Imaging a President: Rawlings in The Ghanaian Chronicle

The post-independence political history of Ghana is replete with failed civilian and military governments. At the close of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, a young Air Force Officer, Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, burst onto the political scene through a coup. After a return to civilian rule in 1992, with him as Head of State, he was to finally step down in 2000. For a greater part of his rule, press freedom was curtailed. But with the advent of civilian rule backed by a Constitution that guarantees press freedom, the country experienced a phenomenal increase in privately-owned media. One of these is The Ghanaian Chronicle, the most popular private newspaper in the last years of Rawlings' time in office. This study, under the influence of Critical Discourse Analysis,· examines "Letters to the Editor" published in The Ghanaian Chronicle that focused on Rawlings. Through manipulating various discourse structures, writers of these letters project an anti-Rawlings ideology as a means of resisting what they see as political dominance reflected in Rawlings rule

US-based Ghanaian Methodist young people : improving their participation in and commitment to church

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/2516/thumbnail.jp

An examination of the linkages between climate, engagement, and wellbeing in higher education.

Research coalescing around psychological climate, engagement, and wellbeing has been receiving considerable attention in management and HRD literature recently. However, research associated with these variables has generally been limited to for-profit businesses and organizations with little of note done using higher educational institutions. Thus, this cross sectional research study examined the extent to which psychological climate, engagement, and wellbeing are associated with each other in higher educational institutions. The study begins with an overview of how these variables have been identified as being connected with each other in research and practice, as well as discusses context specific factors in higher education (i.e. changing nature of operations and an increasing emphasis on employee wellbeing) that warrant the need for this study. A sample of 259 people employed by institutions of higher education in the United States was surveyed. Using mediation and moderation analyses, the study showed that psychological climate, engagement, and wellbeing are positively associated with each other, and that engagement mediated the relationship between psychological climate and wellbeing. Additionally, results indicated that employee role in higher education (i.e. vii faculty or staff) did not moderate the relationship between psychological climate and wellbeing. Finally, no significant differences in wellbeing were found between faculty and staff. Implications for HRD theory and research, as well as specific recommendations for leaders and administrators in higher education are discussed

The Adaptation of a Situational Judgement Test to Measure Leadership Knowledge in the Workplace

In recent times, situational judgment tests (SJTs) have emerged as an instrument of choice in organizations. This emergence is partly due to the high costs associated with developing and conducting high fidelity simulations such as assessment centers, coupled with the recent economic downturn affecting many organizations. The current study sought to validate an SJT as a low cost, alternate form of assessing leadership within an organizational context. A content validation study was carried out by retranslating items into eight dimensions and calibrating item responses. This study resulted in a content valid measure of leadership knowledge. Future studies should focus on further evaluating the psychometric properties of this new leadership assessment. Alternate forms reliability, convergent validity, and divergent validity studies, in particular, should be conducted to evaluate the new test

Reexamining the Benefits of Information Systems in Japanese Manufacturing Companies

It is quite reasonable to presuppose that information systems provide various benefits to manufacturers. But we don’t have much evidence on the benefits especially in Japanese manufacturing. In this paper we investigated the hypotheses presented by Matsui and Sato [6] [7] concerning the effects of information technologies and information systems upon manufacturing benefits with slightly different analytical approach and samples. We introduced more precise measure for implementation of information technologies and information systems, and divided the sample consisting of forty-six Japanese manufacturing companies into two sub-sample, world-class and random. The result of our analysis endorsed some of the propositions proved by Matsui and Sato [7], and provided new evidence to the hypotheses that utilization of statistical process control software improves product quality, implementation of computer-based production equipment control increases product-mix flexibility, and utilization of database for quality information and an increase in the percentage of external units electronically linked with the plant improve customer service. It also suggested additional hypotheses. Further, we discovered different relationships of information systems implementation with manufacturing benefits between world-class and randomly sampled companies

Students’ Perception of the National Open University of Nigeria Scheme: A Case Study of Calabar Centre

As the demand for admission in tertiary instructions rapidly outstrippedavailable institutional space, it increasingly became doubtful whether thetraditional institutions in their structure and resources capacity would copewith the aspiring thousands of Nigerians who sought tertiary education.Hence the need for distance education (National Open University of Nigeria)where those who are workers can snugly fit in also. The paper examines thestudents’ perception of National Open University of Nigeria scheme usingCalabar study centre as a case study. A sample of two hundred and fiftystudents was used and with a single hypothesis formulated, a t-test analysisof the scores derived from the respondents was done. The result shows thatthe calculated t was lesser than the critical t at 0.05 level of significance.Hence the conclusion that male and female students in National OpenUniversity of Nigeria, Calabar study centre do not differ in their perceptionof the scheme

An Empirical Analysis on the Benefits of Production Information Sysem for Japanese Manufacturing Companies

We empirically analyzed the linkage from computer-based information technologies utilized for production activities to the perceived benefits of production information systems, further to the competitive performance of each manufacturing plant, after presenting our research framework and a series of hypotheses. A database used for the analysis includes forty-six manufacturing plants located in Japan from three industries (machinery, electrical & electronics, and automobile). Information technologies we took up include computer aided design (CAD), computer aided engineering (CAE), computer aided processes planning (CAPP), local area networks (LAN) linking design and engineering stations, computer or direct numerical control (CNC/DNC), flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), automated retrieval and storage, material requirement planning (MRP), just-in-time (JIT) software, simulation tools, statistical process control (SPC) software, database for quality information, and electronic data interchange (EDI) linkages among others. The benefits of production information systems were measured in terms of manufacturing cost reduction, decrease in inventories, quality improvement, lead time reduction, increase in flexibility to changing product mix and production volume, new product introduction time reduction and so on. We found that there were several information technologies which did not necessarily show the hypothesized effects, and there were considerable unexpected or secondary effects upon the benefits of production information systems. Furthermore, some important benefits of production information systems, particularly manufacturing cost reduction and increase in flexibility, didn’t lead to the improvement in the corresponding competitive performance indexes

Optimal Inflections as Symmetry between Nominal and Verbal Reduplications in Akan

This paper discusses two issues in nominal and verbal reduplications in Akan, a language which is widely spoken in Ghana. These are the respective morphotactic structures of the two reduplications and the claim that an asymmetry obtains between nominal and verbal reduplications in the language. The issues are discussed in connection with a distinction in inflection for the nasal prefix /N-/ in nominal and verbal reduplications of Akan which, respectively, impute negation and plurality and how the individual inflections underscore and inform the morphotactic structures of the two reduplications. Analysis of issues will be done in the light of the Morphological Doubling Theory (Inkelas and Zoll 2005, Osam et al. 2013) and will further be captured within Optimality Theory (e.g. Prince & Smolensky 2004, McCarthy & Prince 1999). The discussions will particularly be narrowed down on the more interesting morphotactics of the verbal reduplication and its inflection for other verbal affixes (besides /N-/). Establishing the suggested asymmetry, we will also endeavour to show the general order of inflection in the verbal reduplication as opposed to what obtains in the nominal reduplication following structural well-formedness in both reduplicated forms