This study investigates how waqf officers in two State Religious Councils (SRCs) in Malaysia undertake their responsibilities and duties of accountability to inform and improve the management of waqf properties for the benefit of beneficiaries and the public. The thesis uses the concept of holistic accountability by O'Dwyer & Unerman (2008) to conceptualise the relationship between waqf officers (accountors) and waqf stakeholders (accountees). Two key components of holistic accountability are identified, i.e., hierarchical upward and downward accountability. The religious setting of waqf presents an opportunity to examine how Islamic values influence the way holistic accountability is enacted and experienced. The thesis uses the concept of felt accountability to assess the extent to which this occurs. Semi-structured interviews are employed to understand the waqf officers' perception of the extent to which they discharge their responsibilities and duties of accountability. This data collection method is complemented by non-participant observation and documentary analysis. The study finds that Islamic values, such as belief in the Day of Judgement, encourage the officers to undertake their responsibility and duty of accountability in a proactive and creative way. This is explained in the thesis as felt accountability, an individualised . perception of accountability that provides a powerful motivation for waqf officers to discharge their downward accountability. However, the study also finds that the impact of felt accountability on holistic accountability is influenced by the organisational Structure of the SRC. Hierarchical structures may constrain officers' felt accountability whilst decentralised structures may offer too much flexibility to waqf officers.

In this thesis we present the holistic query evaluation model. We propose a novel query engine design that exploits the characteristics of modern processors when queries execute inside main memory. The holistic model (a) is based on template-based code generation for each executed query, (b) uses multithreading to adapt to multicore processor architectures and (c) addresses the optimization problem of scheduling multiple threads for intra-query parallelism. Main-memory query execution is a usual operation in modern database servers equipped with tens or hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. In such an execution environment, the query engine needs to adapt to the CPU characteristics to boost performance. For this purpose, holistic query evaluation applies customized code generation to database query evaluation. The idea is to use a collection of highly efficient code templates and dynamically instantiate them to create query- and hardware-specific source code. The source code is compiled and dynamically linked to the database server for processing. Code generation diminishes the bloat of higher-level programming abstractions necessary for implementing generic, interpreted, SQL query engines. At the same time, the generated code is customized for the hardware it will run on. The holistic model supports the most frequently used query processing algorithms, namely sorting, partitioning, join evaluation, and aggregation, thus allowing the efficient evaluation of complex DSS or OLAP queries. Modern CPUs follow multicore designs with multiple threads running in parallel. The dataflow of query engine algorithms needs to be adapted to exploit such designs. We identify memory accesses and thread synchronization as the main bottlenecks in a multicore execution environment. We extend the holistic query evaluation model and propose techniques to mitigate the impact of these bottlenecks on multithreaded query evaluation. We analytically model the expected performance and scalability of the proposed algorithms according to the hardware specifications. The analytical performance expressions can be used by the optimizer to statically estimate the speedup of multithreaded query execution. Finally, we examine the problem of thread scheduling in the context of multithreaded query evaluation on multicore CPUs. The search space for possible operator execution schedules scales fast, thus forbidding the use of exhaustive techniques. We model intra-query parallelism on multicore systems and present scheduling heuristics that result in different degrees of schedule quality and optimization cost. We identify cases where each of our proposed algorithms, or combinations of them, are expected to generate schedules of high quality at an acceptable running cost.

Dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master's Degree in Technology: Chiropractic, Technikon Natal, 1997. / This study was done in order to compare the effectiveness of chiropractic treatment in association with a wellness approach, to chiropractic treatment without a wellness approach in the management of Mechanical Low Back Pain. Low back pain is an enormous problem in today's society. Vast amounts of money are spent annually on the investigation into and treatment of low back pain, and numerous work days are lost due to absenteeism. Chronic low back pain also affects the individual's life\xB7style, and can lead to psychological problems. Thousands of low back operations are done yearly, with a significantly high failure rate. (Frymoyer et al. 1980.) In this study factors such as cost, recovery tine and incidence of reoccurrence were used as criteria to determine the effectiveness of chiropractic treatment applied to the two groups of patients. The concept of holise was applied to one group, whereas the other group was treated without this approach. The study was conducted as a clinical trial, with two experimental groups. Thirty patients who had responded to an advertiselOent were selected and randomly divided into two groups. The patients were selected fro~ the general population on the grounds of their signs and sylllptoos. Group A received chiropractic treatment in association with the wellness approach. This comprised patient education in the form of guidance towards life-style changes and exercises. Patients were also given a detailed explanation of their problems, leading to an understanding of their conditions. Group B received chiropractic treatment only. Their condition was not explained, and they did not receive any of the holistic aspectts mentioned for group A. / M

Demands by higher education stakeholders in the late 1980s to early 1990s, led the higher education sector to focus on issues of effectiveness, accountability and efficiency. This was as true in the West Indies as elsewhere in the world. The University of the West Indies (UWI) reviewed its governance structure and established an academic quality assurance mechanism to respond to these challenges. More than a decade has passed since the implementation of this major initiative, and quality has since formed an integral part of the UWI’s strategic plans since 1997. Concerns have continually been raised however about the quality of the service provided. This is the focus of this study. This topic was explored and evaluated through the use of three units of analysis using a qualitative case study of the Mona campus. The methods used to gather data were essentially qualitative, using interviews, focus groups, and documentary research. The theoretical orientation was grounded in the quality literature, drawing on both the industrial literature as well as that in higher education. My findings paved the way for judgments which indicated that various quality procedures are employed in different parts of the UWI, Mona Campus. Some of these procedures do not seem to have produced the overall quality culture of excellence which was intended. Out of the information and commentaries produced by the respondents a unified quality framework has been produced that pays attention to effective procedures, processes, and systems. These criteria were assembled in a model to inform practice at the UWI and enhance the overall transformation process of the 2007-2012 Strategic Plan.

This thesis examines the management of multidisciplinary teams in a highly innovative environment through a study of multidisciplinary patient care teams in palliative care. It investigates management that enables spontaneous innovation where necessary, yet maintains discipline and compliance with legislation, regulation and policy. To assist the explanation a model of palliative care multidisciplinary team management and operation is developed, building on work described in the continuous innovation and organisational configuration literatures. This thesis describes innovative practices as focusing on changing the organisation’s social potential, when necessary, in order to match changes in an individual patient’s situation. A definition of innovation suitable to this environment is developed here, adapted from the innovation literature. A definition of social potential suitable to this environment is also developed, based primarily in the literature of the socialisation of organisations. In palliative care organisations, care is delivered to the patient and any group of people supporting the patient during the end of life process. Care provided to these supporters, referred to in this thesis as patient-based carers, can extend beyond the death of the patient. Palliative care is more than symptom management during the dying process and can involve an interaction lasting weeks or months between the organisation and patients and patient-based carers. A patient’s situation is described at many levels and involves a number of aspects of the patient’s condition and life; for example medical, social, psychosocial, spiritual and physical. In palliative care, patients and patient-based carers are the major sources of information about their situation and changes to it. This makes them active participants in the care team, although some patients and patient-based carers choose not to take this role. Every patient and every group of patient-based carers creates individualised situations when progressing through their end of life processes, requiring individualised care from teams that can change the membership mix to suit the situation. Palliative care professionals can be members of multiple individual patient care teams simultaneously and teams can include heads of discipline (managers). Multidisciplinary palliative care teams can be managed from inside or outside the team, as the situation requires. Uncertainty pervades this environment and the response is flexibility based in learning and understanding. From the model developed of the management of innovation in the palliative care environment implications for the management of multidisciplinary teams in a highly innovative environment are drawn. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis investigates the moral content of illness ontologies in different healing systems, in particular biomedicine and homeopathy. It was motivated by the wish to gain a greater understanding of the possible meaning and ethical significance underlying the increasing popularity of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Western countries. CAM is an umbrella term for a diverse group of therapeutic approaches, indicating their marginalized status in relation to conventional, scientific medicine. However, despite their diversity most CAM share a common bond by subscribing to a holistic perspective on life, health and illness. It is for this reason that this thesis concentrates on the conceptual level. The subject is approached by making use of interview material from five homeopathic doctors from Austria. Their perspective on different aspects of non-conventional, as well as biomedical, practice and underlying theory provides the springboard for theoretical investigations. The demand for scientific evidence of CAM is critically examined. The issue of increasing pluralism in health care is explored, along with its challenge of finding appropriate epistemological approaches for therapeutic systems that are based on different illness ontologies. The favored approach in this thesis is based on the recognition by medical historians that there are four basic illness axioms: "illness as loss of balance", "illness as disruption of interpersonal communication", "illness as a physical defect" and "illness as pathic creation". These axioms are matched respectively with four different epistemic pathways: the dialectical, the hermeneutical, the analytical and the phenomenological. The interviewees considered the more humane quality of the doctor/patient relationship in their homeopathic practices to be due to the holistic premises of homeopathy, which place the subjective dimension of patients at their center. The difficulty of achieving informed consent in the commonly used sense in homeopathic practice was solved by engaging in a shared decision-making process. Life was explained by the interviewees in vitalistic terms. Although rejected by science, the notion of vitalism appears to hold significance for the public. Illness was always perceived as a multidimensional process and not as a purely physico-chemical dysfunction. It became evident that the holistic perspective takes account of the many dimensions of human illness, of which neither the conventional reductionist conception nor the dualistic mind/body approach are capable. However, the unmanageable complexity of holism poses a problem for therapeutic practice. A conceptual approach providing some structure for the holistic multidimensionality is found in the four illness axioms and in analogous observations by Aristotle. It is concluded that there could be a connection between the increased popularity of CAM and their underlying holistic perspective, since this theoretical foundation allows the practitioner to address the patient in a whole-person way. At the same time the holistic perspective provides a much broader scope than biomedicine for patients to influence their health. The recognition that human multidimensionality needs to be appreciated at the level of illness ontology may also provide an impetus for bioethics to approach contemporary ethical challenges from a perspective of an ethics of the good life, instead of concerning itself predominantly with setting limits in the arena of technological medicine.

The research reported in this thesis examines the various factors which influence the role of NGOs in development in India. Despite the centrality of NGOs to the development process in the projects examined, little effort has been made to look at existing experience in terms of what works and what does not work in actual practice. This study attempts to analyse the importance and effectiveness of NGOs through the documentation and analysis of the experiences of five NGOs. The five NGOs are: CERTH India and RDI, in the union territory of Pondicherry; ASHA and GRAM, in Krishna and Adilabad districts respectively in the state of Andra Pradesh; and PMDS, in the South Arcot district of the state of Tamil Nadu. These five organisations have spent the five to 15 years organising their respective client communities. The local organisations that have come into existence through their efforts have reached a stage at which village units have federated and are displaying self-management skills to varying degrees. Specific dimensions of the NGOs examined in this study/ include: influencing factors related to their communities and environments; objectives, strategies, structure and functioning, focusing on community participation, vulnerable groups, empowerment, sustainability, the importance of participatory evaluation and participatory research in an NGO; administration and accountability of NGOs; and enabling relations and collaborations which have to be fostered between government and NGOs on the one hand, and global institutions and NGOs on the other. The main approach used in this study was the use of In-depth, openended, informal interviews and discussions based on pre-planned questions, with a range of NGO staff and members of the organisations. Direct contact with some of the beneficiaries, a literature review, and project reports and records also aided the study. The results showed that strategies and techniques used by the NGOs are valuable for attaining self-reliant development. Holistic development is best achieved when the organisation aims at transforming all the important dimensions of people's lives through the process of collective reflection and action on the forces that presently prevent them from developing.

Presented are case studies of two children as they make the transition from Mexican immigrant homes to kindergarten in an English-dominant school in the United States. In the first case, Victor adapts by keeping his attention focused on the teacher, which allows him to avoid disorientation and take on the role of exemplary student. In the second, Natalie adapts to kindergarten through her relationships with peers and the teacher. She often participates in class activities, however, without understanding the narrative or rationale behind them. Cross-case comparisons suggest that each student adapted in a way suited to his or her own needs and resources. The journey from disorientation to adaptation is described through the application of the holistic, systems-oriented, interactionalistic developmental approaches of Werner, Wapner, and Koizumi.

Stress within healthcare environments can be the result of uncertainty, illness, or the environment itself. In order to promote better health outcomes for dialysis users, scientific literature advocates stress reduction within healthcare environments. Dialysis patients are subject to numerous stressors, including the threat of potential losses and lifestyle change. Studies have revealed that patients who suffer from chronic illness perceive different levels of quality of life than those who are considered healthy and because of these lifestyle changes they employ various coping mechanisms when dealing with stress. There is a rising movement to mitigate stress through the use of holistic healing, an approach that addresses a person’s mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual elements to create a total healing environment. In accordance with this growing movement, the intent of this practicum is to create an outpatient centre for Manitoba’s dialysis patients that increases their perceived quality of life. The inquiry process began by questioning dialysis patients and conducting observational research at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre. Literature and precedent reviews were conducted, and the design programme was developed. The result of this research-based design proposal is an outpatient hemodialysis centre located within the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre that helps mitigate stress while patients attempt to cope with lifestyle changes. The resulting design is one that is warm, welcoming, home-like and comfortable, which is supported by the theories explained in the literature review. This environment provides a greater sense of control, creates positive distractions and allows spiritually evoking opportunities to take place for all users of this new facility. / February 2009

This thesis investigates research and practice in coastal management along with the concurrent growth in information technology that can usefully support the management process.