The purpose of this study was to determine the community power structure and its influence on the outcome of bond elections in four selected school districts in the State of Texas. The investigation of the following subproblems was necessary: 1. To determine the involvement of power structure in the decision-making process of the school district. 2. To determine the community people who have exercised the greatest influence in school matters. 3. To determine the educator's need to become cognizant of the nature of power structure. 4. To determine to what extent leaders in school bond elections are also leaders in non-school issues.

This thesis argues that organizational power impacts the development and implementation of Information Systems (IS) Security policy. The motivation for this research stems from the continuing concern of ineffective security in organizations, leading to significant monetary losses. IS researchers have contended that ineffective IS Security policy is a precursor to ineffective IS Security (Loch et al. 1992; Whitman et al. 2001; David 2002; Solms and Solms 2004). Beyond this pragmatic aspect, there is a gap in the literature concerning power relationships and IS Security policy. This research intends to bridge the gap. The dissertation is a two phased study whereby the first phase seeks to understand the intricacies of IS Security policy formulation and implementation. In the first phase, a conceptual framework utilizes Katz's (1970) semantic theory. The conceptual framework provides the theoretical foundation for a case study that takes place at an educational institution's Information Technology (IT) Department. In the results, it is confirmed that a disconnect exists between IS Security policy formulation and implementation. Furthermore, a significant emergent finding indicates that power relationships have a direct impact on this observed disconnect. The second phase takes place as an in depth case study at the IT department within a large financial organization. The theoretical foundation for the second phase is based was Clegg's (2002) Circuits of Power. A conceptual framework for this phase utilizes this theory. This framework guides the study of power relationships and how they might affect the formulation and implementation of IS Security policy in this organization. The case study demonstrates that power relationships have a clear impact on the formulation and implementation of IS security policy. Though there is a strong security culture at the organization and a well defined set of processes, an improvement in the process and ensuing security culture is possible by accounting for the effect of power relationships.

<p>The overall purpose of this study is to examine what consequences might be connected to Swedish meat consumption. To illustrate this, the production chain of beef meat, produced in Brazil and consumed in Sweden, has been mapped and investigated. The analytical focus of this study has been on power distribution within the chain, aiming to outline its socio-economic consequences in the Brazilian context. The empirical data was collected partly from secondary sources, but also from primary sources through interviews with key informants in the buyer-end of the production chain. The Global Value Chain approach served as a methodology for mapping the production chain and as a theoretical device for analysing the embedded power structures.</p><p>The main result, besides an overview of the beef production chain, was an identification of the chain as buyer-driven. Power is particularly concentrated around supermarket chains, which have very specific requirements on production and processing, implemented by the importing firms, thus also having a huge influence. Power concentration was also discovered in the levels of farming and processing, where the number of acting units declines frequently. The Swedish beef consumption thus seems to contribute, however small-scaled, to the process of power concentration along the chain of production, making market entrance a scarce asset. Potential socio-economic consequences of this process, besides unequal access to influence, might be longer travels or changed city of residence for workers, or even employment losses due to inadequate education. Low-income consumers might become vulnerable since cheap low-quality meat becomes inaccessible. Moreover, this thesis has also raised additional questions, suitable for further research, regarding the impacts of Swedish meat consumption.</p>

<p>This study aims at using discourse analysis to analyze SFI students attitudes to religion and religiosity in an SFI-context. The questions are: How is the discourse constructed and maintained by religion and religiosity of SFI students in an SFI context? How do SFI participants experience that their religion has affected their time at SFI?</p><p>Using a case study approach, interviews were conducted with a group of SFI students. The results show that the religious discourse in SFI is influenced by the SFI-context and affected based on the current education discourse that exists there. Furthermore, the discourse is designed and maintained by the participants private religious beliefs and the religion of the majority of the group, One canhere speak of a strong social unit forming a plausibility structure The power structure that emerges is that the majority has the power to define the significance of religion and place within the SFI context. </p><p>In the SFI-context the participants view is that religion is something private that should not be expressed in the school environment. They express that they do not want to talk about religion among a collection of people from other cultures since one would not want to risk creating conflict.</p>

The cooperative design approach, which research and practice have proven to be successful in several ways, is based on understanding users and their contexts through a variety of methods. This approach of working closely together with the users, however, is not the same thing as letting the users decide themselves what to design. Rather it means that designers in an interdisciplinary research team, working in close collaboration with the users, will use their design skills and collected knowledge about the users to produce good designs. Though cooperative design has proven successful, there are ways in which it could be improved. Cooperative design derived as a result of criticism about the lack of focus on users in the design process. In this sense, cooperative design has been the critical view, whereas socio-cultural perspectives such as gender, values and power relations have been either suppressed, deliberately or not, or not taken into consideration to the full extent that they could be. In contrast, three important elements of cultural studies research are meaning, identity and power. Research in this field examines the relationship between people and context, and between cultural and social practices, as well as on forces that change or preserve power structures. One aim of this thesis is to emphasise the importance of these issues within cooperative design. The focus of my thesis is to, through a phenomenological approach and a critical view of the different cooperative design projects I have participated in, discuss issues that have either been part of the projects’ structure, or have been imposed on the projects by circumstances that perhaps could not be foreseen. Three main issues that need further investigation to understand how they affect the design process are discussed: language and meaning, the individual in the group-oriented activities of cooperative design, and finally power relations and structures. I use myself as the subject through which the socio-cultural and critical viewpoints are shown. My aim is to show that there are aspects of the individual researcher in the cooperative design process that impact the design space and design. Through a critical discussion of the projects and related issues, this thesis argues that the cooperative design process can involve data and methods that we do not always know how to handle. As a result, we can miss important aspects of the research or end up in difficult dilemmas. Therefore, we need to better understand on what grounds we make design decisions in the cooperative design process, investigate what effect the individual has in group-oriented design processes, and examine how culture, language and power structures guide us and how we use methods such as triangulation. I believe that researchers need to evaluate our cooperative design process from the outside, with the goal of improving these processes. / QC 20100519

This study aims at using discourse analysis to analyze SFI students attitudes to religion and religiosity in an SFI-context. The questions are: How is the discourse constructed and maintained by religion and religiosity of SFI students in an SFI context? How do SFI participants experience that their religion has affected their time at SFI? Using a case study approach, interviews were conducted with a group of SFI students. The results show that the religious discourse in SFI is influenced by the SFI-context and affected based on the current education discourse that exists there. Furthermore, the discourse is designed and maintained by the participants private religious beliefs and the religion of the majority of the group, One canhere speak of a strong social unit forming a plausibility structure The power structure that emerges is that the majority has the power to define the significance of religion and place within the SFI context.  In the SFI-context the participants view is that religion is something private that should not be expressed in the school environment. They express that they do not want to talk about religion among a collection of people from other cultures since one would not want to risk creating conflict.

The overall purpose of this study is to examine what consequences might be connected to Swedish meat consumption. To illustrate this, the production chain of beef meat, produced in Brazil and consumed in Sweden, has been mapped and investigated. The analytical focus of this study has been on power distribution within the chain, aiming to outline its socio-economic consequences in the Brazilian context. The empirical data was collected partly from secondary sources, but also from primary sources through interviews with key informants in the buyer-end of the production chain. The Global Value Chain approach served as a methodology for mapping the production chain and as a theoretical device for analysing the embedded power structures. The main result, besides an overview of the beef production chain, was an identification of the chain as buyer-driven. Power is particularly concentrated around supermarket chains, which have very specific requirements on production and processing, implemented by the importing firms, thus also having a huge influence. Power concentration was also discovered in the levels of farming and processing, where the number of acting units declines frequently. The Swedish beef consumption thus seems to contribute, however small-scaled, to the process of power concentration along the chain of production, making market entrance a scarce asset. Potential socio-economic consequences of this process, besides unequal access to influence, might be longer travels or changed city of residence for workers, or even employment losses due to inadequate education. Low-income consumers might become vulnerable since cheap low-quality meat becomes inaccessible. Moreover, this thesis has also raised additional questions, suitable for further research, regarding the impacts of Swedish meat consumption.

<p>As a starting point the society is more enlightened and has gained a greater awareness about the gender power structures and its different forms. Present research shows the continuous development into other shapes and comes into different expressions that might be unrecognised. In order to gain knowledge about the present structure of the gender power structure system, the aim of this study was to investigate framing of female and male politicians in media. The main question asked was: “are there framing differences in the portraits of the male and female politicians?” In order to achieve results articles in the biggest Swedish daily newspaper were examined. The method used was a mixed qualitative/quantitative content analysis where theory linked questions were created in order to ask these directly to the text. The results of the study showed that the framings of female versus male politicians were based on traditional gender power structures, though not to the extent the theory claims. More importantly, the result showed that the marginalization of female politicians was made by inclusion and exploiting instead of exclusion. In this way the differences between the genders were shown.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1990. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 821-886).

Abstract This paper will study the power structure of Yemen from the First World War until 2016. The study will be based on a comparative historical analysis as a method. This method allows for an in-depth understanding of why certain events occur and its impact on today's Yemen’s power structure. The work will also be in theory-consuming design, meaning the empire will be interpreted based on three different theories. These three theories’ will explain why Yemen is a weak state. The focus of the work is to study if Yemen is a functioning state and find crucial explanations for its design as we see today.   The result of this study is that Yemen is a week state but not a falling one. The country stands in front of great difficulties as the country have little impact and small recourses to improve the finance state of the country, while poverty strikes. The country lacks a decentralized policy, secure institutions and good approaches to the country's natural resources. This results in starvation, conflict and uncertainty in the country. Even historical events have divide people and caused identity crisis among the people which is a root to many conflicts.