This study crafts a schema for understanding the relationship between what organisations say they do and the way they operationalise what they think: the premise-to-received practice. The study navigates its way through an exhaustive volume of relevant work on organisation and organising. The case is argued for adoption of the symbolic interpretive paradigmatic perspective. It is particularly suitable for investigating enacted premise and received practice contexts. A research design is applied in putting these paradigmatic assumptions into motion. The study reports on interpretations emerging from analysis of 'lived experiences' from the two organisational contexts under investigation.A focus for the study was the Public Sector (Western Australia) reform strategy, known as 'customer focus'. The study's title 'Customer Focus: Enacted premise and received practice', locates interest in the relationship between organisational intentions and actions using customer focus as the lens for grounding organisational experiences. This study investigates the apparent reified social construct of organisation though a customer focus lens.Similar studies have focused on interpretation schemata in order to understand key organisational events that support the methodology and assumptions used in this, study. Such studies owes allegiance to the constructivist ontology, based on the' belief of the existence of multiple realities whereby the research act is epistemologically interpretive, aimed at generating understanding.Following the tenets of constructivist and interpretive knowledge, a qualitative methodology was used. Viewing organising as explicitly communicative, the research strategy adopted a symbolic interpretive theoretical perspective. Consistent with hermeneutics and grounded theory principles (not methods), the study sought further understanding of the relationship ++ / between organisational intentions and actions. The research design emphasised an interpretive approach by eliciting data from individual points of view within the work setting. A sample of six organisations was selected, and sixty-one interviews were conducted. Focus interviews were conducted with Top Management Teams. Individual interviews were conducted with Workers.Two sets of meanings were construed. One, Top Management Teams, enacted involvement, commitment, communication and relationships. This was related to Top Management Teams practice of control. The other, Workers, enacted the same meanings in the customer focus strategy, involvement, commitment, communication and relationships. This was related to Workers received practice of equivocality.This study reports on two major findings. First, there was harmony in the enacted thinking on the meaning for customer focus across Top Management Teams and Workers. Second, the harmony in the enacted thinking on the meanings for customer focus across the two groups were discordant with the way respondents operationalise what they report they think. Top Management Teams were unaware of the discord between the way they say they think (involvement, commitment, communication and relationships) and the way they operationalise what they think (practices of control). The discord between premise and practice in Top Management Teams was received in practice by Workers as equivocality. Equivocality emerged as discordant with Worker premise taken for customer focus as meaning to create shared understanding.The study emerged a non-alignment between what organisations say they do (Top Management Team enacted premise) and the way they operationalise what they think (Worker received practice).

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on October 20, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. James (Sandy) Rikoon. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 194-209) and index.

KOCOURKOVÁ, Kristýna. Consumer behaviour of young people on the market with organic food. Brno, 2014. 116 p. Master thesis. Mendel University in Brno, Faculty of Business and Economics. Thesis supervisor: Ing. Martin Souček, Ph.D. This thesis deals with consumer behaviour of young people on the market with organic food. In the past recent years the market with organic food has been growing fast in the Czech Republic. Qualitative and quantitative research have been used in the practical part of the thesis, specifically Focus Groups, questionnaire and depth interviews with consumers of organic food and their producers. Based on the results of the research, a model of consumer behaviour and a segment on which the producers should concentrate have been created. The thesis also suggests marketing recommendations which could be practically used.

Prosodic focus is phonetically realized by increasing duration, F0 and intensity on the focused constituents in a sentence. In some languages, there is a concomitant compression of F0 and intensity after the focused item, referred to as post-focus compression (PFC). Southern Min is a tone language that does not have PFC, while Beijing Mandarin is a tone language that does. Like Mandarin, American English has PFC; unlike Mandarin, American English has lexical stress rather than lexical tone. The current dissertation investigated the phonetic realization of focus in second language Mandarin by Southern Min and English learners and its realization in English by Mandarin learners. Second language experience was also manipulated in each of the investigations. The findings were that younger Southern Min speakers, who used more L2 Mandarin than the mid-age and older speakers, produced substantial PFC in Mandarin. Chinese-heritage American learners, who were exposed to Mandarin earlier than non-Chinese-heritage learners, produced some PFC in Mandarin while non-Chinese-heritage learners did not produce any. Finally, Chinese students in college with longer residencies in the United States produced more PFC in English than those with shorter residencies. American English speakers were also found to have more difficulties producing contour tones compared to the high-level tone on target focused items in L2 Mandarin while Mandarin Chinese speakers had more difficulties in producing unstressed syllables compared to stressed syllables on target focused items in L2 English. Overall, the results support the Speech Learning Model prediction that similarities in L1 and L2 sound system result in difficulty acquiring L2 sounds. This may be especially true for prosody because there are interactions between word- and sentence-level patterns. The results also confirm that age of learning is especially important for native-like acquisition of an L2; however, for early learners, the amount of L2 use and length of residence in the L2-speaking environment also clearly impact the acquisition of L2 prosody. Finally, the results suggest that production of PFC in a language that requires it provides a good index of second language speech proficiency. / 2015-10-17

No description available.

In this dissertation, I examine the marking of focus and givenness in Nte?kepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). The focus is, roughly, the answer to a wh-question, and is highlighted by the primary sentential accent in stress languages like English. This has been formalized as the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle. Given material is old information, and is de-accented in languages like English. Nte?kepmxcin is a stress language, but marks focus structurally. However, I argue that the structure has a prosodie motivation: the clause is restructured such that the focus is leftmost in the intonational phrase. It follows that Salish focus structures lack the special semantics that motivates the use of English structural focus (clefts). As a theoretical contribution, I show that the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle does not account for focus marking in all stress languages, nor does the "distress-given" generalization account for the marking of given information. This is because focus surfaces leftmost, while the nuclear stress position is rightmost. Instead of "stress-focus", I propose that alignment with prosodie phrase edges is the universally common thread in focus marking. This mechanism enables listeners to rapidly recover the location of the focus, by identifying coarse-grained phonological categories (p-phrases and i-phrases). In Thompson River Salish, the focus is associated with the leftmost p-phrase in the matrix intonational phrase. The analysis unifies the marking of focus across languages by claiming that focus is always marked prosodically, by alignment to a prosodie category. The study combines syntactic analysis of focus utterances with their phonetic realization and semantic characteristics. As such, this dissertation is a story about the interfaces. This research is based on a corpus of conversational data as well as single sentence elicitations, all of which are original data collected during fieldwork. The second contribution of this dissertation is thus methodological: I have developed various fieldwork techniques for collecting both spontaneous and scripted conversational discourses. The empirical contribution that results is a collection of conversational discourses, to add to the single speaker traditional texts already recorded for Nte?kepmxcin. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

Master of Science / Department of Psychological Sciences / Clive J. A. Fullagar / Regulatory focus has emerged as an important construct in the organizational sciences. In the past ten years more than 200 papers have been published applying regulatory focus to a wide variety of contexts ranging from marketing and persuasion to feedback and performance appraisal (Johnson et al., 2015). Despite the ubiquity of RFT’s application, only a few studies have targeted the psychometric properties of measures of regulatory focus; and the findings thus far suggest that improvement is needed. Haws (2010) evaluated five measures of regulatory focus and concluded that they differed substantially with respect to their theoretical content, and that most demonstrated unacceptably low internal consistency. Summerville & Roese (2008) drew similar conclusions in their evaluation of the Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (RFQ) and the General Regulatory Focus Measure (GRFM) and added that the two scales might actually be measuring different underlying constructs. Given the inconsistencies and problems associated with existing measures of regulatory focus, the purpose of the current research is to extend the critical evaluation of existing measures of regulatory focus and then to propose the development of a new measure based on rigorous scale development practices like those set forth in Hinkin, (1995) and Crocker & Algina, (1986). A new scale of Regulatory Focus was developed designed to measure all aspects of RFT and to test whether a two-factor or a four-factor SEM model fit the data best. The final scale consisted of 14 items. CFAs were used to test whether a two-factor or a four-factor model of regulatory focus fit the data best. Results suggested that both models fit the data equally well. However, for parsimony reasons and given that one of the latent factors of the four-factor model contained only two items (making any estimates of internal consistency difficult) the two factor model of regulatory focus was retained as the preferred model.

The purpose of this study was to investigate elite soccer players' attentional focus during their best performances, better understand the strategies they use to enter or re-enter optimal attentional states, and explore potential attentional differences according to soccer positions, performance tasks, and game situations. No previous studies have explored elite soccer players' attentional skills from a naturalistic and qualitative perspective in such detail. The growing interest in soccer among Canadians provided further justification for this study. Data collection consisted of individual semi-structured interviews with eight elite soccer players from five main soccer positions, namely goalkeeper, defender, wing, midfielder, and forward. Cross-case thematic analysis indicated positive thinking and pre-performance routines as important sources of optimal focus. Attentional focus varied according to soccer positions and performance tasks. Information processing, sport expertise, and attentional systems theoretical frameworks informed the discussion of results. Applied and theoretical implications were drawn and future studies were recommended.