We outline four connections between xenophobia and punitiveness toward criminals in a national sample of Americans. First, among self-identified whites xenophobia is more predictive of punitiveness than specific forms of racial animus. Second, xenophobia and punitiveness are strongly connected among whites, but are only moderately and weakly related among black and Hispanic Americans, respectively. Third, among whites substantial proportions of the variance between sociodemographic, political, and religious predictors of punitiveness are mediated by levels of xenophobia. Finally, xenophobia is the strongest overall predictor of punitiveness among whites. Overall, xenophobia is an essential aspect of understanding public punitiveness, particularly among whites.

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There are 1.4 million active nonprofit organizations in the United States; however, funding sustainability often forces nonprofit senior leaders into closure, which can lead to increased unemployment and decreased services provided to local communities. Nonprofit senior leaders seek help from scholars, at times, to identify strategies to secure sustainable funding sources, improve the sustainability of funding, or prevent or reverse losses of funding to their organizations. Through the conceptual lens of the general systems theory, the 2015-2016 Baldrige Excellence Framework and Criteria, and single- and double-loop learning, this single-case study explored strategies used to secure sustainable funding for nonprofit organizations from businesses, foundations, and individual donations. Through a purposeful sample of 3 senior leaders of a small nonprofit organization located in Baltimore, Maryland, data collection occurred through semistructured interviews, a review of public and internal documents, as well as performance outcomes. Through thematic analysis, 4 themes emerged: process strengths, process opportunities, results strengths, and results opportunities. Identifying strategies to secure sustainable funding may assist nonprofit senior leaders when struggling in an environment in which the supply of critical resources is low. The findings have implications for positive social change for nonprofit senior leaders and the community. Nonprofit senior leaders that secure sustainable funding may offer a positive influence in communities by reducing unemployment, creating new jobs, providing tax payments, promoting philanthropy, and improving lives.

Historically, kinky sexualities and sexual behaviors have been understood as pathological or perverse. Such misunderstandings and misrepresentations have contributed to the development and perpetuation of kink stigma. The aim of this retrospective, cross-sectional, correlational research study was to explore the potential relationship(s) between pathology, personality, and kinky sexual behaviors/roles in adulthood. Guided by queer-feminist theory, the research questions addressed whether personality traits, experiences of childhood trauma, or a combination thereof, were predictors for kinky behaviors/roles in adulthood. A multi measure, anonymous, and confidential survey was distributed online including the Childhood Traumatic Events Scale as a childhood trauma questionnaire, the Mini-IPIP, and the sadomasochism checklist. Multiple regression analyses were used, and the results showed that experiences of childhood trauma, personality characteristics, or the combination of both were not significant predictors for kinky sexual behaviors in adulthood. Among the sample surveyed, there were no significant relationships found between the variables to provide sufficient evidence to support the negative perceptions and stigmatization of the kinky population. These findings contribute to social change by better informing deficiencies in the historical pathology-based and personality-based academic literature on kinky sexualities. Additionally, the findings of the present study provide others with an increased awareness and understanding of the kink community and lifestyles which benefits evolving society and psychological professionals, scholars, and the kink community.

Public higher education has evolved over time under the control of each individual state. The public system in each state is made up of distinctive types of institutions that together provide higher education in different formats. Public institutions may largely be classified into three groups based on the level of education provided including community colleges, regional institutions, and research universities. While the institutions employed are largely the same in each state, the extent to which each is utilized and the support given reflect the individual characteristics of the state. This dissertation examines appropriations and enrollments by state and year in three classifications of universities: research universities, regional universities, and community colleges. The appropriations and enrollments in regional and community settings are measured relative to the same for research universities. The explanatory variables are political, economic, and demographic variables relevant in state finance to the allocation of state budgets. There are three empirical chapters. The first uses Granger causality concepts to examine whether appropriations and enrollment have strong predictive effects on each other in the following year. Enrollment has no such effect on appropriations, while there is a weak effect the other way. The second chapter studies relative appropriations, finding that the proportion of appropriations allocated to regional institutions has remained consistent, while states have proportionally shifted toward community colleges. The third chapter studies enrollment, which is very stable for regional universities and has shifted toward community colleges relative to research universities. Again, political and economic factors are somewhat different in these models. Examining year effects net of economics and politics, there are no such effects on appropriations; but for enrollment, regional universities grew somewhat relative to research universities in the earlier years (1986 to 1993), and community colleges grew throughout the period with pauses. The Great Recession is clearly visible in community college enrollments, growing as usual during an economic downturn.

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Employee turnover disrupts organizational functioning, service delivery, and administration. The purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore strategies that some college administrators used to reduce employee turnover in the workplace to increase profitability. The population for the study included 3 administrators in a senior (4-year) college in the southeastern region of the United States who developed and implemented successful strategies to reduce employee turnover. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with college administrators and from publicly available organizational documents. Transformational leadership was the conceptual framework for this study. Data analysis included inductive analysis guided by transformational leadership theory and member checking. Five themes emerged from data analysis including transformational leadership, incentives and rewards, training/career development, establishing trust/employee empowerment, and effective communication. The implications of these findings for social change may benefit students, faculty, and administrators of educational institutions. The findings may enhance consistent and superior educational course delivery to students, improve collaboration between educators and administrators through effective hiring practices to raise the caliber of educator skillsets, and reduce the percent of unemployed as a result of students succeeding in higher education and gaining meaningful employment. The findings may help reduce financial insecurity and improve the living standards of people in the community, while encouraging prospective learners to attain a postsecondary education.

One aspect of leadership strategy is the need to account for the core values of the organization. The purpose of this case study was to explore the perceptions of tribal gaming leader strategies toward sustainability, an action that leads to tribal economic development and stability. The conceptual framework of situational leadership theory was used to guide the scope and analysis of this study. Six tribal gaming leaders from Oklahoma participated in a focus group session; 7 additional tribal gaming leaders from the same gaming organization participated in individual interview sessions. Member checking was used to strengthen the credibility and trustworthiness of the interpretation of the participants' responses. Additionally, company documents were reviewed to triangulate the data. Four emergent themes were identified after data analysis: business value, which was attributed to tribal leaders' alignment to their mission; strategic vision, which included their marketing and overall business environment; collaboration, which was evident wherein the tribal gaming leaders utilized internal and external partnerships to improve local communities and maintain competitive advantage; and communication, which was emphasized for its importance as a daily skill for information sharing. This research explored the strategies necessary for tribal gaming leader choices that could have a significant influence on social progress between the organization and society, environmental protection for the surrounding community, and economic growth for the local economy. The findings from this study may contribute to social change by aiding in the organizational strategy to forecasting; these findings may also aid in the overall business value, prosperity of employees, and the local economy.

This dissertation examines how resilience against disaster is produced on a daily basis by Emergency Managers and private sector continuity professionals working in New York City. Drawing on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, it uses disaster anticipation as a case study in inter-organizational reliability and the interplay between materiality and culture in the processual reproduction of social life. I find that disaster risk managers conceptualize disasters as situations of abrupt mismatch between available material resources and the exigencies of critical tasks and routines. They use three interrelated types of strategies to anticipate these crises: (1) conducting persistent active monitoring and routine intervention in the organizational environment; (2) planning for the consequences, rather than triggers, of disasters; and (3) building a creative capacity to preserve or restore access to resources critical for the reproduction of social and organizational routines. Taken together, I argue, these strategies shed new light on how organizations collaborate across boundaries to build resilience against unexpected shocks. The empirical data provides a lever into deeper puzzles in sociology: how can we account for both the durability of social structures and sudden social change? In other words, what can we learn about the way social life is reproduced by better understanding the work of professionals employed by the state and major corporate firms to proactively manage the events that threaten to punctuate that continuity? This research advances the literature on organizational reliability, as well as the material turn in institutional theory, drawing attention to the role of material resources in the production and reproduction of cultural schemas.

This dissertation research is an archaeological investigation of the burial practices of the Irish Neolithic (4000-2500 BC) and Bronze Age (2500-1100 BC). Burial data from thirty sites are used in order to understand the relationship between the burial treatment of the dead (inhumation vs. cremation), artifact deposition, and faunal deposition with the age and sex of the dead. In order to understand how environmental variability affected the manner in which people constructed their views on identity, the sites were categorized based on two geographic regions, Region A and Region B. Region A refers to sites located in Co. Dublin, Co. Louth, Co. Meath, Co. Kildare, and Co. Wicklow, an area with many sites clustered together on land that was capable of supporting large communities, agricultural surplus, and is geographically located near important long distance trade routes with Britain and continental Europe. Region B refers to the remaining territory of Ireland. The results of the analyses are used to gain information on how burial was used by past populations to reflect social and economic status and how the communal perspective on status changed over time and how the surrounding environment affected the perspective of the people. Previous research on late prehistoric Irish burials has relied on cultural-historical stereotypes of the past to understand the social and economic trends, lumping all data from Ireland as being the same, and even as the same as burial trends in Britain and continental Europe. Therefore, Neolithic Ireland is assumed to have consisted of egalitarian agricultural-based communities, which transitioned into societies with vertical hierarchy dominated by adult males in the Bronze Age because of the rise of metallurgical practices and long-distance trade (Bradley 2007; Waddell 2010). Typically, research interpretations are generated based on only one line of contextual data, rather than taking into consideration the multiple aspects of burial ritual, and environmental variability amongst sites is not considered a factor in socio-economic influences on burial tradition. This study seeks to demonstrate that by using multiple lines of evidence, regional and local differences of burial tradition can be identified which contradict general stereotypes of both the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. The results of this study show that when multiple lines of evidence from burials are analyzed, general stereotypes of the manner in which socio-economic identity was manifested in the archaeological record during the Neolithic and Bronze Age cannot be applied to Ireland as a whole. Instead, the manner in which individuals are deposited and preserved in burial ritual is governed by isolated local traditions, rather than large, regional traditions. This is the result of regional variability in the environment, the arability of land, and the geographic positioning of sites near long-distance trade routes. This research demonstrates that large-scale explanations of social and economic changes in late prehistory and previous understandings of the role of burial ritual in socio-economic displays of identity need to be questioned and re-examined using more datasets to ensure a more thorough interpretation of the past.