This thesis proposes a conceptual framework to analyze the choice of organizational form and assess the shifts in organizational behaviour and form. This thesis argues that the choice of organizational form is an outcome of an individuals or groups mode of identification within the dominant organizational form and property rights structure of society. The framework places/situates the investor-owned firm (IOF) in a position of identification with the dominant ideology and property rights structure of society. The state-owned enterprise (SOE) occupies a position of counter-identification with the dominant ideology and property rights structure of society. The co-operative, on the other hand, represents a dis-identification with both the IOF and the SOE as this form works on and against the ideologies and property rights structures associated with the two former organizational forms.<p>Further, the thesis argues that endogenous and exogenous pressures may cause some organizations to shift their organizational behaviour and form. The researcher examines how internal problems in co-operative organizations (i.e., horizon and principal-agent problems) can exacerbate exogenous pressures (i.e., increasing competition and/or government deregulation) from the market and/or state causing the co-op to imitate the strategies or property rights structure of the IOF in order to cope with these issues. <p>Profiles of the formation of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Wholesale Society and the Consumers Co-operative Refineries Limited and the conversion of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool are used to illustrate the conceptual framework and support the arguments made in this thesis.

As humans we constantly develop theories and methods in order to change and improve our way of working or to find better ways of conducting design work. This thesis is about this strive.The design process of particular interest in this thesis is system design, in the sense of design of computer applications. One major line of reasoning is that the rationality of design work underlying today's system design methods does not reflect the rationality in practice. If a design method is to be accepted by practitioners, it has to reflect a rationality related to the rationality familiar to the practitioners.A comparison is made between different kinds of design processes: the research process, the engineering process and the artistic process, in order to discuss the possibility of a generic design process. One conclusion is that there is no such thing as the "natural" or "given" design process.An outline of an ideal-oriented design theory is presented. The purpose is to make design practice understandable and to reveal the hidden rationale of design work. A rationale must be seen as the sum of at least three different forms of knowledge: reason, aesthetics and ethics, where aesthetics is the ability to judge (the aesthetical-practical form of knowledge). Today "reason" (in the sense of pure empirical-theoretical knowledge) is the dominant form of knowledge in system design methods, This leads to a view of design as problem solving and as "fixing a malfunctioning reality". The design process should instead be viewed as a creative way to design a new reality. In order to discuss this ideal-oriented theory, the concepts of vision, operative image, thought figure, design situation, and intuition are introduced.Some aspects of the design process emerge as particularly important. There is a shift of attention from problem oriented design to ideal oriented, from functionally oriented to aesthetically oriented, from depictive to creative. There is also a shift in the way we view designed artifacts. The artifact is to be seen as a social actor. The design process is a way to invent and establish the space of possible actions. To design is to create a social environment.As a result, the meaning of the concept "method" also changes. The purpose of a design method should be to develop the designers' design ability and to create readiness to act, not to guide the designers in a specific design situation. There is an elaborate discussion of what may constitute the design ability and of how a designer should a a and think in order to improve his design ability.The results of an interview study with twenty system designers are presented. The study shows that if we want to understand the hidden rationale of design practice, it is both meaningful and useful to view the system design practice as ideal-oriented design.The results of the interviews are formulated as a question: How would and could the methodology and practice of system design change if it were based on an ideal-oriented design theory? Some areas where further work and development ought to be done are presented. / digitalisering@umu

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating condition that results from the experience of a traumatic event. Natural kinds are mind-independent entities found in nature and are the objects of scientific inquiry. It is common to deny that PTSD is a natural kind, but extant denials assume a thesis of natural kinds that can be called “essentialism”. According to essentialism, many entities are not natural kinds that one would expect should be natural kinds. The homeostatic cluster view of natural kinds offers an alternative that accommodates these cases, including, superficially, the claim that PTSD is a natural kind. I introduce two novel objections to this claim and recommend a distinction aimed to resolve the newly introduced problems.

Abstract   Title:                       Grades at Primary School – A study of local politicians' arguments in                       connection with the division into grades at Swedish primary schools. Author:                       Annie Linder University of Kalmar C-essay in Social Studies Autumn 2011   The study aims to investigate local politicians' decisions since municipalities took over Swedish primary education in 1990/91. The arguments put forward in support of how stages are organised have been studied, likewise whether municipalities have acted rationally when making their decisions. Six municipalities are included in the survey. They were divided into three educational categories: lower, middle and high level schools; previous and recent schools and F9 schools with pre-schools and primary schools integrated. Minutes from politicians' and civil servants' meetings have been studied and categorised according to arguments for and against. The most common supportive arguments are about economy and organisation, others concern school premises, trends and the wish for a comprehensive compulsory school. The arguments against are few. Those most often put forward are about about the difficulties of organising B-language tuition for grade six pupils. The Rational Actor Model has been used to study whether municipalities have acted rationally when making their decisions. A third of the six municipalities have acted rationally.   Key words: municipality, primary school, grade, stage, rationality.

BACKGROUND: When it comes to corporate decision making, the traditional rational model suggests that deliberative analysis yields good results. Thus, when contemplating strategic moves, executives are “required” to conduct deliberative analyses. As today’s business environment is becoming increasingly complex and fast-paced, however, executives often face the dilemma of having to make carefully considered strategic decisions on the one hand and not having enough time on the other hand. Intuition offers an efficient solution in this situation. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to investigate how corporate executives employ both rationality and intuition in making strategic decisions under uncertain, complex and time-pressured circumstances. RESEARCH METHOD: We conducted three face-to-face interviews with executives from three companies in Sweden. Each interview lasted around one hour.    RESULTS: Drawing on previous psychological and managerial research, we argue that rationality and intuition are better viewed as being complementary rather than separate. Findings from the study suggest that intuition could serve as an effective and efficient means for managers to make strategic decisions; and that intuition indeed plays a role in strategic decision making under complex, uncertain and time limited contexts.

A simple asset pricing model with two types of adaptively learning traders, fundamentalists and technical analysts, is studied. Fractions of these trader types, which are both boundedly rational, change over time according to evolutionary learning, with technical analysts conditioning their forecasting rule upon deviations from a benchmark fundamental. Volatility clustering arises endogenously in this model. Two mechanisms are proposed as an explanation. The first is coexistence of a stable steady state and a stable limit cycle, which arise as a consequence of a so-called Chenciner bifurcation of the system. The second is intermittency and associated bifurcation routes to strange attractors. Both phenomena are persistent and occur generically in nonlinear multi-agent evolutionary systems. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

I present a simple model of an evolutionary financial market with heterogeneous agents, based on the concept of adaptive belief systems introduced by Brock and Hommes (1997a). Agents choose between different forecast rules based on past performance, resulting in an evolutionary dynamics across predictor choice coupled to the equilibrium dynamics. The model generates endogenous price fluctuations with similar statistical properties as those observed in real return data, such as fat tails and volatility clustering. These similarities are demonstrated for data from the British, German, and Austrian stock market. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

Since the transformation from Political Economy to Economics and from Classical to Neoclassical theory in the late nineteenth century, a theory of human behavior has constituted the initial foundation upon which all economic theory is based and developed. Two main theories of human behavior developed by William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger have been generally accepted to have ushered in this Marginalist Revolution. Jevons marginal utility theory popularized by Alfred Marshall is still extensively used today, while the Austrian approach of Menger was effectively removed from academic discussion in the nineteen thirties; mainly as a result of the annexation of Austria and the dissolution of the Austrian School of Economics. Given the inability of economists to fully operationalize the marginal utility theory and realistically explain and resolve a broad range of behavioral anomalies using Neoclassical and Post-Neoclassical Economics, this thesis attempts to examine and address the most fundamental issues of human behavior in economics to explain how utility theory and modern Neoclassical and Post-Neoclassical Economics are flawed and how a realistic theory of human behavior, developed from the scholarly work of the early Austrian Economists, can be used to develop the basis of a scientific economics, derived from observation, that holds the potential to both expand the scope of economic understanding, redirect the focus of the discipline, and possibly unify the many disparate theories in the field.

This thesis proposes a conceptual framework to analyze the choice of organizational form and assess the shifts in organizational behaviour and form. This thesis argues that the choice of organizational form is an outcome of an individuals or groups mode of identification within the dominant organizational form and property rights structure of society. The framework places/situates the investor-owned firm (IOF) in a position of identification with the dominant ideology and property rights structure of society. The state-owned enterprise (SOE) occupies a position of counter-identification with the dominant ideology and property rights structure of society. The co-operative, on the other hand, represents a dis-identification with both the IOF and the SOE as this form works on and against the ideologies and property rights structures associated with the two former organizational forms.<p>Further, the thesis argues that endogenous and exogenous pressures may cause some organizations to shift their organizational behaviour and form. The researcher examines how internal problems in co-operative organizations (i.e., horizon and principal-agent problems) can exacerbate exogenous pressures (i.e., increasing competition and/or government deregulation) from the market and/or state causing the co-op to imitate the strategies or property rights structure of the IOF in order to cope with these issues. <p>Profiles of the formation of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Wholesale Society and the Consumers Co-operative Refineries Limited and the conversion of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool are used to illustrate the conceptual framework and support the arguments made in this thesis.

In an attempt to lend legitimacy to the troubled wolf project and to root policies in wolf-affected counties, decision-making was decentralized to stakeholder-based county wildlife management delegations in Sweden in 2009. Drawing from Habermas’ critical theory, this paper suggests that a phenomenon of instrumental rationality is currently circumscribing free and open deliberation in these delegations. Consequently, stakeholders remain fixed in their predetermined positions as wolf-skeptic hunters or pro-wolf conservationists, unable to be swayed by the deliberative process. The aim of this paper is to identify the barriers to deliberation that account for the perseverance of this strategic stakeholder rationality. Three county wildlife delegations are investigated as examples of this. The paper identifies the following four barriers, which are traced to instrumentality: strong sense of accountability, overly purposive atmosphere, overemphasis on decision as final outcome and perceived inability on the part of the delegates to influence decision-making, which is found by and large to still be ruled by scientists. Through these findings, it suggests that such barriers cause delegates to censor their own discursive attempts and to act with strategic rather than with communicative rationality toward the decision-making process. Finally, the paper concludes that the effect of instrumentality in these delegations is currently leading to (1) a crisis of legitimacy for the wolf project, as according to Habermas’ theory and (2) reduced individual freedom under the pursuit of sustainable development, as freedom has been confined to the dimension of the protection and promotion of private interests.