Thesis (MA (Sociology and Social Anthropology))--University of Stellenbosch, 1964.

This study used a questionnaire designed to identify personal characteristics that successful career women have in common across career fields. Information was elicited on self-esteem, achievement motivation, self-descriptive words, ethnicity, age, income level and occupational field, among other things. Subjects were women publicly recognized as successful by their peers. Twenty three of the sample (n = 249) were randomly selected for interviews. The questionnaire responses were analyzed to identify differences in self-esteem and achievement motivation between occupational fields, age, income levels, ordinal positions and other independent variables. Collectively, the results identified a high degree of self-esteem as the strongest characteristic shared by these successful career women. Additionally, self-esteem was affected by ordinal position of the subjects and related to the level of the women's perceived success and emotional compensation satisfaction. The career women defined the major components of success as: (1) achieving one's personal goals, (2) receiving recognition from others, (3) enjoying one's work, and (4) contributing to the community, to others, etc. The career women generally described themselves as responsible, competent, and hardworking. Non-traditional career women described themselves somewhat differently, as responsible, enthusiastic and confident. There was no statistical support for a relationship to achievement motivation. This finding, combined with the career women's definition of success, shows that items used in the questionnaire did not measure achievement motivation for this group. Several conclusions were drawn from the data analysis: (1) career women who have been publicly recognized by their peers have a high level of self-esteem; (2) women have a unique pattern of career development; (3) women focused more on "contributing to society/to others" than on "earning a high salary," and (4) women defined themselves as "hardworking" rather than "achievement oriented." Hypotheses made on the basis of previous research on career women and on Individual Psychology theory were generally supported. Future research on career women would be appropriate.

This dissertation examines the growth of environmentally sustainable commercial building practices as a voluntary, market-based standard called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), created by the US Green Building Council. I address how environmental ideals became institutionalized and integrated into the design and construction of commercial buildings through the growth of this standard. My goal is to discuss the site at which an ideal becomes a part of organizational practice and to discuss mechanisms by which social movement ideals become institutionalized without the state as a coercive force.First, I look at the historical context in which the environmental movement and the green building movement emerged to see understand adoption of voluntary market-based standards. The USGBC was able to bring together three disparate forms: environmental ideals, the creation of a voluntary standard and a market-based profit focus. I examine how the decentralized environmental movement, the rise of "third wave" environmentalism and corporate strategic environmentalism and a lack of political opportunity made this new form a useful strategy for the movement. Then I examine the importance of the LEED AP accreditation program as a mechanism for integrating green practices into professional work by socializing them through three frames, the LEED system, integrated design and high efficiency buildings. I introduce a new model called hybrid professionalization to explain the integration of social movement ideals across an industry and with a variety of professional groups. Finally, I turn to the demand side of the field to examine the role of organizational consumers and their strategies to rationalize green building to stakeholders. I discuss various ways that green buildings allowed organizations to display and enact their greenness.

Accurate detection and segmentation of intracranial aneurysms plays an important role in diagnosing and reducing the incidence of subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) which is associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality. This research proposes a computer aided detection (CAD) and segmentation (CAS) of intracranial aneurysm in computer tomography angiography (CTA). The efficiency of the CAD/CAS system is boosted by pre-processing the input image with non-linear diffusion to smooth the CTA data while preserving the edges. A 3D region growing-based approach is used to extract the cerebral arteries followed by entropy-based search space reduction to retain the volume of the circle of Willis (CoW) and the proximal cerebral arteries where nearly all intracranial aneurysms are located, whilst eliminating the extracranial and very distal intracranial circulation. Because cerebral aneurysms vary in size we regard the problem of cerebral aneurysm detection as an intrinsically multi-scale problem and employ a multi-scale approach to all detection analysis. Shape index analysis is employed to determine potential aneurysmal regions (PARs). Hessian analysis and gradient vector field analysis which reveal 3D local shape information are used to further characterise the initial PARs. False positive reduction is then performed based on the analysis of the shape characterisations of the PARs. A ranking score is defined based on the outcomes of the shape analysis to rank the likelihood of PARs. The system allows user to navigate through the ranked PARs and select a candidate aneurysm for further analysis (CAS). The boundary of the selected aneurysm and its parent artery is delineated by using a 3D conditional morphology-based region growing approach. The output is presented to the user to be assessed for the aneurysm orientation relative to the parent vessel. A semi-automatic process is applied to detach the aneurysm from its parent artery. To have a fine segmentation of aneurysm which can be used for characterization of the aneurysm, a 3D geodesic active contour implemented in a level set framework is applied. The volume of the separated aneurysm is quantified as a typical characterization ofthe aneurysm. The system has been validated on a clinical dataset of 62 CT A scans with average 274 slices per scan (involving 17,028 CT slices) containing 70 aneurysms. Sizes of aneurysms vary between 3-16mm. 42 CTA scans have been used as a training dataset for parameter selection and 20 CTA scans have been used as a test dataset. The sensitivity of the systems for the CAD component is 97% with the average false positive of 2.24 per dataset (0.008 per slice). CAS performance was evaluated by dual visual judgment of an expert neuroradiologist and neurosurgeon. The detection and segmentation performance indicate the approach has potential in clinical applications.

This thesis addresses the theory of Socio-Technical Systems (STS) within the context of Information Systems (IS), a complicated field combining Information Technology and social shaping impacts. IS have been changing our society for some decades. From Office Automation (OA) to E-Commerce and E-government, IS are creating a new era of Mobilisation. Different industries have all been adopting Information Technology to enhance their business, from enterprises to public sectors. All these changes bring dramatic impacts for organisational behaviour and people's living, which need to be studied. According to academic literature, health informatics, being one of the important and complex fields in IS, started to employ mobile technical systems to improve healthcare service delivery for citizens at the start of the new Millennium. Comparing with other theoretical models in IS, the author argues that the Socio-Technical approach can explain comprehensively the new changes to organisations and society. Following the theories of STS, these case studies were decided by the researchers as field work in Chinese Community Healthcare Service Centres, where there are various mobile services for the citizens. Through multiple case studies, the author found that Leader Emphasis is one new social element in the field of the IS, while Participation, as another social element is essential to the context of this research project. These two social shaping elements, combining together within a model of STS, provide new decision making process, which is vital to a successful development of Mobile Health Information Systems (MHIS). The model has affected organisational behaviour, organisational structure, culture and society, following the usage of Mobile IS. Based on the result of the field work and the relevant literature of E-govemment, this research also concludes that M-govemment can be the transformation of E-govemment, as public service can be delivered efficiently by Mobile IS. A developing model is presented in this thesis.

The status of Information Systems (IS) as a discipline has been widely debated as a body of knowledge that offers a number of concepts, methods and techniques to understand and improve the roles of information communication systems and technologies in organizations. Current state of this debate as reported in academic journals signals an imperative to ground some of the perspectives in relation to what IS professionals use in practice in different cultural and geographical contexts. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by tracing the unfolding of information systems as a body of knowledge using the ideas of Abbott on disciplines. We use three different stages of a discipline's development: differentiation, conflict and absorption and map them using a citation and co-citation analyses of two main IS journals (EJIS and MISQ) in the period between 1995 and 2008. Our results indicate that dominant ideas and models to investigate IS phenomena emerged over time are behavioural based and study IS adoption/acceptance/rejection in organisations, many of which are predictive and thus lending themselves usable for positivistic quantitative and qualitative research. There are however stable varieties within IS building on interpretivism and constructivism that we need to recognise and reignite in order to ensure that this field continues moving forward, in particular in studying current and future processes of innovation and diffusion of technology worldwide. (author's abstract)

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

This thesis is about librarians and librarianship. Questions asked in the thesis are how the librarianship developed between 1475 and 1780 and what the core and the main tasks of the profession were. There is also the question whether the profession is built on a common basis to rely on and if it is characterized by unique knowledge. The history of the librarian is divided in three parallel ongoing parts, the practical, the visionary and finally the personal, the librarians own attitudes. The practical area is characterized by the practical work, as cataloguing, classification, care of books, shelving and protecting the documents in different ways from several possible threats. The work is dictated by the employer. The visionary part complements and develops the methods of library work being established in the practical area, the librarians themselves formulate their thoughts of libraries and librarianship, defines the roles of libraries in society, in education and research. The librarians think about the content of the work and the future of libraries. These two areas done, another dimension is born. That is the ethics of the librarianship, how to behave and how to act towards library users and this dimension puts the librarian in the centre. There have been signs of this before but the completion is done in 1780 by Cotton des Houssayes. His speech opens the future for the librarians to come. The time period covers 305 years from 1475 until 1780. Starting point for this research about the librarian is 1475 because in that year pope Sixtus IV appointed Bartolomeus Platina as librarian of the Vatican library. The bull of 1475 is an official document that describes the librarian as a librarian and that he is told what to do, where to do it, how to do it and why. Jean-Baptiste Cotton des Houssayes, appointed in 1780, sets an end to this period with his speech to the General Assembly of the Sorbonne university in Paris. His speech completes the creation of the librarian. It is also the starting point of something new in librarianship. The common tasks of the librarians investigated, reveal what can be regarded as the essence of librarianship. From the practical area, the employers gave the librarians their tasks, executed at different places in different kinds of libraries. From the area of visions, the librarians built their visions as a continuum of the experiences from the practical work. New areas like the role of the librarian, the goals for the library itself and the librarians as the executors and pathfinders for the future. More of theory became a natural part of the librarianship. The last area of the development of the librarian is to adopt ethical aspects of their profession. This dimension is a self-reflecting attitude important to the librarians themselves. / <p>Akademisk avhandling som med tillstånd av samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten vid Göteborgs universitet för vinnande av filosofie doktorsexamen framläggs till offentlig granskning kl. 13.15 torsdagen den 10 juni 2010 i hörsal C203, Högskolan i Borås, Allégatan 1, Borås.</p>

Thesis advisor: Michael G. Pratt / Despite calls to understand the micro-foundation of institutional theory and to understand how professional identity change relates to the broader macro context (e.g., Lok, 2010; Lepisto, Crosina and Pratt, forthcoming); exploration of the link between a field-level institutional change and the individual professionals' identity responses within the field remains. For this dissertation, I conducted an inductive qualitative study of French veterinarians and their reactions to "the Service Directive", a European Union regulation that re-categorizes veterinarians as "service providers" from "healthcare professionals." Drawing on interviews with practicing veterinarians, leaders of the field, observations, and archival data, my dissertation advances our understanding of professionals' responses to an institutional change which can potentially redefine what their profession is. My findings suggest that professionals negotiate an institutional change (in this case, the Service Directive) at the professional level before its formal implementation and before individual professionals within their organization engaged in any form of response. My dissertation introduces a model centered on understanding how veterinarians responded to this change at the individual level (and more particularly, in terms of identity) within their organization. This model suggests that individual professionals perceive the institutional regulatory change in hopeful, fearful or ambivalent manners. I found that these perceptions are influenced by professionals' work orientation and perceived organization's time orientation. Further, I found that these perceptions lead to different types of identity responses: identity expansion, identity maintenance, giving up a possible self, and de-emphasizing an existing identity. My research enriches emerging perspectives on identity responses to an institutional change by pointing out various identity responses and tying them to the perceptions of an institutional change. My research further suggests that such a change can be perceived as an opportunity, as a threat, or both, not solely as a threat. Furthermore, my dissertation introduces the notions of orientation (work orientation and perceived organization's time orientation) as key to the processing of an institutional trigger. Finally, it calls attention to an emotional processing of the institutional trigger. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

Ao longo das primeiras décadas do século XX, os juristas argentinos e brasileiros se empenharam em estreitar os seus laços, enquanto repensavam o papel que deveriam cumprir na sociedade e reconstruíam certos pressupostos do seu saber. Mobilizaram, ao longo desse processo, mecanismos que iam da realização de conferências à publicação de livros comemorativos, passando pelo rádio. Mesmo que de forma descontínua e enfrentando tensões de distintas naturezas, esses intercâmbios se sustentaram no tempo e contaram com ressonâncias para além do universo jurídico. Adotando uma perspectiva transnacional e procurando inserir tais diálogos em cenários mais ampliados tanto do ponto de vista geográfico quanto do temporal, esta tese argumenta que as interações entre bacharéis em direito dos dois países desempenharam um papel fundamental em meio a sua busca por intervir na vida pública, em especial quando se tratava de legitimar projetos de reformas legislativas. Para tanto, dois âmbitos de análise foram privilegiados: a circulação de impressos e as ações de organizações profissionais, em especial o Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros e o Colegio de Abogados de Buenos Aires. As duas dimensões estiveram diretamente articuladas, uma vez que tais associações mantiveram periódicos e bibliotecas, ao mesmo tempo em que diversas atividades que promoveram foram, posteriormente, consolidadas em publicações. Ao explorar os múltiplos sentidos dos dois verbos que se escondem em seu título, deslocar e deslocalizar, o trabalho lança um olhar crítico para a recorrente narrativa de que brasileiros e hispano-americanos se ignoram, bem como interpela os usos da técnica como discurso de legitimação. / During the first decades of the twentieth century, Argentinian and Brazilian lawyers attempted to strengthen their bonds, simultaneously reconceiving their role in society and rebuilding certain presuppositions of their field of expertise. Throughout that process, they mobilized mechanisms that spanned from conferences to commemorative books to the radio. Even though they were discontinuous and faced tensions of different natures, those exchanges were sustained over time and had resonances that went beyond the legal realm. Adopting a transnational perspective and seeking to place those dialogues in broader geographic and temporal perspectives, this dissertation argues that the interactions between law graduates in both countries played a key role in their interventions in public life, especially when it came to advancing projects for legal reforms. Two separate scopes of analysis were considered: the circulation of printed matter and the actions of professional associations, especially the Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros and the Colegio de Abogados de Buenos Aires. The two dimensions were closely linked, since those associations published journals and sponsored libraries, and concomitantly several activities they promoted were later consolidated in print. By exploiting the multiple meanings of the verb to displace, this work proposes a critical approach to the recurring narrative according to which Brazilians and Hispanic Americans ignore one another, simultaneously questioning the uses of technics as a legitimizing discourse.