The overall theme for this European-style dissertation is an examination of how social identities are represented in treatment studies for social anxiety disorder and how fears of confirming stereotypes about one’s social identities affect social anxiety disorder in the form of stereotype confirmation concerns. In the first chapter, I introduce social anxiety disorder (SAD), describe cognitive behavioral therapy for SAD, review recruitment strategies to increase the representation of social minority groups in treatment research, discuss the importance of accurately reporting the social identities represented in samples, describe the particular relevance of stereotypes for social anxiety disorder, and provide a theoretically grounded rationale for the ways in which stereotype confirmation concerns may impact the experience and treatment of social anxiety disorder. For the second chapter, I present a study that examines the extent to which the demographic characteristics of participants (e.g., age, gender) are reported in treatment outcome research for social anxiety disorder. The findings from this study illuminate who participates in clinical trials for social anxiety (and therefore, to whom they may apply), as well as the infrequency with which some social identities are reported. Failure to report demographic characteristics of participants treated for social anxiety disorder makes it impossible to determine the external validity of the empirical literature. It also begs the question of whether we may be failing to identify salient constructs related to the social identities of our participants that affect our understanding of the social anxiety disorder and its treatment. The third and fourth chapters present two papers on the effects of stereotype confirmation concerns on both the experience and the treatment of social anxiety disorder. The final chapter describes how the series of studies presented in this dissertation fits into research on social anxiety disorder, as well as directions for future research.

The aim of this doctoral dissertation project has been to investigate and describe Entrepreneurship Education in one Swedish county, E‐county. The dissertation is based on five studies, four case studies and a minor follow‐up study. Together these studies constitute a multiple case study called The Main Study. The purpose of the study has been to investigate how European policy on entrepreneurship education has been reproduced and realized in different educational settings in E‐county, and the consequences this has had for fostering students and local identity building. The two first studies, cases A and B were carried out in three schools where three high school programs were studied, the Haircare program, a technical program and a social science program. The programs were chosen so that the whole range of highschool programs were represented; a practical program, a semi‐academic program and an academic program. The third case, C, contained the specific educational program ʺSummer Entrepreneur” which was developed in a local municipality in Ecounty, and had been spread throughout Sweden. The program was developed by local people within the framework of an educational concept that had been imported from Canada, “Open For Business“. The fourth study, case D, was carried out in the educational program Youth Enterprise in local high schools, including the so called “Practice school”. The fifth study was a minor study through interviews with representatives from the different educational programs. To enable methodical triangulation, studies A to D were carried out with interviews, questionnaires, observations and document analysis. The studies were based on theories of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education and general education. The theoretical framework for analysis was based on Basil Bernstein’s (2000) theoretical concepts classification, framing, the pedagogic device and pedagogic identities. The major finding from the Main Study was that entrepreneurship education was already part of the educational programs studied for some time before it became part of the Swedish national curricula in 2011. Entrepreneurship had become an element in the fostering of local identities in E‐county. Since it has become a major element of the value base in the national curricula, it will probably be an important part in fostering and identity building in all Swedish schools in the future.

This thesis adds to the literature on strategy and enterprise discourses by analysing how they are used in interviews with small-firm owner-managers. The literature describes features of strategy and enterprise discourses and their shaping by historical developments. There is much work on the operation of these two discourses at societal and large-organisation levels. Much less researched is how these discourses are used by small-firm managers or how these discourses interact in use. This work characterises a particular discourse-analytical approach to the research interview as suitable for advancing the literature. Small, young publishing firms producing business magazines in late ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland are argued as an apposite context. Detailed analysis of three selected interviews illustrates the relevance of enterprise and strategy discourses in the particular ways these owner-managers talk. Drawing on the notion of ideological dilemmas, this work gives an explicit account of how strategy and enterprise discourses are used and interrelated in a manner described here as a ‘dichotomous unity’. This unity depends not only on the discourses’ commonalities but also on the dilemmatic tensions between them. These tensions allow creative and subtle uses of the unified discourse. Yet these same dilemmas also constrain the discourse within the bounds marked out by them. The persistence and creativity, noted by the literature, in the use of enterprise and strategy discourses is explained by the interpretation offered here. This work also stresses the need to research these discourses as two aspects of the same phenomenon. The interview method used reveals the wholeness of a discourse that other methods might show as fractured. Discourse analysts generally recognise that people both shape, and are shaped by discourses. By explicating how strategy and enterprise discourses operate, this work adds to human agency. Small-firm managers may become more aware of the constraints otherwise implicit in enterprise-strategy discourse. Policymakers may gain an appreciation of the discursive balance that the promotion of enterprise and strategy demands of small-business managers, along with the kind of costs such balancing might entail.

This thesis explores how young children perform their social identities in relation to social class, gender and ethnicity in primary school. In doing so, this study contributes to a growing body of literature that recognises the complexity and intersecting nature of children’s social identities, and views children as actively performing their social identities within discursively shaped contexts. The study operationalizes intersectionality as a sensitising concept for understanding the particular ways in which social class, gender and ethnicity are performed differently in different contexts, and for conceptualising the categories of social class, gender and ethnicity as constitutive of and irreducible to each other. An eight-month long ethnography was conducted in an urban Scottish primary school with young children (aged five to seven). Data were generated mainly from participant observation in the classroom, lunch hall, playground and other spaces of the school, interviews with children and staff, and from gathering a range of texts and documents (e.g. legislation and school displays). The findings of the study show that social class, gender and ethnicity intersect in the complex ways in which children perform their social identities. Particular identities are foregrounded in specific moments and situations (Valentine, 2007), yet the performing of social identities is not reducible to either social class or gender or ethnicity alone. In addition, age, sexuality and interpersonal relationships (e.g. dynamics of ‘best friends’, conflicts between dyadic and triadic groups, family relationships) all intersect within children’s social identities in particular moments. Thus, social identities need to be understood as deeply contextual, relational, and mutually constitutive. Emotions play a significant role for how social identities are invested with meanings and values and produce complex dynamics of belonging and being different. The study highlights the importance of the educational setting, the policy and legislation context and wider social inequalities for shaping the discourses within which children perform their social identities. Tensions and ambiguities – e.g. between ‘diversity’ and ‘inequality’ – in the relevant policies and legislations fail to address the different underlying dimensions of social justice in relation to social class, gender and ethnicity, and these tensions are reflected in staff’s discourses and practices, resulting in the foregrounding of certain aspects of diversity and the silencing of others. This study also highlights how through performing social identities in certain ways, wider social inequalities become manifest. Children are aware of and contribute to powerful discourses of social stereotypes and inequalities. Children also engage in the ‘politics of belonging’ (Yuval-Davis, 2011) by constructing dynamics of ‘us’ and ‘them’, engaging in processes of ‘othering’, and drawing boundaries around certain forms of belonging. The findings of this study emphasise the need for both a reflective practice in educational settings, as well as for policies and legislations to acknowledge and address the complex, intersecting nature of children’s social identities and the multiple dimensions of social justice.

In order to foster social reconciliation in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government has implemented a judiciary system and established a national commemoration period. More importantly, in order to eradicate the ideological foundation of the genocide, the government has outlawed ethnicity as a cornerstone of genocidal propaganda. Ethnography shows that these efforts have been only partially successful and that ethnicity occupies a central, silent space at the centre of Rwandan national politics and social interaction. In this work, I shed light over the entanglement between the memory of the genocide and social identities in Rwanda. I explore the ways in which ordinary Rwandans re-situate their ethnic background through moral categories that surface from the government’s historical narrative of the genocide and of the events that led to it. I analyse the means through which this narrative is established, the judicial enforcement and the memorialisation of the genocide, to illustrate the patterns of blame and legitimacy that saturate these historical constructions. Within these contexts, I explore the ways in which individuals exercise tactical agency in order to re-place their ethnic past in relation to these narratives. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the government’s narrative of the genocide constitutes a moral landscape in relation to which actors acquire — or are denied — instances of victimhood. Negotiation over these instances take the form of accusatory practices which, more or less explicitly, are used in everyday life to define selfhood and otherness with respect to the genocide. My research shows how, cutting across former ethnic boundaries, the category of victimhood represents a form of empowerment, which dialectically depends on the identification of perpetratorship.

In southeast Michigan, tens of thousands of Iraqi American transmigrants have made a home for themselves in metro Detroit in recent decades and they sustain most of their religious beliefs, social norms, cultural values, and national ties. At the same time, they have had to change their social life in sometimes radical ways as they adjust to American society. These changes have led them to build their own cultural and social identity which differs from both American and Iraqi identity and consists of a transnational Iraqi American identity. This study will explore the sociocultural identities that have emerged within the Iraqi-American community in Dearborn and Detroit. The study provides an illustration of the transnational networks, activities, patterns of living, and ideologies that recent migrants have created to span their homeland and host societies. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Dearborn and Warrendale in addition to social media, ethnographic discourse analysis, and study of the community social networks.

This study explores women teachers’ lives to understand their experiences of teaching in South Africa today. Accountability and a culture of performativity have to come to dominate schooling in South Africa. Since then, teachers have decreased discretion and autonomy over their work. This study examines the claim that educational reforms and initiatives have changed the nature of teachers’ work. This is a qualitative study drawing on autobiographies, journal entries and interviews. This study which was conducted with four women teachers from secondary schools, provides a commentary on their past experiences with the intention of exploring their identity formation, and how it frames the enactment of their personal and professional identities. The study analyses the ways in which women teachers experience the new mode of regulation which has changed the nature of professionalism and teacher identity. It examines the expansion of teachers’ roles and responsibilities and their negotiating a balance between work and family. The findings show that the women teachers bring into schools experiences gleaned from their personal history. A prominent feature in the narratives is the women teachers’ struggle to find a balance between the demands of home and school in the light of the new mode of teacher regulation. This thesis contributes to South African research on women teachers and their negotiation of the relationship between work and home.

Thesis advisor: Martin J. Bridgeman / Thesis advisor: Ian Biringer / The first part of this dissertation is on the quasiconformal homogeneity of surfaces. In the vein of Bonfert-Taylor, Bridgeman, Canary, and Taylor we introduce the notion of quasiconformal homogeneity for closed oriented hyperbolic surfaces restricted to subgroups of the mapping class group. We find uniform lower bounds for the associated quasiconformal homogeneity constants across all closed hyperbolic surfaces in several cases, including the Torelli group, congruence subgroups, and pure cyclic subgroups. Further, we introduce a counting argument providing a possible path to exploring a uniform lower bound for the nonrestricted quasiconformal homogeneity constant across all closed hyperbolic surfaces. We then move on to identities on hyperbolic manifolds. We study the statistics of the unit geodesic flow normal to the boundary of a hyperbolic manifold with non-empty totally geodesic boundary. Viewing the time it takes this flow to hit the boundary as a random variable, we derive a formula for its moments in terms of the orthospectrum. The first moment gives the average time for the normal flow acting on the boundary to again reach the boundary, which we connect to Bridgeman's identity (in the surface case), and the zeroth moment recovers Basmajian's identity. Furthermore, we are able to give explicit formulae for the first moment in the surface case as well as for manifolds of odd dimension. In dimension two, the summation terms are dilogarithms. In dimension three, we are able to find the moment generating function for this length function. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Mathematics.

Thesis advisor: Michael G. Pratt / In spite of an undeniably vast and multidisciplinary body of research on mergers and acquisitions (M&As) spanning more than 50 years, extant scholarship provides little insight into how two organizations that have struggled to integrate rebound from failure in their relationship. This dissertation examines two organizations—AMC Hospital and Community Hospital—that achieved this outcome nearly 16 years after they legally merged. To understand this phenomenon, I conducted an inductive, longitudinal qualitative study of these two organizations and their members using interviews, archival data, and observations as my data sources and grounded theory techniques to analyze the data and build theory. Extending prior research on M&As, multiple organizational identity management, and identities as resources in organizations, I advance the notion of multiple identity resourcing by examining how the negotiation of multiple organizational identities fostered greater resource sharing and generation during post-merger integration. Additionally, I elaborate prior research on meaning construction during strategic change by examining how managers’ interpretations of the power and intimacy dynamics in the merger relationship influenced their strategizing, which affected organizational-level episodes of success and failure during the integration process. More broadly, I demonstrate how practices at both the level of the merger relationship and the level of strategy implementation enable successful performance during post-merger integration. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in ful lment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, 2016. / In this thesis, various partition functions with respect to Rogers-Ramanujan identities and George Andrews' partitions with initial repetitions are studied. Agarwal and Goyal gave a three-way partition theoretic interpretation of the Rogers- Ramanujan identities. We generalise their result and establish certain connections with some work of Connor. Further combinatorial consequences and related partition identities are presented. Furthermore, we re ne one of the theorems of George Andrews on partitions with initial repetitions. In the same pursuit, we construct a non-diagram version of the Keith's bijection that not only proves the theorem, but also provides a clear proof of the re nement. Various directions in the spirit of partitions with initial repetitions are discussed and results enumerated. In one case, an identity of the Euler-Pentagonal type is presented and its analytic proof given. / M T 2016