Persia's importance in the latter part of the nineteenth century stemmed from her position between the rapidly expanding Russian empire on one side and Great Britain's Indian empire on the other. Three departments in London the Foreign Office, the India Office, and the War Office were concerned with the affairs of that country. This study is, in part, an analysis of their interests. British statesmen approached the Persian problem from two points of view. Some favoured building the country into a strong and truly independent buffer state. Then Persia, like Afghanistan, would constitute a substantial outwork in Indian defence and a barrier to the Russian movement south. Others, however, believed that the obstacles in the way of reform and regeneration were too great to be surmounted. Their alternative was agreement with Russia and the eventual division of the country into spheres of influence. In the years of this study, from 1885 to 1892, Lord Salisbury was the dominating personality in foreign affairs. As a result of his previous service as Secretary of State for India he was keenly aware of the problems of Central Asia. Persia figured more prominently in his plans than in those of many of his colleagues. He upheld the principle of the buffer state, and he sent Sir Henry Drummond Wolff to Tehran for the purpose of giving life to that policy. Wolff's years in Persia, 1888 to 1891, were successful ones. He sponsored measures, such as the opening of the Karun river to navigation and the establishment of the Imperial Bank, which would promote the welfare of Persia as well as strengthen the position of England there. Simultaneously, however, he carried on the negotiations for an understanding with Russia.

<p> As the leading U.S. state currently welcoming all kinds of refugees, Texas has a public school system that offers a formal education to refugee students (Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration, 2015). For many student refugees, formal schooling begins in this system. Thus it is important to understand how Texas public schools support the linguistic and academic development of these diverse learners. In order to fill this research gap, this study examines student refugee school-based literacy interactions in the U.S. public school system and how these practices connect or do not connect with the literacy practices these students experience in informal settings. </p><p> The theoretical perspectives that inform this study are Social Cultural Theory (Vygotsky, 1978), New Literacy Studies (Barton, 2007; Gee, 2008; Heath, 1983; Street, 2005), and Funds of Knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll &amp; Amanti, 2005). The results from this research investigation, which consisted of a cross-case analysis of two student refugees, document four major themes encompassing their literacy experiences. The first theme encompasses the literacy activities that their ELA/ ESL teacher provides for them. The second theme situates the student refugees as language brokers. The third theme revolves around cultural traditions and oral storytelling. Lastly, religion plays an important role for both participants; connections are drawn between familial religious practices and student literacy. The findings of this qualitative cross-case analysis bear implications for current and future teachers, administrators, and community members. The recommendations are: 1) to identify and implement best practices for developing the literacy of student refugees across the school district; 2) to require specialized professional development for teachers of student refugees; and 3) to establish a partnership between school, home, and community. Further research is needed to explore which best practices content-area teachers may or may not be utilizing in the classroom to support the literacy development of student refugees and how these practices are being connected to the students&rsquo; lived experiences in and out of the school setting.</p><p>

This thesis examines the changes in managers’ construction of their identities during the last two decades of social and organizational change. It is based around a detailed interpretative study of middle managers in three companies, Carlux, Larts and Nylons. The three in-depth case studies were drawn from a wider sample and some additional data were also drawn from this wider sample. The thesis critically examines Gowler and Legge’s 1983/1996 model of managers’ construction of the meaning of management, and argues that the model is is need of extension - on the one hand, to add emphasis to dimensions of gender and power, and on the other, to take into account the changes in organising process which, it is often argued, are moving from modem to postmodern forms. A model, the Management in Three Movements Model, is generated from critical analysis of the relevant literature to suggest a move at three levels - at a structural level from the differentiation of hierarchy to the dedifferentiation of networking; at a representational level from the rationality of accountability to the enchantment of seduction; and at a behavioural level from the commodification of achievement to the consumption of commitment. Additionally a model of modes of production of managerial subjectivity is proposed, identifying five modes incorporation, of disciplined subjectivity, subjective identity, resistance and autonomy. The case study data are then used to interrogate the models and three key factors are observed to be influencing and interrupting the shift from modem to postmodern - managerial narcissism; gender, particularly masculinity; and forms of resistance. Through analysis of the data, four archetypal modes of narcissism are identified; Clegg et al’s power/resistance matrix is modified; and the model of modes of resistance is illustrated at work by mapping aspects of the data onto it. Overall, whilst the shift in conditions of organizational functioning has undoubtedly occurred since Gowler and Legge’s investigation, it is argued that this shift has not fully transformed managerial identities from modem to postmodern forms. Using poststructuralist feminist analysis, it is further argued that identity is never fixed into a form of being, but is always to some extent fluid and becoming, and that methodologies now need to be developed which both recognise and are sensitive to these qualities in data, and allow them to emerge in theoretical accounts.

The education and training systems in many Muslim countries have remained traditional and resistant to innovation. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has attempted to innovate whilst preserving worthwhile traditions through introducing a system of administration which combines the modern and the traditional. The attempt has been only partiy successful. This thesis attempts to throw some light on the main reasons for the technical/industrial education system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remaining weak. Chapter one looks into the historical background of education in the Arabian peninsula from the period before Islam until the emergence of Saudi Arabia. An attempt has been made to trace the main historical events which may have some significant effects on the status of the education and training system. Chapter two presents the contemporary education and training system in the country and highlights the effects of the weak relations and coordination between the various training establishments. Chapter three examines the Government's policies towards technical/industrial education through studying the five Development Plans (1970 to 1995), which explains the effects of separate planning for economy and education. Chapter four analyses the general concept of vocational education in the West as well as the Islamic notions. Some of the most important reasons for devaluation of the vocational education provision in the West and in the Islamic world have been discussed. Chapter five presents a historical sketch of the education and training system in England and extracts some lessons from its experience. Chapter six presents empirical evidence of weakness of technical/industrial education through the field work carried out in the industrial institutes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The overall summary of the thesis and the conclusions drawn from the present study are presented in chapter seven. The traditional view of education was found to be the most important among the various reasons concluded for the weakness of the education and training system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It held back the education system in isolation from social and economic developments and deprived its graduates from effective participation in the development process of the country. The thesis recommended a comprehensive and constructive integration of the modern and traditional models in the Kingdom. To achieve this comprehensive and constructive integration, extensive and broad changes of attitudes and ways of thinking are required from the policy makers of the educational system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

No description available.

No description available.

<p> In this dissertation, I explore agricultural practices as a window into ecocultural communication. Using agricultural practices of villagers in Village G, Oman, as a case study, I explore the ways in which villagers and government officials conceptualize humanature relations and the forces that enhance and/or impede these relations. My specific goals for this study were: (1) to build an interpretive understanding of ecocultural orientations of villagers and officials in Oman and how they conceptualize their humanature relations; (2) to critically examine ideologies and uncover structural forces that enable/constrain humanature relations; and (3) to co-create community engagement work that honors the ecocultural wisdom of farmers, promotes economic viability, and enhances ecocultural sustainability. Accordingly, I ask a set of three questions: RQ 1: What grassroots core ecocultural premises do Omani villagers communicate?, RQ 2: What core ecocultural premises do official government documents and officials discourse communicate in Oman?, and RQ 3: How does analysis of core components of critical community engagement inform researcher-villager-governmental collaborations to design sustainable practices? To answer these questions, I collected data through focus groups, individual interviews, participant observation and official government documents. Using Cultural Discourse Analysis (Carbaugh, 2007) and Community Engagement Framework (Collier, 2014) I identify three ecocultural premises in grassroots discourse: (1) <i>Relations-in-place </i>, (2) <i>kinship-in-place</i> and (3) <i>nurturance-in-place </i>, and four ecocultural premises in governmental discourse: (1) Modern agriculture is more effective than traditional agriculture, (2) Imported food and modern technology feed a growing population, (3) Technologized farming attracts youth, (4) Modern agriculture and profit-motivated practices achieve sustainability but traditional farming is not sustainable. I offer a date palm metaphor as an organizing principle that depicts humanature relations and the contextual factors that enhance and/or hinder these relations. Because date palms have shown resilience over harsh ecological conditions when water was scarce in Oman and heat was high, in this project, I use the date palm as a metaphor that exhibits an alternative discourse to globalized neoliberal ideological discourses.</p><p>

No description available.

The evolution of the genitive noun phrase in English has been the subject of numerous studies, yet some aspects of this evolution have received less attention than others. In this study I address two of these less studied aspects: the evolution of the plural genitive noun phrase in Middle English (1150-1500), and the decline of the overtly case-marked genitive modifiers (singular and plural) in the same period. The former has generally been presented as following the same path of the singular genitive noun phrase; the latter has been all but ignored, with only a single study (Thomas 1931) which explicitly examines the use of the genitive definite article and strong adjective. The study uses text samples from two electronic corpora, the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, Second Edition, as well as samples from printed editions. The texts used in the present study have been selected with the aim of covering as wide a geographical and chronological range as possible. The thesis examines how and why the number of endings for the genitive plural inflection first increased (in the period up to about 1350) and then decreased (from 1350 onward), a fluctuation not found in the singular inflected genitive noun. The number of available inflectional endings increased due to the morphophonological weaknesses of the -V ending type – the dominant ending type inherited from OE – leading to instabilities in the inflectional system which allowed alternatives to arise. However, the number of genitive plural inflectional endings then decreased, apparently affected not only by the phonological strength/weakness of the ending types but also the type of noun phrase that these were associated with. The inflectional ending which survives, -Vs, is most commonly found with genitive noun phrases in which the genitive noun is animate and the noun phrase has one of the genitive functions labelled POSSESSIVE in this study. This distribution of the various inflectional endings according to animacy and function is related to the rise of the periphrastic genitive plural noun phrase. The initial preferred environment for the periphrastic genitive construction is noun phrases with those functions which will be referred to as NONPOSSESSIVE. As the inflected genitive becomes increasingly restricted to a single noun phrase type, the periphrastic construction expands, to become the default genitive construction by the end of the period. The thesis examines the decline of overtly case-marked genitive modifiers in Middle English, both adjective and determiners. In general, the trend is that morphologically more conservative texts are more likely to preserve case-marked modifier forms, although some marked forms are more widespread due to the development of fixed expressions. Where case-marked modifiers are maintained, historical grammatical gender agreement and the strong/weak adjective distinction are often preserved. Factors which play a role in the survival of marked modifiers are chronological distribution, impact of Old English exemplars, and the development of certain fixed expressions with the adjectives. Thomas (1931) considered the loss of case-marked definite articles and strong adjectives to be the principal factor in the shift from inflected to periphrastic genitive constructions, but the evidence from the present study shows that this is not the case for all texts.

No description available.