Ecological imaginaries : organising sustainability

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Business.This thesis investigates organisational enactment of sustainability. The problematic addressed is that despite strong evidence supporting human induced global ecological damage, organisational practices remain unchanged and continue to degrade ecological systems. The question addressed is what factors contribute to the inertia that inhibits change for ecological sustainability in organisations? The question is addressed from the perspectives of individuals who are stakeholders in organisations. The modern concept of sustainability arose during the 1970s and selected aspects of sustainability discourses, for example the concept of the triple bottom line (TBL), have since been integrated into the organising narratives of organisation and society. Despite such success, indicators such as human induced climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequalities between rich and poor, suggest that mainstream institutions have not taken up change for sustainability. The proposition of this thesis is that alteration to our social imaginary (ies) is a necessary precursor to enactment of sustainability. The thesis presents findings from three case studies: Landcare, Corcon and Carepoint. These organisations were selected because they represented different sectors and each had initiated a formal sustainability change project: Corcon is an engineering organisation, Carepoint a community services not-for-profit organisation and Landcare an agricultural organisation. Landcare highlights the dialogue that nature has with individuals and organisations and how recognising this dialogue can lead to ecological solutions for sustainability. The Corcon case contributes the importance of boundaries defining inclusion and exclusion as moral constraints and enablers to developing sustainability solutions and the Carepoint case demonstrates that the multiplicity of competing sustainability discourses are understood by individuals who then make decisions based on the context of the dominant imaginary within which they are situated. These findings from the research highlight barriers concerned with meaning construction that view nature as an excluded other. I argue that the adoption of ecological sustainability by organisations and society needs new narratives to facilitate the emergence of meanings of ecological sustainability conducive to the inclusion of nature. The synthesis of these findings presents two possibilities for stimulating the creation of meaning construction that would facilitate an inclusive approach to nature. The first possibility is the Australian Aboriginal concept of Country, which offers a new source of logics upon which the development of a new socio-political sustainability imaginary may draw. The second possibility argues for the need to create a new social imaginary to support ecological sustainability. A contribution of this thesis is to provide the alternative frame of metabolic organisation to extant models of weak and strong sustainability to stimulate the creation of new ecological imaginaries. Metabolic organisation is defined as a systemic framework comprising three interdependent concepts: metabolism, values and enmeshment, and brings together three distinct strands of theory: social and biological metabolism, value theory and ecological theories

Organising for Ecological Repair: Reconstructing Land Management Practice

© 2015, © 2015 SAGE Publications. In this article, we explore organising narratives that underpin the generation of effective ecological solutions. We examine the processes of meaning construction in relation to the development of sustainable land management practices in the Landcare organisation in Australia. Meaning construction is situated in a variety of contexts that are themselves strongly influenced by a meta-narrative, which Taylor has labelled the “modern social imaginary”: A shared system of meanings that captures the imaginations of individuals and shapes their social groupings and society. The shift in meaning construction is reflected in the emergence of a narrative of “ecological repair” that involved a process of learning and knowledge development we have labelled protracted sense-making. Our research findings have led us to conclude that the development of successful ecological solutions require an active rewriting of the social imaginary

Neutrons from 9Be/alpha,n/ reaction for E alpha between 6 and 10 MeV

Neutron energy spectra measured as function of neutron emission angle and ion bombardment energ

Landcare and the livelihood of knowledge

This paper explores how communities generate effective ecological solutions using both implicit narrative construction and explicit processes of knowledge creation and knowledge application. We argue that the act of developing a narrative frames our understanding of the environment and governs our relationship with our environment. We identify micro-narratives extracted from the interviews with members of Australian Landcare organizations and link these micro-narratives to knowledge creation and dissemination processes. We conclude that social change toward sustainability comes about through the rewriting of the environmental story within which we situate ourselves

A full quantal theory of one-neutron halo breakup reactions

We present a theory of one-neutron halo breakup reactions within the framework of post-form distorted wave Born approximation wherein pure Coulomb, pure nuclear and their interference terms are treated consistently in a single setup. This formalism is used to study the breakup of one-neutron halo nucleus 11Be on several targets of different masses. We investigate the role played by the pure Coulomb, pure nuclear and the Coulomb-nuclear interference terms by calculating several reaction observables. The Coulomb-nuclear interference terms are found to be important for more exclusive observables.Comment: 22 pages latex, 9 figures, submitted to Phy. Rev.

Reaction channel contributions to the helion optical potential

Background: The well-established coupled channel and coupled reaction channel processes contributing to direct reactions make particular contributions to elastic scattering that are absent from local density folding models. Very little has been established concerning the contribution of these processes to the optical model potentials (OMPs) for 3He scattering. For studying such processes, spin-saturated closed shell nuclei such as 16O and 40Ca are particularly suitable target nuclei and the (3He, 4He) reaction is easily handled within conventional reaction theory because it avoids complications such as breakup.Purpose: To establish and characterize the contribution to the 3He-nucleus interaction generated by coupling to neutron pickup (outgoing 4He) channels; also to study the contribution of collective states and identify effects of dynamical nonlocality from these couplings.Methods: Coupled reaction channel (CRC) calculations, including coupling to collective states, will provide the elastic channel S-matrix Sl j resulting from the included processes. Inversion of Sl j will produce the local potential that yields, in a single channel calculation, the elastic scattering observables from the coupled channel calculation. Subtracting the bare potential from the CRC calculations yields a local and l-independent representation of the dynamical polarization potential (DPP). From the DPPs, because of a range of combinations of channel couplings, the influence of dynamically generated nonlocality can be identified.Results: Coupling to 4He channels systematically induces repulsion and absorption in the 3He OMP and also a reduction in the rms radius of the real part. The repulsion and absorption is less for 208Pb than for the lighter target nuclei although the qualitative effects, including the general undularity of the DPPs, are similar for all cases; therefore coupling to these channels cannot be represented by renormalizing folding model potentials. Evidence is presented for substantial dynamical nonlocality of the induced DPPs; for 40Ca this modifies direct reaction angular distributions. The local equivalent DPPs for individual couplings cannot be added to give the overall DPP for the complete set of couplings. For the 208Pb case, channel coupling reduces the reaction cross section although it increases it for 16O, with 40Ca an intermediate case. Conclusions: The DPPs established here strongly challenge the notion that folding models, in particular local density models, provide a satisfactory description of elastic scattering of 3He from nuclei. Coupling to neutron pickup channels induces dynamical nonlocality in the 3He OMP with implications for direct reactions involving 3He. Departures from a smooth radial form for the 3He OMP should be apparent in good fits to suitable elastic scattering data

Many-body effects in 16O(e,e'p)

Effects of nucleon-nucleon correlations on exclusive $(e,e'p)$ reactions on closed-shell nuclei leading to single-hole states are studied using $^{16}O(e,e'p)^{15}N$ ($6.32$ MeV, $3/2^-$) as an example. The quasi-hole wave function, calculated from the overlap of translationally invariant many-body variational wave functions containing realistic spatial, spin and isospin correlations, seems to describe the initial state of the struck proton accurately inside the nucleus, however it is too large at the surface. The effect of short-range correlations on the final state is found to be largely cancelled by the increase in the transparency for the struck proton. It is estimated that the values of the spectroscopic factors obtained with the DWIA may increase by a few percent due to correlation effects in the final state.Comment: 21 Pages, PHY-7849-TH-9

Actionneur à deux degrés de liberté pour micro robot mobile

Ce projet présente un actionneur à deux degrés de liberté (mouvement verticale et rotation) pour des micro-robots mobiles. L’actionneur possède un encombrement de 12 x 10.4 x 3 mm3 et une course de 5.5 mm. L’actionnement est basé sur le principe du stick-slip avec des actionneurs piézo-électriques avec des pieds conducteurs pour éviter des fils. L’actionneur est capable de soulever un poids de 2.5 g et présente des vitesses maximales de 0.7 mm/s en verticale et 0.18 rad/s en rotation

A Microscopic T-Violating Optical Potential: Implications for Neutron-Transmission Experiments

We derive a T-violating P-conserving optical potential for neutron-nucleus scattering, starting from a uniquely determined two-body $\rho$-exchange interaction with the same symmetry. We then obtain limits on the T-violating $\rho$-nucleon coupling $\overline{g}_{\rho}$ from neutron-transmission experiments in $^{165}$Ho. The limits may soon compete with those from measurements of atomic electric-dipole moments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 uuencoded figures in separate files (replaces version sent earlier in the day with figures attached), in RevTeX 3, submitted to PR