<p> Roman Catholic immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced multiple issues as they attempted to acculturate into their new nation. Distrusted by Protestant-Americans for both their religion and their ethnicity, they were further burdened by the biases of their own church leadership. The Catholic leadership in the United States, comprised of earlier-arrived ethnic groups like Irish and Germans, found the Catholicism of the new arrivals from Europe and Mexico to be inferior to the American style. American bishops dismissed the rural-based spirituality of the immigrants, with its reliance on community festivals and home-based religion, as "superstition" and initially looked to transform the faith of the immigrants to more closely align with the stoic, officious model of the U.S. church. Over time, however, the bishops, with guidance from the Vatican, began to sanction the formation of separate "ethnic" parishes where the immigrants could worship in their native languages, thereby both keeping them in the church and facilitating their adjustment to becoming "Americans."</p><p> Additionally, immigrants to the western frontier helped transform the Catholicism of the region, since the U.S. church had only preceded their arrival by a few decades. Catholicism had been a major presence in the region for centuries due to Spanish exploration and settlement, but American oversight of the area had only been in place since 1848. Thus, the Catholic immigrants were able to establish roots alongside the American church and leave their imprint on frontier Catholicism. As the city of Pueblo, Colorado industrialized in the 1870s and 1880s large numbers of immigrant laborers were drawn to the city's steelworks and smelters. Pueblo's position on the borderlands established its reputation as a multicultural melting pot, and the Pueblo church ultimately incorporated many of the religious practices of the immigrants while at the same time facilitating their acculturation to American society through its schools, orphanages, and social-service organizations. The story of Pueblo's Catholic immigrants and their formation of a new ethnic identity is a microcosm of the American immigrant experience.</p>

<p> This mixed-methods study examined the impact of forming a family council on family owners' knowledge, commitment, and stewardship within a single family business. Data were gathered from six of the eight owners using survey and dialogue methods. The study provided evidence that family council interventions can indeed provide opportunities for family members to address unresolved family tensions and empower owners to work together productively. The intervention (a) helped members establish a strong foundation for future operation of the family council, (b) engendered greater family member engagement and stewardship, (c) created conditions for acknowledging and discussing family strengths and tensions, and (d) motivated members to take initiative moving forward. Longitudinal mixed-methods research using larger samples of multiple companies and larger ownership groups with varied levels of participation are recommended to extend these findings.</p>

<p> Despite increased awareness of the link between teamwork and medical errors, and increased development of interventions aimed at improving team performance, the incidence of preventable errors in hospitals, and in the surgical environment particularly, remains high. Absent from interdisciplinary team development efforts is empirical evidence informed by the voices of surgical team members specific to their day- to- day experiences of teamwork. For this reason, a case study of interdisciplinary teamwork among Orthopedic Surgery team members was conducted from June to December 2013 to: (a) discover how teamwork behaviors are enacted in the surgical environment to affect the incidence of preventable surgical errors; and (b) understand the experience of teamwork from the perspective of surgical team members.</p><p> The case study data included 37 one-on-one interviews with Orthopedic Surgery team members (including two supervisors), and observations by the researcher guided by the Observational Teamwork Assessment for Surgery (OTAS) instrument. This study finds that while mindfulness is a prerequisite to safety behaviors that are found in the surgical setting, there is a dynamic interplay between processes of collective mindfulness and traditional teamwork behaviors wherein one continuously informs, shapes, and reinforces the other. Noting contributions of the this study to practice, the opportunity exists to expand the present inquiry beyond Orthopedic Surgery to include other surgical specialties as well as non-surgical practices within the hospital and clinic environments.</p>

<p> While South Korea is ranked high in education, economies and technological development, the level of South Koreans' happiness has not grown simultaneously. This fact contradicts the common sense that improvements in living standards, such as income or education, lead to gains in happiness or individual wellbeing. In order to examine the phenomenon of decreasing perceived individual wellbeing in light of increasing income levels, I analyze the relationship between societal expectations/pressure and happiness in South Korea, using data from the World Value survey conducted in 2010. The uniquely high concentration on human capital in South Korea has played a major factor for extreme competitiveness. Since the financial crisis in 1997, the competitive job market has produced few job opportunities, which has caused a high level of social pressure. The major finding of this study is that the impact of societal expectations on unhappiness increases as people get older and it is more powerful among people of lower income. Also, social pressure has a greater negative effect on happiness for females than males in South Korea. Even when controlling for independent variables, including job security, wages, and high living costs, I show social pressure to have a first order impact on perceived well-being among Korean citizens. From a policy perspective, low levels of happiness can ultimately cause social instability and loss of human capital. Expected policy implications are increasing the number of college entrance exams and fostering work life balance initiatives. In this sense, the findings of this paper can serve as a guideline for the South Korean government not only to improve the overall economic productivity of South Korean society, but also enhance the quality of life along important societal dimensions.</p>

<p> This is an empirical study of ecological worldviews and action logics of global sustainability leaders. Although a body of research has emerged in recent years focused on corporate sustainability practices at the organizational level, the literature has paid less attention to corporate sustainability at the individual level. As a result, little is known about the deeper psychological motivations of sustainability leaders and how these motivations may influence their behavior and effectiveness as change agents. </p><p> This study was based on theoretical insights from several social science disciplines including ecopsychology, integral ecology, environmental sociology, and developmental psychology. Drawing on interviews with 65 leaders in more than 50 multinational corporations, NGOs, and consultancies, the study presents three major propositions that illuminate specific ways that ecological worldviews and action logics are developed and expressed by sustainability leaders. Specific findings include five experiences that shape ecological worldviews over the lifespan and six ways that post-conventional action logics are expressed by sustainability leaders. Findings also include how the complexity of sustainability is driving highly collaborative approaches to leadership. Insights from this research can be integrated into leadership development programs in a wide range of public and private institutions and will be of interest to a range of sustainability scholars, social science researchers, sustainability executives, and social entrepreneurs. </p><p> Key Words: Sustainability leader, ecological worldviews, action logics, ecopsychology, developmental theory, new ecological paradigm, ecological self, corporate sustainability.</p>

<p> I examine the effect of poverty on violent crime in the United States during the years between 2000 and 2012. My analysis contributes to the literature by utilizing state-level poverty rates as the main variable of interest, and directly studying its effect on violent crime rates. I use panel data and a group (state) and time fixed effects estimation method in the study. The results confirm prior research that concludes that poverty does not have a significant effect on violent crime.</p>

<p> The purpose of the study was to examine what role social control, in the context of family, school, and community, played in the participants' decision to join gangs in their adolescent years. The study examined the lives of four male ex-gang members over the age of 18, with extensive criminal records and poor academic histories. Participants were chosen from a Stockton reentry facility where ex-offenders were in the process of improving their lives by breaking the chains of street gang involvement, criminality, and incarceration. </p><p> The findings revealed that social control administered by family, school, law enforcement, and community all played a significant role in shaping each participant's decision to join his prospective gang in adolescence. The researcher found that while the family life of the participants was the prime mover in terms of a nudge toward gang life, school was also a place where they were constantly devalued, in large part because educators did not understand them, and the teachers arrived to their classrooms ill equipped for the realities of teaching in schools located in violence-ridden neighborhoods where the youth suffered morbid and multiple exposure to trauma. In fact, the teachers and law enforcement's inept ways of addressing the participant's maladaptive behaviors&mdash;with a propensity for handling all issues with punitive measures&mdash;ended up creating incentives for the participants to join a gang.</p>

<p> Human beings organize and navigate their experience of everyday life and their interactions with others through the creation, presentation, and representation of myths. This dissertation expands the definition of myth beyond stories of gods and humans to include social narratives used by groups and individuals to contextualize and define everyday situations. As such, they perform vital social functions. These include providing common narratives that have the power to bind otherwise independent beings into more or less coherent collectives capable of joint actions, as well as reducing feelings of individual isolation and existential anxiety by narratively making sense out of the violence, unpredictability, and discontinuity that accompany life. Myths are constructed narratives that masquerade as common sense; they appear to have a supernatural or supra-human basis or origin. Their created nature is collectively, and often unconsciously, denied by those who adhere to them. </p><p> This dissertation outlines an approach to mythology grounded in sociological principles as an alternative to the more familiar approaches of the humanities, religious studies, or psychology. Synthesizing principles drawn from the sociological schools of social constructionism and symbolic interactionism, this dissertation proposes that humans, as users of complex, symbolic language, necessarily experience the world through a matrix of narratives both written and unwritten. But this approach is not simply social constructionism or symbolic interactionism with a mythological gloss. Instead, it serves as a bridge between the macro view of social constructionism and the micro view of symbolic interactionism. </p><p> This dissertation treats myths not as currencies of belief, but rather as currencies of behavior and consequence. For illustration, three examples from the modern world are presented: 1) How same-sex inclusion challenges traditionalist myths of marriage; 2) How myths of divine providence and expansionism have influenced American domestic and foreign policy from the nation's inception to the present; and 3) The role that the propagandizing of engrained cultural myths and stereotypes played during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Ethical and moral implications of human-constructed myths are also considered.</p>

<p>Despite vast literature examining causes of terrorism, domestic terrorism has only recently begun to be studied as an entity unto itself. It has long been postulated that a country&rsquo;s wealth influences its domestic terrorism rates but very little research has backed that claim. Preliminary data suggests that there may be important differences between what leads to domestic attacks conducted by terrorist organizations and attacks conducted by people acting alone. The current study hypothesizes that the relationship between a country&rsquo;s wealth, as measured by GDP per capita, and its domestic terrorism rate may be different for lone-wolf terrorism than for group-affiliated terrorism. Results support this hypothesis but not in the expected way; per-capita GDP appears to have a non-linear relationship with lone-wolf terrorism and a linear relationship with group-affiliated terrorism. The data were highly sensitive to changes in model specification so caution must be taken when drawing conclusions based on these findings. Although these results are preliminary, they should encourage future researchers to examine the differences between lone-wolf and group-affiliated domestic terrorism to best understand and prevent both phenomena. </p>

<p> As new employees come into their new workplaces, they engage in behaviors that make it easy for them to fit in with the already-established environment. Spanning across various industries, both Federal and private sector, 10 participants indicated that they believed their childhood experiences were the source of their socialization process development. Despite previous research, this research concluded that organizational socialization tactics had no real bearing on whether or not a newcomer perceived themselves to be successful in their socialization process. Results indicated that the two most important factors of a successful socialization was that the newcomers understood their jobs, were able to reduce their level of uncertainty through asking questions and seeking feedback, and establishing relationships with their co-workers.</p>