Browsing by Subject "culture"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    Adaptation of aphasia tests for neurocognitive screening in South Africa
    (2010) Mosdell, Jill; Balchin, Ross Malcolm; Ameen, Ozayr Sale
    Two aphasia tests — the Cookie Theft Test and the Boston Naming Test — were adapted to help eliminate western cultural, language and education bias in neurocognitive screening in South Africa. These tests were among the commonly used tests initially chosen for inclusion in a larger neurocognitive screening battery currently being developed and translated for use in South Africa — the Groote Schuur Neurocognitive Battery. The adaptations were made employing quantitative and qualitative converging lines of evidence to evaluate their efficacy. This evidence included consultation with clinicians at Groote Schuur Hospital and translators knowledgeable in Afrikaans and isiXhosa language and culture, qualitative feedback from the research participants, and the results on the tests. The adapted tests were piloted by testing 30 neurocognitively intact controls consisting of equal numbers of Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa speakers, comparing their scores to their performances on the original tests. Three aphasic patients were also briefly tested. Results indicate that the adaptations made to the tests improved the performance of controls over the original versions, and tentatively suggest that the adapted tests should be able to screen for aphasia. This pilot study recommends further changes to the Groote Schuur Naming Test before its introduction into the battery ahead of its validation.
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    Contextually relevant resources in speech-language therapy and audiology in South Africa-are there any?
    (AOSIS, 2011) Pascoe, Michelle; Norman, Vivienne
    In this editorial introduction we aim to explore the notion of contextually-relevant resources. We argue that it is the responsibility of Speech Language Therapists (SLTs) and Audiologists (As) working in South Africa to develop contextually relevant resources, and not to rely on the countries or cultures where the professions originated to do so. Language is often cited as the main barrier to contextually relevant resources: most SLTs and As are aware of the need for more resources in the indigenous local languages. However, the issue is not as straightforward as translating resources from English into other languages. The challenges related to culture, e.g. formal education, familiarity with the test situation, have to be considered; as well as the population on which norms were obtained; the nature of vocabulary or picture items. This paper introduces four original research papers that follow in this edition of the journal, and showcases them as examples of innovative development in our field. At the same time we call for the further development of assessment materials, intervention resources, and contributions to the evidence base in our context. We emphasise the importance of local knowledge to drive the development of these resources in innovative and perhaps unexpected ways, and suggest that all clinicians have an important role to play in this process.
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    Factors influencing Open Educational Practices and OER in the Global South: Meta-synthesis of the ROER4D project
    (African Minds, International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources for Development, 2017-12) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Arinto, Patricia; Cartmill, Tess; King, Thomas
    This chapter provides a meta-synthesis of the findings from the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) empirical studies based on the 13 sub-project chapters in this volume as well as other sub-project research reports. It does so by analysing how three phases of Open Educational Resources (OER) adoption – OER creation, use and adaptation – are observed in the studies as forms of Open Educational Practices (OEP), identifying where there are most likely to be disjunctures that inhibit optimal OER adoption processes and their longer-term sustainability. It compares the open practices reported in the ROER4D sub-project studies to an idealised or maximal set of open processes, modelled as the Open Education cycle framework. It draws upon social realist theory to uncover agential decision-making about OER creation, use and adaptation in relation to structural and cultural environments, and seeks to answer the ROER4D project’s overarching research question: Whether, how, for whom and under what circumstances can engagement with OEP and OER provide equitable access to relevant, high-quality, affordable and sustainable education in the Global South? This chapter interrogates findings from the ROER4D empirical studies using a metasynthesis approach. Following a review of sub-project research reports (including, in some cases, primary micro data), the authors used a literature-informed set of themes to create the meta-level conceptual framework for claims about OER and OEP in relation to access, quality and affordability; the Open Education cycle; and structural, cultural and agential influences on the potential impact on access, quality and affordability. Nvivo software was used to help reveal literature-informed and emergent themes in the studies, identifying the most frequently occurring themes to provide a more comprehensive and classified interpretation of the findings across the empirical studies. Insights and recommendations were then distilled according to Archer’s (2003; 2014) social realist theoretical framework which assesses social change – and its counterpart, stasis – according to dynamically interactive and structural, cultural and agential factors. The authors used these three factors to guide their analysis of the ROER4D findings, as understood in relation to the three broad phases of OER adoption (creation, use and adaptation) proposed in the Open Education cycle. Findings show that in the Global South contexts studied, the ideal or maximal Open Education cycle is incomplete in terms of optimising the benefits of OER adoption. There are five key points of disjuncture: (1) the dependence on copying of existing OER and the corollary failure to localise; (2) the adaptation of OER, but with inconsistent curation and rehosting of derivative works on publicly available platforms or in repositories, limiting access to the derivative OER; (3) limited circulation of derivative OER due, in part, to the absence of a communication strategy; (4) inconsistent quality assurance processes; and (5) a weak feedback loop for continuous improvement of the original or derivative work. The chapter concludes with a critical exploration of the range of influences of OER and associated practices on access to educational materials, the quality of educational resources, educators’ pedagogical perspectives and practices, and student performance as well as the overall affordability and sustainability of education in the Global South. It argues that full participation in the OER movement in the Global South requires that certain structural factors be put in place – including a minimum level of infrastructural support, legal permission to share materials and OER curation platforms – to curate curriculum-aligned OER in local languages. However, these structural adjustments alone are insufficient for the full value proposition of OER to be realised. While individual educators and some institutions are sharing OER, this willingness needs to be bolstered by a much stronger cultural change where communities of educators and students are given technical and pedagogical support to enable OER uptake – especially the creation and adaptation of OER produced in the Global South.
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    Hambo buza unyoko: on future Real conditionals
    (2024) Maduna, Lerato; Makhubu, Nomusa; Mahashe, George
    Drawing from the photographic archives that belonged to my mother Lizzie Maduna (née Moloi), my late grandmother Elizabeth Masesi Moloi (née Dlamini), my late great aunt, Goguse Letta Ntshangase (née Moloi), I re-envision how the women in my family performed futurity. Although these women lived through colonial and apartheid oppression, these photographic archives show how they created liberatory worlds despite the violence they lived through. My creative work surfaces these archives as a matriarchive, which I argue were created in resistance to the oppressive and dehumanising conditions as a performance of future real conditionals.
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    Non-technical factors that influence the implementation of a knowledge management system in a parastatal organisation in South Africa
    (2021) Majavu, Mluleki Justice; Kyobe, Michael
    As the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) has influenced all sectors, and workers who accrued their experience over decades are reaching retirement age, it has become imperative in all sectors to access their knowledge, store it, and share it with new employees to avoid such knowledge being lost. Knowledge management aims to take advantage of the intangible assets that would otherwise be wasted: The knowledge developed and held by the organisations' employees, their accumulated experience, and task-specific knowledge acquired by employees. Hence, the importance of knowledge management (KM) practices in driving organisational growth and profitability is well established. However, there is a paucity of literature regarding the influence of non-technical attributes (employee attitude, organisational culture, and organisational politics) in driving the effective implementation of KM across public sector organisations. Hence, the present study addressed the gap in literature by exploring the non-technical attributes that influence the effective implementation of KM in South African parastatals. The present study was based on the assumption that non-technical attributes are as important as the technical attributes for ensuring effective KM implementation. The study was governed by the Ecological Theory of KM, which endorses that individuals, relationships, and learning communities play an important role, including their interaction with each other as well as internal and external factors that motivate them to share adequate, appropriate, and timely knowledge. This research contributes to the theoretical knowledge within the information systems (IS) community through developing models and theories in the extant literature that may account for the influence of organisational culture and politics in influencing the effective implementation of knowledge management systems (KMSs) in South African parastatal organisations. The evidence suggested that knowledge-sharing behaviour among employees is an important determinant for the effective implementation of KM. Hence, it was speculated that organisational culture and organisational politics might also influence KM implementation within South African parastatals by influencing the employee-related attributes. The ontological and epistemological stances that were considered for this study were objectivism and positivism, respectively. Such stances were adopted because it was contended that the realism related to KM implementation could be estimated through objective endpoints. A mixed-method approach was undertaken to obtain the relevant data from the participants. The subjective responses of the participants were obtained through closed-ended and open-ended questions. Since there are different non-technical factors that could influence the effective implementation of KM, it was hypothesised that a positive organisational culture or a positive employee attitude might not always ensure effective KM implementation. The hypotheses were grounded on the concept that a positive attitude by employees might become undermined by a dominant negative organisational culture, and destructive or over-bearing organisational politics. Under such circumstances, the positive attitude of employees would not be sufficient to influence effective KM implementation. The study showed that attitudes of people and a positive organisational culture significantly influenced an effective KM implementation. One of the novel findings in this study was that organisational politics did not significantly impact the implementation of KM practices (p > 0.05). However, the focus group interviews reflected that the parastatal organisation suffered from leadership challenges, which substantiated the lack of a relationship between politics and KM implementation. The major theory that emerged from this study was that knowledge sharing across a parastatal organisation is governed by the interaction of different knowledge-sharing theories. The novel finding that organisational politics might not significantly influence the effective implementation of a KMS could be explained from the theories of knowledge sharing, which mandate that trait theory and social engagement theory might interact in influencing knowledge sharing across employees of parastatal organisations. If organisational politics do not influence knowledge sharing, the altruistic attributes of an employee may still be sufficient to share tacit and explicit knowledge. Future studies should explore the direct interaction between the positive and negative attributes of people, organisational culture, and organisational politics in influencing an effective implementation of KM across a number of parastatal organisations.
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    Recharged and ready: a week-level diary study exploring an integrated model of weekend recovery, incorporating circadian and boundary perspectives, and their relationship with weekly performance
    (2025) Schroeder, Callum; Bagraim, Jeffrey
    The ability to effectively recover from work-related stressors during weekends is increasingly recognised as vital for the well-being and performance of employees. Given their theoretical alignment with recovery, this study extends an integrated model of weekend recovery by incorporating a boundary perspective (i.e., psychological reattachment to work) and a circadian perspective (i.e., sleep characteristics), offering a more comprehensive understanding of how these components interact with employees' recovery and ultimately influence their weekly job performance. In addition, positioning the weekend as the recovery context provided the opportunity to examine the impact of culture, religion, and spirituality on recovery, particularly as they relate to activities performed during leisure time. Using a longitudinal research design with repeated measures, quantitative data was collected from employees (N = 88) across various companies in South Africa over the course of three weeks before and after weekends. Multilevel model results, primarily at the person level (n = 57), indicated that low-duty activities positively predicted weekend recovery experiences (including psychological detachment, relaxation, and mastery experiences), with physical activities and cultural activities being the most conducive to the recovery experiences. Conversely, high-duty activities were not found to be significant negative predictors of weekend recovery experiences. It was also found that religious and spiritual activities, while not conducive to overall recovery experiences, were positively predictive of psychological detachment from work. Interestingly, inspection of the results for sleep quality and weekend catch-up sleep revealed that sleep quality positively predicted weekend recovery experiences only when high-duty and low-duty activities were removed from the model. Weekend catch-up sleep was not found to be a significant predictor of weekend recovery experiences among the current sample. Week-level findings (n = 102) indicated that weekend recovery experiences positively predicted the state of being recovered on Monday; however, they did not promote psychological reattachment. Nevertheless, it was found that psychological reattachment to work on Monday was found to be the most beneficial recovery-related outcome for optimal weekly job performance (i.e., task performance and work engagement), as opposed to the state of being recovered, which solely promoted employees' task performance for the remainder of the workweek. Ultimately, the relevant implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented.
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    Seeing the world as an African language speaker
    (2014-09-29) Dowling, Tessa
    This lecture will be of interest to anyone who wishes to know more about the relationship between language and culture. Go to Seeing the world as an African language speaker Is the way we see the world influenced by our language, or is it the other way around: is our language influenced by the way we see the world? You’ve all heard (the rather faulty) example of the Inuit having many words for snow – and maybe even have heard of the South American language called Yagan with a word Mamihlapinatapei which refers to the desirous look two people give each other when they want to start something but are too hesitant to do so (what a wistful, romantic culture, you might think!) But what about here in South Africa? What is it about African languages that makes them uniquely different and astonishingly original in the way they are put together? This lecture will introduce you to some of the key features (both structural and metaphorical) of our languages, features essential to understanding their cultures.
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    Sicily: island of cultural and artistic diversity
    (2012) Saunders, Edward
    Because of the Mafia's continuing grip on Sicily, the island's long and rich history is often overlooked. These audio lectures will be of interest to those who wish to learn more about the history of Italy and the cultural and aritistic diversity of this island, earlier known as Sicily.
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    The African imagination: Postcolonial studies, canons, and stigmatization
    (2003) Garuba, Harry
    In the prefatory remarks to his new book, The African Imagination, Abiola Irele traces the trajectory of his professional career from his initial location in Africa to his present base in an American university. The Africa phase of his career, he emphasizes, was marked by an awareness that he was involved in the definition and mapping of a distinctive terrain of imaginative expression and a new academic field known as African literature within the context of a local community of scholars and students mutually engaged in a cultural activity that they felt was central to the needs of an evolving national community. In relocating to the center of the Western academy in the United States, he continues, he now pursues his professional career in an environment within which this literature is marginal. Indeed, the literature is not only marginal, it is more often secondary, serving only to provide validating material for other disciplines and/or evidence for consolidating the paradigms of dominant discourses or epistemologies.
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    The entanglement of culture, leadership and performance in information systems development projects
    (2018) Geeling, Sharon; Brown, Irwin; Weimann, Peter
    Information systems (IS) development represents a significant area of research interest in the IS discipline. Despite this interest, IS development projects consistently fall short in delivering anticipated outcomes within time, quality and cost constraints. Attempts by researchers to uncover contributors to high failure rates are complicated by fragmented views of the nature of the problem. These range from challenges to the validity of performance reports to contesting the conceptualization of success. Furthermore, there is a tendency in practice to address immediate symptomatic problems of IS project failure rather than resolve the fundamental issues. Consequently, recent measures indicate that 48% of IS projects fail to meet time commitments, 33% exceed their budget, 32% don’t achieve their business objectives and 15% fail outright. This PhD thesis presents research to explore and offer explanatory theory of how culture and leadership are implicated in the performance of IS development projects. Importantly, IS development is positioned as a form of social interaction. Thus, an understanding of the social context and the situated meanings that arise through social interaction are necessary conditions to effectively explore this research topic. Within this context the study reveals the performative nature of IS development work and offers explanations for the actions of organizational leaders and IS technical specialists involved in IS development. An interpretive research paradigm and inductive reasoning were adopted for this research and understanding is developed through a hermeneutic mode of inquiry. Two IS projects responsible for delivering strategic benefit to an organization in the financial services sector are the two cases in this study. Qualitative data were collected through interviews, observation and documentary evidence between January 2017 and June 2017. The nature of the relationships between culture, leadership and performance in the course of IS development work was revealed through two analytical iterations. The first iteration used the theory of Cultural Implications in Information Systems Development as a structural framework to support a thematic analysis of the data. A second iteration used frame analysis as a theoretical foundation to examine the interplay of culture, leadership and performance through a within-case and cross-case analysis of the two cases. Key contributions from this research include the development of a conceptual model explaining cultural implications in IS development, the development of an explanatory theory of the entangled nature of culture and leadership and the performance of IS projects, and 11 propositions that offer a basis for testing the emergent theory in future empirical studies. The findings from the research also reveal the performative nature of IS development work and identify concepts important to organizational managers and IS technical specialists. While the theory emerged in the context of IS development projects and the concepts in the emergent theory are central to the practice of IS development, each could be equally relevant to other IS phenomena where culture, leadership and performance are implicated, such as IS management and offshoring. The grounding of theoretical concepts to empirical data enabled the application of the theory to practice; practical guidelines are offered in respect of the influences of culture and leadership on the performance of IS development projects. This research supports the suitability of the Cultural Dynamics Model as a sensitizing lens for data collection in interpretive studies where culture is implicated.
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    THE UNTOLD STORIES: An exploration of police views regarding the policing of LGBTQI+ hate crimes in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
    (2022) Sichinga, Daniel Lifuka; van der Spuy, Elrena
    In South Africa, despite constitutional safeguards, research has shown Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer (LGBTIQ+) individuals who experience hate-related incidents based on their sexual orientation and gender identity expression (SOGIE) do not report their cases to the police for fear of secondary victimisation. Much of the complaints against the police cite homophobic and heterosexist work cultures that leave victims feeling disenfranchised from accessing justice. While this may be the case, little to no research exists regarding the perceptions, experiences, and challenges faced by frontline police officers in policing LGBTQI+ hate crimes. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 30 police officers from five police stations in the Cape Metropole, South Africa, this research investigates the dynamics underlying the policing of LGBTQI+ hate crimes and the ways in which personal, institutional, and national cultural identities intersect. The research finds that police officers' perceptions of policing LGBTQI+ hate crimes are influenced by societal and institutional culture. Within these spaces, police officers are constantly negotiating parts of their identity to fit society and the SAPS' organisation cultural narratives. The research finds that discretion is central to how police officers conduct the policing of LGBTQI+ hate crimes. Discretion is observed in processes and how they define what constitutes criminality. The research further finds that the policing of LGBTQI+ hate crimes occur in spaces with limited resources. Resource constraints combined with burn-out and low morale negatively impact the SAPS service delivery standards. The research concludes with recommendations of a SOGIE-based hate crimes education for all, improving LGBTQI+-police relations through community liaisons and reducing police officers' stressors to improve employee wellbeing.
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    Writing Your World Week 3 Video 1 - Recap on identity and mobility
    (2019-06-01) Nomdo, Gideon; Hunma, Aditi
    This video focuses on the intersection of identity and mobility. It restates all the work that has been done so far in the course with the regards to how individual's mobility affect their identity. The video then introduces a new theme: culture. It defines what culture is and how it is important to our identities. it then touches on how culture can provide a point of reference when writing the essay on identity. This is video 1/12 in week 3 of the Writing your World course.