Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Now Shall We Consume: Widening Conception Of Political Consumption And Analysis Of The American Buyer, John Patton Chew

Masters Theses

As consumption of goods has risen, it has increasingly become a space for political activists to brand products and for the everyday consumer to voice their opinion on how businesses should be run. Through the practices of buycotting and boycotting political consumers have increasingly been able to show their support for issues as diverse as gay rights, environmental issues, funding for disease cures, and American based products.

This study attempts to gain an understanding of how prevalent political consumption is and of who are political consumers. The findings show that a large percentage of the population is knowledgeable and active …

The Politics Of Protection And Promotion: The Case Of The Coal Industry In Environmental Politics, Elizabeth Ashley East

Masters Theses

Business actors have historically been an important point of discussion for environmental sociologists. However, theoretical assumptions of business as an environmental actor provide divergent understandings of business’s role in environmental problems, politics, and improvements. Also, empirical studies of business actors primarily examine how individual firms or industry-funded organizations participate in specific environmental controversies or in the attempted implementation of specific environmental policies. Although these approaches have been instrumental in understanding the roles power, privilege, and resources play in environmental politics, they present an understanding of business engagement in environmental issues as reactionary rather than sustained. Such a characterization neglects the …

Understanding Biotechnology: Conceptualizing And Measuring Us Public Concern, Jenna Ann Lamphere

Masters Theses

Biotechnology has had a short but rather conflict-ridden history. The technology was commercialized in 1995 and since has become a volatile topic for international debate. Arguably, the United States is the biggest supporter of this technology. The United States conducted the first study using recombinant DNA, grows more biotech crops than any other country, and houses the vast majority of the largest biotech corporations. Proponents frequently claim that biotech crops are a way to improve crop production, lower food prices, decrease the need for petrochemical inputs, and alleviate international food security problems. Others see them as accelerating the loss of …

Perform + Function: A Proposal For A Healthy Public Housing Community, Brandon M. Harvey

Masters Theses

PERFORM+FUNCTION: Proposal for A Healthy Public Housing Community

Architecture exists in Place, the integrated context of both the built and natural environments, including socio-economic, cultural, and political climates that influence our growth, development, and survival. As architecture necessitates around human purposes, it is important that architecture is built for and sited in an environment compatible for human well-being. My thesis focuses on human habitation and its immediate relationship with human health, assessing the performance and functionality of Place that have an impact on human health. Using public housing as the vehicle of my investigation, I will seek the appropriate application …

Short-Term Missions: Reinforcing Beliefs And Legitimating Poverty, William Vaughan Taylor

Masters Theses

Every year more than a million short-term missionaries travel abroad. Many encounter intense poverty. Popular discourse suggests short-term missionaries return home radically changed. Social movement theory shows collective experiences can transform participants. In this thesis I explore the narratives of short-term missionaries to understand how they understand the poverty they encounter abroad. I have found short-term mission participants think about encounters with the poor in ways that produce contradictory beliefs and legitimate poverty. Interviewees consistently employed deficiency and fatalistic theories of poverty that provide little moral or practical justification for helping the poor. However, these beliefs conflicted with religious convictions. …

The Global Debt Minotaur: An Analysis Of The Greek Financial Crisis, Steven Alfonso Panageotou

Masters Theses

Since November 2009, Greece has been mired in financial crisis with little indication that it will be solved in the near future. Research and media accounts have faulted Greece for sowing the seeds of its own financial crisis through fiscal mismanagement extending back to the 1980’s. Successive Greek governments have been criticized for racking up an unsustainable amount of foreign debt. Due to the prevalence of such accounts, European officials and Greek politicians have adopted a nationally oriented strategy to resolve the current crisis. This strategy means that the brunt of the reform effort falls on Greece to neoliberalize its …

New Means, Old Ends? World Bank Governmentality In Thailand And Lao People's Democratic Republic, Nicholas Ryan Zeller

Masters Theses

The purpose of this research is to make explicit the arts of government, defined as a field of power in the Foucauldian sense, employed by the World Bank in the cases of Pak Mun Dam in Thailand and Nam Theun II Dam in Lao PDR. Much of the literature on the latter case, both from the World Bank and its critics, focuses on the incorporation of conservation practices and the creation of state apparatuses which account for natural resources and local populations through a discourse of environmentalism. Using World Bank planning and evaluation documents, I argue that although these practices …

Income Inequality And Social Stratification: The Effect Of Market Versus State In Transitional Urban China, Qiong Wu

Masters Theses

The rise of inequality in China is one of the most serious social problems in the reform era in China. Previous studies have debated the relative importance of human capital, political capital, and other factors in determining personal income. By using a new dataset from 2006 China General Social Survey (CGSS2006), I replicate earlier tests to measure whether the market or state has more impact on incomes as a way to the competing hypotheses related to human versus political capital.

The results of the ordinary least squares regression analysis show no significance in party membership, state ownership, and work experience, …

A Cross-National, Longitudinal Test Of Institutional Anomie Theory, Marc Alan Kittleson

Masters Theses

Institutional anomie theory, developed by Messner and Rosenfeld (1994), explains variations in crime rates across geographic areas and time as resulting from the interrelationship between social institutions and culture. Their theory predicts that when the institution of the economy dominates all other social institutions, and when norms and values focus heavily on monetary success, crime rates will be higher than when there is less dominance of the economy. Institutional anomie theory has been tested using a number of different methods and data from county-level to international-level aggregates. This study addresses the research question of whether variations in crime victimization can …

Rape Myth Acceptance And Rape Attitudes In Campus Hook-Up Culture, Karolina Staros

Masters Theses

This study examines the norms of hooking-up and compares these norms to rape culture in order to measure rape myth acceptance or supportive attitudes towards rape as they manifest in hook-up culture on campus. By consulting what is already published in scholarship about rape culture and rape myths, this study builds on the very limited literature on hook-up culture.

This study uses mixed methods to inquire about norms of hook-up culture and measures the rape myth acceptance and rape attitudes by gender of respondents in a Midwest campus environment. By addressing the issues that students face with gender inequality and …