Since Texas contains less than 5% public land, private landowners are critical to the success of environmental management initiatives in the state. This has implications for resources that traverse property boundaries, such as wildlife and groundwater. Texas landowners are increasingly capitalizing on the income potential of fee-based hunting, and many have banded together to form Wildlife Management Associations (WMAs). Not only can such landowner associations enhance the coordination of resource management decisions, they also have the potential to increase social capital, which is reflected by interpersonal trust, reciprocity and civic participation. To improve the management of common-pool resources it is important to understand the relationship between social capital and coordinated resource management because long-term community stability and resource sustainability appear to be highly correlated. A 600-landowner mail survey (with 48.1% response) was conducted in the Edwards Plateau region of Texas to compare the land management characteristics and social capital of landowners who are members of WMAs with non-member landowners. The goal of this research was to determine how WMA membership, property size, and location affect levels of social capital and interest in cooperative resource management. It was hypothesized that members, large landowners, and northern landowners would be more interested in cooperative management and exhibit higher social capital. While WMA members and large-property owners were more involved in wildlife management than non-members and small-property owners, this interest in resource management did not carry over to groundwater. These groups were not more involved in groundwater management activities, and all survey groups were disinterested in joining private cooperatives for groundwater marketing. Social capital differences were more evident between large- and small-property owners than between WMA members and non-members. Members scored higher only on community involvement, while large owners scored higher on community involvement as well as trust. These results suggest that WMA membership per se does not significantly increase social capital among Edwards Plateau landowners, but do not necessarily refute the importance of social capital within WMAs. Differences in trust between members were positively correlated with increased communication and meeting frequency, suggesting ways WMAs can improve intra-association social capital.

The national government gave up defense of mainland Chinese and a large number of accompanying troops retreated into Taiwan in 1949. After many years, these soldiers continually retired from the military. In order to take care of these groups of retired soldiers who had contributed to the nation, the Taiwanese government set up a veteran status system. These veterans are also Taiwanese citizens, but they hold a double citizenship, and they can benefit from different departments. This study started with veterans¡¦ social capital points of view in order to see the relationships between the soldiers¡¦ knowledge of welfare, level of needs for welfare use, their satisfaction with welfare, and the number of social capital they have received. The research randomly selected samples and used a face-to-face survey with 250 veterans who are Kaohsiung city citizens and aged 65 and over. Effective surveys of 225 were received. The results of the research show that the age factor influences the participants¡¦ satisfaction about the welfare system. The participants¡¦ veteran ranks, religious beliefs, and current living conditions are related to their knowledge and use of the welfare offered by the government. Veterans with middle-low income have less knowledge of the welfare from the Veterans Affairs Commission and the Department of Health, and also know less about the welfare items offered by the Department of Social Welfare. From the social capital point of view, the more abundant social capital the participants have, the higher knowledge of welfare they have. However, different social capital systems will also affect satisfaction with welfare used. Veterans are more satisfied with using welfare if social capital is abundant in the family system, the neighborhood, community system, and the Veterans Affairs Commission. On the other hand, veterans are less satisfied with using welfare if social capital abundance is evident in the Department of Social Welfare and other systems. In addition, the results also show a significant positive relationship between the participants¡¦ knowledge and use of welfare. The more welfare items they know, the more they use. These results offer suggestions to the individual government departments, including the Veterans Affairs Commission, Department of Social Welfare, and Department of Health, as well as interdepartmental collaboration. Each of the related departments should strengthen their welfare campaigns and service mechanisms. Most importantly, they should improve their integration in order to avoid overlapping and waste on welfare services. In addition, they must set up good referral and transition services and carry out the welfare measures to benefit the veterans in need.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-247). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, Committee on Human Development, December 2003. / CD-ROM reproduces p. 100-136 of dissertation. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The aim of this dissertation is to present work on a number of salient characteristics of elite relations in Sweden, studied from a social network analytic perspective. Elite integration, the distribution of elite power, and the significance of elites’ informal relations represent the three main themes explored in the original studies that comprise the thesis. Studies 1-3 concern elite relations at the local, i.e. municipal level of political decision-making, while research on parliamentary political elites is reported in Study 4. Studies 1-3 draw upon original complete network data collected through personal interviews with 248 local elites (politicians, corporate leaders, civil servants, etc.) active in four mid-sized Swedish municipalities. The question of local elite integration is investigated in Study 1, while the question of women elites’ potential access to structural power is studied in Study 2. These studies conclude that local elites are well integrated around structural cores of politicians and civil servants, and that women elites are on average not structurally disadvantaged due to their sex. Research concerning the role local elites’ involvement in associations like Rotary clubs is reported in Study 3. The results suggest that membership in such semi-exclusive voluntary settings may have an optimizing impact upon the elites’ personal networks, as far as their individual level social capital is concerned. In the final study (Study 4) focus is shifted to national political elites when a social network analytic perspective is utilized to study social cohesion within multiparty opposition coalitions recently formed in the Swedish Riksdag. The study concludes that the right wing-liberal Alliance coalition formed prior to the 2006 general elections was socially better integrated and more cohesive than the socialist-environmentalist coalition formed during the subsequent parliamentary cycle. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Submitted. Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 4: Submitted.</p>

In recent years young entrepreneurs have attracted considerable attention from policy makers and the media, and there is evidence that increasingly many young people aspire to start their own business. However, there has been little research into how young entrepreneurs actually build their businesses, and the limited existing research about young entrepreneurs has tended to focus on participants who have struggled to achieve business survival and growth. By contrast, this thesis investigates how young entrepreneurs are able to build high performing businesses. All participants have built a business with a turnover between £1 million and £90 million or otherwise raised at least £1 million in external investment. It takes a qualitative approach, based primarily on semi-structured interviewing, to understanding the knowledge and skills 21 young entrepreneurs used to build their businesses. It uses a human capital theory framework to analyse how the young entrepreneurs developed relevant knowledge and skills prior to start-up in order to build a business. It then considers what additional human and social capital the young entrepreneurs acquired during the venture creation process itself. The findings identify three different pathways, each of which typifies the human capital used by particular young entrepreneurs, according to their educational background and the precise age at which they started their business. The study also establishes the necessary human capital which all of the young entrepreneurs developed prior to start-up or during the early stages of starting their ventures, which was important to their success in growing a business. The study finally contributes to the debate about whether general human capital or venture-specific human capital is most important to entrepreneurs, finding that for young entrepreneurs developing pre-start-up general human capital is particularly significant.

The rapidly changing Canadian mosaic compels the educational system to devise new and unique means to address the needs of a heterogeneous student and teacher populace emerging from varied cultural, linguistic, social and pedagogical contexts. Considerable work recommends the creation of an inclusive environment for immigrant students; sparse discourse considers the needs of immigrant teachers in a mainstream K-12 setting. The majority of discussions and discourses on immigrant teacher acculturation study the needs and challenges this diverse group of teachers has to contend with inside the environs of a Canadian classroom. This study extends these initial discourses to include the macrocosmic challenges faced by immigrant teachers by analyzing the lived experiences of immigrant teachers who have successfully established their place in the Manitoba educational system. Using a critical lens, the study endeavors to analyze the role of social capital in the integration experiences of immigrant educators in Manitoba.

Background. Access to health care in northern and rural communities has been an ongoing challenge. Training undergraduate medical students in regional sites is one strategy to enhance physician recruitment and retention in rural regions. With this goal in mind, in 2004, the Northern Medical Program was created to bring undergraduate medical education to Prince George. The NMP is also hypothesized to have wider impacts on the community. This study aimed to describe perceptions of the broader impacts of the NMP. Methods. In this qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with community leaders in various sectors of Prince George. The interviewer probed about perceived current and anticipated future impacts of the program, both positive and negative. A descriptive content analysis was performed. A conceptual framework of hypothesized impacts was created based on the literature and a model of neighbourhood social capital by Carpiano (2006). Findings. Comments were overwhelmingly positive. Impacts were described on education, health services, economy, politics, and media. Some reported negative impacts included tension between the NMP and other departments at UNBC, and a strain on health system resource capacity. Participants also reported that the NMP has impacted social capital in the region. Social capital, defined as the resources belonging to a network of individuals, was a pervasive theme. Impacts on social cohesion, various forms of social capital, access to social capital and outcomes of social capital are described. Conclusions. The full impact of the NMP will likely not be felt for at least a decade, as the program is still relatively new to Prince George. Findings suggest that an undergraduate medical education program can have pervasive impacts in an underserved community. Evaluation of the impact of such programs should be broad in scope. Findings also suggest that impacts of the program on other community sectors and on social capital may in fact lead to greater human capital gains than originally anticipated. A comprehensive communication strategy should be developed and maintained to ensure continued stakeholder support for the program. Next steps include identifying key quantifiable indicators of community impact to track changes in the community over time.

Since early 2010, Facebook.com, the world’s most popular social network site (SNS), has come under a storm of media criticism over the commercial use of its users’ personal information. Yet even as more became known about the fact that Facebook sells publicly shared information to companies for advertising purposes, two years later the SNS amassed one billion members in October 2012. Based on in-depth interviews 30 Millennials (18 to 32-year olds) and 10 Boomers (48 to 58-year olds) that are daily users of Facebook, this dissertation provides a qualitative analysis of attitudes toward privacy and personal information disclosure on Facebook. What steps—if any—are being taken by users to regulate their personal information disclosure? How do users feel about the website selling their personal information to advertisers? What are the benefits of using Facebook and do they outweigh the risks of having one’s information used for commercial purposes? Or is it even seen as a risk at all? What are the sociological implications of users’ answers to these questions? I challenge prevailing conclusions that the intensity of Facebook use is associated with higher levels of social capital and that Facebook is especially useful for maintaining and building bridging ties to one’s acquaintances. On the contrary, among Millennials in my study, the website is used for maintaining bonding ties between close friends and family members, not bridging ties between acquaintances; that the maintaining of bridging social capital is by comparison merely a passive benefit. As well, while the Boomers in my study use Facebook to maintain bridging ties, maintaining social capital is not a consideration. In arriving at this conclusion, I thematically broke out the benefits of using Facebook as Facebook is my life online, Facebook is my primary connection to others, and Facebook is a convenient communication and information tool. As well, the perceived risks of using Facebook involve a lack of privacy and, to a lesser extent, issues of control. For the Millennials and Boomers in my study, the practical benefits of using Facebook outweigh the perceived risks, and the perception of control on the user’s part is a key factor in rationalizing their ongoing use of the website. As a practical application of my findings, I propose how the marketing research industry might apply these findings toward learning more about consumers.

The rapidly changing Canadian mosaic compels the educational system to devise new and unique means to address the needs of a heterogeneous student and teacher populace emerging from varied cultural, linguistic, social and pedagogical contexts. Considerable work recommends the creation of an inclusive environment for immigrant students; sparse discourse considers the needs of immigrant teachers in a mainstream K-12 setting. The majority of discussions and discourses on immigrant teacher acculturation study the needs and challenges this diverse group of teachers has to contend with inside the environs of a Canadian classroom. This study extends these initial discourses to include the macrocosmic challenges faced by immigrant teachers by analyzing the lived experiences of immigrant teachers who have successfully established their place in the Manitoba educational system. Using a critical lens, the study endeavors to analyze the role of social capital in the integration experiences of immigrant educators in Manitoba.