The aim of this thesis is to develop a theoretical model to explore how sociomaterial networks, involving large-scale automation, come into being, persist and change over time, within a healthcare environment. It does so by bridging the gap between design, implementation and use of large-scale pathology automation (LSPA) within two United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service (NHS) laboratories. A longitudinal, multi-site, ethnographic approach was used, along with semi-structured interviews, template analysis and participant observation of LSPA ‘in-practice’. This research has suggested that design features, embedded within the material properties of LSPA, were purposefully intended to bring about organisational change. In both user organisations, the material affordances of LSPA resulted in anticipated skill mix changes. However, material constraints required the enforcement of changes to organisational routines, creating operational difficulties, which were then subsequently transferred across organisational boundaries by the researcher/manager. The identification of these sociomaterial affordances and constraints, in conjunction with humans acting as boundary objects, had the unintended consequence of influencing strategic decision making and initiating structural and cultural change. The development and practical application of the resulting SociomANTerial model allowed the researcher to trace the analytical history of these organisational changes over time and consider the impact of broader social structures such as power. Ultimately it is suggested that a greater emphasis on collaboration between users, designers and corporate agents will result in more innovative approaches for technology adoption and improved organisational design.

It is widely recognised that parents play an important role in children’s emotional and intellectual development, including their success at school. Recently, there has been a growing awareness of the potential of parents to support and enhance children’s English foreign language learning, especially since English learning resources are easily accessible through electronic media. In appreciation of this, there has been an increased interest in recent years in finding ways to harness parental potential through the creation of home-school partnerships in many parts of the world, including in the field of teaching English as an additional language. An important point of departure for developing effective home-school dialogues is an informed understanding of what parents are already doing to support their children’s learning, as an awareness of this can help schools and governments provide parents with targeted input to assist and improve their efforts. However, to date, this remains under researched. Of the limited research that has been undertaken, very little has examined parental efforts to support their children’s learning at home in non-western settings, and research into parental support for children’s foreign language learning is virtually non-existent. In order to address this research gap, the study reported in this thesis examines parental support for young children’s foreign language learning in Saudi Arabia with respect to English T.V. viewing. Drawing upon Vygotsky’s concepts of mediation and the ZPD, it aims to examine the extent and the ways in which parents currently mediate their children’s viewing of English T.V. programmes in Saudi Arabia, the factors which impact on their mediation practices, and how this is seen to contribute to their children’s experience of English language learning. The study is comprised two stages. The first stage entails the distribution of a questionnaire to 500 parents of children aged 6-8, who are currently learning English in a number of private schools in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia in order to gain a global overview of parental perspectives on mediation. This is followed by stage 2, which aims to examine the features and quality of parent-child mediational dialogues. This is achieved by collecting recordings of the dialogues of two parent-child dyads watching DVDs of English T.V. programmes over a four-week period as well as interviewing parents and their children on the experience. The results of the study show that parents believe in the importance and value of supporting their children’s learning (both in general and with regard to their EFL learning). Moreover, they show that they are actively engaged in trying to do so. However, they also highlight a number of ways in which their mediational practices could be improved so that these are less directive and more responsive to their children’s learning needs and growing ability to self-regulate. More broadly, they highlight the need to engage with the complexity of parental mediation as an activity system in discussions of the quality of mediational practice. That is, to understand that parental efforts to mediate need to be considered alongside task, sociocultural setting and, most importantly, the child’s engagement with parental efforts. A number of implications are drawn from the results of the study. Chief among these is that research into parental mediation should look at the inter-relationship between the different elements of the parental mediational system identified and that this provides richer in-depth understandings of parental efforts to support their children than are currently available from those who seek to understand this merely as parental scaffolding. In addition, it is argued that the picture this in-depth analysis revealed provides valuable information which can be used to inform the need for home-school partnerships and the support parents need to make sure they engage in these effectively in settings such as Saudi Arabia where there is currently little appreciation of the importance of parental involvement and the concept of home school partnerships remains in its infancy. In line with the emphasis on the complex multidimensional understanding of mediation as activity as illustrated by the results of the study, it is argued that efforts to promote parental involvement should primarily focus on how parents can help promote quality learning experiences for their children.

Mary Sumner (1828-1921) founded the Anglican Mothers’ Union, which originated as a parish mothers’ meeting in 1876, and followed the Girls’ Friendly Society as the second women’s organisation to be sanctioned by the Church of England. By 1921, the Mothers’ Union had a membership extending across the British Empire and transnationally. Mary Sumner sought to educate mothers in Christian values and pedagogy so that they might educate their children to be future citizens of empire. Her life trajectory occurred against a context of evangelical religious revival, contest over matters of doctrinal authority, the proliferation of women’s philanthropy, the growth of the British Empire and changes in education characterised by state intervention in working-class elementary schooling and the negotiation of educational provision for middle- class girls. This thesis uses primary source material to build on institutional histories of the Mothers’ Union to situate Mary Sumner in networks, emphasise gender and class as mediating of opportunity, and envisage her religious ‘mission’ as educational. The thesis draws on the thinking tools of Pierre Bourdieu, habitus, field and capital, to analyse Mary Sumner’s negotiation of constraint and agency in relation to the fields of religion, mission (understood as religious and philanthropic activism ‘at home’ and overseas) and education through which womanhood runs as a connecting theme. Bourdieu’s concept of reproduction is used to position Mary Sumner in relation to the operation of power across domestic, local and global spaces. The thesis concludes that using Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ highlights how Mary Sumner used opportunities for women within her temporal and socio-cultural context in ways that were complicit with notions of womanhood reflective of patriarchal domination and accepting of hierarchies of class and ‘race’, yet were innovative in her achievement of access for an organisation of women within Anglicanism that was recognised for its educational work.

In the LTE access networks, the Radio Resource Management (RRM) is one of the most important modules which is responsible for handling the overall management of radio resources. The packet scheduler is a particular sub-module which assigns the existing radio resources to each user in order to deliver the requested services in the most efficient manner. Data packets are scheduled dynamically at every Transmission Time Interval (TTI), a time window used to take the user’s requests and to respond them accordingly. The scheduling procedure is conducted by using scheduling rules which select different users to be scheduled at each TTI based on some priority metrics. Various scheduling rules exist and they behave differently by balancing the scheduler performance in the direction imposed by one of the following objectives: increasing the system throughput, maintaining the user fairness, respecting the Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR), Head of Line (HoL) packet delay, packet loss rate and queue stability requirements. Most of the static scheduling rules follow the sequential multi-objective optimization in the sense that when the first targeted objective is satisfied, then other objectives can be prioritized. When the targeted scheduling objective(s) can be satisfied at each TTI, the LTE scheduler is considered to be optimal or feasible. So, the scheduling performance depends on the exploited rule being focused on particular objectives. This study aims to increase the percentage of feasible TTIs for a given downlink transmission by applying a mixture of scheduling rules instead of using one discipline adopted across the entire scheduling session. Two types of optimization problems are proposed in this sense: Dynamic Scheduling Rule based Sequential Multi-Objective Optimization (DSR-SMOO) when the applied scheduling rules address the same objective and Dynamic Scheduling Rule based Concurrent Multi-Objective Optimization (DSR-CMOO) if the pool of rules addresses different scheduling objectives. The best way of solving such complex optimization problems is to adapt and to refine scheduling policies which are able to call different rules at each TTI based on the best matching scheduler conditions (states). The idea is to develop a set of non-linear functions which maps the scheduler state at each TTI in optimal distribution probabilities of selecting the best scheduling rule. Due to the multi-dimensional and continuous characteristics of the scheduler state space, the scheduling functions should be approximated. Moreover, the function approximations are learned through the interaction with the RRM environment. The Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are used in this sense in order to evaluate and to refine the scheduling policies for the considered DSR-SMOO/CMOO optimization problems. The neural networks are used to train the non-linear mapping functions based on the interaction among the intelligent controller, the LTE packet scheduler and the RRM environment. In order to enhance the convergence in the feasible state and to reduce the scheduler state space dimension, meta-heuristic approaches are used for the channel statement aggregation. Simulation results show that the proposed aggregation scheme is able to outperform other heuristic methods. When the aggregation scheme of the channel statements is exploited, the proposed DSR-SMOO/CMOO problems focusing on different objectives which are solved by using various RL approaches are able to: increase the mean percentage of feasible TTIs, minimize the number of TTIs when the RL approaches punish the actions taken TTI-by-TTI, and minimize the variation of the performance indicators when different simulations are launched in parallel. This way, the obtained scheduling policies being focused on the multi-objective criteria are sustainable. Keywords: LTE, packet scheduling, scheduling rules, multi-objective optimization, reinforcement learning, channel, aggregation, scheduling policies, sustainable.

Organizations invest in technology to help achieve strategic goals and to disseminate knowledge in order to enhance employee productivity. This study draws upon social cognitive theory as the theoretical basis for an explanation of the limited acceptance of information systems (IS), which undermines organizations' efforts to achieve greater productivity. This empirical study investigated the use of IS in the workplace by examining the antecedents of computer self-efficacy (CSE). Among such antecedents, this study examined the effect on CSE of employees' knowledge sharing, including collegial and technical support, and encouragement by others such as top management, supervisors, and peers to share knowledge. Additionally, it assessed the differences that the control variable, use of social networking tools (SNT), has on CSE and use of IS in the workplace. This research explored the use of SNT as a way individuals share knowledge and encourage computer abilities in the workplace. This causal modeling study investigated the human-assisted CSE dimension, which focuses on one's ability to use IS resulting from the support of another individual. This study solicited 755 participants from five different organizations, with 256 responses (33.9% response rate). The Cronbach Alpha analysis results showed that all constructs were highly reliable. The structural equation model analysis showed that some, but not all, of the hypotheses were supported in this model. This study provided evidence of how the antecedents, knowledge sharing and encouragement by others, affected the constructs of CSE and the use of IS in the workplace. Important contributions of this study include not only the conceptual model itself but also the implication that encouragement by top management, supervisors, and colleagues plays an important part in knowledge-sharing behaviors. Additionally, the study makes a theoretical contribution to the growing body of research on SNT as a way to share knowledge. This study revealed that use of SNT had no significant effect on the constructs measured.

Promoting knowledge sharing has long been regarded as a very important aspect of the management of knowledge. However, knowledge sharing has its challenges due to the special nature of knowledge. Based on this, the researcher argues that it is knowledge seeking rather than knowledge sharing that plays a crucial role in knowledge management. However, there is no clear definition for knowledge seeking in existing literature. In the few studies of knowledge seeking research, knowledge has been viewed as a noun and as such knowledge seeking has been seen as no different to information seeking. The aim of this research has been to explore the knowledge seeking process in the workplace in order to conceptualise knowledge seeking by developing a theoretical model. A review of the literature concerning knowledge seeking has been conducted in order to clarify the concept of knowledge seeking. From the interpretivist’s perspective, a qualitative research approach has been taken, in which sense-making theory is employed as a methodological guide. Time-line interviews were carried out with construction engineers in China to collect primary data, and Template analysis was utilized. Based on the literature, this thesis defined knowledge seeking as a learning process, which consists of three major themes: experiential learning, information seeking and problem solving, based on which a preliminary framework was developed. Twenty six engineers were successfully interviewed. The findings from the data confirmed the links between the themes. Further codes were also identified to develop a final template, which evolved to a theoretical model illustrating the knowledge seeking process in the workplace. By promoting knowledge seeking rather than knowledge sharing, this research contributed innovatory insight into existing KM research. The new concept of knowledge seeking and the theoretical model developed thereafter contribute to knowledge by providing a theoretical framework for further research in this area. The specific combination of time-line interviews and template analysis has demonstrated good results in this research. Collecting primary data from China, this research applied Western theories onto engineers within a Chinese context, which has contributed to KM research in China. These contributions will result in many practical implications for KM practices.

This doctoral study sets out to investigate how Key Stage 2, primary school children (aged between 7 and 11 years) are being taught to develop information seeking skills and strategies that will allow them to become critical and literate users of information. The methodological approach adopted for this research study is that of interpretivist ethnography. This represents a move away from the traditional quantifiable approaches used in Library and Information Science (LIS) and focuses on gathering data in the natural setting in order to offer a rich picture of the information seeking behaviour of a small group of Key Stage 2 children. In order to become an integrated part of the natural setting it was necessary to become immersed in the school for an extended period of time, one academic school year. Taking a grounded theory approach meant that it was possible, right at the beginning of the fieldwork, to identify situations as they occurred. During the field research, a rich picture emerged of the information seeking strategies and skills of the group of children participating in the study. As the field research progressed, themes and patterns were identified which were then examined against previous research in order to identify similarities or differences in the findings of this study with other studies. The themes that unfolded from the data offered an information seeking model that was specific to the group of Key Stage 2 children. Within the model a further theoretical framework is offered that postulates that a zone of optimal learning exists. The theory suggests that there is an optimal cognitive zone that is the place where new information is assimilated so that it can become knowledge. The zone of optimal learning is the place where a child moves from incomprehension of new information to a cognitive understanding of that information. Investigatingth e influencesu pont he children'si nformations eekingb ehaviour served to highlight both strengths and weaknesses in the ways in which the children developed their information seeking skills and strategies and with this in mind a set of four suggestions are offered that aim to support the way in which information seeking strategies are delivered to Key Stage 2 children based on the children that participated in this study.

This study is an analysis of sagehood in pre-Qin Confucianism from the perspective of the relations between the self, the Ultimate and “others”. By examining the etymological, textual and philosophical evolutions on the concept of sheng (聖) in pre-Qin Chinese tradition, I argue that the pre-Qin Confucians developed a dual system of the Ultimate and hence a dual process of sagehood cultivation. The pre-Qin Confucians since Confucius inherited the ancient idea of the transcendent Ultimate in the names of Di (帝) and Tian (天) with the transcendent Ultimate, the ancient sage-kings, the people and the Rituals as the authorities. Meanwhile, they developed ideas regarding the immanent Ultimate that linked it to Nature (Xing 性), as well as specific corresponding ideas about the self, including Nature, mind/heart (xin 心) and body (shen 身) rooted in the early Zhou dynasty. The ideas about Nature, mind/hear and body broke or redefined the self-other boundaries between the self, the Ultimate and “others”. This new perspective made it possible and feasible for the self to know and become one with “others” intellectually, emotionally and empathetically in accordance with the Way of the Ultimate. Thus, the pre-Qin cultivation of sagehood became a two-fold process. On the one hand, the self willingly chooses to be subjected to, and even internalize, the authoritative “others”, such as the transcendent Ultimate, the sages and the Rituals. On the other hand, the self willingly chooses to be subordinate to the immanent Ultimate via his/her own Nature, mind/heart and body, and to grow from within and enlarge itself from the basic unit shen until becoming one with the Ultimate vertically and all others horizontally in accordance with the Way of the Ultimate. This two-sided process is conducted simultaneously, interactively and ceaselessly as different aspects of the same process. In this process “shen" is located at the center, being self-consciously transformed by the Ultimate, while also transforming “others” from near to far.

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Healthcare assistants (HCAs) have been a longstanding feature of the Irish health service workforce albeit under different guises such as nursing auxiliary or nursing aide. However, concerns have been growing about this workforce since scandals in the UK (Winterbourne View and Mid-Staffordshire) and Ireland (Aras Attracta) reported appalling standards of care being administered by unregulated care assistant staff members to vulnerable adults in residential settings. Whilst recognising these concerns and acknowledging that the role continues to evolve and grow in significance from a policy perspective no proposal has being posited for the professional regulation for this occupational group. The purpose of this study is to explore the changing role of Healthcare Assistants in Ireland and to consider the potential need for professional regulation in the public interest. This thesis makes use of two central theories proposed to explain the pattern and motivation of professional regulation in healthcare, public interest theory and public choice theory. An explorative in-depth case study approach combining a number of different data-gathering methods, including focus groups with HCAs, semi-structured interviews with senior managers and other key stakeholders and document analysis, was adopted. The findings reveal the existence of a three tiered HCA workforce – qualified, part qualified and unqualified that is a source of confusion at the interface between HCAs and registered nurses for delegated tasks and subsequently viewed as a risk to patient safety. This study makes a valuable contribution to a neglected area of knowledge by presenting for the first time the views of HCAs and senior managers regarding professional regulation for the evolving HCA workforce in Ireland. The study also makes a valuable contribution to practice by developing a series of recommendations regarding regulation and governance of the HCA workforce.