From 1926 to 1958, the Savoy Ballroom in New York's Harlem neighborhood played a critical role in the development and showcasing of African-American popular culture. During its lifetime, the Savoy Ballroom significantly affected the concurrent development of jazz music and jazz dance, and laid important groundwork for racial integration. The Savoy Ballroom served as the home base for such jazz greats as William "Chick" Webb, Lucius Venable "Lucky" Millinder, and David "Panama" Francis, and launched the careers of John Birk "Dizzy" Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. Beyond music, the Lindy Hop, a partnered jazz dance that emerged at the Savoy during the late 1920s, was one of the Ballroom's cultural exports; it gained an unprecedented degree of fame and recognition during the late 1930s, and is still practiced today by communities across the United States and the world. The objective of this dissertation is to examine the cultural, social, and musical contribution made by the Savoy Ballroom to the promotion of African-American culture. The first and second chapters of this dissertation address the historical and cultural context of Harlem and the Savoy proper. The third chapter examines some of the emerging traditions behind the Savoy Ballroom's status as the "World's Finest Ballroom." The fourth and fifth chapters address the chronological and technical development of music and jazz dance at the Savoy, with particular attention given to the lasting impact of such advancements as the incorporation of swing feel into jazz. The sixth chapter examines the cultural impact of the Ballroom on contemporary and modern media, particularly print, music, film, and photography. Finally, the seventh chapter examines the Savoy Ballroom's participation in New York's World's Fair exhibition in 1939, and its impact on the worldwide export of Harlem's African-American culture.

The United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards ("the New York Convention") has provided a unique legal framework for the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards and arbitration agreements. Having been adopted by 159 States at the time of this thesis, the New York Convention represents the most significant convention in the field. Having been in force almost 60 years, it is time to assess its meaning for international arbitration. This thesis first examines the contribution of the New York Convention to the development of arbitration to date and second explores whether it has a contemporary role to play. Focusing on both its contribution through its original objective and its effect on the development of a favourable attitude towards international arbitration by courts and legislators, the study demonstrates that the New York Convention has had an impact beyond that which its drafters intended. Regarding its contemporary relevance, the thesis argues that persistent issues in the enforcement of arbitral awards proves that the New York Convention has no active relevance for contributing to facilitate enforcement of arbitral awards.

Young people go to college not merely to equip themselves for competition in the workplace, but also to construct new identities and find a home in the world. This dissertation shows how, in the midst of wrenching social change, communities, too, use colleges in their struggle to reinvent and re-situate themselves in relation to other groups. As a case study of this symbolic process I focus on the City College of New York, the world's first tuition-free, publicly funded municipal college, erstwhile "Harvard of the Poor" and birthplace of affirmative action programs and "Open Admissions" in higher education. I examine five key moments between 1940 and 2000 when the college dominated the headlines and draw on journalistic accounts, memoirs, guidebooks, fiction, poetry, drama, songs, and interviews with former students and faculty to chart the institution's emergence as a cultural icon, a lightning rod, and the perennial focus of public controversy. In each instance a variety of actors from the Catholic Church to the New York Post mobilized popular perceptions in order to alternately shore up and erode support for City College and, in so doing, worked to reconfigure the larger New York public. The five episodes consist of the following: (1) In 1940 a state judge barred the philosopher Bertrand Russell from joining the faculty and a sweeping "investigation" followed that resulted in a purge of fifty allegedly Communist professors from the faculty. (2) Ten years later seven members of City College's national championship basketball team, all of them Jewish or black, were convicted of consorting with professional gamblers to fix games. (3) Then in 1969, in the midst of a mayoral primary, black and Puerto Rican students seeking greater access for members of the surrounding Harlem community seized control of City's South Campus and shut down the college for two tense weeks that were followed by a series of violent racial clashes. (4) Those events in turn ushered in the school's radical and hotly contested experiment with "Open Admissions" along with a decade of relentless media attacks, nostalgia for an imaginatively constructed golden age, and series of dramatic cuts to the college's budget and staff that occasioned the end of its century-old tradition of free tuition. (5) Finally, in 1991 one Afrocentric professor's outrageous remarks about Jews coupled with an accident at a student-sponsored fundraiser in the college gym that claimed nine young lives came---through the offices of the mass media---to stand for the anarchy and physical danger that seemed to be engulfing not only the institution but the city itself. Taken together these five moments, with their attendant tabloid scandals, ritual sacrifices, and manufactured crises, foreground the cultural dimension of City College's history and the construction---including the self-construction, even performance---of particular varieties of student and teacher, both past and present. Newspapers and their various publics were central to---indeed, constitutive of---the process by which different communities claimed disparate meanings for the institution and deployed those meanings toward their own, distinctive ends. The press provided the main stage upon which to enact bitter struggles and excommunication ceremonies and encouraged readers to use the college to reimagine themselves and their place in the changing city and nation.

Like many sociologists, I am perplexed by the fact that in meritocratic societies, individuals whose abilities or talent does not differ widely nevertheless enjoy considerably different levels of achievement and success. The present dissertation seeks to uncover some of the reasons behind such non-meritocratic inequality. There are two main approaches one can take to that problem. The first and more classical one consists in observing inequality that matters – inequality in earnings or career prospects for example – and to show that such inequality can be traced back to broad categorical attributes such as class, gender, or race and ethnicity. This is not the approach I follow here. Rather, I strategically select cases that make it possible to uncover the fine-grained processes and mechanisms generative of non-meritocratic inequality. Among these “pure” cases are art worlds – winner-take-all settings typically marked by high inequality, and where success is often vastly disconnected from merit or intrinsic quality. The first part of this dissertation focuses on one such art world as a laboratory for studying the social processes underlying the formation of economic value, and therefore the formation of inequality in economic success. CONSECRATION AS A SOCIAL PROCESS OF VALUATION My approach to success and inequality rests on the intuition that we can partially explain them by studying social processes of valuation, i.e. processes that shape the value of things or individuals without affecting their underlying differences in ability, merit, performance, or talent. In the first two chapters this dissertation, I outline and test a theory of one such process, namely consecration. The first chapter develops a structural definition of consecration that makes possible to study its occurrence, conditions, and consequences in a variety of social settings. The chief features of that definition are identified using a series of empirical instances of consecration. The chapter then shows how that definition can be operationalized with simple network concepts, and suggests a network-based strategy for capturing consecration empirically – in art worlds for example. The chapter finally draws testable implications from that definition, and explores its relationship with the notion of retrospective consecration. The second chapter uses that notion of consecration to solve an empirical puzzle in the sociology of valuation. Markets for unique and novel goods are often seen as privileged settings for the powerful influence of market intermediaries: when quality is uncertain, or when it lacks definition altogether, intermediaries can play a crucial role in signaling or specifying it, thereby ultimately shaping the prices consumers are willing to pay for products. Products, meanwhile, do not get much more unique or novel than in the market for contemporary art. Yet economic sociologists have repeatedly failed to observe any influence of art market intermediaries on the value of the artists they distribute. This puzzling finding, I argue, arises from a misconception of how intermediaries shape the value of artists. We usually think of intermediation as acting through two chief processes of valuation: credentialing, or the signaling of unobservable quality, and qualification, or the establishment of specific quality criteria. Yet I suggest that it also can influence value through consecration, or the structural signaling of the existence of quality differences in a population. Using the market for modern art in early twentieth-century Paris as an empirical backdrop, this chapter shows that intermediation as consecration, not credentialing or qualification, was indeed how art market intermediaries shaped the value of their artists in the heyday of French modern painting. SOCIAL PROCESSES OF VALUATION AND ELITE CONSOLIDATION IN GILDED AGE AMERICA The remaining chapter is a logical development of the previous two. It builds on the fine-grained insights they offer – on social processes of valuation, and on the mechanisms of non-meritocratic inequality more generally – to address larger-scale issues of social inequality and social reproduction. The chapter uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to understand how cultural participation cemented the status – or social value – of elites in Gilded Age America. The database has information on who subscribed to the Philharmonic between 1880 and 1910 – a period of huge upheaval, of threats to the dominance of traditional elites, and ultimately of elite consolidation in the United States, and in the city of New York in particular. In analyzing these data I seek to understand how culture worked as an elite resource in that era. The classic account of culture and elite consolidation posits that the formation of an upper class and its continued dominance rest on a mechanism of exclusion. In this view, cultural participation reinforces elites by setting them apart – a process akin to consecration as I delineate it in earlier chapters. My work on the Philharmonic challenges that classic view. For the distinctiveness associated with elite cultural endeavors to reinforce elite dominance, I argue, these endeavors have to happen against a backdrop of general agreement over their value. In Gilded Age New York, this agreement happened not through exclusion, but through the inclusion of a group of cultural experts into the cultural institutions championed by the social elite. The inclusion of that cultured group served to testify to the quality of the cultural endeavors of the social elite, and provided them with a stamp of cultural legitimacy. In other words, it valued the elite through a process of credentialing. The second analytical contribution of that final chapter has to do with class consolidation and the reproduction of upper class dominance more generally. While consolidation is often seen as happening through exclusion and closure, I argue that in a context of rapid social differentiation, marked by the emergence of new areas of expertise, maintaining dominance does not necessarily involve barring access to outside groups. It can also mean being flexible enough to include the experts in emerging spheres. To remain atop the social hierarchy, elites may benefit from incorporating external elements that testify to their own continued relevance. Such inclusion is not necessarily full integration – instead, I show that at the Philharmonic it involved a built-in mechanism of protection, namely segregation. Hence cultural experts were included to help reify and support upper class status and social power, but in a segregated fashion to protect the upper class from threats of destabilization. Finally, a word on title: the notion of purity is the recurring motif in this work. It conveys ideas of social exclusion and social closure, as deployed in the third chapter. When thought about in relational terms, purity may also refer to one’s absence of ties to others whom one does not wish to be associated with in the public eye. This relational take on purity has strong affinities with the idea of consecration developed in chapters one and two. As a heuristic tool for the sociological imagination, purity is the thread that connects all the dots in this dissertation.

This dissertation analyzes the group of postwar (1948-1964) independent films known as the New York city symphonies and argues that the films, rather than merely depicting space, produce it. City symphonies combine documentary, experimental, and sometimes fictional techniques to chronicle a paradigmatic day in the life of a given urban environment and its citizenry by concatenating spatially diverse, thematically related phenomena. Produced, distributed, and exhibited outside the commercial system, the New York city symphonies are nevertheless paradigmatic of the nonsynchronous spaces and layered temporalities that characterize late modernity. More important, as late modernist works, they critique this social order and the spaces that constitute it. City symphony films have often been studied as a crucial instance of the intersection of cinema and the urban environment. Previous work in film studies has used the films to argue for the mutual constitution of city and cinema on the grounds that urban modernity is primarily a mode of vision. This dissertation rejects that tradition on the grounds that it reduces space to a concept and cinema to the depiction of a pre-extant built reality. By contrast, this dissertation demonstrates that a city symphony is not a way of seeing but is rather a method for negotiating space - a spatial practice. Through extensive close readings of the films in close conversation with both Henri Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and models of narrative's spatial characteristics, this dissertation concludes that the New York city symphonies comprise a particular practice in which space can be inhabited and abstracted simultaneously, in which experience and language, place and story, are one in the same. That is, the films challenge modernity's dominant relation of production, in which space as a mental thing displaces space as it is lived and perceived. This relation largely depends on space being reduced to a series of metaphors and metonymies - to narrative. Modernity, Lefebvre argues, is constituted by such abstract space. Abstract space is reproduced through the construction of various narrations of space that naturalize or cover over the displacement of space as it is experienced. This dissertation identifies two such narratives, both of which employ microcosmic logic to produce the city as a unified, perfectly ordered, legible text to be read. Against the microcosmic narration of space, the New York city symphonies produce spaces that narrate. The films challenge the fantasy of "New York City" as a proper name that can refer to a single, knowable entity. Instead, they narrate an asynchronous multitude of sometimes overlapping, sometimes mutually exclusive New Yorks that are inhabited and invented by diverse populations as they perform their daily routines. They do this by narrating marginal areas as a series of secret passages that relate to the center through the time of the festival, and the center itself as a collective work. That is, the films not only produce space as an experience, but in doing so suggest an alternative concept of space. This dissertation proposes the New York films as a cinematic discourse capable of enunciating the multiple, contradictory meanings of given locations and from them positing an otherwise unfigurable, radically different social order characterized by both the perfect harmony of space as it is lived, perceived, and conceived as well as unlimited freedom. This dissertation claims the New York city symphonies as immanent utopias.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Law. / The paper examines the evolution of the recognition and enforcement of "foreign" arbitral awards prior to the introduction of the various international arbitration conventions by referring to court decisions of the relevant countries, primarily the United States and the United Kingdom. The scope and importance of the New York Convention will be canvassed, with specific reference to cases. The Dissertation traces the evolution of judicial and legislative attitudes towards arbitration (in particular, the issue of arbitrability), from the original position of antipathy towards arbitral processes, to the active promotion of arbitration and a "hands-off" approach to its processes by legislators as well as courts. The introduction of the arbitral process to developing countries will be discussed in the context of some recent controversial arbitrations in Indonesia and Pakistan. Public policy as the criterion for the enforcement of awards by national courts will be discussed and relevant authorities referred to. The reasoning adopted by courts in this area will be examined and discussed. The paradigm shift in the enforcement of awards and the leeway granted within the parameters of the arbitral decision making process will be highlighted by two case studies. Both demonstrate clearly the current negation of public policy considerations. The first is a decision of the English Court of Appeal which was mirrored by a subsequent arbitration awardin 'which the discarding of public policy considerations was particularly remarkable as constitutional issues were involved, which normally would have given rise to the expectation of deliberations as to the notions of public policy. NOTE CONCERNING "UNITED KINGDOM" AND "ENGLISH" LAW The title of the Dissertation inter alia refers to the " ... laws of ... the United Kingdom." Within the text, there are references to both the "United Kingdom" and "England." The constitutional and legislative position in the United Kingdom is perhaps more complex than in other jurisdictions and a brief outline is necessary. United Kingdom Parliament Parliament is called the "Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." (Great Britain is comprised of England, Scotland and Wales). The United Kingdom Parliament comprises the monarch, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Until relatively recently, Parliament was regarded as the supreme law-making body within the United Kingdom; however, European Community law is now paramount within the United Kingdom's constitutional framework. The legislation of the United Kingdom Parliament is presumed to apply to the whole of the United Kingdom, although there can be an express or implied exclusion of a part of the United Kingdom from the operation of a particular Act. Legal systems England and Wales have the one legal system. As from the Sixteenth Century, "English law" has prevailed in Wales. Scotland has a distinct legal system and its own courts, with, in civil matters, rights of appeal to the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. Northern Island also has its own courts, with rights of appeal to the House of Lords in both civil and criminal matters. Devolution The United Kingdom Parliament has legislated for the devolution of power to regional assemblies - to the Scottish Parliament, the Northern Island Assembly and the National Assembly for Wales. The Scottish Parliament has the power to pass primary legislation, subject to certain subject matters being reserved by the United Kingdom Parliament. The Northern Ireland Assembly also has power to enact primary legislation, but the Northern Ireland Assembly is also presently suspended. The National Assembly for Wales has no power to enact primary legislation - that power remains with the United Kingdom Parliament. Consequently, at present, the Scottish Parliament alone has power to pass legislation which has equal force to that of the United Kingdom Parliament. Dissertation In relation to the expressions used in the Dissertation; generally, references to legislation will be referred to as United Kingdom legislation, as Parliament is the United Kingdom Parliament. It should also be noted that it is the United Kingdom which is the contracting State to the New York Convention. References to decisions of the House of Lords and the Court of Appeal will be described as "United Kingdom" and "English" decisions respectively. As noted above, whilst each of Scotland and Northern Ireland has its own courts, there are rights (in the case of Scotland, in civil matters only). of appeal to the House of Lords. The House of Lords, consequently, hears appeals from the whole of the United Kingdom. The English Court of Appeal is the Court of Appeal for the unitary system of England and Wales. Given that "English law" was historically also the law of Wales, it is more appropriate to refer to decisions handed down by it as "English" decisions. Decisions of other Courts (such as Queen's Bench and Chancery) will also be referred to as "English" decisions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Decker School of Nursing, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New School for Social Research, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-77). Also available in electronic format on the World Wide Web. Access restricted to users affiliated with the licensed institutions.

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Title:"All the news that´s fit to print": A quantitative content analysis of The New York Times and Dagens Nyheters front pages on the basis of tabloidization theory. Authors: Pär Brolin & Kristoffer Olofsson Aim: We intend to distinguish elements of tabloidization in two daily newspapers as an effect to the increased economic and public orientated business models. The New York Times and Dagens Nyheter has been chosen mainly because they operates within different national media markets, secondly they are well known for their high journalistic standard. Based on the upcoming result, it's in our concern to illuminate these possible changes effect on the overall journalistic quality and discuss its importance. We aim to reveal the actual state of tabloidization in the two high quality newspapers The New York Times and Dagens Nyheter and thus answer the following questions: - In which way are the elements of tabloidization shown in The New York Times and Dagens Nyheter in a contemporary context as well under a twelve years period? - Based on the achieved results, what are the main differences between the two examined newspapers and what potential impact could it have on the journalistic quality? Method/Material: In order to perform this study, we have executed a quantitative study built on content analysis of the two newspapers front pages. To be able to see some individual changes within the two newspapers, two empirical swoops has been done, in September year 2000 and in September 2012. This study covers a total of 120 front pages, 60 per newspaper and thus 30 per month. The selected 9 variables are based mainly on the basis of Ingela Wadbrings study from 2012 concerning commercialized journalism which examines the changes of Swedish newspaper content between the years 1960 and 2010. In addition, the theory of tabloidization is based on the academic discourse on the process which describes journalism that aims to satisfy the public demands to gain economic profit rather than report on more important matters in favor to the democratic society. Furthermore, to facilitate the analysis chapter, an academic discussion regarding the reputable journalistic quality constitutes the theory chapter. Main results: This study's result reveals some major differences between the two newspapers publication models. Dagens Nyheter shows pure elements of tabloidization mainly by prioritizing headlines and large pictures in front of clear text as well an equal distribution between hard and soft news. The New York Times shows on the other hand an over-representation of sequentially written text rather than large pictures and headlines, furthermore they demonstrate a frequent occurrence of hard news in favor of soft news. The content quality is, from a theoretical point of view, of a lower journalistic standard regarding Dagens Nyheter than in The New York Times. Although, during the working process it became clear that the overall quality of newspapers content is rather subjective and that the definition of tabloidization, as something uncompromisingly negative, should be reconsidered.Course: Media and communication studies CUniversity: Division of media and communication, department of information science, Uppsala university.Period: Autumn semester 2012Tutor: Lowe Hedman / Syftet med denna uppsats är att utifrån den akademiska definitonen av begreppet tabloidisering jämföra två dagstidningar med liknande värdegrund verkande inom två olika nationella kontexter. Detta för att se om tabloidiseringens faktorer anammats i samma utsträckning över landsgränserna och hur två stora dagstidningar eventuellt tvingats rucka på sina publicistiska värdegrunder. The New York Times och Dagens Nyheter har valts ut som analysenheter vars framsidor kommer att studeras enskilt likväl i komparitet mot varandra. För att underlätta en analys av tidningarnas enskilda progression så utförs två empiriska tidsnedslag, under september år 2000 och september 2012. Då tabloidisering oftast används i negativa ordalag där den klassiska journalistiken anses bli lidande så är det även av intresse att föra en diskussion huruvida den journalistiska kvalitén kan tänkas påverkas i och med tabloidiseringsprocessens faktorer i respektive tidskrift. Detta mynnar ut i följande frågeställningar: -Hur gestaltar sig Dagens Nyheters respektive The New York Times tabliodiseringsprocess i en nutida kontext och över en tolvårsperiod? -Utifrån uppnått resultat, vad är de största skillnaderna mellan de två undersökta tidningarna och vilken eventuell påverkan har tabloidisering på den genomgripande journalistiska kvalitén? För att besvara uppställda frågeställningar är studien en kvantitativ undersökning vars uppnådda resultat slutligen behandlas i en kvalitativ del. Den kvantitativa undersökningen utgörs av sammanlagt 120 framsidor och sammanlagt nio variabler vilka huvudsakligen grundar sig i Ingela Wadbrings studie från 2012 rörande journalistikens kommersialisering. Huvudsakligen uppvisar Dagens Nyheter en velande inställning gentemot deras egen publiceringsmodell, vilket gestaltar sig i en ökning av annonser, överrepresentation av bilder och rubriker före löpande text samt en allt jämnare fördelning av hårda och mjuka nyheter över tid. New York Times uppvisar det tydligaste tecknet på tabloidisering endast i form av en ökande annonsförekomst. Den ansenligaste skillnaden mellan Dagens Nyheter och New York Times är den klara överrepresentationen av hårda nyheter i komparitet med mjuka nyheter från New York Times sida. Den innehållsliga kvalitén utifrån valda teoretiska resonemang visar att Dagens Nyheter i sin hybrida tidningsmodells välkomnande av tabloida inslag löper en större risk att omfamna journalistik med lägre verkningshöjd.