Does learning English help undocumented Mexican transmigrants get better jobs in the United States? In this transborder ethnography, I worked with three households of undocumented people in Tucson, Arizona and traveled to their hometowns in Mexico, to better understand the context of their migration. For these migrants, speaking English did not lead to better jobs. Some employers tried to prevent them from learning English. Others were fired for using English to complain about unpaid wages. One person who was fired was replaced by a monolingual Spanish speaker. Many Americans think that all immigrants must learn English, and this discourse is common, both in the political and educational arenas. However, this study demonstrates that alongside this social discourse, there is a parallel economic discourse, urging the production of docile workers. Docility means not speaking English. Despite these findings, the discourse of "learning English in order to find better work" is a persistent one among the undocumented. I traced its origins and found that it begins shortly after a migrant arrives in the U.S. If English did not lead to better jobs, why did migrants learn it? For some people, it was because English helped them perform the identity of a U.S. citizen. They used self-consciously constructed semiotic and linguistic performances to appear Chicano/a, and these performances lessened their anxiety about deportation. For others, English was a conflicted symbol. Although it was a symbol of wealth, and therefore desirable, using it in public could easily reveal one's legal status to the wrong interlocutor. There are significant obstacles to the use of English among undocumented Mexican transmigrants, and language use is essential for language mastery. This study encourages those who teach English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) to understand the social structures that impact their students' language use. With implications for education, border, and immigration policy, this study sheds light on the lived experiences of undocumented migrants and brings language and language use into conversations about globalization. Understanding transmigrants' experiences and ideologies offers a new lens to theorizing social inequality and human agency, and ultimately, to creating more humane borders.

This study utilizes a multi-method approach to analyzing the experience of working class and lower class women's experience in graduate school. A quantitative analysis is used to determine the number of working class and lower class females in graduate school using parents' education as a proxy. Most first-generation females in graduate school were found in Research I universities in the field of Education. A qualitative analysis includes semi-structured interviews of 34 women from two Research I institutions in the Southwest in the fields of Education, Psychology, Health Sciences and Biology. Data consists of the women's definitions of social class, values and experiences as well as their perceptions of graduate school culture and their mobility process during their graduate school experience. The women in this study revealed a contemporary definition of social class unlike academic Marxist and other sociological definitions. Their experiences of graduate student culture reveal a direct conflict with their social class values. Finally, their mobility experience in graduate school reveals contradictory feelings of pride and hiding their accomplishments from family.

Over the last fifty years, literacy and its study have moved considerably beyond the ability solely to read and write; it may be now viewed as a centrally mediating factor to interpret the signs engraved into the texts of our experiences and the fulcrum to participate more fully in our public and our private worlds. Among these realms of literacy, the world of work has borne witness to incredible changes in the form and content of professional occupation. With growth in global political, economic and technological interdependency, transfer of knowledge and professionals across borders accelerates and becomes more prevalent. Addressing the professional domains of literacy practices, this is a descriptive study designed to investigate how professionals experience and use literacy, be they literacy skills (technical knowledge or expertise) or literate behaviors (practical knowledge or know how) in transnational contexts of practice. Using an ethnographic methodology and multimethod strategies (informant interviews with professional stakeholders from the regulated, globalized professions in the United States in construction and design, business and finance, allied health, and technology and engineering; published professional development international training program curriculum review; and focus group sessions with accreditation, licensing and certifying body officials addressing the need for guidelines for professionals in transnational practice) data gathering and analysis are focused on input from quality assurance authorities, faculty from professional schools, multinational corporate human resource executives, and the practitioners themselves. In the broadest sense, the study's purpose is to map the relevant dimensions of literacy in transnational professional practice in the regulatory, cultural, linguistic, technological and locational realities of another country. The results of this study indicate that across the affinity groupings mentioned above, professionals in transnational contexts of practice operate within at least five categories of literacy engagement: resources, people, information, systems, technology, with literacy skills and literate behaviors being directed principally toward working with people and within systems overseas. An array of literacy insights are also provided, drawn from thematic congruencies across the three data sets.

This research examines the extent to which U.S.-Mexican households invest in the training or education of their female members as an economic strategy in Nogales, Arizona. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the study aimed at three objectives. One objective was to isolate those factors that influence the household's ability or willingness to invest in education as a strategy in order to increase its economic stability. These factors were observed operating at two levels. At the level of labor market structure are those factors that precondition a household's ability to take the risks associated with long-term investments, such as education. At the household level, were factors that constituted sets of socially defined practices affecting the nature of an individual's productive and reproductive labor. The second objective was to analyze the interrelationship of those factors in an attempt to define comparative models of social interaction that explain how educational goals are negotiated. A final objective was to document the experiences and histories of Mexican-origin women, who in negotiating multiple roles, represent an interface between the labor markets and households; and through this information, offer new interpretations and solutions to the problem of their under-education in a region of global transformation. The results of the study indicate that investment in women's education is significantly increased with household stability. In addition, the level of investment for education of household members is raised with her increased educational attainment. It is argued that social exchange mechanisms can be used to improve the rate of education acquisition for women, and by so doing, empower the household economically.

The purpose of this research is to illuminate the role of the chief academic officer at research universities. First, it identities the activities of provosts as a collective---as a group of similarly situated executive managers who interact with one another on a regular basis. Next, it examines the careers of chief academic officers, including their transition into administration and their professional relations with presidents, deans, and faculty. Further, it identifies and analyzes the spoken agendas of the provosts, including the management mechanisms they employ and the directions they pursue. Fundamentally, it asks, "What is the role of chief academic officers at research universities, and where are they taking their institutions?" The investigation is a multiple case study of twenty AAU research university provosts and five collective bodies through which they meet and interact. The study employs qualitative research methods including participant-observation, direct personal interviews, and document analysis. The data gathered in the study is analyzed through the frameworks provided by several organizational and sociological theories as applied to leadership and management in higher educational organizations. Chief Academic Officers at research universities are revealed in this study to be interconnected executive managers who work individually and collectively to advance the cause of research universities and to establish the directions pursued on the campuses. At once complex and contradictory, the role of the research university provost begins with reluctant acceptance of administrative responsibilities and progresses through the acquisition of new knowledge and skills to the utilization of powerful management mechanisms and professional contacts. Ultimately, the provost draws upon these skills, mechanisms, and contacts to advocate for the advancement of research universities generally and to reshape the campuses individually in response to the competitive marketplace. As they do so, the activities of deans and faculty are redirected to projects that benefit the institutions through the attraction of external resources.

<p> Everything we touch, sit on, use and lean against is designed. Design disciplines (e.g. architecture, landscape architecture, city/urban planning, interior design and industrial design) play an extremely significant role in shaping the man-made environment we live in. They help to populate it with cars, furniture, buildings, clothes, cell phones, and countless other artifacts and also play a significant role in producing innovations that drive successful companies in a challenging and fiercely competitive global market. Perhaps more importantly, the consumption and use of designed goods, spaces, and services produce, reproduce, and mediate our very identities and culture. </p><p> Despite their cultural, economic, and political significance, design professions are understudied in sociology. In sociology, the few available case studies of design professions emphasize professional practice and tend not to study the higher education system, where professional designers are produced. Moreover, there are no studies in sociology that examine academic design disciplines comparatively. </p><p> This dissertation undertakes a quantitative, macro-comparative study of the institutionalization and growth of design disciplines in the US during the past 26 years, 1984-2010, using a unique longitudinal dataset. Through analysis of the intra- and extra-institutional resources and conditions that promote the growth of design disciplines and comparing their growth to those of art and engineering, this study provides valuable insights to policymakers and administrators who seek to make meaningful interventions within the academy and will advance sociological understanding of the changing organization of academic knowledge.</p>

<p>The United States is an increasingly diverse society. The recent Supreme Court hearings on Affirmative Action have reiterated the need to study the impacts of changing demographics on organizations. Race-based policymaking fundamentally rests on a "diversity is good for the organization" ideology, yet there is relatively little research that directly measures the institutional effects of racial/ethnic diversity. Diversity within organizations (also known as structural diversity or organizational heterogeneity) is overdue for a broader range of scholarly attention. Building on an organizational demography framework, this study investigates whether or not there are relationships between diversity and outcomes at higher education institutions (HEIs) nationwide. It adopts a new theoretical approach, the &ldquo;Critical Mass in Context&rdquo; perspective, which includes not only demographic factors, but culturally-related, or <i>contextual</i> factors in estimating the effects of diversity on two organizational outcomes: student retention and the diversity of degree completers. The results of these comparative tests are mixed, and show that the effects of demographic diversity may be <i>either</i> positive or negative (or have no effect), and that these results are highly <i> context dependent</i>. In other words, diversity did not have wholly negative nor positive effects on the outcomes included in this study, and the type of institution played a role in determining these how these results varied. For instance, although student gender and racial/ethnic diversity had negative effects in models that measured student retention rates, faculty gender contributed positively to predicting this outcome. Contextual factors, such as the MSDI 4 (or very high diversity elements in an HEI&rsquo;s mission statement) and an HEI&rsquo;s urban index (or suburban locale) contributed positively. In models that used the racial/ethnic diversity of degree completers as the tested outcome, the race/ethnicity of <i>overall students</i> was the most important (indeed, nearly the only) predictor. So, not only do the research results depend on what <i>types</i> of organizational outcomes are considered, but also in what <i>context</i> and <i> how</i> they are measured. This study therefore adds new levels of understanding to what effects diversity may have on institutions and the importance that culturally related factors may have on these effects. </p>

<p> This study, guided by a Chicana feminist epistemology and Latina/o Critical Theory narrates and contemplates the experiences of people who have decided to take part in collective struggle. It explores the ways 10 Mexican-origin activists and organizers (5 women and 5 men, ages 19 to 60) from Santa Ana, California conceptualize identity, community, space, and grassroots. Within the findings, "alternative educational spaces" is introduced as a concept based in the participants' experiences in spaces that contributed to self-worth and built a sense of collective responsibility that countered institutionalized racism and classism in schools and within city policies. This study highlights the heterogeneity of Mexican-origin peoples and investigates the ways in which the participants' lived experiences as Santa Ana-based activists and organizers contribute to developing histories and community building. </p>

<p> In the face of global economic recession, the competition and collaboration for innovation and future growth among nations has led to discussions of how young people are being prepared to become the next generation of workers and leaders. Although the U.S. has enjoyed a strong presence among the international community since the turn of the century, U.S. scores on international reading assessments and the GCI have dropped over the past decade. National literacy assessment comparisons on the NAEP show that variations exist in economic equity and literacy achievement among the fifty states. </p><p> Multiple Spearman rho calculations were performed in the study to examine the possibility of a correlation between academic achievement and economic health using the PISA OECD country literacy rankings, the NAEP U.S. state literacy rankings, and the GDP per capita from 2009. In doing so, the possibility of a correlation between international and national data was investigated. </p>

<p> This mixed method research investigated the question: What elements do African American charter school parents in a Southern California community identify as important in their children's charter schools? Twenty-three African American families who had enrolled their children in charter schools in a Southern California community responded to a survey. Five respondents were randomly selected for semi-structured interviews. </p><p> The history of African American parents and children in this country has been one of limited access and choice. Early African American educators proposed education as the means by which African Americans could improve their lives and pursue the American dream (Dubois, 1989; Washington, 1901; Woodson, 1933). After centuries of being in traditional public schools the majority of African American children are not being successfully educated (Johnson, 2002; Haycock, 2009). As a result of widespread dissatisfaction with public schools, an increasing number of African American parents are choosing charter schools as an alternative to traditional public schools (Zimmer et al., 2003, 2009). </p><p> The African American families in this study shared the following six elements that influenced their decision to enroll their children in charter schools: academic achievement/ curriculum, parental engagement, quality of teaching, class/school size, safety/ security, and extra activities. Implications from this research and future research are included.</p>