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This qualitative case study explored the impact of mentoring on professional advancement among African Americans healthcare professionals. A nonrandom purposeful sample was used to identify 21 African American hospital decision makers employed in the specialty areas of nursing, medicine, pharmacy, and administration. Two central research questions were used to explore the role of mentoring on professional advancement and the participants' perception of the importance of mentorship and empowerment on their professional advancement. Data was analyzed using Moustakas (1994) modified van Kaam method of analysis. Results of the study showed that mentoring plays an important role in the professional advancement of African American hospital professionals. Additionally, the study participants believed that mentoring empowers African Americans for professional advancement.

Vertical and horizontal expansion of irrigated agriculture to feed the increasing population has contributed to excessive groundwater withdrawal and affected the availability of water in terms of both quality and quantity. To sustain agricultural growth, strategic measures should be adopted to reduce water consumption while minimizing adverse effect on yield. The effect of deficit irrigation on wheat yield was studied in three consecutive years (2002-03 to 2004-05) in field and pot. Ten irrigation treatments were imposed in a randomized complete block (RCB) design covering full deficit, no deficit at all, single deficit at different stages, and alternate deficits. Water deficit was created by withholding irrigation at different growth stages. The results indicate that deficit irrigation strategies affected all aspects of plant growth (leaf area index, chlorophyll content, root growth, nutrient uptake, plant height) adversely. Yield attributes were affected by deficit irrigation treatments although they are not statistically significant in all cases. Differences in grain and straw yield among the partial- and no-deficit treatments were small, and statistically insignificant in most cases. When compared within single-deficit treatments, the grain yield reduction was in the order to water deficit at phases: CRI> maximum tillering > booting - heading >flowering- soft dough. The crop coefficient (kc) under different ET0 methods for early, crop development, middle, and late period ranged from 0.54 to 0.96, 0.95 to 1.36, 1.2 to 1.62, and 0.68 to 1.05, respectively. On average, yield response factor (ky) for early, maximum tillering, booting-heading, and flowering-soft dough stages was 0.27, 0.21, 0.25, and 0.17, respectively. The sensitivity index (?i, of Jensen model) for early, vegetative, booting-heading, and flowering-soft dough phases was 0.35, 0.22, 0.31, and 0.14, respectively. From the evaluation of yield, irrigation amount, irrigation water productivity, relative water savings, relative yield reduction, and maximum profit under limited water resource condition, it can be concluded that when limited quantities of water is available, preference should be given to irrigate first at CRI (if one irrigation is available), then at CRI and booting-heading (if two irrigations are available), and next at CRI, maximum tillering and booting-heading (if three irrigations are available) stages of growth.

For the nearly three decades of coexistence between economic liberalization and political authoritarianism, China remains as an anomaly to the liberal mantra of our time. This book explores a segment of the China Paradox, the state-society interaction channeled by the Residents Committee. Being the largest urban neighborhood organization, the committee deserves study because of its controversial status between ordinary residents it claims to represent and the authoritarian state. The committee enters the discourse as a directly congruent example of the same paradox that the whole China displays, when it is endowed with important, yet tension-changed statutory functions ranging from social control to service provision and neighborhood self-governance. How, and under what conditions, does the committee carry out its functions? What can be learned about changing state-society relations from the dynamics of neighborhood politics in China? This book draws its analytical framework on the theoretical models of state penetration, civil disobedience, corporatism, and synergy, as well as on the practices of American, Cuban, and Japanese neighborhood organizations and the Chinese Rural Villagers Committee. Four distinctive Residents Committees in Tianjin City are studied in detail, and their functions are identified and explained primarily through their structural connections with the lowest state organ in cities, the street office, and residents (including other neighborhood organizations and activists). The book reveals multiple possibilities of Chinese social/political transformation. Among them emerges a promising trend of state-society cooperation, which is realigning and accommodating political authoritarianism and economic openness into a seemingly sustainable pattern of development at the urban grassroots. Referred to as an "amphibian" organization spanning public-private division, the committee highlights the limits of the state-society antithesis in the study of political transformation. The observed patterns of neighborhood politics also raise caution against the universal applicability of the liberal norm of civil society to countries like China with distinctive conditions from which the original norm is present and constructed.

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.

Institutions develop geographic strategies in order to diffuse their ideas and organizations. These strategies may be either or both explicit and implicit and involve the generation of organizational structures, the examination of problems and possibilities and the deployment of resources. American Protestant religious institutions expand territorially and numerically by establishing new congregations. Founding methods, operational relationships between judicatories and existing congregations, and deployment processes of six denominations (Dutch Reformed, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist and Methodist) in upstate New York before 1810 are explored, with special emphasis on the Methodist Episcopal Church which showed the most successful expansion during that period. A series of maps and charts have been assembled to indicate the diffusion patterns of these six religious institutions. The various time periods examined, 1788 and before, 1789-1793, 1794-1798, 1799-1803, 1804-1810, correspond with significant growth and realignments of Methodist districts. The results of this study show that geographic strategies have directly affected the success and failure of denominational expansion.

The thesis aims to examine and explore NPD activities within China and establish whether a Western interpretation of NPD is appropriate to indigenous Chinese companies, engaged in an economy which is entering an era of globalisation.The research is based on ten case studies undertaken within five industrial sectors: lighting (light fabrication), watches (personal consumer products), white goods, automotive and telecommunications. Cases are representative of the differing types of Chinese organisations, and include examples of privately, collectively and state owned enterprises (POEs, COEs and SOEs), together with international joint ventures (IJVs). Conceptual approaches are developed to examine organisational background, NPD culture, technology transfer, NPD coordination, entrepreneurial behaviour, network development and market dynamics within each case study. The units of analysis in the framework reflect three main themes of intra, extra-organisational and strategic issues which are revisited throughout the thesis.The case studies are analysed using a mapping process in which each of the cases is described in terms of its engagement with NPD roles and performance and their correlation with economic development, compared with Western practice. Contingent on this, the thesis identifies a series of assumptions within Western literature, which are evaluated by assessing the case study findings, to establish the transferability of NPD conceptions. In addition, correlations between differing NPD related issues are identified using repertory grid theory detailed in a separate appendix and complementary to the case study analysis.The thesis concludes by proposing models of strategic NPD specific to Chinese organisations, at both intra-organisational, and micro and macro-economic levels; these provide an overview of distinctive NPD performance in indigenous companies, contextualised within the Chinese economy. The implication is that the future development of the Chinese economy will necessitate greater engagement with NPD, albeit in a differing form.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo five times over five years while Prime Minister. As a result, Japan's relations with China and Korea have declined to their worst state since the end of World War Two. However, Prime Minister Koizumi has accused the two of meddling in Japan's internal affairs - he does not see this as an international issue. For China, Korea, and others the fact that the shrine also includes 14 Class A War Criminals makes the Prime Minister's visits to the Shrine, official or not, an issue of international concern. Why is there such a rift not only between Japan and its neighbors but also between the way Koizumi sees his visits and the way in which China, Korea, and other countries perceive these visits? What do the visits mean? This thesis has three arguments. First, this thesis argues that the Yasukuni Shrine is caught in a paradox of its legacy - a religious shrine and a state memorial to the war dead left untouched from before the war, in a country that since the end of World War Two has had a separation of Church and State. Second, this thesis argues that the domestic politics vis-à-vis Yasukuni are defined by this paradox, with an ill-fitting policy of separation of church and state without resolution of the need to recognize the war dead. Third, this thesis argues that by visiting the Shrine, along with various policies of the Government of Japan that have endorsed and supported the shrine since Japan signed the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, Koizumi demonstrates to Japan's neighbors that it is hollowing out Japan's post war reconciliation. While Japan has officially apologized for its actions in World War Two, for Japan's neighbors, visiting the shrine is a visible sign that Japan does not wish to act very sorry.