Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Empathy has been shown to be a very powerful social and work ability. This study surveyed 754 employees of a privately held eastern United States company, and incorporated annual performance evaluations to empirically link interactive empathy to leader performance of 102 leaders. Data was collected from the leader’s followers, peers, and supervisors and from self-report personality evaluations. The results of this study show that leaders that are willing to engage their followers with empathic displays are seen as better leaders from their supervisors and have more engaged employees. Other contributions of this study include validation of the interactive empathy scale in a corporate environment and empirical support to show how interactive empathy adds incremental explanatory power of leader’s performance above and beyond that explained by personality. Directions for future research and practical implications of these results are also offered.

A Muslim should be encouraged to comprehend the benefit and value behind every aspect of Islamic practice and wisdom, and not just practice their religion because they were told to do so. The products proposed in this thesis aim to achieve this by inviting and encouraging a Muslim to practice The Five Pillars of Islam while comprehending their value through the use of modern means such as Arduino technology, 3D printing and visual computing programing. I am provoked by the fact that the circle of Gulf-region Muslims I’m surrounded by, and have been exposed to since childhood, belong to one of two stereotypes: those against or afraid of change who force adherence to religious chapter and verse, or those straying further and further away from our religion’s rituals and traditions. Can the practice of religion, and the values that it teaches us, be made more accessible and engaging by incorporating the very technology that is often accused of distracting us from its practice?

While quantitative research has determined that first-generation college students (FGS) are less likely to interact with faculty than are their non-FGS peers, this qualitative study examines how incoming first-year college students, both FGS and non-FGS, perceive faculty-student interaction and whether they consider it important. Addressing different types of interaction with college instructors, both in-class and out-of-class, participants across a range of FGS status shared their views through surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups. Focusing specifically on incoming first year students, this study also explores the motives for, impediments to, and encouragements to faculty-student interaction that students identify. Finally, the study examines the origins of students’ perceptions of such interactions. It finds that FGS and non-FGS come to college with different cultural and social capital pertaining to this, and that non-FGS have a greater familiarity with the field and expected habitus of college. However, FGS demonstrate an ability to access their social capital in order to obtain valuable knowledge that informs their perceptions of college and of faculty-student interaction. Further, in the focus groups, FGS described emerging comfort with faculty over the course of their first months of college. The origins of students’ perceptions often differed, as non-FGS were more likely to describe being influenced by family, while FGS more often explained how they accessed their social capital in order to obtain cultural capital and practical knowledge regarding college and faculty-student interaction. Meanwhile, FGS’ and non-FGS’ motives for interacting with faculty, and the impediments and encouragements they identified, were frequently similar. The motives included their desire to learn and share opinions, as well as their interest in obtaining letters of recommendation in the future, while comfort with classmates and faculty and interest in class were commonly named as encouragements to interact with faculty.

This dissertation analyses the biofuel debate in the UK, focusing on how the UK Government has deployed expectations to legitimise its biofuel policy. The analysis builds on the sociology of expectations, integrated with insights from the multi-level perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions. By the end of the 1990s, a sustainable paradigm permeated UK road transport policy opening a space for biofuel policy to emerge. In the second half of the 2000s, disagreements among UK stakeholders over the translation of EU biofuel targets into UK biofuel policy prefigured later EU-wide discussions over limiting targets for first-generation biofuels. Biofuels critics disagreed with the UK Government and biofuels supporters over how to protect a space for future second-generation biofuels, which were expected to overcome the harm caused by currently available, but controversial, first-generation biofuels. The UK Government and biofuels supporters defended rising targets for available biofuels as a necessary stimulus for industry to help fulfil the UK’s EU obligations and eventually develop second-generation biofuels. By contrast, critics opposed biofuels targets on the grounds that these would instead lock-in first-generation biofuels, thus pre-empting second-generation biofuels. I argue that these disagreements can be explained in relation to the UK Government‘s responsibilities relating to “promise-requirement cycles”, whereby technological promises generate future requirements for the actors involved. Further, I claim that the UK Government’s stance reflects what I call a “policy-promise lock-in” – i.e. a situation in which previous policy commitments towards technology innovators of incumbent technologies (currently controversial and potentially driven by several imperatives) are officially justified as necessary for the development of preferable emerging technologies. Finally, my analysis expands the focus of the sociology of expectations, which has hitherto mostly been used to investigate expectations from technology innovators – i.e. scientists or industrialists – by investigating how other types of actor mediate expectations among different parties, in particular, public authorities, industry associations, consultancies, and non-governmental organisations.

Cette thèse vise à étudier conjointement deux thèmes de recherche habituellement traités séparés par la littérature académique : les caractéristiques des directeurs généraux et l'engagement des employés au travail. La problématique peut se définir ainsi : quel est l'impact des caractéristiques des dirigeants sur leur engagement au travail ? ou autrement dit, comment les caractéristiques managériales influencent la nature et le degré d'implication des dirigeants au travail? Les dirigeants dans notre travail de recherche seront les dirigeants des banques au Liban : on va essayer de leur créer une typologie. / Organizational commitment has been studied comprehensively along with varied professional groups. The concept that commitment is essential for the apprehension of organizational and professional goals mainly in the Banking organizations has remained unexploited by researchers. The study of employee commitment should be important to Banking organizations receiving large amounts of community savings and playing an important role in the development of the economical sector as a whole.No previous studies have tackled the Lebanese bank managers’ subject in relevance to their organizational commitment and its relation with their biographical traits and their Job perforamance; therefore the study of organizational commitment will particularly be relevant to Lebanese bank managers, as those represent the leading power for the future of the Lebanese banking sector.

Durant les années 80, la prise en charge des personnes insuffisantes respiratoires a bénéficié d'avancées techniques qui ont permis aux malades, auparavant contraints de rester à l'hôpital, de pouvoir retourner chez eux. Les patients ont alors dû faire face à des problèmes auxquels ils n'étaient pas toujours préparés. Atteints d'une pathologie qu'ils ne connaissaient pas, ces derniers ont dû devenir plus autonomes en matière de recherche d'information, de gestion des crises de la maladie et d'utilisation des traitements. Ils devaient comprendre et construire une représentation de leur maladie, très souvent inconnue par leur entourage et par eux-mêmes. Il leur a fallu également affronter le regard des autres et lutter contre la stigmatisation. Progressivement, les patients se sont réunis et ont créé des associations dans le but de faire face ensemble à ces problématiques. Ces associations départementales ou régionales se sont rapidement fédérées pour former une organisation d'échelle nationale, la Fédération Française des Associations et Amicales de malades Insuffisants ou handicapés Respiratoires (FFAAIR). Progressivement, ce mouvement a permis à des agents d'acquérir la légitimité de représenter les malades et de participer avec les professionnels de santé à la construction d'un nouveau champ social. Ces transformations ont été accompagnées et rendues possibles par l'émergence d'une nouvelle forme d'engagement socio-discursif associatif / During the 1980's, the management and treatment of people suffering from respiratory failure has been improved by new technical developments enabling patients to return home instead of staying in hospital. These patients were thus confronted by certain issues that they were not necessarily prepared for. Diagnosed with a pathology that they did not know, they had to become more self-reliant in terms of information research, health crisis management and the use of medical treatment. They had to understand and build a representation of their disease, a disease often unknown to their family/social circle as well as themselves. They also had to face the regard of others and to fight against stigmatization. The patients thus joined together and created associations in order to address, together, such problems. These departmental or regional associations soon became an organization on a national scale, the Fédération Française des Associations et Amicales de malades Insuffisants ou handicaps Respiratoires (FFAAIR). Progressively, this movement enabled agents to gain legitimacy in representing patients and, together with health professionals, take part in the construction of a new social field. Such transformations were supported and made possible by the emergence of a new form of socio-discursive associative commitment

Employee engagement is a recent work attitude that was introduced among practitioners in the 90's of last century. Academic researchers accepted this new concept reservedly and discuss the actual contribution of the term to the work motivation theory. There can be identified several different approaches toward defining the term in the academic literature. Yet there is no general agreement on one single approach. At the same time the concept is a subject to objections, that it brings nothing new and extra above the existing work concepts, especially work satisfaction and organizational commitment. In my thesis I set myself an objective to answer a question whether the concept of employee engagement introduces new aspects of strong identification and activation to the work motivation theory. In the second chapter I compare employee engagement to the established work attitudes, namely to work satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement and organizational citizenship behaviour. By compilation of theoretical resources I demonstrate that employee engagement is distinct from the other work attitudes by its strong degree of employee identification and activation. Afterwards I define engagement on its own and strive for systematic classification of its concepts. Via compilation of theoretical...

Master of Science / Department of Special Education, Counseling and Student Affairs / Doris Carroll / Social media is the use of online applications and websites to create and exchange user-generated content. These websites are becoming ever more popular with college aged students to connect with their peers, businesses, and areas of interest. These websites could be taken advantage of to provide new opportunities to engage students in campus life. This paper examines the concept of student engagement and the role of social media in engaging student with campus life. A brief overview of Facebook and Twitter, the two most popular social networks, is provided. This paper also reviews the limited body of research available on the impact of social media on student engagement. It is argued here that social media can be a positive influence on student engagement within the college campus and could lead to improvements in the way that higher education professional assist with student development. Due to the limited amount of academic research available, popular news sources as well as websites and blogs were examined to determine the most influential uses of social media, and this report makes recommendations for incorporating social media use into higher education. Social media allows higher education professionals to “meet students where they are” and provide for opportunities for engagement and student development. If the recommendations made in this report are implemented by student affairs professionals, they could be assessed for their impact on student engagement and development in the future.