Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons^™

Harnessing The Power Of Cliftonstrengths®: How Multinational Corporations Can Use Deep-Level Diversity To Enhance Organizational Inclusion, Trapper Kay Pace

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research explicitly investigated how multinational corporations can enhance workplace inclusion through the novel use of the CliftonStrengths® assessment as a dimension of deep-level diversity. The study gleaned insights from employees’ perspectives, employing a constructivist grounded theory approach to explicate their experiences in rich qualitative narratives. Through open-ended surveys and intensive interviews, participants were selected using purposeful sampling to ensure meaningful data collection from the study organizations’ three global regions. The researcher conducted the analysis systematically through the constant comparison of data utilizing the NVivo14 software to assist in constructing codes, themes, and a theoretical schema. Results highlighted the significance …

Identifying Youth Appeals In Alcohol Alternative Social Media Content Through Framing, Melina Oneal

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Proposed regulations for alcohol advertising prevent beverage companies from targeting people under the legal drinking age. However, similar regulations for alcohol alternative beverages are less explored, which could allow alcohol alternative products to create awareness for alcoholic beverages among youth. Alcohol alternatives beverages, including no-alcohol and low-alcohol products, are increasing in popularity and can function as compliments to alcoholic products to decrease the total alcohol volume consumed or as substitutes for alcoholic products. Framing theory can be operationalized through the Content Appealing to Youth Index, an index of content elements found in research literature to be appealing to youth, to …

Ghost Hotel, George Acosta

Masters Theses

The home, once a private space, now serves as a site of representation and consumerist consumption in the digital age. The thesis investigates the current public sphere surrounding home sharing - a development in the commodification of the home.

The thesis explores a housing typology in New York City - where impermanence and tourism have contributed to hyper-generic conditions of commodified spaces dictated and influenced by media, trends, and ideals. The project narrative presents the uncanny and generic qualities of the home through the rendered image. The satirical images reveal the difference between the illusion and reality of housing imagery …

Dei Without Equity: Lab Coat Culture And Persistent Racism In Bioengineering Laboratories, Janet Canady

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From biased algorithms to discriminatory devices to medical racism, it is clear that biomedical products are created in ways that reproduce racial disparities in access and use. Yet the most common solutions recommended by biomedical research institutions emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that research has already proven ineffective and sometimes harmful. In fact, labs rarely scrutinize whether and how their research products reflect racial bias, assumptions, or ideals. In this paper, I shift the focus to consider how bioengineering laboratories function as a site in which racial processes contribute to product outcomes. I ask, what are the racial dynamics …

The Great Resignation: A Content Analysis Of News Sources' Portrayals Of The Covid-19 Labor Shortage., Mackenzie Williams

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

When workers left the labor market in large numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, proclamations of a labor shortage emerged extensively throughout the news. In this study, I analyze the coverage of the worker shortage among three news sources with different political orientations. Several themes emerged from analyzing a total of 75 articles. The findings showed that the perspective shown in the article, the cause of the labor shortage, restaurant worker portrayal, support of solutions, and opinion of the labor shortage all differed based on the political identity of the news source. This research supports previous findings that show there is …

Healing Racial Injustice With Mindfulness Research, Training, & Practice, Danielle "Danae" Laura

Mindfulness Studies Theses

This thesis offers a collection of authors and studies in support of improved research, training, and practice connecting mindfulness with racial justice through intergroup applications. The paper identifies barriers at work (e.g., colorblindness, spiritual bypass, white fragility, and implicit bias) in contemplative science, Western Buddhist communities, and secular mindfulness centers, which block the sizeable contributions possible in studying the intergroup application of mindfulness practice—specifically Lovingkindness Meditation, among others—when used as an intervention with anti-racist aims. Through secondary qualitative research, I reviewed six key works from Black authors on mindfulness and race, as well as six sample studies on the prosocial …

The General Artificial Intellect, Ramon S. Diab

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In passages of Marx’s Grundrisse known as the Fragment on Machines, Marx suggested that advanced capitalist development leads to the production of autonomous machines that replace labour-power in the direct production process. Autonomist Marxist interpretations of this text have emphasized that the proliferation of immaterial labour is the historical condition that is leading to a crisis in the measure of value based on labour-time and that will lead to a future communist mode of production. Further, Mario Tronti posited that as capitalist development unfolds, it subsumes both the state and society, a concept known as the ‘social factory thesis’. …

University Hackathons: Managerialism, Gamification, And The Foreclosure Of Creativity, Anthony L. Clary

Theses and Dissertations

This research presents a generative critique of hackathon events held in the contemporary research university. Through the analysis of cultural imaginaries and embedded techno-political forms, it works toward an assessment of whether these events support, foreclose, or redirect ideas of the future that might otherwise challenge technocratic, accumulatory, and/or hierarchal organization. Informed by institutional histories and firsthand field research at events, dynamics of entrepreneurialism, gamification, and techno-solutionism are extrapolated and problematized. Ultimately, this research draws on a historical materialist approach to understanding how and why hackathon events have flourished in the university setting. Corroborating recent theories of platform capitalism, vectoralism, …

Intercultural Coworker Relationships (Icors) In The Global Workplace: A Grounded Theory Study, Jennifer L. Morton

Dissertations

Previous research supports what employees intuitively sense: peers make the place (Chiaburu & Harrison, 2008; Schneider, 1987). Extant research suggests coworker relationships have critical influence on outcomes ranging from turnover (Felps, Mitchell, Hekman, Lee, Holtom, & Harman, 2009) to creativity (Homan, Buengeler, Eckhoff, van Ginkel, & Voelpel, 2015) to organizational commitment (Viswesvaran & Ones, 2002) to employee health and well-being (Heaphy & Dutton, 2008). Despite the increase of Intercultural COworker Relationships (ICORs), particularly in multinational firms in the technology industry, research has yet to examine what defines coworker relationship quality in the presence of national cultural differences. In other words, …

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

Automation, Work, And Ideology: The Next Industrial Revolution And The Transformation Of "Labor", Anthony Jack Knowles Ii

Masters Theses

Over the last several decades, scholars and commentators from a variety of different fields, expertise, and ideological positions have written on automation technologies and their potential to cause technological unemployment. As a sociological analysis and critical examination of how experts ideologically frame these issues, this thesis demonstrates that ideology plays a crucial role in the revived debate over automation and technological displacement. Weberian ideal types are developed to demonstrate how three major ideological positions—liberal, conservative, and radical—approach and frame the link between automation, technological displacement, and the potential for technological unemployment. The qualitative tools of ideal type construction and theme …

Grassroots Diplomacy And Vernacular Law: The Discourse Of Food Sovereignty In Maine, John Welton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine, a coalition of small-scale farmers, consumers, and citizens building an alternative food system based on a distributed form of production, processing, selling, purchasing, and consumption. This distribution occurs at the municipal level through the enactment of ordinances. Using critical-rhetorical field methods, I argue that the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine develops a ‘constitutive’ rhetoric that composes rural society through affective relationships. Advocates engage the industrial food system to both expose its systemic bias against small-scale farming and construct their own discourse of belonging. Based upon agrarian values such as …

Global Movements In The Capitalist World System: Occupy Wall Street And The World Social Forum, Loren M. Collins

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Over the past forty years, the information revolution, a neoliberal agenda and globalizing financial markets have led to a quantitative increase in accumulation, widening inequalities throughout the globe. This widening inequality has cast doubt on the legitimacy of a world system governed primarily by the invisible hand of the free market. Economic power has taken priority over political power in determining the nature of social relations and our institutions. This imbalance has opened the door for resistance movements to challenge a system that fails to represent the interests of the vast majority of the world’s population while it benefits a …

Towards Evidence-Informed Agriculture Policy Making: Investigating The Knowledge Translation Practices Of Researchers In The National Agriculture Research Institutes In Nigeria, Isioma N. Elueze

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study investigated the knowledge translation practices of researchers in the National Agriculture Research Institutes of Nigeria and the utilization of research knowledge by policy actors in the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in Nigeria. Data for the study was obtained from agriculture researchers and the policy actors through questionnaires and interviews. In addition, bibliometric and content analysis were carried out on documents from the research institutes and the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to gauge the transfer and use of knowledge by the researchers and policy actors respectively. Out of about six hundred questionnaires that …

Sanctioned Silencing, Symbolic Resistance: Race, Space, And Dispossession In A Marginalized South African Community, Killian Richard Miller

Senior Projects Spring 2016

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

My field work and the written portion of my ethnography work through issues of marginality, state apparatuses, illusions of freedom, and making meaning in a context of oppression. All these power dynamics are historically-situated within the cultural context and community of Hangberg, a place forged by the race-based forced removals of Apartheid. British and Dutch colonization, Apartheid's racial regime, and the post-Apartheid oligarchical state, are all historical and contemporary authoritative forces that are impacting the everyday lives of people in Hangberg. Perspectives of power also serve as examples …

Temporary Work On The Bakken Shale, Peter D. Ore

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this thesis, I explore what accounts for worker consent to precarious employment in the context of rapid industrial change in the rural United States. In recent years, domestic oil development has transformed the landscape of western North Dakota and Eastern Montana into a zone of oil production now known as “the Bakken.” The acute demand for labor brought about by this development resulted in vastly inflated wages, which in turn drew workers from around the U.S. and the world. State and private labor market intermediaries, including temporary labor agencies, formed to organize and market this labor force for employers …

Power, Subjectivity, And Life In Spain: A Continuation Of Elite Power, Matthew Mason

Master's Theses

On December 20, Spain will hold national elections to determine the new prime minister and national and local parliaments. These elections will be another crossroads in the long history of Spain. The elections come about in a political and social atmosphere of ‘change’ and ‘regeneration,’ marked by the rise of two new political parties, Podemos and Ciudanos. These parties are the new forces in the political scene in Spain. This atmosphere of change is the result of the 2008 economic crisis. The economic crisis of 2008 was not only an economic crisis in Spain, but it provoked a political and …

Environmental Gentrification And Development In A Rural Appalachian Community: Blending Critical Theory And Ethnography, Rhiannon A. Leebrick

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold: first, to explore the relevance of environmental gentrification, a concept largely applied to urban settings, as a means to understand social change in rural and small town Appalachia; and secondly, drawing upon political economy perspectives within environmental sociology and the tradition of early Frankfurt School critical theory, to contextualize the process of environmental gentrification within global capitalism. Conflicts over green economic development, including the maintenance of idyllic vistas, appear to have arisen among various groups with opposing interests and perceptions. These conflicts are complex, affected by the rise of gentrification accompanying uneven development …

Entropy And The Economy Of Violence: Anthropophagy And Sacrificial Violence In Late Modernity, Benjamin Corey Webster

Masters Theses

In this project, I explore the relationship of biosocial perspectives, specifically the study of energy and entropy, to contemporary work in criminology and social theory. After working through an elaboration of entropy, I explore its relevance to social life through an eclectic but necessary survey of a key set of scholars whose work focuses upon the sacrifice and criminalization of the poor, the intensification of exclusion and genocidal contexts, and finally, the possibility of a politics of change through indigenous knowledges. Bringing these various schools of thought together allows us to see the interdisciplinary linkages that might better reveal the …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Manufacturing Legitimacy: A Critical Theory Of Election News Coverage, Gabriel N. Elias

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To what degree does instrumental reason influence election news coverage? Using Habermas's understanding of system/life-world as a heuristic, I map the rationalization process of political communication. This illuminates the institutional logics at play in the field of politics and the field of journalism, and the way the social dynamics between them enable the framing of political life as a strategic game. This understanding is then contextualized within an analysis of the media frames that informed the Canadian federal election of 2011. I find that news coverage does tend to focus on political strategy; but this is not wholly at the …

Risk, Oil Spills, And Governance: Can Organizational Theory Help Us Understand The 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill?, Evelyn Cade

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico awakened communities to the increased risk of large-scale damage along their coastlines presented by new technology in deep water drilling. Normal accident theory and high reliability theory offer a framework through which to view the 2010 spill that features predictive criteria linked to a qualitative assessment of risk presented by technology and organizations. The 2010 spill took place in a sociotechnical system that can be described as complex and tightly coupled, and therefore prone to normal accidents. However, the entities in charge of managing this technology lacked the …

Biopolitics Of Climate Change: Carbon Commodities, Environmental Profanations, And The Lost Innocence Of Use-Value, Emanuele Leonardi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The analytical core of this study is the historical development of the relationship between nature and the capitalist mode of production. In particular, we aim at shedding light on the process through which the “grammar” of ecological crisis (and consequently of its possible solutions) turned into an exclusively economic one. In addressing this issue we discuss the successive problematisations of the environment that took place since the emergence of biopolitical governmentality (late Eighteenth century). Following Foucault's intuition, and supplementing it with aspects of Marxist analysis, we argue for a profound transformation – based on a crucial leap of abstraction – …

Technology, Alienation, And The South Korean Factory Worker, Jerre R. Brimer

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the School of Social Sciences at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Jerre R. Brimer on July 29, 1977.