Internet has become increasingly ubiquitous and with the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies and concepts it has almost become second nature for many Internet users. This study attempts to view the “social life” of this “new” online environment through its current manifestation in the form of the popular social networking site Facebook. It argues that Facebook has become a tool for the management of one's self both online and offline and that people's reflexive relation to their self-identity is made visible through their engagement with this social media. How such a new form of social media incorporates itself into everyday life but also how the media acts as an extension of the reflexive self has been the main focus of this study.

[pt] Esta pesquisa tem como proposta refletir sobre alguns dos significados dos automóveis construídos pelo discurso publicitário. O ponto de partida é entender que o consumo é um fato social inerente às relações socioculturais nas sociedades moderno-contemporâneas e que a publicidade, como sua principal narrativa, tem por função operar a valorização dos bens através do imaginário produzido em seus anúncios. Para a execução da pesquisa, foram retirados anúncios impressos de um jornal e de uma revista de grande circulação nacional, com o intuito de interpretar, no caso do automóvel, algumas das múltiplas significações do consumo e compreender o potencial publicitário como fornecedor de sentido aos bens. / [en] This research proposal is to think over the symbolic meanings of automobiles, based on their advertising speech. The initial conception is to understand that consumerism is a social fact inherent to socio-cultural relations in the modern-contemporary society and that advertisement, as its principal idea, is functional to operate a value in the products through imaginary speech in their ads. This research was based on print ads of newspapers and magazines of national distribution in order to infer that, in the automobile industry, advertise gives multiple consumption meanings, and to understand the advertising potential as a supplier of significance to material products.

The goal of the thesis is to analyze the contemporary form of ideology through the work of Slavoj Žižek. It aims to answer the question - resulting from the widespread notion of the end of ideology - what do people believe in nowadays. In other words, what do we follow or what do we respect if it is said that we do not believe in anything? The collapse of the communist project in the Eastern bloc brought a period of distrust towards grand narratives and utopian projects. In addition, the widespread form of ideology, which currently has been liberal democracy, allows each individual to choose their own way of life and among a wide range of parties with different political orientations. The answers to the critical analysis of this assumption and the current form of ideology are found in the work of Slavoj Žižek, who has been dealing with these questions since the end of the Cold War. The first part of the thesis presents the Marxist tradition of critique of ideology - its forms and observations it brought into this area. The second part deals with Žižek's contribution to the topics while clarifying the concepts of the Symbolic and the Big Other, representing the current forms of the unconscious and practiced collective activity. The influence of the dominant form of ideology on the population and...

Newspapers often report on the violation of learners’ rights. Many of these violations and critical incidents are related to the right to freedom of expression, which is internationally viewed as a core right in a democracy. My inquiry focused on grade 11 learners’ understanding of the right to freedom of expression. It is important to understand learners’ understanding of the right to freedom of expression, as they are the leaders of tomorrow and the right to freedom of expression is central to the survival of democracy. This inquiry was informed by an interpretivist paradigm. Atlas.ti™ was used to systematically analyse the data and categorise it into three hermeneutic units. This computer-aided qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) tool facilitated the process of analysis and enhanced the validity of the research. During the inductive process of analysis two patterns crystallised, viz. the absolutising of the right to freedom of expression by some learners and the lack of skills to implement the limitation to the right to freedom of expression in schools. The main findings indicated that some learners did not have knowledge regarding the right to freedom of expression, although most learners were aware that they could speak their minds under this right. Furthermore, learners didn’t seem to know how to exercise the right to freedom of expression. One of the factors disrupting the implementation of the right to freedom of expression in schools is the perpetuation of an authoritarian culture in schools. Theoretical and practical recommendations are suggested and avenues for future research are identified. / Thesis (PhD (Education Management))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Education Management and Policy Studies / unrestricted

Empirical Bayes methods have been around for a long time and have a wide range of applications. These methods provide a way in which historical data can be aggregated to provide estimates of the posterior mean. This thesis revisits some of the empirical Bayesian methods and develops new applications. We first look at a linear empirical Bayes estimator and apply it on ranking and symbolic data. Next, we consider Tweedie’s formula and show how it can be applied to analyze a microarray dataset. The application of the formula is simplified with the Pearson system of distributions. Saddlepoint approximations enable us to generalize several results in this direction. The results show that the proposed methods perform well in applications to real data sets.

Having a modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is seen as increasingly important if an organisation wants to compete in today’s business environment. The implementation of a new ERP system can result in added automatization and the replacement and/or coupling of legacy systems. The replacement and coupling of legacy systems can help an organisation increase data integrity and accessibility by lowering data fragmentation. Previous research on the topic of ERP implementations has emphasized user participation as an important factor when aiming to succeed with an implementation. The research is however inconsistent with its use of participation and involvement where involvement is often used synonymously with participation, but sometimes it signifies that the implementation is of personal importance to the user. This study defines user participation as the user partaking in activities relating to the implementation, and user involvement is defined as the user perceiving the project or system as important. This study also introduces a new term: user inclusion, which encompasses both user participation, and if a user is on the receiving end of one-way communication, for example when receiving a newsletter. This study argues that symbolic adoption, the belief that implementing the system is a good idea, is an important part of system success and uses a combination of factors from the UTAUT model and the I/S success model as antecedents to the dimensions of symbolic adoption that has been presented in previous research. The purpose of this study is to examine how users are included in ERP implementation processes, and how their inclusion in the process affects users’ symbolic adoption. To address this purpose, a qualitative multi-case study that included two cases was conducted. In order to answer how users are included, this study divides how into three sub-questions; who; when and in what way users were included throughout the implementation. ​This study concludes that users’ inclusion increases over time throughout the implementation process, both in terms of influence, and in number of participating users. This study also shows that users included in project initiatives can affect the antecedents to symbolic adoption in various ways, both their own symbolic adoption, and that of their non-participating colleagues. An example of this is how intended users’ expectations can be managed through communication and when they get first-hand experience of the system, their expectations correct themselves so that they are closer to the actual performance and effort required. The antecedents, performance and effort expectancy, are in turn linked to the symbolic adoption dimension effort worthiness.

The aim of the diploma thesis is to find answers to questions connected to the symbolic construction of collective identity of the initial drug community in communist Czechoslovakia. This discourse creation of collective identity is analyzed on the basis of biographical interviews with outliving members of the then drug subculture. In the course of the terrain investigation there has been recorded a total of 34 narratives of the representatives of the two successive generations of this drug community by using the unstructured and semi-structured interview technique. For the purposes of this research, there has been analyzed 7 interviews closely connected to the beginning and the initial process of formation of drug community. By means of analysis and interpretation of the content of these biographical materials there are primarily captured the collectively shared interpretative frames of values and important identification attributes by which protagonists of the oldest generation of this community form their former collective identity. In this way is clarified how the narrators themselves re-construct and re-interpret their subjectively experienced "we" and at the same time using the symbolic resources to define borders against the non-members of this collectivity. The biographies of the...

Magister Artium - MA / The black middle class of South Africa has been the subject of academic and media fascination since the democratisation of South Africa almost 30 years ago. However, this attention tends to portray a one-dimensional and homogenous image of the black middle class. The homogenising of this group often involves derogatory stereotypes and framing the group as shallow, and prone to especially excessive conspicuous consumption and vulgar displays of wealth and material possessions. Implicitly or overtly, the black middle class is therefore not seen as a bona fide middle class, i.e. entrepreneurial, zealous, dynamic and enterprising in demanding social recognition. Through the lens of food and food culture (which uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class and capital distinction), this thesis undertakes a phenomenological exploration of a group that is not only heterogeneous but also very energetically rebuilding a sense of self and dignity in the face of power relations, racism and stereotypes linked to colonialism, apartheid and post-colonial politics. The findings of this thesis reveal that black middle-class South Africans are determined to (a) affirm their belonging in society, (b) confirm their class standing and access to capital, and, (c) establish their individual identities as well as an individualised group identity. In the face of continuing inequality, unequal power relations and tense social relations, this group has developed strategies to mitigate and navigate these challenges. This thesis identified two key strategies that are employed by black consumers both online and in the field: ‘eating without food’ and the ‘cultured palate’ (my terms). These two strategies empower practitioners to navigate foodscapes and social spaces as well as demonstrate their class belonging.

In April 2015, the bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes- notorious mining magnate, archimperialist and champion of a global Anglo-Saxon empire- was removed from its concrete plinth overlooking Cape Town, South Africa. This came as a result of the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement, a movement that would see statues questioned and vandalised across the country. Two years later, fierce contestation over the hegemonic narrative told through the American South’s symbolic landscape erupted over the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, resulting in the deaths of multiple people in Charlottesville, Virginia. Increasing research on the removal of Rhodes and the removal of Confederate statuary has emerged in recent years. However, previous scholarship has failed to compare the wider phenomena of the calls for removal, from the memorialised figures to their change in symbolic capital, the movements’ inception and its outcomes. There is subsequently a gap in the literature understanding what the politics of statue removal tell us about not only the American and South African commemorative landscapes, but the nations’ interpretations of the past and societies themselves. Therefore, this thesis uses descriptive comparative analysis to compare two case studies where the debate over statue removal has surfaced most vehemently: Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town and Lee’s statue in Charlottesville. Ultimately, this dissertation finds that the calls for the removal of statues are part of a wider change in tenor towards understanding and disrupting prevailing hegemonic narratives of white supremacy, in both society and its symbolic landscape. The phenomena demonstrates that heterogeneous societies with pasts marred by segregation and racism are moving to reject and re-negotiate these histories and their symbols, a move that has elicited deeply divided, emotional responses. Despite waning attention to monument removals, the issue remains unresolved, contentious, and capable of re-igniting.

In the recent decades, alternative notions regarding the role of symbols in intelligence in natural and artificial systems have attracted significant inter- est. The main difference of the so-called situated and embodied approaches to cognitive science from the traditional cognitivist position is that symbolic repre- sentations are viewed as resources, similar to maps used for navigation or plans for activity, instead of as transparent stand-ins in internal world models. Thus, all symbolic resources have to be interpreted and re-contextualized for use in concrete situations. In this view, one of the primary sources of such symbolic resources is language. Cognitivism views language as a vessel carrying informa- tion originally located in the processing mechanisms of the individual agents. Situated approaches, on the other hand, view language both as a communicative mechanism and as a means for the individual agents to enhance and extend their cognitive machinery, by e.g. better utilizing their attentional resources, or mod- ifying their perceptual-motor means. Taking inspiration from these ideas, and building on multi-agent models developed in other fields, the field of language evolution developed models of the emergence of shared resources for communi- cation in a community of agents. In these models, agents with various means of categorization and learning engage in communicative interactions with each other, using shared signs to refer either to pre-given meanings or entities in a situation. In order to avoid falling into the same mentalist pitfalls as cognitivism in the design of these models, such as the stipulation of an inner sphere of mean- ings for which communicative signs are mere labels, the role of communication should be viewed as one of the social coordination of behavior using physically grounded symbols. To this end, an experimental setup for language games, and a robotic model for agents which engage in such games are presented. The setup allows the agents to utilize shared symbols in the completion of a simple task, with one agent instructing another on which action to undertake. The symbols used by agents in the language games are grounded in the embodied choices presented to them by their environment, and the agents can further use the symbols created in these games for enhancing their own behavioral means. The learning mechanism of the agents is similarity-based, and uses low-level sensory data to avoid the building in of features. Experiments have shown that the establishment of a common vocabulary of labels depends on how well the instructors are trained on the task and the availability of feedback mechanisms for the exchanged labels.