Poster exhibited at GPSC Student Showcase, February 24th, 2016, University of Arizona.

New institutionalism in sociology addresses how institutional pressure influences organisational behaviour. Its particular impact on “new economic sociology” is to establish a counter perspective to neo-classical economics by criticising the rational actor model of behaviour and emphasising cultural and cognitive references for business actions. Recent developments in new institutionalism increasingly focus on researching national and international contexts, which demonstrate a keen interest in non-local environments. Micro sociological research accordingly receives limited attention and the meaning of locality for production strategy in relation to markets is largely neglected. This thesis presents evidence from the kitchen-furniture industry of East Westphalia and Lippe (EWL) in Germany that, in an increasingly globalised economic system, local institutional contexts continue to influence business behaviour significantly. The thesis demonstrates the importance of locality for production organisation and business strategy in this case. The research aims to contribute to new institutionalist theory by establishing the relevance of “localness” and to encourage research to re-engage in meso-analysis on the sub-national level. The analysis presents results from a qualitative case study, which encompasses in-depth interviews, as well as results derived from contextual analysis of the industry’s structure and performance and statistical indicators provided by local institutions. The study tries to understand why about 70% of German produced kitchens, and about every fourth kitchen in Europe, originates from EWL. The findings demonstrate that managers’ evaluations of local production networks, regional cultural norms and values, shape managerial cognitive frameworks, which influence business behaviour significantly and can create meaning for locality of production sites.

This thesis explores the disciplinary aspects of formal financial institutions, and in particular banks, upon population behavior. To that end, the political significance of banks is first traced throughout the European and American history of governmental concerns around the notion of financial inclusion, the proportion of the population embedded in the formal financial sector. Over the course of two centuries, governmental interests congeal in the importance of distributing formal, interested, institutional debts. Second, the more specific effects of financial inclusion are looked at in detail through the lens of the microfinance industry around the world, with a case study in contemporary Egypt-using both surveys and qualitative interviews. The main effect of these disciplinary institutions lies in their capacity to convert strong social ties into weaker ties, and thus to guarantee forms of sociability that are easier to govern for liberal, market-oriented state and business actors. Against modernization theory, banks are thus identified as the twin pillars of both civil society and the marketplace.

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Agricultural Economics / Allen M. Featherstone / A solidarity nuanced economy has the potential to be an antagonist to inequality and poverty. Solidaric features in an economy can serve development initiatives in that solidarity fosters cooperation and promotes self-help. Exchange is one of the most ubiquitous of all human behaviors. A principle of exchange is that both parties, either individuals or groups, must derive greater benefit than sacrifice for the exchange to occur. Exchange enhances an economic agent’s utility. Solidarity informs utility; thus, solidarity impacts exchange. Solidarity can be tersely defined as “social cooperation.” Utility maximization unwrought is based on the premise of self-regarding behavior. Solidarity, on the other hand, is other-regarding behavior. These two elements in exchange need not be in discord; quite the opposite, they act in concord. Solidarity is articulated as being distinct from large group collective action. Collective action can incorporate features of revenge and punishment. Solidarity, as a specialized form of collective action, is strictly associated with cooperation and charity. Solidarity is a process of other-regarding mutual exchange. The inescapability of living out solidarity is described and the case is presented that solidarity is of individual initiative. Because incentives (dis-incentives) are felt at the individual level, it is here that other-regarding behavior (i.e., solidarity) is incubated. The Inequality Predicament suggests that economic inequality is the most pressing issue hindering development (United Nations, 2005). The inequality phenomenon calls for more attention to the role of economic solidarity. The inequality predicament may not be so much a matter of wealth inequality as it is inequality of access to resources and markets. Solidarity is an implement of engagement in gaining access to markets. Few studies in collective action literature are addressing how rural households are affected by changes in property rights and how land policies impact incentives to engage in solidarity. Land rights can only be properly understood in the context of their development. The uniqueness of land rights is informed by past and present culture. This dissertation presents a conceptual framework for examining the relationship between solidarity (i.e., cooperation) and access to land markets. The focus of this study is on the interplay between property rights and solidaric utility decisions of individuals or small groups. The arena of research is land fragmentation and agricultural development in the Republic of Moldova.

In this Thesis, I investigate the social meaning of child support payments for members of separated families. Drawing on 21 interviews with members of separated families, I explore how payments from one parent to another shape family relationships. I focus on three main topics: how child support payments are different from other forms of money in the ways that they are discussed, earmarked and spent; what child support payments reveal about cultural expectations of motherhood and fatherhood; and how respondents regard the fairness and efficacy of state child support policy. I argue that child support payments reinforce class and gender inequality. Child support reifies mothers’ disproportionate responsibility for children and uneven child support enforcement further subjects the poor to the coercive power of the state. / text

Thesis advisor: Juliet B. Schor / In this dissertation, I study dynamics of inequality in three post-bureaucratic organizations: a makerspace and two on-demand labor platforms for couriers. I focus on three aspects of post-bureaucracy: 1) Identity work and social clorure. 2) Dynamics of status and distinction making. 3) Technology as an alternative to rational-bureaucratic and value-rational organizations, and the experience of technologically organized work. Collectively, these cases explore how institutional orders are created, reproduced, and transformed in organizations that reject interpersonal authority relationships. As a social technology for coordinating activity, bureaucracies rely upon formalized rules, responsibilities, and impersonal authority relationships. In a completely rationalized bureaucracy, coordination is achieved through rigid adherence to codified roles and procedures, as well as deference to designated superiors within a bureaucratic hierarchy. Post-bureaucratic organizations, by contrast, eschew formalized interpersonal authority relationships - typically emphasizing normative and technical controls. For example, many high-tech organizations group workers into teams that negotiate and enforce norms. Material technology may also be used by organizations as a method to coordinate and manage workers, as in the case of on-demand labor platforms that direct workers via software technology. Like conventional bureaucracies, post-bureaucratic organizations are susceptible to a variety of pathologies. Two tendencies, however, are particularly salient: anomie and reification. Technical control involves reifying aspects of an institutional order that otherwise would be interactively negotiated and enforced. One risk in reifying an institutional order is that it will be incapable of responding to changes in the environment. In contrast to the problem of an institutional order that is too stable, anomie is a quality of normlessness and an ambiguous institutional order. Previous research suggests commitment forms of organizing are susceptible to anomic tendencies. In such weakly institutionalized environments where norms are open for negotiation, there can be considerable competition between individuals over how to define norms and practices. These individual status competitions may come at the expense of collective goals, in addition to being an avenue by which race, gender, and class inequalities are produced and reproduced. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Thesis (S.M. in Management Research)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-28). / Recent research on immigrant naming demonstrates a market tendency towards "acculturative conservatism," whereby immigrants select given names for their children that were highly popular in an earlier generation of the native population. Acculturative conservatism can potentially be explained as an attempt to address immigrants' feelings of insecurity by favoring cultural practices that most clearly convey the national identity. However, a more straightforward interpretation is that immigrants lack the necessary cultural capital to know which cultural practices are fashionable. In this paper, we first show that acculturative conservatism is a significant social force by examining how it lowered the rate of change in the fashion of given names between 1880 and 1920 in the United States. Second, we develop a novel analytic strategy to distinguish the effects of a lack of security and those of a lack of cultural capital. Our data include the English names of the early male children of Jewish immigrants who immigrated to America between 1880 and 1920, and the male names of the mainstream in the same period. By applying our analytic strategy, we find that Jewish immigrants tend to select among the formerly popular English names by favoring those whose popularity was still rising and to avoid those that were declining in the native population. This suggests that Jewish immigrants had considerable knowledge of the latest fashions, but deliberately chose older names that would convey their national identity more strongly and thereby address their feelings of insecurity. / by Jiayin Zhang. / S.M.in Management Research

This dissertation studies the relationship between China¡¦s socio-culture and its financial system from the perspective of economic sociology. After denouncing the Marx-Lenin-Mao Ideology Deng Xiaoping adopted the ¡§Reform and Open Door¡¨ policy with an emphasis on the economic development as the supreme objective. As a result, the Chinese economy has grown at a speed faster than ever. Chinese are wealthier year after year and the social structure is much changed. The people are differentiated in its social classification. The richer middle class is consequently emerged and its proportion among population is increasing. Numerous labor-class and peasant are getting relatively poorer. Currently the Hu-Wen regime considers the domestic stability the first goal and the foreign exchange rate is not adjusted upward as much as expected. My research shows that the China¡¦s financial system and the policy-decision making obliviously are shaped by the influence of the China¡¦s socio-culture. In order to create the value of social justice, the function of People¡¦s Bank (the Central Bank) of China and four other specialized banks such as Chinese Construction Bank are thoroughly separated. Hu Jintao emphasized his governance ¡§for the people¡¨ to create ¡§social harmony¡¨ as his administration motto. This is a policy change in priority from efficiency only, to equity as well: a reflection from one extreme towards the middle-of-the-road in accordance with Confucianism. Key words: social culture, financial system, well-off society, society harmony

This dissertation investigates patterns of financial exchange in Ukrainian couples. While previous studies of money management focus on the physical organization of money in the home—e.g. pooled, independent, partially pooled—I focus on the meaning of money in exchange and explore how patterns of exchange become legitimized in the home. Drawing on data from 110 in-depth interviews with married and cohabiting individuals, I advance a theory of gendered money and demonstrate how couples give special symbolic meaning to men’s money in domestic exchanges. Unlike earlier perspectives on gender and money such as resource theories and gender performance, this framework acknowledges money as a prop and tool that couples use to construct gender boundaries and signal normalcy in the marital relationship. Integrating concepts from economic sociology with Hochschild’s insights on the symbolism of domestic labor, I find that Ukrainians use money as a token and symbol of value, not as a commodity with which to obtain desired outcomes. By spending men’s money on "necessary" items and avoiding accessing women’s money in the household, couples construct men’s money as both visible and valuable while rendering women’s money non-fungible. Partners adopt the financial practices that feel comfortable and gender-appropriate, even when women earn more than their husbands. Building on this framework of gendered money, I problematize the concept of a gender "ideology" by arguing that gender beliefs do not always drive financial practices in ways anticipated by gender scholars. Using Swidler's toolkit theory of culture to better understand the duality of gender beliefs and gender structures, I argue that not all gender beliefs can be conceptualized as "ideological." I explore how many of my respondents were inconsistent in the ways they discussed gender and fairness in the home. These inconsistencies provide evidence that individuals can be highly flexible in the ways they legitimize their domestic exchanges. This flexibility creates dilemmas for individuals who desire to change their strategies of action over time. Specifically, I give examples of women’s thwarted desires—respondents who wanted to align their practices with their beliefs but could not due to the lack of cooperation from their partner. I conclude that practices need not always match articulated beliefs; moreover, particular patterns of exchange are culturally entrenched and difficult to displace. Lastly, I analyze how money and labor are symbolically exchanged in the home. I argue that power asymmetries occur when one partner must exert more labor to engage in an otherwise “equal” exchange with their partner.