Governing for Stakeholders

This PhD thesis lies at the intersection of stakeholder theory and corporate governance research. Stakeholder theory proposes that firms are best understood as a set of relationships among groups that have a stake in the activities of the firm. Corporate governance research, on the other hand, has almost exclusively focused on the owners of firms as it deals with the question of how decision-making structures and accountability practices should be designed within organizations, such that owners can ensure themselves of getting a return on their investment. By adopting a stakeholder theory lens to corporate governance, I seek to broaden the theoretical and empirical scope of corporate governance such that various stakeholder groups can be included in the analysis of the corporate governance of organizations

Bureaucracy: a Love Story

Bureaucracy usually only becomes visible when it stops working—when a system fails, when an event gets off schedule, when someone points to a problem or glitch in a carefully calibrated workflow. But Bureaucracy: A Love Story draws together research done by scholars and students in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas to illuminate how bureaucracy structures our contemporary lives across a range of domains. People have navigated bureaucracy for centuries, by creating and utilizing various literary and rhetorical forms—from indexes to alphabetization to diagrams to blanks—that made it possible to efficiently process large amounts of information. Contemporary bureaucracy is likewise concerned with how to collect and store information, to circulate it efficiently, and to allow for easy access. We are interested both in the conventional definition of bureaucracy as a form of ordering and control connected to institutions and the state, but we also want to uncover how people interacted—often in creative ways—with the material forms of bureaucracy

Personal finance challenges facing taxi drivers at Umbumbulu, KwaZulu-Natal : a case study.

Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.The South African taxi industry is a fast-growing industry and greatly contributes to the GDP growth of the country. While it also contributes to the decrease of unemployment problem in the country, it does very little to compensate its employees, the taxi drivers. A large body of research has been done on the taxi industry regarding its growth and future development such as recapitalization, and SANTACOs initiatives at introducing a much affordable Airline. However, little research has been done concerning the financial challenges facing taxi drivers in South Africa, especially in Umbumbulu, South of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. This is the gap this dissertation is attempting to fill in. The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance understanding of how taxi drivers fare in this fast growing informal economy, namely, the taxi industry, by investigating their financial management practices. Through the utilization of, questionnaires, indepth interviews and ethnographic approach, a model will be developed to describe, firstly, how financial management practices are carried out to facilitate the fulfillment of specific life goals of these taxi drivers and secondly, discuss how these practices translate to financial management. For the purpose of this study a questionnaire was used to investigate the financial management practices of taxi drivers in Umbumbulu. 27 owners and drivers were interviewed during their loading intervals when they were not busy. The study revealed that the Umbumbulu Taxi Rank drivers face huge financial difficulties which are due to different reasons. The challenges have been found to not only affect them but also their families. The conclusion drawn from the results was that even though taxi drivers face these problems they are able to deal with them through different strategies, such as, saving money through Stokvel and savings accounts

Social work as narrative: An investigation of the social and literary nature of social work accounting

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis investigates what can be gained by approaching social work reports and conversations as narratives. A conventional approach to social work accounting practices is to treat such documents as (more or less) accurate descriptions of social workers' clients, their problems and proposed remedies. Such a realist approach was found to be flawed, since it assumes straightforward access from accounts to external reality, not considering the constructedness of such documents. Drawing on theoretical themes from the sociology of scientific knowledge, literary theory, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics, this thesis explores the construction and reception of social work accounts as rhetorical, narrative and interactional processes. The documents analysed represent some of the occasions on which social workers describe and recommend social work intervention with children and their families - research interviews, court reports, internal memos, case file entries and journal reports. On these occasions, social work is performed and displayed in descriptions of people and their attributes, justifications for social work intervention and excuses for lack of success. The main theme of the thesis is that social work accounts can profitably be analysed as stories. To explain their work and their clients' world to a variety of audiences, social workers are heard to tell competent, professionally persuasive stories. A variety of storytelling features are explored, looking in particular at plot, character, the construction of the reader and the authority of the writer. Stories are heard to vary with reading occasions and critical audiences, and it is the study of reading relations which is a main focus of the analysis - to whom are these accounts addressed and how are they available to be read? Rhetorical features are investigated in order to understand how social work accounts are made available to be read as morally and factually persuasive. A critical reading is also offered, which questions the adequacy of the accounts, and makes available the possibility of reading unheard stories. Reflexive interludes comment on the claims of the thesis writer in terms of the efforts of the social work writer. The implications of this study are that treating social work accounts as textual accomplishments undermines social workers' claims for reporting objectively about their clients and their problems. Social work can be seen as constituted in and through the performance and reception of stories: doing competent social work is achieved through telling competent social work stories

"The Story In It": The Design of Henry James's "New York Edition"

Thesis (Ph.D)--Boston UniversityHenry James regarded as "definitive" the selected edition of his Novels And Tales in twenty-four; volumes which he prepared for publication by Scribners in 1907-1909, not only because of its revisions and its prefaces but equally because he implied, through the order of its fictions, an interpretation of his artistic "case." The edition (involving, James said, "illuminatory classification, collocation, juxtaposition and separation throughout the whole series") builds an architecture; but this architecture is not, as Mr. Leon Edel has suggested, modelled on Balzac's divisions within La Comedie humaine, although James's sequence does have a relation to what for him was "the lesson of Balzac." James orders his series much as he composes his fictions: so that each unit makes a certain "germ" progressively clearer, or better-enforces the same (often intricate) idea. For this exfoliating type of design James often used the term "story." It is important to recognize this characteristic order in the "New York Edition" not for its complexity but because the design enforces James's interpretation of an aesthetic and an extra-aesthetic significance of his own "case." External evidence is limited and is not conclusive on the purpose of the architecture in the edition. This dissertation examines mainly internal evidence: James's preface statements and their sequence, and especially both the structural and the thematic features of each of the included fictions. By identifying an artistic "case," which he thought any critic's main task, James always means relating salient characteristics of the artist's production to the artist's prominent and enduring "conditions" of work. The volume divisions of the "New York Edition" are itsfundamental units, and groups of volumes comprise four major units: Volumes I-IX, X-XII, XIII-XVIII, XIX-XXIV. The arrangement of fictions within single volumes and of volumes within each of the major units unfolds the same meaning that the succession of major units also exfoliates. The order pervasively demonstrates what is James's "case" and that it evinces a "continuity" equally with a "growth." That is, James grew in the sense of intensifying his awareness of the same endeavor, or in the sense of "cultivating" his stable "operative consciousness" of difficulties always arising from the interplay of four of his enduring conditions. These conditions were: (1) his aim to write fiction such as would genuinely "represent" and represent.the human comedy in his time, (2) his command of details from but a limited number of areas of experience and from areas he considered peripheral (especially to the society--America--where lay his deepest roots), (3) his tendency to pursue all the relations between the details he did command, his sense that relations "end nowhere," (4) his necessity, for publication of his fiction, to compress it into briefer space than the ideal of artistic economy indicated, and to address an audience resistant to his understanding of worthwhile "life" or of "free spirit." The design of the edition stresses (a) that James's "case" was a successful one of having converted obstacle into aid through cultivating his awareness that difficulty was his "operative condition," (b) that this "case" shows composition of raw material to be any fiction writer's primary "resource" for representing "the real" and the human comedy, (c) that James's pursuit of thoroughness of composition enabled him to articulate a particular theme of great "civic use"--the theme that "free spirit" is inherently contagious and expansive through exchanges of consciousness in inter-personal relations. Perceiving that the design of the edition unfolds James's view· of his "case11 and of its importance solves many problems: for instance, why he has not placed all of his novels and nouvelles so as to trace his exact course of technical development; has not brought together all the fictions which use the supernatural; nowhere has juxtaposed sub-groups of his international stories; has ignored chronology so greatly and has not grouped by genre in Volumes X-XVIII; has combined a group of fictions including "Daisy Miller" with another group including "The Real Thing" in Volume XVIII; has pointed in the prefaces to classifications he might have employed; and has retained the publication order of The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors. [TRUNCATED

Spaceball (Or, Not Everything That\u27s Left is Postmodern)

Given law-school postmodernism\u27s epistemo/ontology of juvenile antirealist agnosticism, its commitment to Gadamerian and/or Derridean notions of linguistic indeterminacy, its mono- maniacal dedication to centrifugal end-justifies-the-means Lefty politics, its abhorrence of commonly recognized conceptions of neutral principle, its concomitant disrespect for the very notion of truth, and its inextricably intertwined obsession with names and propensity for linguistic doublespeak, Professor Arrow confesses to initially wondering what it might mean to take anything uttered by a postmodernist literally, or at face value. But undaunted by that \u27paradox, Professor Arrow not only takes up Feldman\u27s challenge to critique postmodernism on its own terms (by playing a pantomime Spaceball game with Feldman), but also critiques it logically--and (gasp!) pragmatically (not \u27pragmatically\u27 . Maintaining the tonal and stylistic playfulness to which law-school pomoers profess to aspire (but in no known instance have achieved), Professor Arrow assures the reader that there will be numerous interesting (not interesting\u27) plot twists along the way. In the process, Professor Arrow also offers speculation about the way in which the postmodernists\u27 ultimate contribution to American law schools is likely to be assessed-but cautions (as is appropriate under the circumstances) that you\u27ll have to find it in a footnote