6 research outputs found

    Academic identity : place, race, and gender in academia or is it really all academic?

    Get PDF
    Is higher education part of the solution to the vexing problems facing the world today? How will higher education deliver on its promises in the 21st century? How will it respond to student needs and demands for a practical education at the same time it satisfies academia’s lofty vision of learning for learning’s sake? How might it reconcile these seemingly irreconciable beliefs? Who makes the decisions determining what subjects are “favored” and which are less favored, or even disfavored? This book attempts to cover all these questions because they all interconnect

    The development and institutionalisation of an integrated health care waste information system

    Get PDF
    Includes bibliographical references.Waste management generally in South Africa is poorly defined and practised, and the inadequate management of health care waste (HCW) has been recognised by the South African government as a significant environmental and public health risk. The literature revealed that an integrated health care waste information system (IHCWIS) serves as an important intervention to address the issue of poor health care waste management (HCWM). The overall key research question which this research asked was: "How does an IHCWIS develop and become institutionalised among health care waste generators?" The aim of the research was to gather empirical data to understand how the development and institutionalisation of an IHCWIS contributes to effective HCWM

    Constructing Cassandra: The social construction of strategic surprise at the Central Intelligence Agency 1947-2001

    Get PDF
    This dissertation takes a post-positivist approach to strategic surprise, and examines the identity and internal culture of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the lens of social constructivism. It identifies numerous social mechanisms that created and maintained four key, persistent attributes of the CIA’s identity and culture between 1947 and 2001. These features are: 1) homogeneity of personnel; 2) scientism and the reification of a narrow form of ‘reason’; 3) an overwhelming preference for ‘secrets’ over openly-available information; and, 4) a relentless drive for consensus. It then documents the influence of these elements of the CIA’s identity and culture in each phase of the intelligence cycle (Tasking, Collection, Analysis, Production and Dissemination), prior to four strategic surprises: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, the collapse of the USSR, and al-Qa’ida’s terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. It concludes that these key aspects of the CIA’s identity and culture created the antecedent conditions that allowed these four strategic surprises to occur, and thus prevented the CIA from fulfilling its mandate to ‘prevent another Pearl Harbor’. This conclusion is supported by contrasting the majority views at the CIA prior to these events with the views of ‘Cassandras’ (i.e. individuals inside or outside the Agency who anticipated the approximate course of events based on reasoned threat assessments that differed sharply from the Agency’s, but who were ignored or sidelined). In so doing, this work shifts the burden of proof for explaining strategic surprises back to the characteristics and actions of intelligence producers like the CIA, and away from errors by intelligence consumers like politicians and policymakers. This conclusion also allows this work to posit that understanding strategic surprise as a social construction is logically prior to previously proposed, entirely positivist, attempts to explain or to prevent it

    Bowdoin Orient v.130, no.1-22 (1998-1999)

    Get PDF
    https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1990s/1011/thumbnail.jp
    corecore