Thesis advisor: Zine Magubane / Thesis advisor: Stephen Pfohl / In a series of case studies, I problematize the reification of race in the American Sociology of race from a postcolonial perspective. I argue prominent theories within the American sociology of race tend to essentialize race as a cause of racial inequality in the United States. These theories assume the existence of racial categories and then discuss how other entities become racialized into racialized social systems (Bonilla-Silva 1997), or racial projects (Omi & Winant 1994). These theories emphasize national structures, but occlude empire. I argue the occlusion of empire in the American sociology of race, particularly in theorization of racial categorization, is problematic. Empire is the structure that links race to class inequality, and produces race as a social category of exclusion. Therefore, a sociological theory of American racial inequality, which does not analyze imperialism as a structure that produces race, and rather focuses solely on national-structures, or a definition of capitalism severed from imperialism, cannot provide a thoroughly structural explanation for the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Young women occupy unprecedented space in contemporary society. Their professional ambitions, educational achievements, practices of cultural consumption, and participation in sport and leisure all offer evidence of a new position for young women. This thesis analyzes female snowboarders as exemplars of young women in contemporary society and popular physical culture. Many young women today play sport and engage in physical activity with a sense of enthusiasm and entitlement unknown to most of their mothers and grandmothers. Against this background the female snowboarder is an excellent barometer of the nature of contemporary youth and popular culture, of the changes in those cultures including the development of niche female cultural industries, and of the emerging opportunities available to middle-class women in Western society. Women's snowboarding, however, is a complicated and multidimensional phenomenon interwoven with numerous political, cultural, social and economic events and processes. In this thesis I set out to capture the complexity of female snowboarding by systematically contextualizing and interrogating the lived experiences of female boarders through drawing upon six critical social theoretical perspectives: Marxist political economy, post-Fordism, feminism, hegemonic masculinity, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of embodiment, and Foucauldian theorizing. In applying these theories, I select key concepts and engage them in conversations with my insider cultural knowledge of snowboarding, numerous periods of fieldwork, and an extensive base of artifacts and sources collected over five years. In this thesis I extend academic understandings of female youth culture via the case study of women in snowboarding, and offer a valuable critique of contemporary social theories used to explain many different social phenomena that involve tensions and power relationships between the genders. While no single theory or concept proved adequate to deal with the multidimensional phenomenon of the female boarder, each having its shortcomings and offering quite different insights, several reveal important commonalities in relation to some key concepts in critical sociology, viz, structure, agency, culture, the body and embodiment, gender and power. These commonalities, I argue, offer future directions for theorizing about, and advancing our understanding of, young women in popular physical culture.

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Abstract The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) currently enjoys the status of being the leading predictive tool for testing user acceptance of new technologies. Despite IS researchers and practitioners holding the model in high esteem, this study exposes some of its limitations when applied to a study of shop-floor users in South Africa. In search of an alternative theory explaining why these users so openly embraced the new information system, it emerges that the Critical Social Theory (CST) of Jürgen Habermas provides the most relevant insight. The use of the CST perspective reveals how these users view the new system as a potential means with which to achieve emancipation from their otherwise dreary existence as product inspectors. This thesis argues that this emancipatory potential offered by the new system played a major role in its successful acceptance. / Dissertation (Magister Commercii (Informatics))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Informatics / unrestricted

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / A philosophical elaboration of Theodor Adorno's conception of aesthetic form. Adorno's aesthetic theory is presented through a reconstruction of the major concepts in his Aesthetic Theory and via the projects of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics. / 2031-01-01

This research explores the subtle distribution of power within early American industrial capitalism, as seen in the nineteenth-century company town of Fayette, Michigan. Research methods for the project include GIS-based analysis of the built environment and artifact patterns; the development of a historical ethnography for the town; and archaeological excavations of household refuse excavated from three class-based neighborhoods (an artifact database is attached to this document in CD format). Issues surrounding power and agency are explored in regard to three heuristic categories of power. In the first category, the company imposed a system of structural, class-based power that is most visible in hierarchical differences in pay and housing, as well as consumer behavior. A second category, bio-power, addresses disciplinary activities surrounding health and the human body. The class system extended to discrepancies in the company's regulation of employee health, as observed in medicinal artifacts, disposal patterns of industrial waste, incidence of intestinal parasites, and unequal access to healthcare. In addition, landscape analysis shows how the built environment served as a disciplinary technology to reinforce hegemonic and naturalized class divisions, to regenerate these divisions through symbolic violence and workers' daily practices, and to impose self-regulation. The third ensemble of power relations is pluralistic, heterarcical, and determined by personal identity (e.g., consumer behavior and gender). Individuals drew upon non-economic capital to bolster social status and express identity apart from the corporate hierarchy. This research explores the social impacts of our industrial heritage and the potential repercussions of industrialization today.

Although the patent systems of the United States and Europe have become continuously more similar their underlying legal philosophy continues to be different. This study examines how the two patent philosophies emerged out of different social situations and why and how patent systems can develop similar formal arrangements without experiencing a similar harmonization of underlying philosophy. As patent laws are historically unique to western culture it provides a lens through which to observe its relative social appreciation of industry, technology, commerce, and the role of the law. This study argues that the two separate 'patent philosophies' emerged as results of unique historical situations and that the reason as to why they have been able to maintain their distinct natures is that a similar ideological pressure has not been present since. The patent law of the United States, which is based on an 'inventor philosophy', was the product of the ideological currents of the movement toward American independence. This philosophy is friendly to inventors and entrust them with all responsibility over their inventions. Its individualistic and democratic character resonated well with the country's anti-colonial and anti-monarchical political campaign. A similar ideological pressure to revise fundamental opinions on technology and law has not emerged since. Virtually all European nations are today part of the European Patent Organization which administers the world's only true regional patent office. This European system is based on an 'invention philosophy' which was designed in the late 19th century by German industrialists. This philosophy is anti-monopoly and sees the State as a guardian of the public benefits which arise from technological novelties. Due to German industrial efficiency, it was used to model European patent law. Although both philosophies have proved viable, the case of patent law suggests that the role of legal philosophy must be reduced. Apart from being crucial in the creation of a new legal system, this study argues for the need to drastically reconsider the relationship between substantive and formal law. Both patent philosophies have consistently lost importance over time to the point where they today support two formally very similar systems.

Socially produced risks – ranging from financial crises to climate change – are of fundamental importance to contemporary economic, political, and social life. Given the central importance of these risks, the development of frameworks that analyze the relation between risk, power, and inequality is a key task for sociology. Ulrich Beck’s theory of risk society is a leading and powerful framework for analyzing the growing social production and distribution of risk, but it has fundamental problems in its understanding of the relation between risk and class. Beck has argued that class relations will be dissolved due to the increasingly equal and catastrophic nature of risks, while, in response, his critics have shown that increasing risk does not undermine class. This thesis explores the important, but as yet unasked, question: if class does continue to be a central factor, will it become even more important due to the changes associated with risk society? In pursuing this question, this study shows how the theory of risk society has conceptual resources and explanatory implications that both Beck and his critics have misapprehended. Firstly, it is argued that the processes associated with risk society tend to exacerbate class inequalities rather than simply dissolving or reproducing them. Secondly, it its argued that the theory of risk society is not antithetical to class analysis, but can actually make an important contribution to theorizing the dynamics of existing class relations. By analyzing how the distribution of environmental bads and the social production and distribution of financial risk tend to intensify class inequalities, this thesis substantiates this re-theorization of risk society and class. It thereby makes a fundamental intervention into contemporary understandings of the relation between risk, inequality, and power in the twenty-first century. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-26 11:44:32.979

The work submitted for examination consists of ten items, with the key sole-authored components comprising a book chapter (Winn, 2012) and four peer-reviewed journal articles (Winn, 2013; 2014; 2015a; 2015b). Other, joint-authored work is intended to be supplementary and to provide further evidence of the two persistent themes of inquiry which my work has been concerned with over the last six years: the role and character of labour and property in higher education, or rather, ‘academic labour’ and the ‘academic commons’. Six of the ten publications discuss these themes through a critique of the role of technology in higher education, in particular the way networked technology forms the practical, ideological and legal premise for the idea and forms of ‘openness’ in higher education. Throughout my work, I treat ‘technology’ as a reified and fetishized concept which masks the more fundamental categories of labour, value and the commodity-form that are concealed in the idea and form of the ‘public university’. I start from the observation that advocates of ‘open education’ tend to envision an alternative form of higher education that is based on a novel form of academic commons but neglect to go further and critically consider the underlying form of academic labour. As such, the product is set free but not the producer. In response, through my publications I develop the theoretical basis for an alternative social and institutional form of co-operative higher education; one in which openness is constituted through a categorial critique aimed at the existing commodity-form of knowledge production.

This thesis is about using rather than applying Norbert Elias’s conceptual ideas, and its analytical procedure employs a ‘fair play’ approach to theorists and theory. This is put to use regarding British independent funeral firms by conceiving these as a figuration developing over the long-term, and exploring the accounts of funeral directors placed in dialogue with Elias’s ideas. The thesis examines how the key Eliasian concepts of figuration, sociogenesis, habitus and de/civilising processes play out in context, including over-time developments within the British funeral industry. Its focus is ‘thinking with Elias’ about such matters in relation to the everyday working practices of independent funeral directors. Chapter One introduces Elias’s key conceptual ideas. In beginning its ‘fair play’ analysis it discusses criticisms, debates and uses of his work and explores the substantive literature on death, funerals and the British funeral industry. Building on this, Chapter Two considers analytically the process of methodologically trying out potential approaches to thinking with Elias around one of his core ideas, figuration. Departing from Elias’s retrospective approach, it chases the independent funeral firm figuration as it unfolds in the present. Using figuration in thinking with Elias sets the stage for further analytical use of Eliasian concepts in subsequent chapters. Chapter Three explores how sociogenesis works by examining intersections and departures between the funeral directors’ accounts and the Eliasian view of long-term development. Regarding sociogenesis, the ‘actual’ processes of death-related social change were not of central interest to the funeral directors, who were more concerned with ensuring their firms’ persistence. Chapter Four engages with Elias’s ideas about habitus and the we-identities of the independent directors, shared belief and behaviour traditions within and between firms and the directors, and also sources of conflict. Core to this is the emphasis on traditions, although these are present-time ‘invented’ around the priority of remaining in business. Chapter Five presents Elias’s theory of the de/civilising process as his ‘bigger picture’ of social change, and its analysis engages and contrasts this with the independent funeral directors’ accounts of the bigger picture in discussing perceived trends. They respond to changes as these are unfolding, and explain over-time matters of stasis and change as they experience them in ways that challenge Eliasian thinking. Chapter Six discusses the main contributions of the thesis. In using theory and thinking with Elias rather than against him, I have aimed to be a fair player in doing sociology. First, my thesis recognises the importance of context and that how concepts play out in ‘real’ life will vary significantly. Second, in adopting a fair play approach, the thesis provides a detailed empirical example of how to evaluate theorists on their own terms by following in their suggestions and engaging with their ideas in contextual and reflexive ways. It has neither replicated nor reproduced an Eliasian study, but instead demonstrated how actually using it in a context will play out. Third, the thesis has used the Eliasian key concepts of figuration, sociogenesis, habitus and de/civilising in a present-day setting so as to examine how these unfold in the present and can be explored through people’s accounts. Fourth, it analyses the accounts of the independent funeral directors in a fair play way and establishes that their ideas work as theory, as exploring the dialogue between Elias and the funeral directors has shown. Overall, the thesis is a reply to Elias’s call for sociologists to think for themselves, engage with and expand upon ideas and settings to hand, and to pursue the actual processes at work in society.