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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo
Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo
Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I advance a political ethnography of critical infrastructure to better understand terminal capitalism, in which the waste products of commodification and resource depletion are destroying the ecological systems that support life. My object of study is the massive disjuncture between individual knowledge and intention, and these catastrophic collective planetary outcomes. Theoretically, I develop critical infrastructure theory to diagnose these destructive structures. By “infrastructure,” I mean systems of material and discursive flows fundamental to sedentary human organization, connecting local actions with global systems. Such infrastructure is “critical” in three senses: A) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure …
Organizational Variation In Federal Agencies’ Gender Pay Gaps, Karen M. Brummond
Organizational Variation In Federal Agencies’ Gender Pay Gaps, Karen M. Brummond
Doctoral Dissertations
Although previous research has identified differences in the gender pay gap by employment sector, existing research on the causes of employer variation in the gender pay gap, particularly in the U.S. Federal Government, is limited (Smith-Doerr et al. 2019; U.S. Government Accountability Office 2020). This dissertation fills that gap by exploring organizational characteristics contributing to varying inequality regimes (Acker 2006) and subsequent pay equity variation. Using a linked employer-employee administrative dataset covering over 2 million federal employees, I measured governmentwide and agency-level gender pay gaps and explored organizational characteristics that explain agency-level differences. I found a governmentwide gross gender pay …
Superstar Firms And The State: Amazon In The U.S. And France During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Priscilla Hernandez
Superstar Firms And The State: Amazon In The U.S. And France During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Priscilla Hernandez
Masters Theses
This article explores the relationships between superstar firms, states, and labor during a period of sharp challenge to normal functioning of capitalist societies. My working definition of superstar firms includes firms that have amassed a formidable economic power in their home markets, but also hold a large amount of social, economic, and political influence in societies more generally. They are powerful enough to maneuver within the global capitalist field to side-step challenges from the state and labor as well as market competitors. This paper is focused on superstar firm Amazon in the United States and France during the height of …
By The Numbers: How Academic Capitalism Shapes Graduate Student Experiences Of Work And Training In Material Sciences, Timothy Sacco
By The Numbers: How Academic Capitalism Shapes Graduate Student Experiences Of Work And Training In Material Sciences, Timothy Sacco
Doctoral Dissertations
The neoliberal reorganization of higher education has reshaped the research and education missions of university science. Much of the scholarship examining this shift focuses on faculty experiences. This dissertation centers the experiences of student scientists to explore: (1) how entrepreneurial universities manage marginal academic knowledge workers, including students, through processes that shift responsibility onto individual workers; (2) how universities use mechanisms like internships and Individual Development Plans to shift educational responsibilities onto students; and (3) how performances of masculinity in commercial spaces of university science contribute to durable gender inequalities among students under academic capitalism. Longitudinal qualitative methods were employed …