title: Being Jacques Villeneuve: Formula One, 'Agency' and the Fan

authors: Sturm, Damion

subjects: Fandom

abstract: In this thesis, I analyse my fandom for the Formula One driver, Jacques Villeneuve.  Despite its rampant commercialism, innovative mediation, prestige and popular status within global sport, Formula One is surprisingly an under-researched topic in academia.  Moreover, 'intense' fandom has often been stigmatised; at worst associating such individuals with pathological and obsessive behaviours or refuting their affections as merely symptomatic of the socio-economic forces that transform fans into duped consumers.  This thesis argues against such simplistic disqualifications and reconceptualises fandom in light of how the structure/agency binary has itself been reconceptualised within media and cultural studies.  Rather than privileging either the determining social, mediated and commercial structures, or championing the 'active agential' capacities of social individuals, Grossberg's notions of 'affect' and 'structured mobility' are drawn upon to underpin a more flexible explanation of contemporary fandom.  In particular, affect offers theoretical purchase for how fans form attachments with selective media objects and why these come to 'matter' for specific individuals.  Furthermore, by marrying affect with 'structured mobility', affective investments are recognised for their capacity to 'anchor' individuals in specific and concrete spatial/temporal 'moments' of social reality as they navigate both the mediated apparatus of the sport and the structured social, cultural and economic terrain that shapes their mediated fandom.  Such insights are developed through a 'funnelling' approach in this thesis which moves from an examination of collective Formula One fandom to my own, exploring the affective traces of a friction that Villeneuve's maverick status provided within the broader machinery of the sport and to which this fan has responded.

text: Being Jacques Villeneuve: Formula One, 'Agency' and the Fan In this thesis, I analyse my fandom for the Formula One driver, Jacques Villeneuve.  Despite its rampant commercialism, innovative mediation, prestige and popular status within global sport, Formula One is surprisingly an under-researched topic in academia.  Moreover, 'intense' fandom has often been stigmatised; at worst associating such individuals with pathological and obsessive behaviours or refuting their affections as merely symptomatic of the socio-economic forces that transform fans into duped consumers.  This thesis argues against such simplistic disqualifications and reconceptualises fandom in light of how the structure/agency binary has itself been reconceptualised within media and cultural studies.  Rather than privileging either the determining social, mediated and commercial structures, or championing the 'active agential' capacities of social individuals, Grossberg's notions of 'affect' and 'structured mobility' are drawn upon to underpin a more flexible explanation of contemporary fandom.  In particular, affect offers theoretical purchase for how fans form attachments with selective media objects and why these come to 'matter' for specific individuals.  Furthermore, by marrying affect with 'structured mobility', affective investments are recognised for their capacity to 'anchor' individuals in specific and concrete spatial/temporal 'moments' of social reality as they navigate both the mediated apparatus of the sport and the structured social, cultural and economic terrain that shapes their mediated fandom.  Such insights are developed through a 'funnelling' approach in this thesis which moves from an examination of collective Formula One fandom to my own, exploring the affective traces of a friction that Villeneuve's maverick status provided within the broader machinery of the sport and to which this fan has responded.

year: 2009

title: The impact of reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes, information asymmetry and organisational commitment on managerial performance

authors: Chong, Vincent

subjects: reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes

abstract: This study examines the effects of information asymmetry and organisational commitment on the relation between the extent of reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes and managerial performance. The responses of 109 managers, drawn from a cross-section of Australian manufacturing companies, to a questionnaire survey, were analysed by using a multiple regression technique. The results provide evidence of higher managerial performance for managers with low organisational commitment and a high reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes in high information asymmetry situations. On the other hand, the results show that the performance level of managers with high organisational commitment is unaffected regardless of the degree of information asymmetry and the extent of reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes.

text: The impact of reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes, information asymmetry and organisational commitment on managerial performance This study examines the effects of information asymmetry and organisational commitment on the relation between the extent of reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes and managerial performance. The responses of 109 managers, drawn from a cross-section of Australian manufacturing companies, to a questionnaire survey, were analysed by using a multiple regression technique. The results provide evidence of higher managerial performance for managers with low organisational commitment and a high reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes in high information asymmetry situations. On the other hand, the results show that the performance level of managers with high organisational commitment is unaffected regardless of the degree of information asymmetry and the extent of reliance on incentive-based compensation schemes.

year: 2007

title: Introduction: Recognition, redistribution and reconciliation in postcolonial settler societies

authors: van Meijl, Toon

subjects: multiculturalism

abstract: Various questions are addressed regarding recognition of special rights for indigenous minorities in postcolonial nation-states, redistributing resources to redress longstanding indigenous grievances about the history of colonial dispossession and strategy of reconciliation between the immigrant majority of settlers and their descendants against a backdrop of multiculturalism.

text: Introduction: Recognition, redistribution and reconciliation in postcolonial settler societies Various questions are addressed regarding recognition of special rights for indigenous minorities in postcolonial nation-states, redistributing resources to redress longstanding indigenous grievances about the history of colonial dispossession and strategy of reconciliation between the immigrant majority of settlers and their descendants against a backdrop of multiculturalism.

year: 2003-09-01