Bureaucracy is being seriously challenged today by other organizational designs because its rigidity is being viewed as a detriment to organizational survival in the hypercompetitive marketplace of global business. Standardization, homogeneity, and hierarchy are not conducive to meeting the changing demands of a turbulent business environment. As a result, new organization forms based on flexibility and adaptibility are gaining prominence in the business literature and in managerial practice. The purpose of this study was to provide an empirically-based examination of how employees are responding to these new organization forms. Three hypotheses were generated concerning the impact of the new organization forms on employee alienation, and the role of ideology as a moderating variable between the new organization forms and alienation. I predicted that employees working in new organization forms with an orientation toward communitarianism would be more alienated than employees who were more inclined toward the ideology of individualism. While my hypotheses were not supported, hindsight suggests an alternative hypothesis for further study: Employees with differing ideological dispositions can both prosper in the postindustrial workplace as long as elements of the traditional economic compact are in place. / Ph. D.

Viktor Shklovsky writes that "the technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." This collection of short fiction capitalizes on that aim, weaving together history and humor with an absurd, biographical style. "Himilco and Other Stories" includes several pieces of constrained fiction in the style of Oulipan authors, but produced with original rules and algorithms. "Zugzwang" results naturally from Donald Barthelme's form, whereas other stories capitalize on a more modern interpretation of the much-used zoomorphic narration. Most are written in the first-person perspective, though the scope and focus of each often speaks to a broad human philosophy. Stories range from the dark pine forests of Maine to ancient Tunisian deserts, and are often told by jaunty, untrustworthy narrators. Taken as a whole these stories lay bare a desperation born from absence and disrepair, fear and adolescence--eight stories that struggle to answer the question, how do we get better?

Abstract Not Prrovided / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The purpose of this study is to use Marxist theory of alienation to explain voting patterns among impoverished Southerners. This research is important in explaining the relationship among alienation, religiosity, politics of opposition, and their impact on voting trends in the southern portion of the United States. I will construct a Marxian model based on the literature available and test it by using data in the General Social Survey of 1998. I will construct a concept of class based on the interaction of alienation and income. I will then test it by running multiple linear regressions to see if the hypothesized relationships of positive correlations exist among class and politics of opposition, apathy, and religion. I will also examine the relationship between religion and politics of opposition. And lastly I will see how all of these factors influence political ideology. / Master of Science

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This project has two aims. First, to provide a comprhensive interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of alienation, beginning with the discussion of alienation in Being and Nothingness and concluding with Critique of Dialectical Reason. I argue that the meaning of alienation throughout these works is the revelation or experience of being an object for another freedom. I argue that this experience is fundamentally an experience of vulnerability, in the sense of the capacity to be wounded. The meaning of alienation in Sartre's philosophy is therefore an experience of vulnerability. Understanding alienation as an experience of vulnerability provides an alternative to the conventional understanding of Sartrean alienation as equivalent to violence and oppression. The second aim of this project is to discuss the way alienation is related to the concepts of violence and oppression. Violence and oppression are understood, by Sartre, in terms of alienation, but alienation itself is not identified with either violence or oppression. I explore Sartre's discussions of violence and oppression in the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics and in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and show through these texts, that alienation consistently refers to the experience of vulnerability, but also, that and this experience is the basis of violent actions and oppressive social relations. Although alienation is not equivalent to violence and oppression, and these concepts must not be confused, violence and oppression must be understood in terms of alienation, according to Sartre's thought. / Philosophy

Yes / In this article I look at the emotional effects of alienation in modern capitalist societies. I begin by considering Marx’s theory of alienation, focusing especially on the alienation between people and between them and the social institutions to which they should be connected. In this way, alienation is understood as a form of estrangement within social relations and I draw out the emotional implications of this, in terms of the relations between people and in the way people feel about their own self. This is enhanced through an understanding of emotions as relational phenomena, a position highly attuned to Marx’s own mode of social analysis. I then illustrate and develop this understanding of alienation and emotion by drawing on the empirical examples of political relations and property relations in the UK, concluding with a discussion of what this tells us about alienation and emotion in contemporary capitalist societies.