A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Commerce. Johannesburg 1996. / This paper addresses concerns surrounding information privacy and the secondary use of information in South African corporations. This study also attempts to assess the level of concern that management and information technology practitioners if! South African retail banks have about privacy issues. The research suggests that privacy is a huge concern internationally and may affect South African corporations if they do not follow certain policies and practices. Eleven in-person structured interviews were conducted at four banks. The research proposes a set of guidelines by which South African management and IT practitioners, who are involved with the identification and solution of some of the problems that may be presented by possible privacy legislation, will be able to assess their policies and practices against international practices and policies. The results inform IS managers and executives about appropriate business policies they can implement voluntarily to address public concerns about specific information practices that may be considered a threat to privacy. The findings suggest that the executives are deliberately avoiding confronting the issue of information privacy for as long as possible. The executives are adopting a wait-and-see attitude and will react 011 whatever legislation requires them to do. At the time of the report senior executives at banks were not accepting responsibility for information privacy policies and practices and were leaving this responsibility; to the middle level managers who implement their own practices based on their own needs. / GR2017

In recent years there has been dramatic growth in mobile devices and technologies. According to reports from comScore [1], 47% users in the United States (aged more than 13) are using a smartphones as their primary phone. Smartphone offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than contemporary phones. In today’s world, a user wants to keep their smartphones private, because of the personal information present in it. Among these users, some of them are minors. This thesis addresses the functionality to track/control the mobile activities of minors by their parents using mobile phones. As a parent they want to know, whom his/her child is talking to and for what they are accessing browser for. Cellular network companies are providing number blocking services from the carrier side, but those are monthly paid services. In this thesis, we propose application architecture for remotely control the child phone and grant access to selected numbers for call and text. We use the emerging Android mobile platform and Google nexus phones to implement and test the application. This architecture will help developers to make more innovative applications in future which helps parent to access child phone information. We performed a study and reported the result using the proposal. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

This dissertation examines the underexplored importance of technology, and attendant forms of social organization, to artists, writers, and activists in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Third World era. "Signs of Neon" borrows its title from the 1966 junk sculpture exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, led by the artist Noah Purifoy, in order to signal the ways that for black thought in the period technologies were understood to not simply be "new" and future-oriented, but as part of processes of production involving waste and "junk," histories of racial capitalism, and the racialized distribution of people. It is also intended to signal the importance of aesthetics to both conceptualizing these relationships and to imaging them otherwise. The dissertation analyzes the technological thought of a diverse group of artists and theorists, especially, James and Grace Lee Boggs, Noah Purifoy, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Paule Marshall, Charles Burnett, and Martin Luther King Jr. It argues that this was seen as a contradictory moment: because of technologies like automation and cybernation it was potentially liberating, no longer necessitating that black Americans be productive for white wealth, and at the same time one where, as James and Grace Lee Boggs argued, black communities were being technologically "undeveloped." Exploring these potentials and contradictions meant turning to the historically contingent relationship between processes of racialization and technology that dated to plantation slavery. While this was done in explicitly theoretical ways, "Signs of Neon" argues that a significant strain of black aesthetic practice was focused on the technological and that attention to it expands the boundaries of the Black Arts Movement and The Black Aesthetic. Consistent with the era's anthologies, this is an inter-media dissertation. However, instead of works of cultural autonomy these works focus on the processes described above. They suggest that an experimental and capacious black aesthetic practice was a privileged mode for conceptualizing the period's complex technological forms of organization, as well as the aesthetics' capacity for imaging new relationships and potential futures not reproductive for racial capitalism. While this dissertation is a historical one, it's aesthetic and analytical concerns continue to be relevant. In ending it considers the contemporaneity of this group's thought to the present, and especially to what Francoise Vergès has recently termed the "racial capitalocene."

Social media is increasingly used for social protest, but does online participation advance the aims of social movements, or does it undermine efforts for social change? We explore this question in the present thesis by examining how the use of social media for collective action shapes, and is shaped by, the social psychological concerns of technology users. Adopting a diverse approach in terms of research questions and methodology, we examine how collective action is affected by: (1) features of the digital environment, (2) internet-enabled modes of participation, and (3) digitally-facilitated communities. Our findings demonstrate that group-level representations of the self and salient others are integral to the relationship between digital technology and collective action. Ultimately, we argue that digital technology can act as both a psychological bridge and barrier between disparate groups and issues; in this way it can both facilitate and undermine mobilisation efforts and broader aims for social change.

I investigate whether or not a firm’s social network size (also known as social capital) impacts the quality of its information environment. Following social capital theory, I posit three potential channels that help bring an informational advantage to wellconnected firms. First, well-connected firms are likely to have timely access to a broader set of information that affords them the opportunity to disclose this information. Second, a social network fosters trust among social peers, which promotes the transfer of more accurate information within that network. Third, well-connected executives and directors have greater reputational capital at stake, which may encourage them to provide accurate information to the market. I provide evidence that well-connected firms have higher quality information environments. I further document that the beneficial impact of the firm’s social network size on the quality of the firm’s information environment is higher for complex firms. I also find that the beneficial effect of the firm’s social ties on the quality of the firm’s information environment is greater when the firm’s connections are in the same industry or are top executives or are industry leaders or are financiers in the capital markets. My study extends existing social network literature by investigating whether firm’s social connections to outside executives and directors impact the quality of the firm’s information environment. My paper focuses on the networking skills of the executives and directors and extends the literature on how executives’ and directors’ personal characteristics are important. Additionally, I respond to the call by Engelberg et al. (2013) to identify the mechanism by which a CEO’s network creates value to the firm and well-connected CEOs get paid higher compensation. This study also contributes to a growing debate in social network literature between social capital theory and agency theory. Finally, my study is important to the regulators and standard setters as they can provide further evidence on the impact of non-financial information on the information quality surrounding the firm. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

People with disabilities, and in particular people who are blind or vision impaired, are not embracing computing and Internet-related technologies at the same rate as the able-bodied population. The purpose of this study was to find the reasons behind this digital divide for people with disabilities and provide solutions. The investigation into this 'disability divide' initially examined the historical significance of the social construction of disability, the developments of computing and Internet-related technologies and the evolution of associated government and corporate policies. In order to gain an understanding of the specific elements in the current disability divide, interviews were conducted with a range of government representatives, multinational information technology developers and online information providers in Australia and the United States of America. In order to gain an understanding of what people with disabilities required from information technology, a national survey was conducted with people who are blind or vision impaired to determine their computing and Internet experiences. This study clearly identified that people with vision disabilities have a high level of computing and Internet expertise and it is specific barriers, rather than lack of will, that has prevented access to computing and Internet-related technologies. These barriers include issues relating to the perception of disability in society, Federal and state government policy, corporate policy, mainstream computing products, assistive technologies, real-time online communication, poverty and a lack of educational opportunities. Addressing the issues in these areas will significantly reduce the impact of the disability divide, allowing people who are blind or vision impaired to participate more effectively in the information age.

Communication technologies have become a central characteristic of workplace functioning. The literature has suggested that the use of these technologies fundamentally changes the manner in which team members interact. The present study sought to reorganize previous research on the impact of virtuality on team emergent states and behavioral processes to elucidate how different degrees of team virtuality shape team functioning, and to investigate the manner in which these relationships differ according to team type, team membership stability, and publication year. Findings from 174 studies (total number of teams = 9204; total N approximately 26,050) suggest that there is not a strong relationship between team virtuality and emergent states and behavioral processes. However, moderator analyses revealed that a reliance on highly virtual tools may be most detrimental to action teams and ad hoc teams. Moreover, findings demonstrate that the degree to which virtuality shapes team transition and action process may be changing over time.

Environmental monitoring initiatives are typically conceived as strictly scientific affairs designed to provide support for managerial decision-making; as a consequence most initiatives are centered on a formal mandate or an overarching mission statement that provides direction for monitoring activity. But official frameworks tend to marginalize lay perspectives as experts pursue disciplinary rigor at the expense of public input, a situation not in keeping with the spirit of the biosphere reserve concept. This thesis argues that an alternative design approach that reaches beyond scientists and resource managers is necessary. Environmental monitoring under an ecosystem approach is subject to scientific, social, and bureaucratic demands that defy easy disentanglement. A medley of factors influence how data are collected, interpreted, and used; neglect of these 'soft' dimensions runs the risk of failing to win the enduring support of stakeholders. There is a need to coordinate activity and to partially align multiple perspectives-this is the 'soft underbelly' of integrated monitoring that gets short shrift in most designs. While there is much monitoring being done in and around the Long Point World Biosphere Reserve, there is little coordination among monitoring groups and no obvious way to combine disparate data sets in a meaningful way. This thesis describes the elements of a locally-sensible framework for monitoring practice that is mainly concerned with trying to make sense of confusing and ambiguous situations; it strives to integrate the 'why', 'what', and 'how' of monitoring in as transparent a manner as possible by crafting 'boundary objects' that help to congeal understanding and provide centers of coordination. Using principles of participatory design in the soft-systems tradition, the overall intent is to primarily support sense-making, not decision-making; to generate searching questions, not final solutions; to facilitate learning, not control.

Environmental monitoring initiatives are typically conceived as strictly scientific affairs designed to provide support for managerial decision-making; as a consequence most initiatives are centered on a formal mandate or an overarching mission statement that provides direction for monitoring activity. But official frameworks tend to marginalize lay perspectives as experts pursue disciplinary rigor at the expense of public input, a situation not in keeping with the spirit of the biosphere reserve concept. This thesis argues that an alternative design approach that reaches beyond scientists and resource managers is necessary. Environmental monitoring under an ecosystem approach is subject to scientific, social, and bureaucratic demands that defy easy disentanglement. A medley of factors influence how data are collected, interpreted, and used; neglect of these 'soft' dimensions runs the risk of failing to win the enduring support of stakeholders. There is a need to coordinate activity and to partially align multiple perspectives-this is the 'soft underbelly' of integrated monitoring that gets short shrift in most designs. While there is much monitoring being done in and around the Long Point World Biosphere Reserve, there is little coordination among monitoring groups and no obvious way to combine disparate data sets in a meaningful way. This thesis describes the elements of a locally-sensible framework for monitoring practice that is mainly concerned with trying to make sense of confusing and ambiguous situations; it strives to integrate the 'why', 'what', and 'how' of monitoring in as transparent a manner as possible by crafting 'boundary objects' that help to congeal understanding and provide centers of coordination. Using principles of participatory design in the soft-systems tradition, the overall intent is to primarily support sense-making, not decision-making; to generate searching questions, not final solutions; to facilitate learning, not control.

Technology conceptualized as a social entity and a relation has attained new meanings and inquired based on different methodological and theoretical standpoints since 1970s. It was widely recognized as autonomous however it emerges and related to social relations and have a determining role on social, economic and political character of societies. The role of technology in transforming scientific knowledge into needs of society is mostly considered within pragmatic understanding. The aim of integrating and questioning the social character of technology lead to critical contemporary discussions of technology. The goal of this study is to question whether technology is socially shaped and dependent or independent/autonomous social entity. That is whether it is largely external-outside of society, exogenous, supra-social and posses its own path or it is a socially dependent entity. This study thus aims to provide a critical inquiry on technological determinism and the social determinism is examined in the light of in-depth interviews carried out with scientists from Turkey. The social character of technology is related to issues concerning the expansion of capitalist social relations: uncertain, risky and rational.