This integrating essay is based on an Aristotelian-Thomism in exploring ethical decisionmaking and corporate governance mechanisms to address issues of corporate deviant behaviour, and ultimately, human flourishing. Eight (8) peer-reviewed journal articles analyse the causes of moral failings of corporate governance and ethical decision-making mechanisms, and propose to address these ethical deficits: (1) Virtue Theory as a Dynamic Theory of Business proposes a meta-theory of business that links the concepts of virtues, the common good, and the dynamic economy, (2) A Communitarian Model of Business: A Natural Law Perspective offers a communitarian view of business in defining the business organisation as one that incorporates its social purpose that acknowledges the primacy of people over profits, (3) Corporate Governance: An Ethical Perspective makes the distinction between ethical and legal compliance approaches to corporate governance in arguing the necessity and importance of the former approach as a basis for an effective legal compliance culture, (4) Striking a Balance between Rules and Principles-Based Approaches for Effective Governance: A Risks-Based Approach highlights the drawbacks of an excessively heavy reliance on rules-based approaches to corporate governance, (5) Ethical Decision-Making: A Case for the Triple Font Theory offers a comprehensive, systematic, practical approach to ethical decisionmaking that attempts to integrate virtue ethics into act-oriented normative ethical theories, (6) Reconciling Situational Social Psychology with Virtue Ethics attempts to reconcile the virtue ethicssituational social psychology debate, (7) Slippery when Wet: The Real Risk in Business identifies factors that contribute to corporate deviant behaviour from both an individual and organisational perspectives, and (8) An Aristotelian-Thomistic Approach to Management Practice argues that an Aristotelian-Thomistic humanism better promotes human dignity as it corrects the dysfunctional aspects and ethical deficits than its utilitarian naturalistic humanism counterpart. The failure to integrate an Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of the virtues and natural law ethical principles of subsidiarity, solidarity, human dignity, and the common good into business practice threatens the stability and survival of the firm since they are required to correct the dysfunctional aspects and ethical deficits of certain aspects of market behaviour.

The aim of this study is to define and further the understanding of the practice of lobbying as it manifests in the participants’ interactions with each other and to identify its specific conditions (rules, standards, traits). A research overview shows that lobbying as a political phenomenon is well researched, but that the action per se tends to been taken for granted as ‘talking’. Communication between lobbyists and politicians has predominantly been reconstructed as transmission, informationexchange. The study addresses this deficiency by applying an ethnographic method, shadowing, and by focussing on the micro-level of lobbying as a socio-political phenomenon. Lobbying is researched in moments of interaction between interest representatives and representatives of the political system, i.e. MEPs and their assistants. Seven lobbyists and politicians in Brussels have been shadowed for one week each; a further 34 interviews were conducted. The analytical strategy was to infer from the actors’ impression management (Goffman). The study is informed by a neo-institutional perspective. It assumes that cognitive, normative, and regulative structures provide meaning to social behavior, and that these resources are identifiable. Goffman’s concept of team and the distinction between frontstage and backstage emerged as central categories. My results suggest that the small world of the EU’s capital results in a sense of ‘us in Brussels’ shared by lobbyists, politicians and assistants alike. Lobbying-interaction in frontstage-mode is governed by strict conventions; ignorance or transgression are sanctioned as unprofessional. The key result, however, is that lobbyists actively work towards engagement on other terms. Lobbyists employ various strategies and build relations with politicians in order to create moments of backstage-interaction. In backstage-mode, lobbyists not only gain access to soft information, but can negotiate ways of working together with politicians in pursuit of different, but partly overlapping agendas.

This study explores how experienced science teachers promote conceptual change. It examines how instructional strategies, learning methods (Darden, 1991) and conceptual change interrelate. Three research methods (expert micro-teaching, verbal protocols and retrospective debriefing) were used. Data were video-recorded and managed using NVivo. Six groups of 11 year-old pupils took part (three girls and three boys) in each expert micro-teaching interview, led by a science specialist (Advanced Skills Teacher). A ‘Concurrent Verbal Protocol and Retrospective Debriefing’ interview (Taylor and Dionne, 2000) happened with the teacher approximately one month later. Six teachers participated altogether. About fifteen hours of interview data were analysed using grounded theory methods. The interpretivist theoretical perspective (symbolic interactionism) was underpinned by a social constructionist epistemology. What can be considered evidence is inevitably affected by the researcher’s methodological position. So what constitutes reliable evidence can be contentious. Appropriate criteria for evaluating the grounded theory emerging from this study were used. Interpretivist approaches for investigating conceptual change in school science are necessary to avoid dominance by positivist literature. This approach, proved successful in other fields (Pressley, 2000), is new to this context. The assumption that instructional strategy is a plan does not adequately explain the data collected here. However, abandoning attempts to unpick complicated interactions between pupils and teacher whilst learning takes place, leaves practitioners without guidance. Consensus exists among most conceptual change researchers that instructional strategies, learning methods and conceptual change must be considered together where possible. This present study proposes a grounded theory for how experienced science teachers promote conceptual change and questions how instructional strategy is understood in the literature. Findings show that during and between sporadic periods of ‘conceptual conflict’ participants used eleven ‘teaching and learning techniques’. The relative weight given to each technique was termed the ‘strategic profile’ of the teacher. ‘Tactics’ is the theory of the use of teaching and learning techniques in conceptual combat. ‘Strategy’ is the theory of the use of such conceptual combats to try to achieve an aim (here to promote conceptual change). Teachers (and pupils) demonstrated and described tactical and strategic behaviour. Techniques, tactics and strategies frequently failed. How participants managed such ‘friction’ was described. Teachers and researchers view classroom dynamics from different perspectives. This study argues that an interpretivist approach, which moves back and forth between the particular and the general, can help bridge the “gap” between practice and theory in this field (Duit et al., 2008, p.629).

This thesis is divided into two parts: In the first one (Chapters 1 and 2), we deal with problems arising from quantitative homogenization of the random elliptic operator in divergence form $-\\nabla \\cdot a \\nabla$. In Chapter 1 we study existence and stochastic bounds for the Green function $G$ associated to $-\\nabla \\cdot a \\nabla$ in the case of systems. Without assuming any regularity on the coefficient field $a= a(x)$, we prove that for every (measurable) uniformly elliptic tensor field $a$ and for almost every point $y \\in \\mathbb^d$, there exists a unique Green\'s function centred in $y$ associated to the vectorial operator $-\\nabla \\cdot a\\nabla $ in $\\mathbb{R}^d$, $d> 2$. In addition, we prove that if we introduce a shift-invariant ensemble $\\langle\\cdot \\rangle$ over the set of uniformly elliptic tensor fields, then $\\nabla G$ and its mixed derivatives $\\nabla \\nabla G$ satisfy optimal pointwise $L^1$-bounds in probability. Chapter 2 deals with the homogenization of $-\\nabla \\cdot a \\nabla$ to $-\\nabla \\ah \\nabla$ in the sense that we study the large-scale behaviour of $a$-harmonic functions in exterior domains $\\{ |x| > r \\}$ by comparing them with functions which are $\\ah$-harmonic. More precisely, we make use of the first and second-order correctors to compare an $a$-harmonic function $u$ to the two-scale expansion of suitable $\\ah$-harmonic function $u_h$. We show that there is a direct correspondence between the rate of the sublinear growth of the correctors and the smallness of the relative homogenization error $u- u_h$. The theory of stochastic homogenization of elliptic operators admits an equivalent probabilistic counterpart, which follows from the link between parabolic equations with elliptic operators in divergence form and random walks. This allows to reformulate the problem of homogenization in terms of invariance principle for random walks. The second part of thesis (Chapters 3 and 4) focusses on this interplay between probabilistic and analytic approaches and aims at exploiting it to study invariance principles in the case of degenerate random conductance models and systems of interacting particles. In Chapter 3 we study a random conductance model where we assume that the conductances are independent, stationary and bounded from above but not uniformly away from $0$. We give a simple necessary and sufficient condition for the relaxation of the environment seen by the particle to be diffusive in the sense of every polynomial moment. As a consequence, we derive polynomial moment estimates on the corrector which imply that the discrete elliptic operator homogenises or, equivalently, that the random conductance model satisfies a quenched invariance principle. In Chapter 4 we turn to a more complicated model, namely the symmetric exclusion process. We show a diffusive upper bound on the transition probability of a tagged particle in this process. The proof relies on optimal spectral gap estimates for the dynamics in finite volume, which are of independent interest. We also show off-diagonal estimates of Carne-Varopoulos type.

The Bahá'í principle of religious unity is unique among the world's religious traditions in that its primary basis is found within its own sacred texts and not in commentaries of those texts. The Bahá'í principle affirms the existence of a common transcendent source from which the religions of the world originate and receive their inspiration. The Bahá'í writings also emphasize the process of personal transformation brought about through faith as a unifying factor in all religious traditions. The apparent differences between the world's religious traditions are explained by appealing to a perspectivist approach grounded in a process metaphysics. For this reason, I have characterized the Bahá'í view as "process perspectivism". Radical pluralism is the greatest philosophical challenge to the Bahá'í principle of religious unity. The main criticisms made by the radical pluralists are briefly examined.

The economic modernization of the Amazon fostered by the Brazilian military government during the 1960s and 1970s was largely realized without taking into consideration the presence of local households which lived from the extraction of forest products (mainly non-timber). When they began to be expulsed, a political resistance, often guided by the Catholic Church, appeared as well as the creation of unions based on traditional identities, especially that of rubber tappers. During the 1980s, these unions made a strategic alliance with the ecologist movement which started to consider traditional populations, whose lifestyle depended on the forest, as allies for the protection of the Amazon rainforest. The movement gained a decisive momentum at the end of the decade by putting forward new proposals of land tenure for traditional populations, grounded on collective land rights. This strategy has been very efficient during the 1990s and 2000s, during which about 1,300,000 km(2) of rainforest were set apart and reserved for the use of "traditional communities" under a variety of legal status. But it has also led to mix under the same "collective" etiquette and principles a number of different ways of using and managing land and natural resources. This assumption however should be nuanced by a careful analysis of the resource management systems existing in each case, for they are in general complex and mix varying proportions of individual and collective decisions. The aim of this paper is to explore this question using the example of the Chico Mendes agroextractive settlement (PAE-CM), inhabited by about 100 rubber tapper families and symbolic of the political struggle of traditional populations in the Amazon for being the home of the rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes assassinated in 1988. Applying Ostrom "design principles", we try to catch what are the local institutional arrangements and to see if they suggest collective or individual management, and what the boundaries between both categories are. As a conclusion, we find that the PAE-CM's system is much less collective than expected, and also very much controlled by external authorities, in a logic pretty much away from the idea of a CPR system. This finding is useful to understand the shortcomings in the actual management of the PAE but also to foresee difficulties which will probably arise in the management of many of the areas which have gained collective land rights or collective management statutes in the Amazon.

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Möten i stadsrummet är ett examensarbete i informationsdesign med inriktning mot rumslig gestaltning. Syftet med arbetet är att undersöka hur det går att bidra till att en outnyttjad plats i stadsrummet kommer till användning, samt vilka kriterier som bör eftersträvas för att möjliggöra en trevlig vistelse på platsen. Mina studier utgår från Stockholms stadsbiblioteks terrasser som på grund av dess utformning och avsaknad av funktion ofta står tomma och outnyttjade. Arbetet syftar till att generera ett designförslag som understödjer ett ökat flöde av människor till terrasserna samt får besökarna att vilja stanna. Målet är att fler besökare ska få ett större utbyte av stadsbibliotekets terrasser och att platsen ska komma till större användning. Genom rumsanalys, observationer, notationer av rörelsemönster, intervju och samtal har det framkommit att terrasserna är outnyttjade på grund av dess avsaknad av funktioner samt dess utformning. Genom teoretiska studier inom bland annat rumslighet, formelement, offentliga platser i stadsrummet och kognitionspsykologi framkom att val av formelement och placering av rumsliga element kan bidra till att människor väljer att vistas på terrasserna. Det i sin tur kan skapa förutsättning för ett ändrat rörelsemönster och ett ökat flöde till platsen. Ett gestaltningsförslag har tagits fram utifrån teori och empiri. Det syftar till att genom rundade och svängda former, ett tydligare och mer enhetligt formspråk, samt genom tydligare funktioner väcka besökarnas uppmärksamhet och bidra till ett ökat flöde till terrasserna. / Meetings in urban spaces is a thesis in information design with emphasis on spatial design. The aim of this thesis is to is to examine how poorly utilised spaces in urban environments can become more useful, as well as which criteria are required to enable a pleasant stay in these locations. The object of the study is the terrace outside Stockholm Public Library which, due to its current appearance and lack of function, most of the time is unused and deserted. The study’s aim is to generate a design proposal that encourages an increase in the flow of people to the terraces and that makes people want to spend more of their time there. The goal is to get more visitors to appreciate the terraces and utilise the space better. From the results of collected empirical data through spatial analysis, observations, notations of movement, interviews and discussions it has become clear that the reason for the terraces being unused is a lack of functionality and the spaces appearance. The conclusion of the theoretical and practical studies about spatiality, shape, urban public spaces and cognitive psychology etc., show that the choice of shape and placement of spatial elements can contribute to people choosing to linger on the library terraces. In its turn, this knowledge can create the right conditions for a changed pattern of movement and a greater flow of people to the location. A design proposal was created, based on theories and empirical data presented in the study. The aim design proposal is to show how it may be possible to draw visitors’ attention to the terraces and create a more natural flow there. This may be achieved by adding round shapes and curved lines, more variety in shape and proportion and by creating more obvious functions that meet visitors’ needs of activity and aesthetics. While this study is focused on the terraces of Stockholm Public Library it is my hope that these conclusions may also be applicable to similar environments in other location.

Recent years have seen progress in the analysis of the heat kernel for certain reversible random walks in random environments. In particular the work of Barlow(2004) showed that the heat kernel for the random walk on the infinite component of supercritical bond percolation behaves in a Gaussian fashion. This heat kernel control was then used to prove a quenched functional central limit theorem. Following this work several examples have been analysed with anomalous heat kernel behaviour and, in some cases, anomalous scaling limits. We begin by generalizing the first result - looking for sufficient conditions on the geometry of the environment that ensure standard heat kernel upper bounds hold. We prove that these conditions are satisfied with probability one in the case of the random walk on continuum percolation and use the heat kernel bounds to prove an invariance principle. The random walk on dynamic environment is then considered. It is proven that if the environment evolves ergodically and is, in a certain sense, geometrically d-dimensional then standard on diagonal heat kernel bounds hold. Anomalous lower bounds on the heat kernel are also proven - in particular the random conductance model is shown to be "more anomalous" in the dynamic case than the static. Finally, the reflected random walk amongst random conductances is considered. It is shown in one dimension that under the usual scaling, this walk converges to reflected Brownian motion.

A skill instruction technique based on cognitive behavioral principles was applied to thermal imagery to determine if it could enhance either subjective or physiological responsiveness. The effects of imagery instruction were compared with the effects of muscle relaxation on imagery vividness, thermal imagery involvement, and the finger temperature response. The subjects were 39 male and 29 female volunteers from a minimum security federal prison. The personality characteristic of absorption was used as a classification variable to control for individual differences. It was hypothesized that high absorption individuals would reveal higher levels of imagery vividness, involvement, and finger temperature change; that imagery skill instruction and muscle relaxation would be more effective than a control condition; and that the low absorption group would derive the greatest benefit from the imagery task instruction condition. None of the hypotheses was supported. Finger temperature increased over time during the experimental procedure but remained stable during thermal imagery. The results suggest that nonspecific relaxation effects may best account for finger temperature increases during thermal imagery. Results were discussed in relation to cognitive-behavioral theory and the characteristic of absorption.