12,238 research outputs found
Economia colaborativa
A importĂąncia de se proceder Ă anĂĄlise dos principais desafios jurĂdicos que a economia colaborativa coloca â pelas implicaçÔes que as mudanças de paradigma dos modelos de negĂłcios e dos sujeitos envolvidos suscitam â Ă© indiscutĂvel, correspondendo Ă necessidade de se fomentar a segurança jurĂdica destas prĂĄticas, potenciadoras de crescimento econĂłmico e bem-estar social.
O Centro de Investigação em Justiça e Governação (JusGov) constituiu uma equipa multidisciplinar que, alĂ©m de juristas, integra investigadores de outras ĂĄreas, como a economia e a gestĂŁo, dos vĂĄrios grupos do JusGov â embora com especial participação dos investigadores que integram o grupo E-TEC (Estado, Empresa e Tecnologia) â e de outras prestigiadas instituiçÔes nacionais e internacionais, para desenvolver um projeto neste domĂnio, com o objetivo de identificar os problemas jurĂdicos que a economia colaborativa suscita e avaliar se jĂĄ existem soluçÔes para aqueles, refletindo igualmente sobre a conveniĂȘncia de serem introduzidas alteraçÔes ou se serĂĄ mesmo necessĂĄrio criar nova regulamentação.
O resultado desta investigação Ă© apresentado nesta obra, com o que se pretende fomentar a continuação do debate sobre este tema.Esta obra Ă© financiada por fundos nacionais atravĂ©s da FCT â Fundação para a CiĂȘncia e a Tecnologia, I.P., no Ăąmbito do Financiamento UID/05749/202
Lift EVERY Voice and Sing: An Intersectional Qualitative Study Examining the Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer Faculty and Administrators at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
While there is minimal literature that address the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans* identified students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), the experiences of Black, queer faculty and administrators at HBCUs has not been studied. This intersectional qualitative research study focused on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer identified faculty and administrators who work at HBCUs. By investigating the intersections of religion, race, gender, and sexuality within a predominantly Black institution, this study aims to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at HBCUs by sharing the experiences of the LGBQ faculty and administrators that previously or currently work at an HBCU as a full-time employee. The research questions that guided this study were 1) How have LGBQ faculty and staff negotiated/navigated their careers at HBCUs? and 2) How do LGBQ faculty and staff at HBCUs influence cultural (relating to LGBQ inclusion) change at the organizational level? The main theoretical framework used was intersectionality and it shaped the chosen methodology and methods. The Politics of Respectability was the second theoretical framework used to describe the intra-racial tensions within the Black/African American community. The study included 60-120 minute interviews with 12 participants. Using intersectionality as a guide, the data were coded and utilized for thematic analysis. Then, an ethnodramatic performance engages readers. The goals of this study were to encourage policy changes, promote inclusivity for LGBQ employees at HBCUs, and provide an expansion to the body of literature in the field pertaining to the experiences of LGBQ faculty and administrators in higher education
INVESTIGATING THE PERCEPTION OF EXPATRIATES TOWARDS IMMIGRATION SERVICE QUALITY IN SHARJAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES THROUGH MIXED METHOD APPROACH
The public sectors in UAE are under immense pressure to demonstrate that their services are customer-focused and that continuous performance improvement is being delivered. The United Arab Emirates is a favoured destination for expatriates due to its own citizens form a minority of the population and are barely represented in the private sector workforce. These highly unusual demographics confer high importance on the national immigration services. Recently, increased interest in international migration, specifically within the United Arab Emirates, has been shown both by government agencies and by the governments of industrialised countries. Given the importance of the expatriate labour force to economic stability and growth in the Emirates, this research investigates how immigration services are perceived, with the aim of contributing to their improvement, thus ultimately supporting economic growth. It proposes a service quality perception framework to improve understanding within SID of how to raise levels of service delivered to migrants and other persons directly or indirectly affected by SID services.
Qualitative data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews and quantitative data by means of a questionnaire survey based on the abovementioned framework. The survey data, on the variables influencing participantsâ experiences and perceptions of SID services, were subjected to statistical analysis. The framework was then used to evaluate quality of service in terms of general impressions, delivery, location, response, SID culture and behaviour. Numerical data were analysed using inferential and descriptive statistics. It was found that service quality positively influenced service behaviour and that this relationship was mediated by SID culture.
This research makes an original contribution to knowledge as one of the few studies of immigration to the United Arab Emirates. By examining the workings of one immigration department, it adds to the literature on immigration departments and organisational development in developing countries. It illuminates the mechanics of immigration services and demonstrates their increasing importance to the world economy
'The talk': risk, racism and family relationships
Parents employ a wide range of anticipatory strategies to prepare their children for, and protect them against, risks of racism. This paper argues that, whilst black children need to be equipped with the skills and understanding to navigate racist societies, these practices are also the site of a significant injustice for minority families. Specifically, the imperative to take strategic steps to protect children against threats of racism creates unfair barriers to the enjoyment of some valuable relationship-based goods. In advancing this argument, the paper brings recent philosophical work on the family into dialogue with a rapidly developing body of empirical research on racial and ethnic socialization. I show that Brighouse and Swiftâs âfamilial relationship goodsâ framework generates a valuable new perspective on some contested empirical terrain. But I also highlight, and seek to begin to redress, a problematic silence on race within contemporary philosophy of the family
Supernatural crossing in Republican Chinese fiction, 1920sâ1940s
This dissertation studies supernatural narratives in Chinese fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. The literary works present phenomena or elements that are or appear to be supernatural, many of which remain marginal or overlooked in Sinophone and Anglophone academia. These sources are situated in the May Fourth/New Culture ideological context, where supernatural narratives had to make way for the progressive intellectualsâ literary realism and their allegorical application of supernatural motifs. In the face of realism, supernatural narratives paled, dismissed as impractical fantasies that distract one from facing and tackling real life.
Nevertheless, I argue that the supernatural narratives do not probe into another mystical dimension that might co-exist alongside the empirical world. Rather, they imagine various cases of the charactersâ crossing to voice their discontent with contemporary society or to reflect on the notion of reality. âCrossingâ relates to charactersâ acts or processes of trespassing the boundary that separates the supernatural from the conventional natural world, thus entailing encounters and interaction between the natural and the supernatural. The dissertation examines how crossing, as a narrative device, disturbs accustomed and mundane situations, releases hidden tensions, and discloses repressed truths in Republican fiction.
There are five types of crossing in the supernatural narratives.
Type 1 is the crossing into âhauntedâ houses. This includes (intangible) human agency crossing into domestic spaces and revealing secrets and truths concealed by the scary, feigned âhauntingâ, thus exposing the hidden evil and the other house occupiersâ silenced, suffocated state.
Type 2 is men crossing into female ghostsâ apparitional residences. The female ghosts allude to heart-breaking, traumatic experiences in socio-historical reality, evoking sympathetic concern for suffering individuals who are caught in social upheavals.
Type 3 is the crossing from reality into the charactersâ delusional/hallucinatory realities. While they physically remain in the empirical world, the charactersâ abnormal perceptions lead them to exclusive, delirious, and quasi-supernatural experiences of reality. Their crossings blur the concrete boundaries between the real and the unreal on the mental level: their abnormal perceptions construct a significant, meaningful reality for them, which may be as real as the commonly regarded objective reality.
Type 4 is the crossing into the netherworld modelled on the real world in the authorsâ observation and bears a spectrum of satirised objects of the Republican society.
The last type is immortal visitors crossing into the human world. This type satirises humanityâs vices and destructive potential.
The primary sources demonstrate their writersâ witty passion to play with super--natural notions and imagery (such as ghosts, demons, and immortals) and stitch them into vivid, engaging scenes using techniques such as the gothic, the grotesque, and the satirical, in order to evoke sentiments such as terror, horror, disgust, dis--orientation, or awe, all in service of their insights into realist issues. The works also creatively tailor traditional Chinese modes and motifs, which exemplifies the revival of Republican interest in traditional cultural heritage. The supernatural narratives may amaze or disturb the reader at first, but what is more shocking, unpleasantly nudging, or thought-provoking is the problematic society and peopleâs lives that the supernatural (misunderstandings) eventually reveals. They present a more compre--hensive treatment of reality than Republican literature with its revolutionary consciousness surrounding class struggle. The critical perspectives of the supernatural narratives include domestic space, unacknowledged history and marginal individuals, abnormal mentality, and pervasive weaknesses in humanity.
The crossing and supernatural narratives function as a means of better understanding the lived reality.
This study gathers diverse primary sources written by Republican writers from various educational and political backgrounds and interprets them from a rare perspective, thus filling a research gap. It promotes a fuller view of supernatural narratives in twentieth-century Chinese literature. In terms of reflecting the social and personal reality of the Republican era, the supernatural narratives supplement the realist fiction of the time
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF EFFORTFUL FUNDRAISING EXPERIENCES: USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN FUNDRAISING RESEARCH
Physical-activity oriented community fundraising has experienced an exponential growth in popularity over the past 15 years. The aim of this study was to explore the value of effortful fundraising experiences, from the point of view of participants, and explore the impact that these experiences have on peopleâs lives. This study used an IPA approach to interview 23 individuals, recognising the role of participants as proxy (nonprofessional) fundraisers for charitable organisations, and the unique organisation donor dynamic that this creates. It also bought together relevant psychological theory related to physical activity fundraising experiences (through a narrative literature review) and used primary interview data to substantiate these. Effortful fundraising experiences are examined in detail to understand their significance to participants, and how such experiences influence their connection with a charity or cause. This was done with an idiographic focus at first, before examining convergences and divergences across the sample. This study found that effortful fundraising experiences can have a profound positive impact upon community fundraisers in both the short and the long term. Additionally, it found that these experiences can be opportunities for charitable organisations to create lasting meaningful relationships with participants, and foster mutually beneficial lifetime relationships with them. Further research is needed to test specific psychological theory in this context, including self-esteem theory, self determination theory, and the martyrdom effect (among others)
'Exarcheia doesn't exist': Authenticity, Resistance and Archival Politics in Athens
My thesis investigates the ways people, materialities and urban spaces interact to form affective ecologies and produce historicity. It focuses on the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athensâ contested political topography par excellence, known for its production of radical politics of discontent and resistance to state oppression and eoliberal capitalism. Embracing Exarcheiaâs controversial status within Greek vernacular, media and state discourses, this thesis aims to unpick the neighbourhoodsâ socio-spatial assemblage imbued with affect and formed through the numerous (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations rooted in its turbulent political history. Drawing on theory on urban spaces, affect, hauntology and archival politics, I argue for Exarcheia as an unwavering archival space composed of affective chronotopes â (in)tangible loci that defy space and temporality. I posit that the interwoven narratives and materialities emerging in my fieldwork are persistently â and perhaps obsessively â reiterating themselves and remaining imprinted on the neighbourhoodâs landscape as an incessant reminder of violent histories that the state often seeks to erase and forget. Through this analysis, I contribute to understandings of place as a primary ethnographic âobjectâ and the ways in which place forms complex interactions and relationships with social actors, shapes their subjectivities, retains and bestows their memories and senses of historicity
Investigating and mitigating the role of neutralisation techniques on information security policies violation in healthcare organisations
Healthcare organisations today rely heavily on Electronic Medical Records systems (EMRs), which have become highly crucial IT assets that require significant security efforts to safeguard patientsâ information. Individuals who have legitimate access to an organisationâs assets to perform their day-to-day duties but intentionally or unintentionally violate information security policies can jeopardise their organisationâs information security efforts and cause significant legal and financial losses. In the information security (InfoSec) literature, several studies emphasised the necessity to understand why employees behave in ways that contradict information security requirements but have offered widely different solutions. In an effort to respond to this situation, this thesis addressed the gap in the information security academic research by providing a deep understanding of the problem of medical practitionersâ behavioural justifications to violate information security policies and then determining proper solutions to reduce this undesirable behaviour. Neutralisation theory was used as the theoretical basis for the research. This thesis adopted a mixed-method research approach that comprises four consecutive phases, and each phase represents a research study that was conducted in light of the results from the preceding phase. The first phase of the thesis started by investigating the relationship between medical practitionersâ neutralisation techniques and their intention to violate information security policies that protect a patientâs privacy. A quantitative study was conducted to extend the work of Siponen and Vance [1] through a study of the Saudi Arabia healthcare industry. The data was collected via an online questionnaire from 66 Medical Interns (MIs) working in four academic hospitals. The study found that six neutralisation techniquesâ(1) appeal to higher loyalties, (2) defence of necessity, (3) the metaphor of ledger, (4) denial of responsibility, (5) denial of injury, and (6) condemnation of condemnersâsignificantly contribute to the justifications of the MIs in hypothetically violating information security policies. The second phase of this research used a series of semi-structured interviews with IT security professionals in one of the largest academic hospitals in Saudi Arabia to explore the environmental factors that motivated the medical practitioners to evoke various neutralisation techniques. The results revealed that social, organisational, and emotional factors all stimulated the behavioural justifications to breach information security policies. During these interviews, it became clear that the IT department needed to ensure that security policies fit the daily tasks of the medical practitioners by providing alternative solutions to ensure the effectiveness of those policies. Based on these interviews, the objective of the following two phases was to improve the effectiveness of InfoSec policies against the use of behavioural justification by engaging the end users in the modification of existing policies via a collaborative writing process. Those two phases were conducted in the UK and Saudi Arabia to determine whether the collaborative writing process could produce a more effective security policy that balanced the security requirements with daily business needs, thus leading to a reduction in the use of neutralisation techniques to violate security policies. The overall result confirmed that the involvement of the end users via a collaborative writing process positively improved the effectiveness of the security policy to mitigate the individual behavioural justifications, showing that the process is a promising one to enhance security compliance
Socio-endocrinology revisited: New tools to tackle old questions
Animalsâ social environments impact their health and survival, but the proximate links between sociality and fitness are still not fully understood. In this thesis, I develop and apply new approaches to address an outstanding question within this sociality-fitness link: does grooming (a widely studied, positive social interaction) directly affect glucocorticoid concentrations (GCs; a group of steroid hormones indicating physiological stress) in a wild primate? To date, negative, long-term correlations between grooming and GCs have been found, but the logistical difficulties of studying proximate mechanisms in the wild leave knowledge gaps regarding the short-term, causal mechanisms that underpin this relationship. New technologies, such as collar-mounted tri-axial accelerometers, can provide the continuous behavioural data required to match grooming to non-invasive GC measures (Chapter 1). Using Chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) living on the Cape Peninsula, South Africa as a model system, I identify giving and receiving grooming using tri-axial accelerometers and supervised machine learning methods, with high overall accuracy (~80%) (Chapter 2). I then test what socio-ecological variables predict variation in faecal and urinary GCs (fGCs and uGCs) (Chapter 3). Shorter and rainy days are associated with higher fGCs and uGCs, respectively, suggesting that environmental conditions may impose stressors in the form of temporal bottlenecks. Indeed, I find that short days and days with more rain-hours are associated with reduced giving grooming (Chapter 4), and that this reduction is characterised by fewer and shorter grooming bouts. Finally, I test whether grooming predicts GCs, and find that while there is a long-term negative correlation between grooming and GCs, grooming in the short-term, in particular giving grooming, is associated with higher fGCs and uGCs (Chapter 5). I end with a discussion on how the new tools I applied have enabled me to advance our understanding of sociality and stress in primate social systems (Chapter 6)
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After Creation: Intergovernmental Organizations and Member State Governments as Co-Participants in an Authority Relationship
This is a re-amalgamation of what started as one manuscript and became two when the length proved to be more than any publisher wanted to consider. The splitting consisted of removing what are now Parts 3, 4, and 5 so that the manuscript focused on the outcome-related shared beliefs holding an authority relationship together. Those parts were last worked on in 2018. The rest were last worked on in late 2021 but also remain incomplete.
The relational approach adopted in this study treats intergovernmental organizations and the governments of member states as co-participants in an authority relationship with the governments of their member states. Authority relationships link two types of actor, defined by their authority-holder or addressee role in the relationship, through a set of shared beliefs about why the relationship exists and how the participants should fulfill their respective roles. The IGO as authority holder has a role that includes a right to instruct other actors about what they should or should not do; the governments of member states as addressees are expected to comply with the instructions. Three sets of shared beliefs provide the conceptual âglueâ holding the relationship together. The first defines the goal of the collective effort, providing both the rationale for having the authority relationship and providing a lode star for assessments of the collective effortâs success or lack of success. The second set defines the shared understanding about allocation of roles and the process of interaction by establishing shared expectations about a) the selection process by which particular actors acquire authority holder roles, b) the definitions identifying one or more categories of addressees expected to follow instructions, and c) the procedures through which the authority holder issues instructions. The third set focus on the outcomes of cooperation through the relationship by defining a) the substantive areas in which the authority holder may issue instructions, b) the bases for assessing the relevance actions mandated in instructions for reaching the goal, and c) the relative efficacy of action paths chosen for reaching the goal as compared to other possible action paths.
Using an authority relationship framework for analyzing cooperation through IGOs highlights the inherently bi-directional nature of IGO-member government activity by viewing their interaction as involving a three-step process in which the IGO as authority holder decides when to issue what instruction, the member state governments as followers react to the instruction with anything from prompt and full compliance through various forms of pushback to outright rejection, and the IGO as authority holder responds to how the followers react with efforts to increase individual compliance with instructions and reinforce continuing acceptance of the authority relationship. Foregrounding the dynamics produced by the interaction of these two streams of perception and action reveals more clearly how far intergovernmental organizations acquire capacity to operate as independent actors, the dynamic ways they maintain that capacity, and how much they influence member governmentsâ beliefs and actions at different times. The approach fosters better understanding of why, when, and for how long governments choose cooperation through an IGO even in periods of rising unilateralism
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