Digital Commons Network^™

Contributors, James A. Wren

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 16, issue 2 of Reconstruction.

International Communication: The Effect Of Culture On The Content, Organization, And Design Of Nonprofit Annual Reports, Lia Blanchard

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

A professional document must convey information with a high degree of readability and usability. The inclusion of visual rhetoric, the transformation of technical writing from product-oriented to user-oriented information, the development of Simplified Technical English, and the adoption of plain writing practices are all steps toward communicating effectively in today’s “postnational” world. Continued evolution requires a deeper understanding of cultural differences—acknowledging not only differing symbols, heroes, and rituals, but the values that inspire them. This study examines the content, organization, and design of two nonprofit annual reports produced in 2013: one from the Russian Federation and one from the United …

Comparative Empirical Analysis On Computer Software Piracy Behaviors Between China And The United States: An Exploratory Study, Xiang Fang, Sooun Lee

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Using the data collected from several universities in China and the United States, which have drastically different piracy rates, economic development stages, income levels, and national cultures, this study aims to identify which demographic factors affect software piracy significantly. Totally, the dataset includes 600 valid responses. Multivariate data analysis, supported by Multivariate Analysis of Variance and Turkey’s test, reveals that among various factors, country difference and gender most significantly influence software piracy. In addition, this study offers recommendations on how to curb software piracy effectively.

Contents, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Art And Art History, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Program Of Study, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Computer Science, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Cross-Cultural Studies, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Women’S And Gender Studies, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

World Languages And Cultures, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Index, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

Changing Rights To Family Life: Biolegalities In The Globalization Of Reproduction, Sonja Van Wichelen

Socio-Legal Review

This article focuses on Australian court practices that concern the legalization of parenthood for children born out of overseas surrogacy arrangements. Analysing arguments and decisions from federal and local cases, it demonstrates how a “human rights approach” promoted by judges that act in the “best interest of the child” destabilizes the enforcement of local Australian law regarding commercial surrogacy. Ultimately, the article examines how the law interacts with biotechnological changes and how legal justifications engage with biological and social knowledge that are creating a changing landscape of rights and ethics around surrogacy. Using the concept of “biolegality”, it conceptualizes rights …

Globalization And Possibilities For Intercultural Awareness: Multimodal Arabic Culture Portfolios At A Catholic University, Sawsan Abbadi

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This case study explores the teaching and learning of Arabic at one Catholic university campus, with a focus upon the complex interactions between language and culture in a postmodern globalized context. Specifically, it examines the use of “multimodal culture portfolios” as a means to engage students both linguistically and culturally in classroom and community discourses. Through their interactions and co-construction of knowledge with other participants, these students are led to think about the multiple communicative contexts that are shaping and being shaped by them. Data collection was conducted through survey questionnaires and students' responses to the assigned culture portfolio. The …

Photic Stress In Symbiont-Bearing Reef Organisms: Analyses Of Photosynthetic Performance, Natasha Mendez-Ferrer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Photo-oxidative stress is one of the key factors that can induce bleaching in reef organisms. With the decline of coral reefs and recurrent bleaching events, many studies have focused on understanding the mechanism behind this phenomenon. Two of the hypotheses that explain how the photosynthetic performance of the symbiont is affected and influences bleaching are: (1) disruption of the photosynthetic pathway by direct damage to the photosystem II (PSII), and (2) by inhibition of the Calvin-Benson cycle. In this dissertation I examine different aspects of photosynthetic performance in symbiont-bearing reef organisms and how this is influenced by symbiont loss and …

Introduction: Imagining Post-Neoliberal Regulatory Subjectivities, Mika Viljanen Dr, Mikko Rajavuori, Tal Kastner

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

To explore these tentative diagnoses and conceptualizations we called for papers engaging different aspects of law's subjectivity turn. A selection of papers that map the possible genealogies for the emergence of post-neoliberal law, address the implications of anthropomorphic corporate regulation, or analyze transformations in sovereign subjectivities is now published in this symposium issue. The papers take up and make salient an array of the big questions of our day.

While overlapping, the papers can be broadly divided into two categories. The first category consists of papers that explore the internal make-up of legal and regulatory subjectivities. Drawing on history, queer …

Living, Again: Population And Paradox In Recent Cinema, Keith Clavin

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

The last several decades have witnessed a drastic increase in ecological writing, but also a substantial lack in regards to the discussion of human population control. This article argues that the deficiency has been reproduced within several recent examples of eco-cinema, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Despite strong conservationist themes and narratives encouraging social revolution, the films encounter similar theoretical difficulties, and enact similar resulting absences, within their representational fields. As a consequence, the environmental topics are filtered through an anthropocentric lens that generates a set of paradoxes regarding human consumption, sacrifice and the visualisation of future sustainable states.

Impact Of Uk And Australian Transnational Higher Education In Malaysia, N Arunasalam

School of Nursing and Midwifery

This study investigated outcomes of the provision, by one Australian and two U.K. universities, of bridging programs that allow registered Malaysian nurses to upgrade their diploma qualifications to degree level. The study was informed by current literature on Transnational Higher Education (TNHE) programs. Not sufficiently explored in the literature are nurses’ lived experiences of such programs and how far they apply TNHE theory in clinical practice. Using hermeneutic phenomenology, interviews were conducted with 18 Malaysian nurses who completed these TNHE programs. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings were that personal and professional development did occur but it …

Communication, Saint Mary's College Of California

Academic Catalog

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Safety Culture And Ethical Leadership On Safety Performance, Kevin O’Leary

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This dissertation investigated the effects of safety culture and ethical leadership on safety performance in Fractional jet pilots in the United States. The primary objective was to develop a well-fitted model linking these constructs. A composite survey instrument was developed from instruments previously validated in the literature.

There were 305 complete and valid responses from Fractional pilots. The hypothesized factor structure consisted of seven factors. The exogenous factor of safety culture was made up of four sub-factors. The endogenous factors included ethical leadership, pilot commitment, and safety performance. Safety performance was a second order factor consisting of errors and attitudes …

Critical Intercultural Dialogue: Discourse Analysis Of Context, Intersectionality, And Reflexivity In Undergraduate Conversations, Erin Watley

Communication ETDs

Intercultural conflicts continue to persist for numerous reasons. The groups involved remain polarized, individuals tend to primarily concentrate on defending their own point of view, or solutions concentrate on individual actions instead of the consequences perpetuated by complex social systems. The communicative behaviors that often accompany intercultural conflicts also frequently work to sustain them, helping those who are involved to perpetuate dominant narratives and marginalizing social systems in ways in which they are both active and complicit. In this study Critical Discourse Analysis was used to examine the ways that undergraduate students discussed and conceptualized intercultural conflicts during their involvement …

Femmage And The Diy Movement: Feminism, Crafty Women, And The Politics Of Gender Performance, Rosemary L. Sallee

American Studies ETDs

Through a variety of lenses, contemporary crafting is examined as a complex and contradictory gender and class performance that serves as a form of communication among women that both enables and contains oppositional and gender role explorations. Crafting is created through myriad texts which transform into an individual form of expression, a societal spectacle, a fashion trend, a subculture, an addiction, a coping mechanism, an oppositional act, and a means of healing both physically and emotionally. This study investigates how the objects women make and collect reflect and define crafters' negotiations between personal desires and public personas, help them voice …

Communities In (Digital) Space: Creating Networks For Daily Living Through Pervasive Media, Jamie Lynn Henthorn

English Theses & Dissertations

Studies of online communities often focus either on communities that produce texts or the texts with which individuals engage. This dissertation examines online communities that practice in ongoing activities, in their leisure time, often with no end goal of producing any final text. Through interviews, surveys, and community forum analysis of running, gaming, and translation communities, this study finds that place and everyday habits factor heavily into the ways that sustained online communities structure their work. “Place” can have several meanings within this context, including the communities valuing specific locations or working with specific individuals because of where they live. …

The Existential Territories Of Global Childhoods: Resingularizing Subjectivity Through Ecologies, Laura Trafí-Prats

Occasional Paper Series

Draws upon photography to discuss the construction of childhood within the ecological spaces of globalization.

Faculty Research, Scholarship, And Creative Activity Report, 2015, Saint Mary's College Of California

Saint Mary's Scholarship Reports

No abstract provided.

Extreme Response Style In Correlational Research, Katarzyna Kinga Kowalczyk, Agnieszka Mulak, Grzegorz Król

European Management Studies

Extreme Response Style, defined as the tendency to consistently use (or avoid) the extreme ends of response scales in questionnaires with a multiple response category format (Clark, 2000), is one of the most studied response styles. The reason for this is its potential to distort survey results, especially in cross-cultural research (Cheung & Rensvold, 2000). Furthermore, the relationships between ERS and most frequently analyzed socio-demographic variables (such as gender, age, education) are inconclusive. We replicated a number of well-established effects, using data from the World Value Survey, and expanded these analyses by including an ERS index, to determine its possible …

Cross-Country Comparisons Of Environmental Concern, Krzysztof Nowak, Dorota Markiewicz, Jakub Gawraczyński, Paweł Mazurkiewicz

European Management Studies

We investigate two approaches to exploring environmental concern in cross-national, big datasets. It is widely believed that environmental concern encompasses at least two components: the cognitive component, i.e. the recognition of environmental threats, and the conative component, i.e. the willingness to do something about them. Previous research examining the International Social Survey Programme Environmental Module used either one general factor linked to environmental concern (Franzen & Vogl, 2013) or two independent factors (Marquart-Pyatt, 2012) to measure the cognitive and connotative factors separately. In the present work we used a multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to examine both approaches. Our results indicate …

Comparability Problems Of International Survey Data: The Example Of Japan And Italy, Jerzy Wierzbiński, Anna Olga Kuźmińska

European Management Studies

The paper shows problems of comparability of data collected in Italy and Japan, which can be treated as proxies of Western and Eastern cultures, respectively. Following the theoretical and empirical comparison of these two cultures performed by Nisbett (2003), we predicted and tested the differences in the response styles on Italian and Japanese representative internet samples, as well as data collected in both countries as part of the International Social Survey Programme (1998, 2008). In almost all of the six question sets analyzed, the Japanese gave fewer extreme responses, as well as more “don’t know” responses than Italians.

Are Gay-Straight Alliances Working ? Advisor's Perceived Role Of And Level Of Success Of Gsas In Combatting The Bullying Epidemic In South Carolina, Jason Paul Bagley

Theses and Dissertations

This phenomenological, ethnographic, collective case study examined the effectiveness of Gay-Straight Alliances in public high schools in South Carolina in reducing or eradicating aggression and bullying towards LGBTQ students through the lenses of both queer and critical theories within a framework of social justice. The current study investigated the perceptions of experts and GSA faculty advisors regarding the success of the clubs in reducing or eliminating bullying in South Carolina high schools. The investigation stemmed from the perceived discrepancy between literature on GSAs, which reports that the clubs contribute to a more positive school climate, positive effects on LGBTQ youth, …

What Makes Information Strategic ? An Examination Of Access To Information Resources For Entrepreneurs And Business Performance, Yao Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of the relationship between the access to and use of information resources of entrepreneurs and their business performance. The survival and competence of organizations relies heavily on their recognition of information as important strategic resource. Entrepreneurs, specifically, face a constantly changing environment and are in a disadvantaged competitive position in finance and experience compared with large companies. Access to, and use of information resources, will help them improve their business performance.

This study collects both qualitative and quantitative data, investigating the entrepreneurs’ business performance and their behaviour in accessing and …

Discursive Intersections: Tracing The Becoming Of Pre-Service Teachers - An Action Research Study, Elizabeth Mccall Bemiss

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to construct knowledge about the intersections between a teacher educator’s discourses and pre-service teacher identity performances in a university classroom. The researcher used Mills’ (2011) action research design to examine the ways she intersected with the identity performances of 24 pre-service teachers in a literacy methods course. Data collection included audio recordings and transcriptions of class sessions, a teacher journal, written communication between teacher and students, and course assignments. Thematic analysis and methods of discourse analysis were used to identify patterns across pre-service teachers’ performances in the classroom. Findings revealed multiple, fluid, dynamically evolving, …