Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / The United States Navy Submarine Hydrodynamic/Hydroacoustic community is a decentralized, multiorganizational, geographically distributed enterprise. Strategic planning and management, whether formal or ad hoc, is necessary for effective functioning of any organization. However, formal strategic planning is particularly difficult in multi-organizational, geographically diverse enterprises. Enterprise-wide performance measurement and a shared understanding of enterprise performance is necessary to devise compelling and effective strategies. During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy submarine force had a clear mission and compelling goals, with resulting clarity on performance metrics. The Submarine Hydrodynamic/Hydroacoustic workforce was focused on helping the submarine force achieve these goals. In the post-Cold War era, the submarine force mission in the integrated battle space is less defined. The percentage of the military budget that can be spent on discretionary spending is decreasing. The Submarine Hydrodynamics/Hydroacoustic community has been directly impacted by the recent lack of focus and budget reductions. The purpose of this thesis is to research the past processes used to perform strategic planning for the Submarine Hydrodynamic/Hydroacoustic community, identify current strategic issues for the community, and document strategic lessons learned that can be identified through the evaluation of product successes and failures. / Civilian, United States Navy

In the field of world language education, it has long been affirmed that language and culture are inseparable. It has also often been asked how teaching language and culture in an inseparable way is to be accomplished. One solution that has been proposed is ethnographic interviews. Other studies have demonstrated that interviewing native cultural informants is beneficial for language students. This study examined whether such interviews are also beneficial to the native informants. The participants in this project, sixteen native speakers of Spanish, were each interviewed three times by a pair of Spanish students who employed ethnographic techniques as a part of the interview process. The native speakers answered two brief questionnaires, one before and one after the interviews, and many of them participated in one-on-one interviews with me, the primary researcher, to follow-up on their answers to those questionnaires and their experiences with the interviews. I found that the participants perceived the project as beneficial in multiple areas including, but not limited to, the chance it gave them to talk about their culture, the interest they perceived in their culture and their viewpoints, and the opportunity it gave them to confirm, modify, or strengthen conclusions they had made from previous cultural experience. A small percentage of the native speakers either did not understand or appreciate the ethnographic techniques that were employed. However, after initial interviews, I gave the students of Spanish feedback on how to better make use of those techniques in order to improve the students' and native speakers' experiences with the interviews and a large majority of the native speakers observed how the subsequent interviews improved. Therefore, similar projects might benefit from making use of this information. Specifically, it might be useful to explain ethnographic techniques not just to interviewers, but also to interviewees, so that both groups might better understand and appreciate the purpose of those techniques. It might also be useful to give feedback to those who use ethnographic techniques to interview native culture informants.

Today’s globalised world calls for a multilingual workplace, with employees who can communicate effectively and efficiently with colleagues and clients around the world. Communication, both in the sense of actual language use and of language management, is an important but often forgotten part of productivity and performance in multinational corporations. This exploratory study aims to investigate how language is used and managed in two Swedish companies with English as at least one of the official languages. By using in-depth ethnographical interviews and a short analysis of the companies’ language policies from the view of centricity, present study is focused on the employees’ perceptions of the day-to-day language use and the company’s language management. It can be concluded that English is the main language used for written communication while both Swedish and English are used in spoken interactions. Language is negotiated through a set of variables and is thus determined by the people involved in the interaction, the function of the interaction and the medium of communication. Although some strains and difficulties did emerge in the interviews, both informants are positive towards the use of English. It is hoped that this small study will contribute to a better understanding of language use and language management in multinational companies in Sweden.

In 1948 and 1949, three doctoral students in sociology and anthropology conducted ethnographic fieldwork in York, SC (called Kent), a mill town. Through interviews, white town elites, black mill workers, and white mill workers revealed their lives to the scholars. What resulted were three remarkable studies on southern town life in the immediate post World War II period. Although segregation had begun to weaken in the face of postwar socioecomic change, it still held whites and blacks in its grip. The “thick description” of community life provided by the ethnographic interviews, as well as the authors’ analysis of life in York, makes these three books invaluable still to scholars of the history and sociology of the South.