Thesis (MTech (Business Administration))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2019 / The Fourth Industrial Revolution has entrenched the use of communication technologies in the workplace owing to their advantages. However, these same technologies can also present challenges for organisations, especially when employees become too dependent on them, for example, using emails as a sole form of communication. Consequently, this impacts staff interaction, their interpersonal communication, as well as staff cohesion negatively. The main objective of this research study was to establish if faculty staff rely excessively on email communication, resulting in reduced interpersonal communication, staff cohesion, and staff interaction. The researcher used an interpretive phenomenological quantitative research approach in a case study at the Faculty of Business and Management Sciences at UoT X with the aim to understand participants’ email experiences. The sample frame comprised 438 staff members, while the study adopted a non-probability sampling method. The findings revealed that a majority of the employees rely on electronic communication to communicate important information to other staff members in spite of the fact that they did not receive any formal training to use email in a professional business environment. Moreover, the research found that over-reliance on email communication impacted negatively on relationships amongst faculty staff, whilst poor interpersonal communication was a major cause of conflict and misunderstandings, as shown in the literature. Faculty staff should be encouraged to interact with their colleagues on a face-to-face basis, and should only resort to using electronic communication in urgent contexts. Staff relations are built and strengthened by sharing experiences, interacting both formally and informally, resolving disagreements, and encouraging interpersonal dialogue, diversity and tolerance through interactions. Furthermore, faculties should create social environments such as off-campus research retreats, university sports events, conferences, recreational tours, and subject clusters to aid sharing experiences, and staff cohesion.

This qualitative thesis uses discourse analysis to examine parental resistance towards medical treatment of critically ill children. It is an investigation of the 'mobile and transitory' discourses at play in instances of resistance between parents, physicians and nurses within health care institutions, and an examination of the consequences of resistance through providing alternative ways of perceiving and therefore understanding these disagreements. The philosophical perspectives, methodology and methods used in this thesis are underpinned by selected ideas taken from the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and supported by relevant literature in the fields of media, law, children, parenting, caring, serious childhood illness, medicine and nursing. The thesis obtains information from a variety of texts that includes established literature (such as medical, sociological, legal, academic and philosophical), newspaper articles, radio or television interviews, internet sources, court reports and proceedings, legal experts and other commentators - and 15 interview based texts, where the focus is on analyses of narratives of parents, doctors and nurses. In the texts gathered for this thesis, there are noticeable differences between the personal experience discourses of parents, the 'in-between' discourses of nurses, and the disciplined discourses of physicians. This thesis brings these discourses into conversation with each other suggesting that parental resistance does not occur because of an infrequent and unusual set of circumstances where a few socially isolated and/or 'difficult' parents disagree with the treatment desires of paediatric physicians. Instead, it is argued that from an examination of interview based texts, parental resistance is an omnipresent but transitory occurrence that affects many of the interactions between the parents of seriously ill children and clinical staff. It is maintained that within these interactions, the seeds of this resistance are sown in both critical decision making situations and in everyday occurrences between doctors, nurses and parents within healthcare institutions. Contributing factors to parental resistance include the use of power games by staff, the language of medicine, forms of symbolic violence, the presence or absence of trust between parents and medical staff, the effects of medical habitus, and challenges to the parental role and identity. Overall, it is proposed in this thesis that parents who resist treatment for their seriously ill child are not exceptions to the normative patient-physician relationship. Instead an analysis of their discourses and practices is able to illuminate the complex interactions between patients and medical conventions. It is therefore possible to see parents who resist medical advice not as peripheral to the medical encounter but as examples of how patient-physician relationships come to be codified, constructed and crafted through everyday discourses and practices within health care settings.