Doctor of Philosophy / Using the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service in 1994 as its major case study, this thesis hypothesises that, although this inquiry had a far reaching impact on both the personal and working lives of police officers in the organisation itself, it proved ineffectual in its attempt to control corruption. It argues that corruption, and the subsequent inquiries into this corruption, can be seen to have a cyclic nature and the failure of such inquiries has a long and international history. It contends that the nature of the public inquiry itself can be seen to contribute to the continuation of the cycle of corruption. Clearly, putting an end to corruption requires more than the investigation, public exposure and punishment of a few corrupt police, followed by a generalised tightening of the chain of command. Instead, this thesis demonstrates that the problem is primarily an organisational one and it is important to look at management reforms. This thesis contends that the cycle of corruption involves the nature of police work; the catalyst that triggers the inquiry; the inquiry itself and the issue of the report; and the police and community responses. An examination of all these factors is crucial to understanding the cycle’s dynamics. The final report of the Wood Royal Commission was in 1996 and this thesis specifically analyses the cycle of corruption in relation to the response of the police executive to this inquiry. It shows how the police response focused on the tactical crisis response central to operational policing — in this case appeasing official censure and community fears. As little more than a public relations exercise, senior management strategically addressed the specific recommendations of the report rather than creatively considering the implications exposed during the inquiry. The idea that corruption is a symptom of an ineffective system and not simply a slackening of effective control by senior management was never considered. In the aftermath of the Wood Royal Commission there was much discussion about ‘police culture’ being ‘a culture of corruption’. The forgotten casualties of the inquiry has been individual police officers, many of whom see policing as a vocation. This thesis has allowed many voices to be heard and used both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse a wide range of information and data, which included personal interviews with serving police officers and members of external organisations, as well as printed material from Royal Commission Reports, Hansard and other government documents, internal Police Service documents and media reports.It has used Bourdieu’s theoretical approach which allows an analysis of the complex relationships involved between police officers as individuals who operate within the wider networks of a specific organisation and the way the personal is important as an explanatory tool of what happens within a policing culture and how this culture is perceived differently from within and without. Bourdieu’s theory also facilitates analysis of the interactions of this network with the wider community, putting in context the responses of both the police service and the community. The connection with the personal is important as an explanatory tool of what happens within a policing culture and how this culture is perceived differently from within and without. Bourdieu constructs an understanding of the ‘nature of the game’ of policing and the shaping of the individual within police culture, giving insight into the source of moral dilemmas, personal beliefs and personal behaviour. As the current management system of command and control is at the heart of this response, this thesis has also analysed the assumptions inherent in this management philosophy, considering both necessary operational strengths as well as organisational weaknesses. A central theme of the thesis is that open dialogue will reduce the incidence of corruption and risk within policing institutions. This thesis argues that there must be an integrative approach to reform — accountable, active leadership combined with critically constructed practical approaches that tackle the complexity of the dynamics embedded in the ‘nature of the game’ of policing itself.

<p>Domfors, Lars-Åke (2000): Döfstumlärare – specialpedagog – lärare för döva och hörselskadade. En lärarutbildnings innehåll och rationalitetsförskjutningar</p><p> (Teacher of the Deaf-Mute – Teacher of Special Education – Teacher of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. The Content and Rationality Changes of a Teacher Education Program).</p><p>Örebro Studies in Education 1, 304 pp. Örebro ISBN 91-7668-252-8.</p><p>This dissertation is a study of some aspects of Teachers of the Deaf (ToD) education programs using the theoretical perspectives of symbolic interactionism and concepts of rationalitites. Changes in Swedish ToD teacher education from 1873 to the 1990s are examined through the text analysis of documents such as government regulations and syllabi and other texts such as education journals. It is argued that, parallel with the dominant rationality of the period, strands of other rationalities are to be found. In an ongoing struggle for power, one dominant rationality is challenged and gradually replaced by another. The research indicates the dominance of a patriarchal values-rationality in the decades following 1873, an instrumentaltechnical rationality during the 1930s to the 1960s and a communicative rationality from the 1970s.</p><p>Research was carried out at the National Upper Secondary School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in order to understand what characterizes Deaf education and the ToDs’ work, and what kind of professional skills are therefore required. The research was based on teacher interviews, student questionnaires and teaching observations in classes. Learning processes within a ToD teacher education course, as perceived by ToD students, are analysed by a study of written reflections, seminar observations and transcipts from tape-recorded seminars. ToD teacher education programs at universities in Washington D.C. and Edinburgh are also analysed.</p><p>A model for ToD education is discussed. It is argued that even if the dimension of essentialism stressing ToD basic skills and knowledge is important, the main theories for understanding the ToD education process are communicative rationality and interactionism. </p><p>It is further argued that, at societal level, the dominance of different rationalities implies different meanings of the ToD socialisation process, mediated through different historical and cultural contexts.</p><p><i>Keywords:</i> Teacher of the Deaf, educational history, research on teacher education, rationalities, symbolic interactionism.</p><p><i>Lars-Åke Domfors, Department of Education, Örebro University,</i></p><p><i>SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden</i></p>

The shapes of naturally occurring objects characteristically involve spatial events occurring at many scales. This paper offers a symbolic approach to constructing a primitive shape description across scales for 2D binary (silhouette) shape images: grouping operations are performed over collections of tokens residing on a Scale-Space Blackboard. Two types of grouping operations are identified that, respectively: (1) aggregate edge primitives at one scale into edge primitives at a coarser scale and (2) group edge primitives into partial-region assertions, including curved- contours, primitive-corners, and bars. This approach avoids several drawbacks of numerical smoothing methods.

This report describes a program which automatically characterizes the behavior of any driven, nonlinear, electrical circuit. To do this, the program autonomously selects interesting input parameters, drives the circuit, measures its response, performs a set of numeric computations on the measured data, interprets the results, and decomposes the circuit's parameter space into regions of qualitatively distinct behavior. The output is a two-dimensional portrait summarizing the high-level, qualitative behavior of the circuit for every point in the graph, an accompanying textual explanation describing any interesting patterns observed in the diagram, and a symbolic description of the circuit's behavior which can be passed on to other programs for further analysis.

This paper explores automating the qualitative analysis of physical systems. It describes a program, called PLR, that takes parameterized ordinary differential equations as input and produces a qualitative description of the solutions for all initial values. PLR approximates intractable nonlinear systems with piecewise linear ones, analyzes the approximations, and draws conclusions about the original systems. It chooses approximations that are accurate enough to reproduce the essential properties of their nonlinear prototypes, yet simple enough to be analyzed completely and efficiently. It derives additional properties, such as boundedness or periodicity, by theoretical methods. I demonstrate PLR on several common nonlinear systems and on published examples from mechanical engineering.

Dynamics with choice is a generalization of discrete-time dynamics where instead of the same evolution operator at every time step there is a choice of operators to transform the current state of the system. Many real life processes studied in chemical physics, engineering, biology and medicine, from autocatalytic reaction systems to switched systems to cellular biochemical processes to malaria transmission in urban environments, exhibit the properties described by dynamics with choice. We study the long-term behavior in dynamics with choice. We prove very general results on the existence and properties of global compact attractors in dynamics with choice. In addition, we study the dynamics with restricted choice when the allowed sequences of operators correspond to subshifts of the full shift. One of practical consequences of our results is that when the parameters of a discrete-time system are not known exactly and/or are subject to change due to internal instability, or a strategy, or Nature's intervention, the long term behavior of the system may not be correctly described by a system with "averaged" values for the parameters. There may be a Gestalt effect.

Advertising, as an industry, reflects contemporary values whilst creating new symbols and changing both behaviour and public opinion. In the last hundred years, advertising has pervaded most areas of life, and spaces that are commer-cial free are becoming rare. The aim of this dissertation is to explore and map various social objects that create the perception of morality that exists within an advertising agency. The approach can be described as qualitative, descriptive, analytical and constructionist. The study belongs within a research field that borders on business economics/business ethics and philosophy/descriptive eth-ics. Fundamental to my study is the exploration of stories told by different key advertising practitioners. Using a symbolic interactionist approach I iden-tify important meaning carriers that together create and identify the social object “morality”. The empirical material is based on a total of 36 inter-views conducted 1998-2000 with advertising practitioners from 15 Swedish advertising agencies. In addition to the interviews, an observational study was conducted for eight months in 1998 along with a literature study. In my analysis two related areas for morality emerged; one area focusing mo-rality related to clients/consumers, and one area focusing morality within the agency/branch. Two models illustrating the results were constructed. Ethics, economics and aesthetics often find themselves on opposing sides in various situations and at different levels in the work process at the agency. The need for profit gives precedence to the economic aspect mak-ing it superior to the other two aspects, ethics and aesthetics. However, advertising practitioners that prioritise the aesthetic aspects may find them-selves be awarded a golden egg at some yearly gala. Hence, to stretch a little on morality and sin with refinement may be quite rewarding. The dissertation was preceded by and builds on a licentiate dissertation in busi-ness economics by Larsson-Eklund (2002) - “Med skaparkraft som etiskt argu-ment. En explorativ studie om moral och yrkesetik inom reklambranschen ur ett internt relationsperspektiv” (enclosed in appendix 6).

ERLANG is a concurrent functional language, well suited for distributed, highly concurrent and fault-tolerant software. An important part of Erlang is its support for failure recovery. Fault tolerance is provided by organising the processes of an ERLANG application into tree structures. In these structures, parent processes monitor failures of their children and are responsible for their restart. Libraries support the creation of such structures during system initialisation.A technique to automatically analyse that the process structure of an ERLANG application from the source code is presented. The analysis exposes shortcomings in the fault tolerance properties of the application. First, the process structure is extracted through static analysis of the initialisation code of the application. Thereafter, analysis of the process structure checks two important properties of the fault handling mechanism: 1) that it will recover from any process failure, 2) that it will not hide persistent errors.The technique has been implemented in a tool, and applied it to several OTP library applications and to a subsystem of a commercial system the AXD 301 ATM switch.The static analysis of the ERLANG source code is achieved through symbolic evaluation. The evaluation is peformed according to an abstraction of ERLANG’s actual semamtics. The actual semantics is formalised for a nontrivial part of the language and it is proven that the abstraction of the semantics simulates the actual semantics. / ASTEC

Sustainability is a growing trend and companies are increasingly engaging sustainability in their core business strategy. One example of how this is manifested is through the development of products that are  labelled as energy-efficient. There is a lack of insights into how consumers perceive and gain benefits from such sustainable products, particularly so regarding the nonfunctional and non-economical benefits and into how culture influences those benefits. The purpose of this study is to investigate consumer perceived non-functional and non-economical benefits that are associated  with energy-efficient products,  in order to gain a deeper understanding on how the Swedish compared to the Thai culture influence consumers perception of energy efficient products within the home appliance industry. The literature review regarding the  symbolic meaning of products concludes that the most relevant perceived benefits of products includes emotional-, self-expressiveness-, and social benefits. A cross-cultural quantitative study performed in Sweden and Thailand determines that culture influences consumers understanding of products and thereby influence their perceived benefit from energyefficient home appliances. How culture influences consumer perceived benefits depends on the characteristics of the different cultural dimensions established by Hofstede (2010), involving: power distance, masculinity, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation.

Television often portrays African Americans in unfavorable positions in comparison to Caucasians. Typically these unfavorable depictions reinforce negative stereotypes associated with African Americans. Research indicates that television portrayals can influence people’s attitudes toward one another. A question left unanswered by current research: are mass-mediated images as influential at reversing or counteracting stereotypes as they are at reinforcing them? An experiment with undergraduate students was conducted to investigate the relationship between the positive portrayal of African Americans and subsequent racial attitudes. Participants viewed a video clip with either an African American or Caucasian chairman for the Georgia Division of Public Health. The clip included a still photograph of the chairman and was accompanied by a pre-recorded voice addressing treatments for lung cancer patients. At the beginning of each class, professors showed students the video after which the class lecture proceeded as scheduled. Just before the class ended a researcher entered the class and told students he/she was doing a survey on racial attitudes. Students were then given a questionnaire regarding racial attitudes toward African Americans. Between the time of the video viewing and the completion of the survey, students were not informed that one was related to the other. Subjects also completed an evaluation of the speaker in the video and of the health message.