Students often fail to develop a sophisticated understanding of scientific topics despite years of formal education designed to help them do so. Through studying how students learn the physical sciences, conceptual change researchers have amassed a large body of evidence that people, rather than being empty vessels who passively accept scientific…

This dissertation explores the impact of an authoritarian state on the university as represented by the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt. I examine how academics negotiate their tasks of acquiring, disseminating and producing knowledge within the confines of an authoritarian state. "The 2003 Arab…

Although social stratification usually calls to mind the hierarchical ranking of individuals, sociology often broadly considers it the ranking of any social objects. The Treiman Socio-Economic Index (SEI), for example, provides a quantitative assessment of the hierarchical ranking of occupations. This dissertation considers the hierarchical…

In this dissertation, I study the performance impact of information technology (IT) investments in the public sector. IT has been one of the key assets in public administration since the early MIS era. Even though the information systems (IS) discipline has witnessed a considerable amount of research efforts on the subject of IT business value for…