In this dissertation, I explore, through qualitative means, the perceptions of parents related to discourse (what is said and not said) within formalized and required processes of special education. These processes are federal requirements that parents of children with disabilities or suspected disabilities encounter as their children progress through the school system. The processes purportedly protect the rights of children with disabilities. The goal of the process is to help children with disabilities make academic gains by providing scaffolds that meet their individual needs. During this process, parents of children with disabilities become empowered or disempowered by discourses focused on eligibility for special education services and Individualized Education Plans. These discourses may serve to privilege, empower, disempower, alienate and marginalize, or unite and value. I critically examine instances of this discourse to support and empower parents concerning instances of negatively framed discourse and to assist administrators, professionals, and teachers. My goal is to help these individuals understand how parents perceive the discourse within this framework. I aim to lessen instances of alienation, marginalization, and power inequities that parents repeatedly encounter through education. This study involves 15 survey participants and 14 remaining case-study participants who have or have had children with disabilities go through the special education process from five separate school systems within the Western U.S. I utilize a survey covering perceptions and attitudes about formalized special education processes along with open-ended, semi-structured interviews for case-study analysis. Participants discussed inequities and inequalities such as a perceived lack of power and voice. They referred to lost dignity for themselves and their children with disabilities and high levels of frustration due to poor communication and follow-through. Participants perceived successful interactions from persistent effort, advocacy, and self-education on special education law, procedure, and the disabilities of their children. I provide participant summary perceptions and desires regarding the special education process. I present two models of special education discourse derived from grounded theory and discuss my results regarding models of disability, a school-equity-improvement model, an ethical framework, and I argue for a call to action to begin the groundwork for positive, lasting change.

This grounded theory study investigated how registered nurses (RNs) managed problem-solving and decision-making in residential aged care facilities (nursing homes) in Western Australia. The outcome of the study was the substantive theory of situational positioning, the process used by the RN participants when they were trying to get things right .In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 purposefully selected registered nurses and nursing home management staff. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and analysed using the constant comparative method. Other sources of data. guided by theoretical sampling. were selected documents such as government reports regarding aged care, and some field observations. Situational positioning was a process that involved physical. cognitive, emotional, and moral dimensions, and reflected how the RN participants acted and responded when dealing with situations at work. Situational positioning was conceptualised as occurring along two intersecting continua of behaviours, and these behaviours emerged from the data as four interrelated categories. Yielding and confronting represented the poles on a continuum of action-oriented behaviour, with being flexible and being rigid on a continuum that reflected more affective or attitudinal responses. The four categories that made up the positioning continua had both positive and negative meanings in relation to the actions and responses of the participants, depending on the particular situation. Yielding was a conceptual category that reflected participants' comments about stopping a particular action and trying something else or giving up completely and even leaving the situation. f he term confronting was used to describe participants' actions that were based on assertiveness that was seen as a constructive behaviour, or anger that tended to be non-productive. / Being flexible meant that the participants were responsive to changing situational variables, and this was usually seen as a desirable attribute of effective nursing practice in aged care. However, it could also mean being pliant and ready to compromise in order to get through situations when the participants realised that they would be unable to get things right. At the other end of the response axis, the term being rigid was defined as the opposite of being flexible, that is, having firmly fixed or set ways of responding. or a tendency to respond to situations in the same way in all circumstances. The basic psychosocial problem, being unable to get things right, had two properties. One property was temporal, in that the problem occurred when the participants were getting behind or running late because of having insufficient time. usually due to interruptions. The second property of the problem was more qualitative in that contextual and intervening conditions led the participants to feel that they were not doing things properly because of adverse conditions. Conditions that varied .situational positioning were those that led to the participants being unable to get things right, such as having insufficient time. working with unqualified carers. and trying to meet the differing expectations of various stakeholders. Situations that were easy for the participants to manage involved known routines and few, if any. interruptions. In those circumstances, si uational positioning was intuitive and the phases of recognising, prioritizing, and moving on were negotiated quickly. In more complex situations, or when significant interruptions occurred, the participants followed an alternative pathway, which involved recognising that something in the situation changed. then compromising. that is. choosing a new course of action. / Compromising required tolerance, as the participants adjusted their expectations of what could be achieved in the circumstances. Repositioning then occurred belore they moved on to the next task or to the end of their shifts. Moving on. the third phase in the process, involved persevering as they continued trying to get things right. The adverse conditions that prevailed in nursing homes during the time of this study impeded nursing practice and the delivery of consistently good standards of care for all residents. Situational positioning enabled the participants to persevere in their efforts to try to get things right, but their capacity to maintain the effort was eroded by the apparently unrelenting nature of the adverse conditions that existed in nursing homes. The main conclusion of this study was that the RN role in nursing homes in Western Australia was ill-defined, and inefficient in terms of best utilisation of nursing time. Recommendations included a review of the RN role in aged care and implementation of strategies that would enable aged care RNs to focus on their clinical roles.

This study explores the processes and conditions surrounding long-term care decision-making and care management after traumatic brain injury. Grounded theory methodology and methods were used. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a total of 51 participants in New South Wales, Australia. A grounded theory of care management was developed through constant comparison of data and cases and identified a social problem, a core social process, strategies, conditions and consequences. The basic social problem was the need for ongoing care, a problem which the person with brain injury and others managed collectively. Together, they determined an appropriate care location or living situation, configuration of carers and level of care. This study provides a framework for understanding preferred ways of living with care after brain injury. Increased autonomy was a desired outcome. Living alone and spending time alone were associated with increased autonomy and increased risk. A series of strategies and processes are suggested that allow professionals and family carers to gradually increase risk, and share responsibility for risk management. The findings have implications for health professional and legal practice, education, research and policy. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Alignment of information systems (IS) with business activities has been an important problem for practitioners for many years even though there has been considerable research in the area. A criticism of some past research into IS/business alignment is that it has ignored organisational complexity and context. This is partly due to the dominant paradigm in use within IS research. One result of this paradigm is that there are numerous prescriptions provided in the literature for improving alignment but little in the way of theory development that explains the behaviour of practitioners when confronted with the task of attaining alignment. To address these criticisms a grounded theory approach was adopted using a coding family that encouraged the discovery of systems of interaction between variables rather than assuming linear causality. Data was collected via three unstructured focus groups that limited the effect of prior reading of the literature, an important consideration when conducting a grounded theory study. These were followed by semi-structured individual interviews. The instruments for the latter were developed after the focus group interviews were analysed, so reducing the impact of a prior reading. Analysis of the focus group interviews found that the major concern of practitioners was aligning IS strategies to either business strategies documented in business plans or the business strategies in use. This is a similar result to earlier alignment research. As a result of analysis of the focus group interviews the research question stabilised. This research investigated how factors within an organisational setting impact the ability of senior IT managers to identify, then act upon, the business strategies in use. It confirmed many of the enablers and inhibitors to alignment identified in earlier research. However, it also identified two variables that are rarely given prominence in the literature: the mental models held by managers; and the motivation and measurement schemes applied to managers. It is believed that both these variables have a significant impact on the alignment of IS and business strategies. The theory developed here demonstrates that a system of variables will tend to encourage IT managers to either collaborate with their business peers, or retreat from the business and concentrate on providing a low cost reliable technical IT solution. In the former situation alignment of IT managers’ actions to those of their business peers is encouraged. In the latter situation there will be little alignment between business and IS strategies nor between the actions of business and IT managers. A feedback loop of actions by actors within the system tends to reinforce the situation making a change in response extremely problematic. This, then, helps explain the intractable nature of alignment that has been observed for many years.

The purpose of this research is to discover how university lecturers in management subjects respond to the mix of local and international students in their classes. The aim is to develop a substantive theory based on a conceptual understanding of the main concern of lecturers working in a changing Higher Education context. The aim of developing theory rather than providing rich description led to the choice of Orthodox Grounded Theory as the methodology. Grounded Theory is an inductive methodology that provides the methods to conceptually generate the patterns that explain the behaviours of participants in the substantive area. This was relevant for the current research as I commenced with no explicit hypotheses and there was limited literature on the responses of university lecturers to teaching diverse groups of students, particularly a mix of local and international students. Interviews and observations were conducted with lecturers from both traditional and newer universities in Melbourne, and data analysed using open coding, categorising, constant comparison, theoretical sampling and coding, and frequent memoing. The main concern of respondents emerged as balancing professional capability with the requirements of a heterogeneous student population. The Basic Social Process and Core Category that resolves this concern is Maintaining Competence. Maintaining Competence is both a causal-consequence model, and a typology model consisting of four strategies � Distancing, Adapting, Clarifying and Relating. The emergent Grounded Theory of Maintaining Competence contributes to the extant literature, in particular the literature on professional competence, and the literature on teacher centred and student centred approaches and on contextual and contingency models of teaching. It adds to the latter by demonstrating the importance of the interplay of moderating variables, specifically Forces in the Lecturer and Forces in the Environment. The thesis adds also to the Grounded Theory literature in its explicit presentation of Orthodox Grounded Theory methods and its discussion of the research journey of a novice grounded theorist.

There are increasing numbers of Australian nurses working in part-time employment. This is important in a background where contemporary nursing shortages are a considerable barrier to the provision of adequate nursing personnel to meet nursing service demands. An accurate understanding of the situation of part-time nursing is necessary to enable effective human resource management of this segment of the nursing workforce. However, a paucity of available knowledge related to Australian part-time nursing represented a serious gap in the information required for effective and efficient management. Therefore the aim of this study was to discover and describe phenomena and develop theory that explains the ‘realities’ of part-time nursing in regional Queensland. Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) version of the grounded theory approach and methods were used to conduct this study. A sample of 86 regional Queensland part-time nurses and 18 nurse managers and nurse educators provided data that permitted the discovery of a substantive theory of part-time nursing. This theory has contributed knowledge relevant to practitioners in the substantive area by discovering, describing and explaining the phenomenon of part-time nursing, the conditions that influence the phenomenon and the responses that are made to adapt and adjust to the associated challenges. The developed grounded theory represents a significant contribution to the meagre base of knowledge that previously existed by offering insight, enhancing understanding and providing a valuable guide to action.

<p>Uppsatsen syftar till att skapa en större förståelse för hur omorganisationer påverkar de anställdas inställning och engagemang till sitt arbete. Studien utfördes inom en del av industrin som hade varit inbegripna i ett projekt vars övergripande syfte var att höja de anställdas arbetsengagemang för att på det sättet uppnå en högre produktivitet.</p><p>Studien utfördes genom kvalitativa intervjuer vilka analyserades och tolkades genom en metodik som inledningsvis var inspirerad av Grounded Theory. Studien har också kompletterats med en teoretisk referensram utifrån det empiriska materialet. Den bärande teoretiska ramen utgår ifrån Max Webers rationalitet som till viss del kompletteras med Karl Marx`alienationsteori.</p><p>Resultatet från studien visar att det undersökta ALF- projektet inte upplevdes ha påverkat de anställdas arbetssituation i någon högre grad. Studien belyser olika faktorer som bidragit till den upplevelsen. Studien påvisar att företagets och de anställdas skilda målsättningar tillsammans med ett likartat rationellt handlande bidrar till att engagemanget och inställningen till förändringsarbetet varierar hos de anställda.</p>

<p>The aim of this study was to investigate how a workplace should be formed to promote health according to the employees. The study was made in IKEA handla hemma in Älmhult, Sweden. The aim of the study was to find out why people experience health at their workplace environment, from a salutogenetic point of view. The study is based on 12 strategically selected interviews and where analysed according to Grounded Theory. This resulted in a model where the core category was “The prevailing spirit of the organisation” and the five main categories was “That the organisation creates favourable conditions to promote health”, “That there is a god atmosphere amongst the colleagues and the bosses”, “The personal point of view about health”, “The relationship to goals and responsibility” and “The personal point of view about their surroundings”. The result shows that it’s important to look upon health in its entirety. Health isn’t stronger than its weakest point. The findings should work as a guide in the on going work with the employees at IKEA handla hemma. For the future it would be interesting to do a study in a workplace with worse health and then compare them with each other.</p>

Cette recherche a pour objectif d'élaborer un cadre d'évaluation de la performance d'institutions de micro-financement. Ces institutions sont mises en place pour répondre au besoin de financement de micro-entreprises initiées par des populations pauvres pour satisfaire leurs besoins de base. Ces micro-entrepreneurs, compte tenu de la précarité de leur situation économique et sociale, ont en effet été longtemps exclus du secteur bancaire traditionnel. Pour pallier ces imperfections de marché, différents modes organisationnels ont vu le jour (Organisations Non Gouvernementales, coopératives d'épargne et de crédit, banques, etc.). Habituellement, les auteurs intéressés par cette problématique recourent aux théories contractualistes pour expliquer le phénomène d'exclusion des micro-entrepreneurs du marché du crédit traditionnel et l'émergence de ces modes organisationnels spécifiques. Quoique ce cadre théorique offre des éléments d'explication intéressants pour notre problématique, notre thèse doctorale montre également ses limites. Afin de rendre compte de la multiplicité des objectifs qui peuvent être poursuivis par les membres des institutions de micro-financement (aides aux plus démunis, rentabilité des capitaux, etc.) ainsi que des mobiles qui peuvent animer ceux-ci (intérêts personnels, collectifs, etc.), nous montrons tout l'intérêt d'adopter une perspective conventionnaliste. A la suite de trois études de cas menées en profondeur au Chili, selon les principes méthodologiques de la ‘Grounded Theory', nous proposons un modèle d'évaluation de la performance des institutions de micro-financement qui présente la particularité de tenir compte du registre conventionnel adopté par les membres de ces institutions. Outre les aspects théoriques explicités plus haut, cette thèse prétend également à avoir une portée prescriptive pour les acteurs intéressés par la problématique de l'aide aux populations défavorisées.

Thesis (Ph.D. (English)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.