Adaptation and resistance: the impact of German unification on the living and working conditions of visual artists in Saxony and their response to transformation

This thesis analyses the changes in visual artists' living and working conditions and the ways in which visual artists reacted to these changes after German unification. It has sought to explore aspects of the interface between the state, the individual visual artists and the visual artists' community in a society of transformation and comments on the impact of change on the existence of such a relationship. The aims are twofold. First, to contribute to an understanding of visual artists' reactions to the dynamics of change created by changes of their working and living conditions after German unification. A second aim was to analyse the causes of the behaviour of the group of older visual artists. This study of change employed an interdisciplinary approach and combined sociology, psychology, history and cultural policy studies in order to analyse visual artists' responses to the challenge of German unification. Exploration of these themes has been informed by a qualitative empirical study of how visual artists respond to change in the East German region of Saxony. A theoretical framework was developed using grounded theory, which was used to code the following datasets: interviews with 30 visual artists, 10 administrators and 3 group discussions. The theoretical perspective adopted drew on organisational change theory, on sociology of culture and on socialisation theory. In this way it contributes to the relocation of visual artists as key actors in cultural policy research. The results of the research revealed that initial expectations of the swift adaptation of visual artists' to the new living and working conditions were not fulfilled and that visual artists moved between adaptation and resistance. Although the administrative transformation of the state was completed by 1998, the process of change is ongoing for the visual artists. Unification left the visual artists in a state of shock, a state they have been recovering from since 1990. The findings lead to development of the Visual Artists Adaptation Model, which as a unique approach combines the collective cultural shock model and human change role model with the responses of visual artists to German unification. It analyses the process of change experienced by visual artists in five stages (1. euphoria, 2. shock and disconfirmation, 3 adaptation, 4. stabilisation, 5. normalisation). In an ideal case scenario, the result of adaptation should be a career re-start, which can be achieved once visual artists manage to overcome cultural shock. I argue that adaptation is delayed when learning anxiety conflicts with survival anxiety and when a psychologically safe situation fails to be provided. This proved to be the case for the group of older visual artists. It is concluded that values, developed as part of a socialist socialisation, acted as key obstacles to adaptation to the capitalist system. These values and norms evolved in different ways over years due to successful indoctrination with Marxist-Leninist ideology

Implementing Hager's exchange methods for matrix profile reduction

Hager recently introduced down and up exchange methods for reducing the profile of a sparse matrix with a symmetric sparsity pattern. The methods are particularly useful for refining or-derings that have been obtained using a standard profile reduction algorithm, such as the Sloan method. The running times for the exchange algorithms reported by Hager suggested their cost could be prohibitive for practical applications. We examine how to implement the exchange algo-rithms efficiently. For a range of real test problems, it is shown that the cost of running our new implementation does not add a prohibitive overhead to the cost of the original reordering

Deconstructing multi-agency working: an exploration of how the elicitation of 'tacit knowledge' amongst professionals working in a multi-agency team can inform future practice

The theory of organisational knowledge creation and conversion clarified the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge and highlighted the importance of tacit knowledge in the workplace. The key components of successful multi-agency working and accompanying group processes have been explained in terms of activity theory and the sharing of different forms of knowledge and practices. This research has illustrated how professionals in a multi-agency family support team construe their role in, and the role of, the team. The use of personal construct psychology and repertory grids (Kelly, 1951/1991) enabled team members to access their tacit knowledge about multi-agency working through sorting tasks involving similarities and differences, discrimination and selection. The sharing of elicited knowledge amongst the whole team as a participatory process helped build a common language around embedded tacit knowledge. It led to the identification of important role elements in which, for example, practitioners' roles in their previous teams influenced their views of their role in the family support team. Differences in ratings of elements for particular constructs produced dilemmas, such as whether professional identity should develop as the team evolved or when the team was established, which affected group cohesiveness. High staff turnover and lack of clarity over operational procedures within an activity system context resulted in the team oscillating between forming and storming stages of group development. This undulation together with team members' awareness of imminent comprehensive changes in core team structures and processes and their fear of the future led to incidental changes in core construing. This research elicited individual and whole team constructs based on the tacit knowledge held by various professionals about their role and the role of the multi-agency team in which they work. The whole team's co-construction of six superordinate bi-polar constructs was evidenced in implicit, reactive and deliberative learning (Eraut, 2000). The theory underpinning knowledge transfer (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) was supported. The research marked out the importance of activity theory (Leadbetter, 2006) in helping the team mature and perform and confirmed particular dilemmas surrounding inter-agency practice (Arming, et al., 2006)

Implementing Hager's exchange methods for matrix profile reduction

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