Insourcing, outsourcing and co-sourcing are three approaches to procuring an information system. This research contributes to the body of knowledge on insourcing an information system; exploring and discussing the enabling and inhibiting factors of the insourcing of an information system in selected government agencies in Malaysia. This study was undertaken in response to a paucity of similar projects and a limited literature focused on developing countries. It considers the post outsourcing context following the decision to insource a major Malaysian Government Information System in 2011. A qualitative research method was used to obtain empirical evidence from selected government agencies through 69 semi-structured interviews in two data collection periods: 2013-2014 and 2015. Interviews were conducted with civil servants at all levels, from senior management to clerical staff, including users of the government information system. By using coding principles from grounded theory to analyse the data, seven exciters and six inhibitors of insourcing a government information system were identified and mapped in the analytical framework. Further, this is the first research to use an enhanced model, devised by combining the OPTIMISM model and two distinct theoretical traditions: institutional theory and the capability approach; in order to analyse the insourcing of government information system adoption. The enhanced model was created by mapping the OPTIMISM model (that has a set of dimensions) to an analytical framework comprising the capability approach, institutional theory and technology (ICTs). The main research contribution of this thesis is in the area of capacity building of the internal development team. The increased budget for training, the selection of appropriate training providers and knowledge sharing among experienced and novice developers all contribute to building capacity in the internal development team; and consequently help to improve the quality of the system which will improve service delivery to the general public. The approach and findings of this study contribute to the body of knowledge and understanding of the subject in government information system development and implementation, and can also be applied to improving the quality of service delivery. While this study has focused on government information systems, the wider area of eGovernment, and applications serving the needs of the general public, is equally important, and therefore the researcher suggests that insourcing eGovernment applications would also assist in the capacity building of internal IT staff.

Syftet med undersökningen är att synliggöra förskollärares attityder till matematik och hur attityderna påverkar barns matematiska lärande i förskolan. Detta undersöks genom ett sociokulturellt perspektiv och med fokus på de teoretiska begreppen kultur, mediering, språk, den proximala utvecklingszonen, matematik enligt Bishops modell, attityd och matematisk subjektivitet. Studien följer en kvalitativ ansats och empirin har samlats in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer. Resultaten visar att förskollärarna har positiva attityder till matematik och att de är medvetna om att deras attityder till matematik påverkar barns lärande och prestationer i matematik. Vidare visar resultaten att förskollärarna betonar miljön som viktig för barns lärande där de själva och konkret material ingår i miljön.

Unemployment rate is all time low in Europe and this results in shortage of skilled workers. At same time technology changes are on their boom which puts new requirements of skills including diversifying competencies. The companies like consultancy faces issues to find right people with right skills and at right time. This unavailability of resources impacts the strategic goal of company. Smaller companies need to compete with mid-size and large companies over the same skilled workforce. Due to the lack of branding and company recognition, this can cripple the companies to grow and gather a completive advantage. Previous work has failed to address this issue, especially related to the smaller IT consultancies which is the fastest growing segment. The 99% of all business in Europe represents by small or medium size companies. IT consultancy companies represented the most growing and major contributor in value creation in information and communication sector in Europe. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to answer in what way the low unemployment rate affects the strategical process and execution for small IT consultancy companies. Furthermore, this study looked into the role of recruitment process to attract and retain skilled employees. A qualitative approach combined with semi-structured interviews was used as the main methodology to gather empirical data and answer the key problems of this study. The semi-structured interviews were chosen due to the possibility to give the interviewers a freedom to speak and explain moderately, especially strategy processes, which are different from one company to other ones. This study found that small IT consultancy companies had little or no formal structure in the strategical processes in relation to the literature available in the topic, but still highlighted and expressed that strategy is important for the companies. Although if small IT companies want to grow, they must rethink the organizational structure. All studied companies are providing high salaries, freedom of work, technology learning, and job satisfaction as a key tool to attract talent. All companies in general asked the most critical questions on how to grow their business with the basis of their own limitations. Unfortunately, none of the companies reviewed and monitored their objectives on frequent and regular basis.  This study found that the low unemployment rate plays a critical role which can increase the profit margin, but cannot increase the number of employees and potentially minimize the importance of the strategical process. The study also found that low unemployment rate creates a healthy competitive environment where all large and small consultancy companies enables each other to grow instead of competing.

With the number of Asian immigrants continually increasing in New Zealand society, Asian immigrant businesses have been appearing more rapidly in New Zealand, particularly in Auckland. The primary purpose of this study is to enquire into why a certain Asian immigrant group become business people after migrating to Auckland, New Zealand. In addition, it investigates the level of their business activity and the level of happiness with their new life in New Zealand. This study examines the growing phenomenon of Asian immigrants, and the entrepreneurship rate of ethnic groups through existing statistics. The study focuses on Korean immigrants. Twenty self-employed Koreans who are running a business in Auckland participated in the study. They were invited to talk about why they became self-employed business people and related matters about their business activity. The study found that Korean immigrants chose self-employment as a means of getting a job. They gave up seeking mainstream employment opportunities due to the language barrier and their inability to cope with a new society and new system. Other fundamental factors in their decision to become entrepreneurs were that firstly, they were willing to invest a considerable amount of their own money and secondly, they preferred to participate in the workforce rather than to depend on the New Zealand welfare system. Based on the information acquired through the research, the study reported that the recently increased numbers of Asian businesses are partly attributable to New Zealand business immigration policy which introduced a new business category – Long Term Business Visa (LTBV). The findings from this research pointed to commitment that immigrant businesses contribute to the New Zealand economy and New Zealand society as taxpayers and potential employers.

<p>Manlighet och känslor är, historiskt sett, två sällan sammankopplade fenomen. Mannen har i stor utsträckning setts som den rationella och känslokalla av de två könen. Manlighetsidealet håller dock på att förändras och både forskning och mina informanter menar att mannen idag tillåts visa känslor i mycket större utsträckning än vad som var tillåtet i det manlighetsideal som fanns förr. I Sverige verkar det som att vi numera har androgynatet som dominerande patriarkatfas, vilket innebär mer jämlikhet och individualism. Detta verkar innebära mer frihet för mannen att välja vilka delar av manlighetsidealet han ska internalisera i sitt liv. Utifrån mina informanters resonemang bedömer jag att det rådande manlighetsidealen för dem i stor utsträckning är en medveten man som har kontakt med sitt känsloliv och kan vara sig själv.</p> / <p>Masculinity and emotions is a rarely combined phenomenon, at least historically speaking. Men have to a large extent been seen as the rational and unemotional of the two sexes. The ideal masculinity is about too change though and both research and my informants claim that men today are allowed to show more emotions than was allowed in the ideal masculinity in the past. In Sweden it seems that we nowadays live in a context with an androgynous direction of patriarchy, which means more equality between men and women and more individualism. This seems too imply that men have more freedom to choose which part of the ideal masculinity they want to internalize in their lives. I estimate from my informants point of view that the current ideal masculinities for them is a conscious man that are connected with his emotions and that could just be him self.</p>

Focusing on communication as an important means besides other efforts for conflict resolution in an asymmetric armed conflict in Afghanistan, this study looked for a rhetorical communication approach appropriate to Pashtun tribal setting in South-eastern (Loya Paktya region) Afghanistan. The study explored and found some perceived essentials of such persuasive communication by conducting face-to-face semi-structured in depth interviews with 17 participants. Thematic analysis was used to code and categorize data. Aristotle’s rhetorical theory provided a framework for this qualitative study by narrowing down the focus to exploring credibility of the communicator (ethos), the rationality of the message (logos), and the emotional appeals (pathos), particular for the south-eastern Pashtun tribal setting, during communication. In addition, considering the relation between rhetorical and soft power theories in influencing the choice of an audience, this project also asked participants if and how communication in their tribal setting could be framed as an influencing power by attraction rather than by coercion. Therefore, soft power of which persuasive communication is a crucial part was also used as a theoretical framework for this study. The findings show the significance of persuasive communication in future conflict resolution efforts in Afghanistan.

Focusing on communication as an important means besides other efforts for conflict resolution in an asymmetric armed conflict in Afghanistan, this study looked for a rhetorical communication approach appropriate to Pashtun tribal setting in South-eastern (Loya Paktya region) Afghanistan. The study explored and found some perceived essentials of such persuasive communication by conducting face-to-face semi-structured in depth interviews with 17 participants. Thematic analysis was used to code and categorize data. Aristotle’s rhetorical theory provided a framework for this qualitative study by narrowing down the focus to exploring credibility of the communicator (ethos), the rationality of the message (logos), and the emotional appeals (pathos), particular for the south-eastern Pashtun tribal setting, during communication. In addition, considering the relation between rhetorical and soft power theories in influencing the choice of an audience, this project also asked participants if and how communication in their tribal setting could be framed as an influencing power by attraction rather than by coercion. Therefore, soft power of which persuasive communication is a crucial part was also used as a theoretical framework for this study. The findings show the significance of persuasive communication in future conflict resolution efforts in Afghanistan.

Information monitoring systems are publish-subscribe systems that continuously track information changes and notify users (or programs acting on behalf of humans) of relevant updates according to specified thresholds. Internet-scale information monitoring presents a number of new challenges. First, automated change detection is harder when sources are autonomous and updates are performed asynchronously. Second, information source heterogeneity makes the problem of modelling and representing changes harder than ever. Third, efficient and scalable mechanisms are needed to handle a large and growing number of users and thousands or even millions of monitoring triggers fired at multiple sources. In this dissertation, we model users' monitoring requests using continual queries (CQs) and present a suite of efficient and scalable solutions to large scale information monitoring over structured or semi-structured data sources. A CQ is a standing query that monitors information sources for interesting events (triggers) and notifies users when new information changes meet specified thresholds. In this dissertation, we first present the system level facilities for building an Internet-scale continual query system, including the design and development of two operational CQ monitoring systems OpenCQ and WebCQ, the engineering issues involved, and our solutions. We then describe a number of research challenges that are specific to large-scale information monitoring and the techniques developed in the context of OpenCQ and WebCQ to address these challenges. Example issues include how to efficiently process large number of continual queries, what mechanisms are effective for building a scalable distributed trigger system that is capable of handling tens of thousands of triggers firing at hundreds of data sources, how to effectively disseminate fresh information to the right users at the right time. We have developed a suite of techniques to optimize the processing of continual queries, including an effective CQ grouping scheme, an auxiliary data structure to support group-based indexing of CQs, and a differential CQ evaluation algorithm (DRA). The third contribution is the design of an experimental evaluation model and testbed to validate the solutions. We have engaged our evaluation using both measurements on real systems (OpenCQ/WebCQ) and simulation-based approach. To our knowledge, the research documented in this dissertation is to date the first one to present a focused study of research and engineering issues in building large-scale information monitoring systems using continual queries.

Manlighet och känslor är, historiskt sett, två sällan sammankopplade fenomen. Mannen har i stor utsträckning setts som den rationella och känslokalla av de två könen. Manlighetsidealet håller dock på att förändras och både forskning och mina informanter menar att mannen idag tillåts visa känslor i mycket större utsträckning än vad som var tillåtet i det manlighetsideal som fanns förr. I Sverige verkar det som att vi numera har androgynatet som dominerande patriarkatfas, vilket innebär mer jämlikhet och individualism. Detta verkar innebära mer frihet för mannen att välja vilka delar av manlighetsidealet han ska internalisera i sitt liv. Utifrån mina informanters resonemang bedömer jag att det rådande manlighetsidealen för dem i stor utsträckning är en medveten man som har kontakt med sitt känsloliv och kan vara sig själv. / Masculinity and emotions is a rarely combined phenomenon, at least historically speaking. Men have to a large extent been seen as the rational and unemotional of the two sexes. The ideal masculinity is about too change though and both research and my informants claim that men today are allowed to show more emotions than was allowed in the ideal masculinity in the past. In Sweden it seems that we nowadays live in a context with an androgynous direction of patriarchy, which means more equality between men and women and more individualism. This seems too imply that men have more freedom to choose which part of the ideal masculinity they want to internalize in their lives. I estimate from my informants point of view that the current ideal masculinities for them is a conscious man that are connected with his emotions and that could just be him self.

Autism-spectrum disorders (ASDs) are a group of neurodevelopmental disorders that are becoming increasingly more prevalent. A diagnostic criterion for autism is the presence of restricted, repetitive behaviours (RRBs), one of which is the intense fascinations for virtually any topic: circumscribed interests (CIs). CIs have the potential to be used for motivational purposes. This study employed semi-structured interviews using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) with individuals with ASDs and their parents. In total, 11 families participated in this study, comprising 33 individuals (16 parents and 17 individuals with ASDs). This study found five themes: He's Very Unique; They Don't Realize that Not Everyone Lives and Thinks the Same Thing All the Time; We Couldn't even Pronounce the Names of These Dinosaurs, and Jason was Telling Us; You Can't Change Them, You Can Only Love Them; and So I Can Do My Job at the Same Time and Observe the Weather at the Same Time.