Sociology Commons^™

The Punitive Laboratory Of Neoliberalism: A Cross-National Examination, Beth A. Fera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A large body of research has been produced to explain global punitive trends in recent decades. Neoliberalism, an economic philosophy expressed by market deregulation, privatization, and the retrenchment of social supports, has been offered as an explanation for increases in cross-national punitiveness. According to neoliberal penality theory, neoliberalism has shifted principles guiding punishment practices and the treatment of offenders, which has resulted in harsher national responses to crime. However, many tenets of this theory have not yet been tested empirically. Drawing heavily on propositions from neoliberal penality, group-threat, and penal populism literature, this dissertation examines the relationship between economic shifts, …

(Re)Constructing National Memory In Neoliberal Chile Through Patricio Guzman's The Cordillera Of Dreams (2019), Mica Barrett

Scripps Senior Theses

One of the most renowned Chilean exile filmmakers is Patricio Guzmán. Best known for his documentary work regarding the Allende years, Guzmán has continued to make films regarding his homeland in the decades following his initial exile.

The Cordillera of Dreams is the concluding film in a trilogy exploring the natural lands of Chile and their relationship to physical remnants of the human past. The initial and most renowned film in the series, Nostalgia for the Light, centers the Atacama Desert and Chileans’ relationship to the geography as a gateway to revealing artifacts of Chile’s recent history of genocide …

Contextualizing The 2019 “Chile Despertó” Movement: The Impact Of Historical Relational Processes On Mobilization And Repression, Tanya Leon

International Studies (MA) Theses

To expand our theoretical and empirical understanding of mobilization and repression in Latin America, this thesis asks three critical questions. Are economic indicators sufficient predictors of social movement emergence in Latin America? What other factors contribute to large-scale mobilization in Latin America? How do government’s respond to large-scale Latin American social movements? Specifically, when, and why do democratic governments choose to employ repression against social movements? Accordingly, I construct a quantitative model to test the correlation between rise in protest and worsened economic conditions. I apply it to a comprehensive dataset of political events in multiple South American countries throughout …

The Bursting Of The Non-Profit Bubble: Why Non-Profit Kids Simply Won’T Catch A Break, Jederick Estrella

Senior Theses and Projects

Studying conceptions of success within nonprofit and boarding school students and how they envision their future. Through an understanding of students' individual conceptions of success, one can start to analyze how reliant students were on elite educational institutions and nonprofit scholar programs to make them worthy of sponsored mobility through their track record of success.

The Elusive Rainbow Nation: Assessing Post-Apartheid Reconstruction Strategies In Johannesburg, South Africa, Ashley May Eugley

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This paper examines how South Africa’s political and economic orientation following the nation’s democratization in 1994 enabled a continuation of Apartheid-era patterns in the City of Johannesburg. In particular, it contends that governmental decentralization, neoliberalism, and global city aspirations—enshrined in both local and national policy documents—turned attention away from addressing internal deprivations. Rather than redistributing social and economic power, uplifting the Black-majority, and allowing urban stakeholders to play a central role in policy formation and decision-making, Johannesburg’s City Government catered to elite outside interests, effectively introducing new forms of segmentation and disenfranchisement. Although the African National Congress committed to transform …

Meritocracy And Marketization Of Education: Taiwanese Middle-Class Strategies In A Private Secondary School, Amanda Shufang Yang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the 20th century, economic growth in Taiwan has brought social prosperity and fundamentally altered Taiwanese social structure. While successive generations of young people have climbed the social ladder and experienced upward mobility, being successful is still narrowly defined through academic achievement. This study argues that, despite constant education reform, a solution to class inequality in education has yet to be found. The mandate of the 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum in 2019 was an answer to local, global, and international transformations. While citizens celebrate the neoliberal concepts of autonomy and deregulation embedded in the 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum, coercion is …

Employee Ownership And Moral Hazard: How Broad-Based Equity Sharing Can Lower Agency Costs And Reduce Inequality, Colin Clinton Hudson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Providing incentives to top managers by offering equity has become the norm; this practice, however, does not hold for all levels of employees. After tax incentives for employee ownership were introduced through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, there has been little legislative support to encourage companies to implement broad-based equity sharing programs. Moreover, decades of neoliberal policies have incentivized the pursuit of short-term profits and speculation, which contribute to economic instability and explain the growing gap between productivity and real wages observed since the late 1970s. Developments in the literature contend that employee ownership aligns the goals …

From The Black Panther Party To Black Lives Matter: Lessons From The Arab Spring And The Prospects For Social And Political Change In The Post-Ideological World, Raphael Lewis

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms From Influencers To Multi-Level Marketing Schemes, Frankie Mastrangelo

Theses and Dissertations

I define girlboss feminism as emergent, mediated formations of neoliberal feminism that equate feminist empowerment with financial success, market competition, individualized work-life balance, and curated digital and physical presences driven by self-monetization. I look toward how the mediation of girlboss feminism utilizes branded and affective engagements with representational politics, discourses of authenticity and rebellion, as well as meritocratic aspiration to promote cultural interest in conceptualizing feminism in ways that are divorced from collective, intersectional struggle. I question the stakes involved in reducing feminist interrogations and commitments to discourses of representation, visibility, and meritocracy. I argue that while girlboss feminism may …

Thrown Together: Credit Union And Commercial Bank Regulation And Competition In The Consumer Finance Industry, 1960-2015, Grace Cale

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

This project seeks to assess whether there are meaningful differences between the stability of the Credit Union and Consumer Banking industries before the 1980s, and how both industries’ stability had been affected by subsequent political-economic changes. I also sought to assess if deregulation would make credit union behave at risk levels similar to banks. I initially observed that there was a strong inverse correlation between credit union size and failures, which I argue could be explained by regulatory change. This claim was strengthened by the observation that credit unions had benefitted from certain key forms of deregulation, they were still …

Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …

Local Immigration Enforcement Entrepreneurship In The Punishment Marketplace, Daniel L. Stageman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The contemporary neoliberal economic order plays a significant role in American social organization and policy-making. Most importantly, neoliberal ideology drives the creation and imposition of markets in public goods and services and the valorization of free market ideology in cultural life. The neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is in turn delimited and upheld by an authoritarian system of punishment built around mass incarceration, surveillance, and an unprecedented level of social control directed at the lowest strata of American society – a group that includes both the urban underclass, and unauthorized immigrants.

This study lays out the theory of the punishment marketplace …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

The Value Of Postsecondary Education: Human Capital Theory In Ontario's Postsecondary Education Discourse 1962 - 2005, Adam M. Jog

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Contemporary understandings of postsecondary education systems are informed by a globalization discourse that incorporates human capital theory to explain the economic importance of postsecondary education institutions in the global economy. In this study, the influences of human capital theory and of liberal education in Ontario’s postsecondary education discourse are examined through a content analysis of government-commissioned reviews of Ontario’s postsecondary education system from 1962 to 2005. In particular, I hypothesize that instances of human capital theory would increase over that time period while instances of liberal education would decrease. The results of the content analysis clearly demonstrate that instances of …

The Money Of Qaroon And The Patience Of Ayoub: Women And Land In Egypt's Mubarak Resettlement Scheme, Dina Najjar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation addresses the challenge of achieving increased empowerment and equality for Egyptian women. The dissertation tests the assumption that land access (through both joint and full titles) increases empowerment and equality for women in two desert resettlements of Sa’yda and Intilaq, part of the massive Mubarak Resettlement Scheme (MRS). In particular, the dissertation identifies: 1) how land access could empower Egyptian women and 2) women’s experiences with land access in the MRS. Findings reveal that land access is indeed the most promising route for women’s advancement in life, but the desert land required patience and financial assets. Land access, …

Untangling Neoliberalism’S Gordian Knot: Cancer Prevention And Control Services For Rural Appalachian Populations, George F. Bills

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

In eastern Kentucky, as in much of central Appalachia, current local storylines narrate the frictions and contradictions involved in the structural transition from a post-WWII Fordist industrial economy and a Keynesian welfare state to a Post-Fordist service economy and Neoliberal hollow state, starving for energy to sustain consumer indulgence (Jessop, 1993; Harvey, 2003; 2005). Neoliberalism is the ideological force redefining the “societal infrastructure of language” that legitimates this transition, in part by redefining the key terms of democracy and citizenship, as well as valorizing the market, the individual, and technocratic innovation (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Harvey, 2005). This project develops …

The Flow Of Water, Power, And Ideas: Water Commodification In Cape Town, South Africa And The Stratified Experiences Of Time And Space Compression, Jenna Washburn

Master's Theses

I use the neoliberalization of the water sector in Cape Town, South Africa in order to test my theory of unequal development. I assert that the neoliberal economic practices of water commodification, business-friendly tariff policies, and prepaid management devices keep people along the periphery from accessing water, power, and ideas – thus causing a stratification of time and space compression between the core and the periphery.

By painting a theoretical picture of world cities, I wish to complicate the dominant views of time/space compression and suggest that, much like development and arguably because of it, time and space compression actually …