Intresset för brottsofferfrågor har vuxit sig allt starkare i Sverige under de senaste årtiondena. Socialtjänsten är den instans som har det lagstadgade ansvaret att erbjuda brottsoffer den hjälp och det stöd de behöver. Idag tyder dock mycket på att det föreligger stora brister i socialtjänstens brottsofferstöd. Det är i dessa brister som denna studie har tagit sin utgångpunkt med två primära frågeställningar: (1) varför har det varit så svårt för socialtjänsten att fullfölja sitt lagstadgade ansvar gentemot brottsoffer och (2) vad skulle behöva göras för att få socialtjänstens brottsofferarbete att fungera på ett bättre sätt än vad det gör idag? Ingen liknande kartläggning har tidigare gjorts på området.Genom åtta stycken nyckelpersonsintervjuer undersöktes dessa frågeställningar. Vid intervjuerna användes en utformad modell bestående av faktorer som inbegriper begreppet förmåga, denna har utgjort en central utgångspunkt för kartläggningen av socialtjänstens förmåga att stödja brottsoffer. Nyckelpersonerna bestod av företrädare i nyckelpositioner inom verksamheter som på olika sätt arbetar med brottsofferfrågor.Resultatet visade på att det föreligger en stor ovisshet kring dessa frågor. Det visade sig även att en majoritet av de intervjuade anser att den största problematiken beror på att det inte riktigt finns den vilja som behövs för att prioritera och förbättra brottsoffersituationen i Sverige. Därmed kvarstår också den viktiga frågan; varför är det så svårt för socialtjänsten att fullfölja sitt lagstadgade ansvar gentemot brottsoffer? Med dessa oroväckande upptäckter är det än viktigare att fler studier utförs på området. Vidare forskning bör riktas mot att ta reda på var den faktiska problematiken ligger. Därefter kan det vara lämpligt att utreda eventuella åtgärder. / Interest in crime victim issues has grown stronger in Sweden in recent decades. The social services have the statutory responsibility to offer victims of crime the help and support they need. Recent indications suggest that there are major shortcomings in the social services for crime victim support. Based on these shortcomings this study investigates two primary issues: (1) why has it been so difficult for the social services to fulfill their statutory responsibilities towards victims of crime and (2) what would be needed for the social services for crime victim support to work better than it does today? No similar study has been conducted in this area before.Through the execution of eight key informant interviews these issues were investigated by the use of a designed model constituted of various factors including the concept of ability. This concept has been a central point for the mapping of the social services’ ability to support victims of crime. The key informants consisted of representatives in key positions in operations that work with different crime victim issues.The results show that there is a great uncertainty around these issues. It was also found that a majority of those interviewed believe that the biggest problem regarding these issues is that the will and the necessary prioritization of crime victim matters are relatively low. These alarming findings show an even greater need of more studies performed in this field. Thus remains the important question; why is it so difficult for the social services to fulfill its statutory responsibility towards victims of crime? Further research should be directed at finding out where the real problem lies. Further on, suggestions for improvement should be investigated.

<p>The decade of the nineteen-twenties has generally been recognized as a dynamic period in English-Canadian literature, but so far as fiction is concerned its achievement is widely assumed to be the introduction of social realism into the Canadian novel. Those novels which employ other than realistic conventions have been assumed by many critics to be inferior because of their non-realistic aspects. </p> <p>This dissertation examines four such novels, supposedly flawed by melodramatic excess~ Raymond Knister's White Narcissus (1929), Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925), Morley Callaghan's A Broken Journey (1932), and Frederick Philip Grove's The Yoke of Life (1930) - in order to discover the function and significance of melodramatic conventions and the sort of vision they project.</p> <p>The first part of the dissertation defines such terms as "realism" and ''melodrama." and explains the critical approach to be used. In the central four chapters, this critical approach is applied to each novel in turn.</p> <p>When the novels are compared, following the detailed analysis of each, significant similarities emerge. In thematic terms, a quest is undertaken, in each case, which is meaningful on several levels: on the literal level there is an arduous physical journey across or into a specific (and generally threatening) landscape; on a symbolic level there is a journey of mythological and/or religious import; in psychological terms the journey is into the less rational aspects of human experience in an attempt to re-integrate a personality divided against itself. In terms of structure, as well, certain patterns emerge: each novel employs a balanced, rather symmetrical structure, formal devices which tend to distance the reader from the material, and vortex-like patterns of movement on the part of the protagonist.</p> <p>The formal and thematic patterns which emerge from a comparison of the four novels, then, suggest that there is a "melodramatic mode" common to them, and possibly to novels of periods other than the one explored in this thesis. Indeed, it is further argued, melodramatic conventions (which are related to the gothic mode and romanticism in general) may serve as an appropriate vehicle for the expression in fiction of a profound modern theme, the portrayal of alienated man in a secularized and relativistic universe.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Although the majority of Filipinos are Christian, recent developments reflect an upsurge in conversion to Islam, particularly in the northern Philippines. This dissertation examines one of the fastest growing religious phenomena in Southeast Asia, Balik-Islam, which means “reverts to Islam,” or the process of “returning to Islam.” The Balik-Islam movement has become popular since the 1970s, and its religious narratives on Muslim reversion challenge and complicate what we already know generally about conversion to new religions, including the impact of the external “non-religious” factors associated with it. This dissertation shows how a discourse of “reversion” among Balik-Islam members reveals complex realities about the appeal of Islam to Filipinos. While other scholars have used paradigms concerning “othering” and underlying “symbolic” forces to understanding the reasons why conflict and crisis might appear in conversion narratives, this characterization also tends to reify religion and position Christianity and Islam as polar opposites operating within a hostile environment. My approach is to understand how Balik-Islam members negotiate their transition to Islam by virtue of social and cultural settings that are both fluid and multifaceted. By critically assessing their “reversion” narratives, this dissertation reveals how their transition to Islam reflects a “symbolic negotiation,” or an act of reimagining the process of religious conversion itself, substituting it for a discourse of reversion that reflects a diverse set of spiritual and social needs. / Religion

This dissertation traces the formation of powerful urban discourses in the context of rapid economic transformation in Macau to understand different levels of symbolic production as they are situated within the larger symbolic structure of power. The research is motivated by my attempt to assess the Neo-Marxist utopian proposition about local culture being a possible counter-hegemonic space where revolutionary politics will develop. Exploratory in nature, my research questions are: Can local culture in the forms of personal and localized practices actually generate oppositional politics? Or do they merely serve as marketing tools for the expansion of economic development? What is the role of local culture in the context of Macau’s urban restructuring? To answer these questions, I view the ongoing cultural production of discourse as indications of local culture. Employing the extended case method, I apply reflexive science to ethnography as an ongoing process that looks continually for patterns of situations and elements to inform me about the relationship between local culture and social change. My research adopts a variety of qualitative methods --- I conducted 7 focus groups, 50 in-depth interviews which included life stories and photo-elicitation, critical discourse analysis, as well as extended ethnographic participation. Three types of discourses were identified during fieldwork to understand the formation of local culture with relation to power and social change: authorized, everyday, and mobilizing discourses. Drawing from the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu such as symbolic power, field, and misrecognition, I connect and map the production of discourses and argue that they represent the macro-, micro-, and meso-levels of a symbolic system whereby authorized discourse (such as political rhetoric and global neoliberal ideology), everyday discourse (such as local narratives and emotions), and mobilizing discourse (such as protest slogans and grassroots campaigns) interact with one another in multiple fields where the struggle over meanings reinforces and creates social relations linked to power positions. My overall argument asserts that discourses should be conceptualized as a symbolic structure—one that provides the organization and transformation of power relations. Since the struggles over symbolic power via the construction and maintenance of effective discourses involve the production, transmission, and transfusion of cultural meanings that provide appropriate frames and positions for social agents who occupy multiple and sometimes overlapping sub-fields (e.g. fields of social activism, politics, everyday life) structured by the larger field of power relations, social change does not transpire in the field of local culture separate from or innocent of hegemonic power relations. In Macau, local culture simultaneously contains both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic frames and arguments. Social change occurs dialectically when agents negotiate their specific sets of economic, political, and ideological interests within the sub-fields they find themselves in by choosing from the reservoir of possible cultural symbols and thereby reproducing part of culture as structure, while repurposing and tailoring them to create new social practices in pursuit of what they deem desirable and valuable. / Sociology

This dissertation explores the problem of how knowledge is possible, given that knowledge is necessarily rooted in the reality of the knower. The Kantian critical philosophy defeats Humean skepticism by demonstrating the a priori necessity of certain categorical functions at the root of all human cognition, but ultimately results in merely shifting the problem of certainty to these same functions. Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms seeks to extend the critical philosophy of Kant beyond the limits of theoretical thinking, and thereby broadens the functional foundations of cognition to include all symbolic modes of thinking in a unified system of human cognition. However, this expansion of the system of knowledge only serves to further highlight the fundamental problem of how knowledge of any sort can be a “symbol” of reality, when the symbolic form that produces that symbol always involves the mediation of reality in some way. This general problem is described throughout Cassirer’s writings in terms of a dialectic of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben), which, he argues, is the fundamental dialectic to which all other oppositions in the history of metaphysics can ultimately be reduced. In the present work, the nature of this dialectic is described and tied to the general problem of knowledge within any systematic critical philosophy, as seen in Cassirer’s philosophy as well as the works of Peirce, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Through this discussion, Cassirer’s own esoteric conception of a monadic metaphysics will be revealed, and the key importance of freedom as a solution to this dialectic will be drawn from his interpretation of earlier philosophers, particularly Nicolaus Cusanus. / Philosophy

In today’s competitive labor markets, successfully recruiting a large pool of skilled and qualified job applicants is a prime concern of many organizations. In Study 1, I focused on how organizations can successfully employ four traditional recruitment practices (sponsorships, job fair activities, word-of mouth endorsements and corporate advertisements) simultaneously to disseminate information about their positive recruitment brand images to job seekers to enhance organizational attraction. The results which supported all my hypotheses indicated that, communication of an organization’s brand images to job seekers through the simultaneous use of these four traditional recruitment practices can indeed influence job seekers’ positive perceptions of an organization and result in enhanced organizational attraction. In Study 2, which was built on findings in Study1, I theorized that social media may have become a prominent source of information for job seekers. In this study, I predicted that job seekers’ use of four social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and LinkedIn) in job search will explain incremental variance in organizational attraction over the use of traditional recruitment methods. I also predicted that job seekers’ utilization of social media in job search will be positively related to organizational attraction through enhanced perceptions of instrumental and symbolic attributes. Surveys for both studies were posted on and data collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results from the second study were mixed; but the results confirm findings from prior research, which showed that the instrumental-symbolic framework can be used to predict potential job seekers’ perceptions of organizational attractiveness. Overall, results in the two studies reveal that organizations can better enhance recruitment by using a combination of social media and traditional recruitment methods to attract potential job seekers. / Business Administration/Human Resource Management

What does Mexico mean to the cultural imagination of the United States? What has it meant in the past? In what ways has the U.S. incorporated aspects of Mexican culture into its own? This dissertation explores these questions of cultural and intellectual exchange between the U.S. and Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s by positioning itself amid the present “transnational” and “hemispheric” turn in U.S. literary study. Its subject matter ranges from architecture and urbanism to journalism and travel writing to short stories and novels to muralism and the visual arts. Such an interdisciplinary approach is bolstered by crossing scales of geography from the international to the continental, the national, the regional and the local. Positioning the discussion in geographic terms allows one to see how the possibilities for cultural exchange could never be fully realized, as the ways in which U.S. writers and intellectuals understood Mexico-- then and now-- can rarely be separated from either the physical proximity or the cultural dissimilarity of the two countries, a relationship that has been described as one of “distant neighbors.” This dissertation takes the spatial components of culture seriously, employing useful concepts from the disciplines of human geography and cultural landscape studies to inform its understanding of how diverse figures ranging from Conrad Aiken, Stuart Chase, José Clemente Orozco, Katherine Anne Porter, Sophie Treadwell, William Carlos Williams-- among others less widely known-- understood Mexico and presented it to a U.S. audience during the interwar period. Their narratives often employ the symbolic landscape of Mexico to communicate the qualities of Mexican culture while unwittingly obscuring the reality of what the country itself. Nonetheless, each example points to possible correctives in the pattern, offering a hemispheric perspective from which much can still be learned today. / English

This dissertation focuses on the digital presentation of athletification, a process through which non-athletes incorporate an athletic identity into their self-concept. Although many studies have explored consumer behavior driven by team identification and how athletes manage impressions on social media, extant literature has devoted little attention to the symbolic meaning of virtual athletic identity and its impact on consumption from a non-athlete’s perspective. Using a multimethod approach, this dissertation is divided into three standalone essays and examines the following in the context of influencer marketing: 1) the use and role of digital athletic identity in building a digital self-brand; 2) the motivation and consequences of constructing a digital identity; and 3) the impact of a digital athletic identity on consumers. This dissertation contributes to the literature by constructing a theoretical foundation for athletification as a self-branding tool on social media and uncovering its influence on consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. These studies offer insights for social media influencers and marketers attempting to leverage their impacts on consumers. Findings also provide actionable strategies that could improve the promotional messages presented online. / Tourism and Sport

In the context of expanding public concern about the healthfulness of food, this thesis examines how health is understood and taken up in individuals’ everyday activities of eating. Sociological frameworks emphasize the complex relations shaping health practices in context; however, a greater focus on the structured nature of practice has weakened appreciation of the agent. Food scholars investigating choice and constructions of healthy food and eating categories, highlight processes involving meaning, experience, action, and identity, at work in contexts of healthy eating. To better locate the agent of health practices, and to connect a health practices approach to healthy eating scholarship, this study draws on theory and methods from the symbolic interactionist tradition in an analysis of lived experiences of healthy eating. Using ethnographic data, including qualitative interviews with 18 adopters of the Paleo Diet, and analysis techniques from grounded theory, this study aims to add nuance to current sociological understandings of health practices. Findings reveal that subjective understandings of the relationship between food and health evolve through interpretive processes involving meaning. By connecting cultural understandings of health to personal, embodied experiences, adopters achieve multilayered understandings of healthy eating that legitimate and catalyze their commitment to their diet. Facing challenges to achieving a Paleo diet, adopters, as agents, engage in material and symbolic work to create “doable” and “livable” versions of Paleo better aligned with resources, preferences, and understandings. Adopters also construct and work to maintain valued identities surrounding their practice; however, Paleo identities are spoiled identities, as adopters sought to manage conflicting expectations of what constitutes healthy eating, and impressions of who eats a Paleo diet. This thesis demonstrates how an interactionist perspective that appreciates the processual, subjective, and interactional elements of agents’ situated and contextual practices, can be usefully brought in to investigate and inform understandings of activities affecting health. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This paper takes a psychoanalytic approach to analyse the protagonist Scout Finch’s identity formation and her rebellion against social expectations of femininity. Her aggressiveness plays a central role in her character development, reflecting Maycomb’s societal struggle in dealing with discontent in its social, political, and economic situations. Understanding the dynamics behind her aggression and life choices is examined through Lacanian concepts of lack and desire in the context of the Imaginary and Symbolic Order. Her desires are substantiated explicitly and implicitly through her pursuit of emulating the father figure—the Symbolic Order, and the aggressiveness in her behaviour stems from the premature severance from the Imaginary Order, which parallels the defeat that Maycomb experienced in the American Civil War. As a result, Scout Finch’s identity is heavily influenced by the values and ideologies of the father figure, as well as the social conventions dictated by her society.