Dissertation com aug 2007 (3 risultati)

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - This study investigated the impact that women's body image had on prehistoric, ancient Greek, and developing Jewish and Tibetan Buddhist religions. Questions focused on the validity of a Mother Goddess concept, the justifications used to reinforce negativity about women's bodies, and the roles women assumed to maintain their spirituality. The evolution of patriarchal leadership was investigated, given the archaeological evidence that women's biological functions were seen as connected to the divine world and in parallel with the mysteries of nature. Data was drawn from archaeological, historical, and mythological accounts to present an interpretation of women's bodies through ancient times. Scriptural and doctrinal changes concerning women's body image were examined in developing Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism. The investigation concluded that initially God as creator was perceived as female, and high status was accorded to women whose bodies functioned like the Divine. The study further concluded that the reversal of that status was connected to two issues: the subjugation of the Mother Goddess by nomadic invaders, and controls exerted to regulate food supply, land ownership, and new moral codes based on male leadership. Women, in their dependent status, assumed supporting roles in religion. In ancient Greece, women faired the best in promoting their unique ability to safeguard the polis and its food supply by participating in exclusive festivals. In Judaism, women's body excluded her participation beyond home rituals. In Tibetan Buddhism, women achieve status by ignoring their physical states. Clarification of the divine as having male and female attributes is an avenue available only in 'alternative' approaches in all three religions.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - In the field of antitrust, the freedoms to contract and compete can and do contradict. Profit-maximizing companies desire perfectly competitive input markets to minimize their costs, but want monopolistic markets for their outputs to maximize their profits. Consequently, they have strong incentives to undermine competition in their output markets. In a world without antitrust laws, many companies would thus eliminate competition by using their freedom to contract, either by entering into legally enforceable agreements which fix prices or divide up markets, or by merging and acquiring rivals to gain market control. Therefore, guaranteeing and safeguarding companies' abilities to compete comes at the cost of restricting their freedoms to contract. The states role in this task is a delicate one though: government intervention itself necessarily limits the economic freedom of individuals and firms, and limiting the freedom of contract has potentially detrimental effects on economic activity as well. Hence, antitrust policy must find the right balance between the two freedoms of competition and contract, allowing competition to flourish while upholding the contractual freedoms necessary for a functioning market. The policies in the U.S. and Europe used to protect competition with per se rules, setting clear boundaries for the freedom to contract where it interfered with the freedom to compete. Over the past decades, improvements in economic analysis provided measurable dimensions for 'competition' through measures like efficiency and welfare. With these new and complex economic tools, the aim of an antitrust policy moved away from an 'indirect' mechanism which provided and enforced a strict framework of negative per se rules within which the competitive process was allowed to happen. The current policies directly aim at promoting welfare by attempting to 'balance' the welfare effects of individual business practices, permitting contracts or mergers with benign effects and prohibiting contracts with detrimental effects on welfare in potentially every case. These economic insights have promoted a better understanding of the competitive process and contributed to improved antitrust rules. However, in the actual enforcement of antitrust laws, recent developments caused by the influence of economic analysis have had a detrimental impact on antitrust policy in both the U.S. and the EU. First, it increased the discretion of competition authorities, lowering legal certainty for companies and increasing the potential for wrong decisions. Second, it gave companies incentives to waste resources on rent seeking activities by using economic analyses to demonstrate efficiencies in complicated and timely investigations and litigation. And third, the predominant use of economic analysis has massively increased the costs of enforcement. This thesis is the first one to depict these negative effects caused by recent developments and shows that a policy with clear limitations through proposed per se rules would be superior for it would eliminate the illustrated negative effects. …

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The purpose of the study was to examine, through narrative, contributing factors which lead to burnout in three Hispanic middle school teachers in a school in South Texas that is predominantly Hispanic. Burnout, in this work, was understood to be the experience of excessive stress and anxiety which accompanies teachers' inabilities to cope with environmental stressors present in their workplaces. While this term served to introduce the study, the participants defined their experiences of burnout in their own words (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Merriam, 1998). While the exact impact of teacher burnout on student achievement is unknown, it is clearly detrimental for the well being of the individual teacher and presumably to those around him or her, including students. Different factors such as teacher's attitudes towards perceived stressors, administrative support, classroom discipline, and physical environment were characterized. The researcher additionally used personal experiences and reflections in conjunction with existing scholarship on the subject in order to illuminate the stories. Stories were framed within different contexts (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).The research in large part followed the narrative thread of the responses that the participants provided, resulting in the themes of the study. Teachers candidly discussed their thoughts and opinions about stressful factors. Although the stories of each of the teachers included different reasons for burnout, within which the temporal nature of burnout was revealed, as well as the angst of teachers trying to relate their careers to their lives, it was apparent that burnout is an essential problem in this Hispanic teaching community. From this work, scholars and practitioners should be able to gather a sense of what a few bilingual South Texas teachers experience in their workplaces.…