Evanini (2010) have examined and discovered similar outcomes of stress variation in his work with dialectal features across the state of New York. Rather than analyze the state and its borders in their entirety, I focus on morpheme-specific analogical change of stress in specific social categories within the Syracuse, New York region. In terms of lexical items, I analyze stress placement within four-, five-, and six-syllable words containing the -mentary affix and explore how stress shifts in these words depending on those social and linguistic factors. Data were collected through formal and informal sociolinguistic interviews in which each instance of the target words were analyzed as belonging to one of five types of stress. Results indicate that Syracuse is one of the locations in the state that see all five stress patterns. To further investigate, I take the provided evidence of stress variation and filter for sociological relevance for factors of age, gender, and residence.

Promoting knowledge sharing has long been regarded as a very important aspect of the management of knowledge. However, knowledge sharing has its challenges due to the special nature of knowledge. Based on this, the researcher argues that it is knowledge seeking rather than knowledge sharing that plays a crucial role in knowledge management. However, there is no clear definition for knowledge seeking in existing literature. In the few studies of knowledge seeking research, knowledge has been viewed as a noun and as such knowledge seeking has been seen as no different to information seeking. The aim of this research has been to explore the knowledge seeking process in the workplace in order to conceptualise knowledge seeking by developing a theoretical model. A review of the literature concerning knowledge seeking has been conducted in order to clarify the concept of knowledge seeking. From the interpretivist’s perspective, a qualitative research approach has been taken, in which sense-making theory is employed as a methodological guide. Time-line interviews were carried out with construction engineers in China to collect primary data, and Template analysis was utilized. Based on the literature, this thesis defined knowledge seeking as a learning process, which consists of three major themes: experiential learning, information seeking and problem solving, based on which a preliminary framework was developed. Twenty six engineers were successfully interviewed. The findings from the data confirmed the links between the themes. Further codes were also identified to develop a final template, which evolved to a theoretical model illustrating the knowledge seeking process in the workplace. By promoting knowledge seeking rather than knowledge sharing, this research contributed innovatory insight into existing KM research. The new concept of knowledge seeking and the theoretical model developed thereafter contribute to knowledge by providing a theoretical framework for further research in this area. The specific combination of time-line interviews and template analysis has demonstrated good results in this research. Collecting primary data from China, this research applied Western theories onto engineers within a Chinese context, which has contributed to KM research in China. These contributions will result in many practical implications for KM practices.

Det är trendigt just nu att utifrån olika aspekter se över vad offentliga upphandlingar bidrar till och vilken roll de ska ha i framtiden. Vissa av dessa aspekter som tas upp i debatten, exempelvis miljökrav och sociala krav, har traditionellt sett inte har hört hemma inom inköp och offentlig upphandling. Men den här typen av krav är sannolikt här för att stanna och det krävs därför effektiva processer som omhändertar den här typen av krav som ställs i allt större utsträckning. Men bortsett från lagstiftning, politiska krav, måluppfyllnad etc. finns det ett egenvärde i att ha effektiva processer. Processperspektivet har fallit lite mellan stolarna nu när det är så mycket annat som är aktuellt och relevant inom upphandlingsvärlden. Syftet med studien är att utveckla kunskap kring styrkor och förbättringsområden i processen ”att ta fram upphandlingsunderlag” för att se hur processen kan utvecklas vidare. Detta sker med utgångspunkt i medarbetarnas egna erfarenheter av att arbeta fram detta underlag. För att besvara syftet, har data har samlats in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer och granskning av en logg. Studien är en fallstudie och den genomfördes som en kvalitativ studie för att få en djupare förståelse för situationen. Resultatet visar att styrkorna bl.a. är att det finns erfarenhet av upphandlingsprocessen och kunskap om vilka krav lagstiftningen ställer. De förbättringsområden som identifierades är att det i viss utsträckning är oklara förväntningar på vem som ska göra vad. Det finns också bristande förståelse för vilken tid och resurser som krävs för att ta fram ett upphandlingsunderlag. / It's trendy right now to see various aspects of what the public procurement contributes to and what role they will have in the future. Some of these aspects addressed in the debate, such as environmental and social requirements, have not traditionally have belonged in purchasing and public procurement. But this type of requirement is likely here to stay and it therefore requires effective processes that take care of these types of requirements increasingly. But apart from law, political demands, achievement of goals, etc., there is an intrinsic value in having efficient processes. Process perspective has fallen between the cracks a bit now that there is so much else that is current and relevant in the procurement world. The purpose of the study is to develop knowledge about the strengths and areas for improvement in the process "to prepare procurement documentation" to see how the process can be further developed. This is done based on the employees' own experiences of working up this material. To answer the purpose, the data were collected through semi-structured interviews and the examination of a log. The study is a case study and it was conducted as a qualitative study to gain a deeper understanding of the situation. The result shows that the strengths including is that there is experience in the procurement process and knowledge of the legal standard. The improvement areas identified is that there is to some extent unclear expectations of who should do what. There is also a lack of understanding of the time and resources required to develop a procurement documentation.