The number of women in the Chartered Accounting (CA) profession has continued to rise since the 1970s; women now make up one-third of working CAs in Canada (Tabone, 2007). Yet, the number of women in the upper levels of the profession remains very low. The main purpose of this dissertation is to understand how women CAs experience and talk about the CA profession and to explore the implications of the CA context for the development and maintenance of friendship among women CAs. The ways in which power and agency are exercised in the micro-politics of the everyday lives of women CAs and the nexus of relations through which individuals develop and enact their identities is explored through open-ended interviews and discussion groups with Western Canadian women CAs. <p> The dominant ideology of professionalism constructs both individual and collective identities while structuring workplace relations. The findings of this study demonstrate that female CAs believe strongly in elements of professionalism such as meritocracy, excellence, client service, and commitment but that their understanding is gender-neutral and differs from the dominant masculinist interpretations and practices. The participants narratives reveal a particular pattern of engagement with the profession characterized by stages of early optimism, disillusionment and the glass ceiling, negotiation and the glass box, resignation, and justification. All participants encountered a glass ceiling, or invisible barriers to advancement, as a result of the conflicting meanings of the ideals of professionalism. As the women attempted to negotiate solutions to the constraints imposed by the professions elite, masculinist discourses were mobilized by those in power in new ways resulting in further constraints upon the women, containing them within a glass box that limited their career mobility in all directions and may contribute to gender segmentation in the profession.<p>Masculinist discursive practices have a significant impact not only on the participants career aspirations, but also on their friendship relationships, which are, in part, constituted by their relationship to the profession, their need for support against masculinist strategies, and their choice of gender identity strategy. Friendships do not increase activism as the participants feel powerless to create change and fear reprisals.

I examined whether perceptions of intergroup similarity and conflict interact to predict prejudice and facilitation of an intergroup social interaction as a consequence of physiological linkage – a state correlated with successful social interactions wherein two people's autonomic nervous systems synch-up in time. Studies 1 and 2a, revealed an association between similarity, conflict and low prejudice. In Study 2b participants completed essays priming similarity and conflict in order to test the indirect effect of their interaction with participants' physiological reactivity on the success of a dyadic social interaction. Similarity, conflict and physiological reactivity interacted to predict physiological linkage, which in turn moderated the effects of conflict on the success of the social interaction. These results suggest that physiological and social cognitive processes play key roles in determining the important moment when an outgroup stranger becomes a potential friend.

I examined whether perceptions of intergroup similarity and conflict interact to predict prejudice and facilitation of an intergroup social interaction as a consequence of physiological linkage – a state correlated with successful social interactions wherein two people's autonomic nervous systems synch-up in time. Studies 1 and 2a, revealed an association between similarity, conflict and low prejudice. In Study 2b participants completed essays priming similarity and conflict in order to test the indirect effect of their interaction with participants' physiological reactivity on the success of a dyadic social interaction. Similarity, conflict and physiological reactivity interacted to predict physiological linkage, which in turn moderated the effects of conflict on the success of the social interaction. These results suggest that physiological and social cognitive processes play key roles in determining the important moment when an outgroup stranger becomes a potential friend.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as electronic mail and newsgroups, is quickly becoming a pervasive interpersonal communication means. The general research purpose of the present study is to investigate the communicative strategies individuals use to maintain exclusively Internet-based friendships and the extent to which cultural, relational and channel-related factors may affect the use of these strategies. A total of 136 Chinese Internet users and 134 American Internet users completed an online survey that measured maintenance strategies that they used for sustaining a friendship that they had developed on the Internet, their online friendship relational experience (relational and partner certainty and relational equity), and communication channel-related variables (perceived social presence of the Internet and anticipation of face-to-face interactions in the near future). Participants were also asked to think of an offline “real-life” friendship and to answer questions about relational maintenance strategies used for sustaining this friendship. The results suggested that overall people use more prosocial relational maintenance strategies in their offline friendships than in their online friendship. However, this pattern was moderated by friendship status. The gap of frequencies of relational maintenance strategies in online and offline friendships was particularly large for casual friendships. With regard to antisocial maintenance strategies, participants reported more coercion/criticism in offline friendships but more deception in online friendships. Consistent with the prior findings concerning cultural variations in relational maintenance, the current study found that the American participants more frequently used prosocial maintenance strategies than did the Chinese participants in both online and offline friendships. On the other hand, the Chinese participants were more likely to use all types antisocial maintenance strategies than their American counterparts in both online and offline friendships. The result of the current study confirmed that varied degrees of relational uncertainty and relational equity are associated with the use of relational maintenance strategies. The findings also indicated the impact of communication channel-related factors on online friendship maintenance strategies. In sum, the findings of this cross-cultural study lent credence to the view that meaningful relationships are maintained via CMC. This study has added knowledge about ways this new technology used in sustaining relationships across different national cultures.

WOMEN’S RELATIONSHIPS: FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA AND LOVE, MARIAMA BA’S SO LONG A LETTER AND SEFI ATTA’S EVERYTHING GOOD WILL COME by KADIDIA SY Under the Direction of Renée Schatteman, Chris Kocela and Margaret Harper ABSTRACT This study analyzes female friendship in four novels written by black diasporic women and examines the impact of race, class and gender on women’s relationships. The novels emphasize how women face the challenges of patriarchal institutions and other attempts to subjugate then through polygamy, neo-colonialism, constraints of tradition, caste prejudice, political instability and the Biafra war. This dissertation uses characterization and plot analysis to explore the different stories and messages the novels portray. As findings this study foregrounds the healing powers of female bonding, which allows women to overcome prejudice and survive, to enjoy female empowerment, and to extend female friendship into female solidarity that participates in nation building. However, another conclusion focuses on the power of patriarchy which constitutes a threat to female bonding and usually causes women’s estrangement. INDEX WORDS: Women’s relationships, Female friendship, Female bonding, Sisterhood, Female solidarity, Female Empowerment

Thomas Churchyard served his country as a soldier and a poet, and he was the only poet besides Edmund Spenser to earn a pension from Queen Elizabeth I. Churchyard maintained a very active literary career: he began publishing during the reign of King Edward VI and continued to do so through the first year of King James I’s reign. Churchyard uses his poetry as a mirror to reflect his preoccupation with the moral fabric of his society. In order to understand Churchyard’s didactic tendencies, readers must become familiar with his poem A Praise of Poetrie, for this poem explores his theory of poetry and the duty of poets to entertain and to teach their readers. He composes poems of different genres, such as the country house poem (the earliest known example of this genre in English), fable, fabliau, and friendship poems, to entertain his audience while he simultaneously teaches them the virtues of charity and temperance.

"Elizabeth Carter's Legacy: Friendship and Ethics" examines the written evidence about the relationships between Elizabeth Carter and her father, Dr. Nocolas Carte; Catherine Talbot; Sir William Pulteney (Lord Bath); and Samuel Johnson to explain how intellectual and personal relationships may become the principal ethical sdource of human happiness. Based on their own set of moral values, such as intellectual and individual liberty and equality, the relationships between Carter and her friends challenged eighteenth-century traditional norms of human relationships. The primary source of this study, Carter's poetry and prose, including her letters, present the poet's experience of intellectual and individual friendship, reflecting Aristotle's ethics, specifically his moral teaching that views friendship as a human good contributing to human happiness--to the chief human good. Carter's poems devoted to her friends, such as Dr. Carter, Talbot, Montagu, Lord Bath, as well as her "A Dialogue" between Body and Mind, demonstrate her ethical legacy, her specific moral principles that elevated human relationships and human life. Carter's discussion of human relationships introduces the moral necessity of ethics in human life.

The seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), long regarded as a harbinger of the ideals of professional independence that characterize the artists of the Romantic era, is here returned to the social circumstances of his own time. This dissertation argues that Rosa’s personal and professional identity of autonomy and his pursuit of an original, distinctive persona were facilitated by male friendship. A key component of the philosophical ideal to which Rosa and his friends subscribed, friendship is defined by a standard of egalitarianism that permits its practitioners to be at once dependent and independent. In his adoption and cultivation of the rituals and discourses of friendship – especially academic friendship – Rosa found a strategy for navigating the obligatorily socially-delineated parameters of self-fashioning in seicento Florence and Rome. Friendship permeated the most vital elements of Rosa’s career: his early theatrical practice in Rome, his private academy in Florence, and his business tactics as a painter and printmaker in Rome. This dissertation aims to open up an area of insight into Rosa as both unique among and representative of his contemporaries, and to expand upon the existing scholarly knowledge of an artist on the cusp of an important development in the history of the visual artist’s identity.

In his literary works, the Swedish author Peter Pohl (b. 1940) persistently deals with the issue of friendship which is described as a source of joy and consolation as well as a cause for difficulties and pain. Another common theme in his writing is vulnerability, especially that of children and adolescents, as he regards them as particularly exposed to violence and injustice. Pohl features the act of telling as an important instrument in the process of personal development on many different levels. Finally, his authorship shows that his purpose is to be a spokesman for those who cannot speak for themselves. These four topics which are visible in the main part of his production represent the most important aspects of Pohl's literary project which may be described as a desire to improve the conditions of less privileged groups of society. This thesis deals with the works by Pohl written between 1985 and 2007. In the first chapter, the author is presented. The second chapter is an analysis of his first novel Janne, min vän with a special focus on the above-mentioned themes. Chapter three deals with the novel Malins kung Gurra, a story for young readers that can be looked upon as second, but simpler version of Janne, min vän. In chapter four, the five novels Regnbågen har bara åtta färger, Medan regnbågen bleknar, Vi kallar honom Anna, Vilja växa and Klara papper är ett måste are analyzed and discussed. The last chapter is an attempt at dealing with the remaining books written by Pohl. The aim is to establish whether these works are compatible with the general picture given of Pohl’s literary project.

Although the Epicurean ethical system is fundamentally egoistic and hedonistic, it attributes a surprisingly significant role to friendship. Even so, I argue that traditional discussions of Epicurean friendship fail to adequately account for the value (or pleasure) of individual friends. In this thesis I present an amended notion of Epicurean friendship that better accounts for all of the pleasure friends afford. However, the success of my project requires rejecting an Epicurean ethical principle. Because of this, I explore textual evidence both in favor and against the amended notion I propose and the problematic ethical principle. After arguing against the problematic ethical principle and dispelling additional objections to my project, I conclude that Epicureans should endorse the amended notion of friendship I have developed.