<p> This dissertation research is a comprehensive study of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements. It aims to measure changes of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements between 2005 and 2015, to examine the glass ceiling facing Asian Americans, and to evaluate the impacts of the Great Recession and concentration on occupational attainments of Asian Americans. </p><p> Using American Community Survey data, I attempt to answer the following questions. First, how did the patterns of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements changed over a decade between 2005 and 2015? Second, how thick and persistent is the glass ceiling faced by Asian immigrants and U.S.-born Asians? Third, did Asian Americans benefit from geographical and industrial concentration? Fourth, what was the impacts of the Great Recession on Asian Americans? </p><p> The potential contributions of this study are as follows. First and foremost, it provides substantiate empirical findings on glass ceiling facing Asian Americans. Moreover, it clarifies the effects of industrial and geographical concentration on each of the major Asian American groups. It examines how glass ceiling facing Asian Americans being strengthened during the Great Recession. In addition to the theoretical contributions, it also improves research methods through applying synthetic cohort analysis on the study of glass ceiling. </p><p>

<p> This dissertation explores the work of author Jonas Hassen Khemiri and filmmaker Ruben &Ouml;stlund, examining the ways both artists consistently negotiate racial identification and &ldquo;Swedishness&rdquo; in neoliberal economic contexts that are often at odds with other Swedish, exceptionalist discourses of social justice. Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund represent contrasting perspectives and tonalities, yet both artists identify the successful competition for capital as a potentially critical component in achieving access to &ldquo;Swedishness.&rdquo; Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund recognize that race and economics are intertwined in neoliberal arguments, even in Sweden, something their works help to elucidate. The implications of such similar observations from very different artists might go overlooked if discussed in isolation. </p><p> I argue that it is crucial to analyze the negotiation of identity in these works not merely in abstract economic terms, but through their use of a very specific neoliberal economic discourse. In Khemiri&rsquo;s and &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s work, characters-of-color and white characters alike employ and internalize this neoliberal discourse as they compete in a highly racialized Swedish society filled with increasing economic precarity. I will also discuss the ways Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund continually undermine these characters&rsquo; attempts to succeed in this economic competition, and what this may say about the need for the ultimate deconstruction of normative categories of identity. </p><p> Another aim of this dissertation is to explore the ways Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund use queerness as a conceptual strategy to mediate the understanding of race and economics. Nearly every one of &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s films and most of Khemiri&rsquo;s novels and plays feature queerness in the form of homosexual characters, homoeroticism, and/or homosociality. The ubiquity of queerness in their work helps us understand the connection between masculinity and the maintenance of economic privilege. Queering this connection can generate narratives that undermine normative categories and present new ways of thinking about neoliberal ideology. </p><p> However, both Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund frequently undermine the potential positives of what Jack Halberstam calls &ldquo;queer failure&rdquo; and portray what appears as actual failure (Halberstam 2011). Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund leave queer characters or characters who experience queerness in ambiguous positions, in which their queerness either fails to rescue them from toxic hetero-masculinity and/or becomes a symbolic manifestation of the dissolution of stable sense of selfhood amid competing discourses of &ldquo;Swedishness.&rdquo; This dissertation will examine the implications of actual queer failure in relation to neoliberalism in these works. The tension between competitive success or failure becomes even more pointed for a spectator or reader when the competitors are children, potential symbols of Sweden&rsquo;s future. In both artists&rsquo; work, the figure of the child continually represents this tension between competing, social-justice and neoliberal discourses. </p><p> Chapter One examines Khemiri&rsquo;s first two novels, <i>Ett &ouml;ga r&ouml;tt</i> (2003) and <i>Montecore &ndash; en unik tiger</i> (2006), as well as his play <i>Invasion!</i> (2006), exploring the way characters interpret and perform neoliberal economic values and how success and/or failure either jeopardizes or enhances a stable sense of identity. Chapter Two shifts attention to &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s earlier films, focusing on his first widely-released and controversial films <i>De ofrivilliga </i> (2008), <i>Play</i> (2011) and <i>Turist</i> (2014), considering how characters embody or challenge notions of the neoliberal subject of capacity. In &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s films, this struggle with &ldquo;Swedishness&rdquo; is often portrayed as a Nietzschean tension between individual will and social pressure. Chapter Three will compare and contrast &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s and Khemiri&rsquo;s most recent works &ap;<i>[ungef&auml;r lika med]</i> (2014), <i>Allt jag inte minns</i> (2015), and <i>The Square </i> (2017). In this final chapter, I argue that Khemiri&rsquo;s and &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s most recent work demonstrates a departure from their previous plays, novels, and films in two critical ways. First, all three works situate capitalism as the overarching cause of internalized tensions between the individual and society. Second, characters in these later works who embody neoliberal values symbolize the ultimate fractured identity. &Ouml;stlund and Khemiri appear to have followed a similar arc toward representing actual physical and mental embodiment of the effects of economic systems. The dissertation&rsquo;s conclusion suggests additional perspectives on the above works and offers ideas for potential future scholarship.</p><p>

The Independent Theatre's production of Ghosts at the Royalty Theatre, London in 1891 precipitated one of the most famous theatrical quarrels in European theater history. Although many have commented on the extremity of the response from the conservative reviewers, few have remarked on the fact that the majority of these reviews were laden with disease metaphors. Ibsen, in the age of the classic epidemic, comes to be perceived by his English hosts as a contagious entity. The importance of Ghosts , then, lies in its ability to "introduce into the cultural matrix a germ, a foreign body, that cannot be accounted for by its existing codes and practices" (Attridge 55–6). In this dissertation, I examine the theatrical reviews as serious cultural artifacts in order to avoid reducing them to mere entertaining invective. In "Myth Today," Barthes powerfully concludes that "[h]owever paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear" (121). The myth of Ghosts was all about "making public" to such a degree that it quickly overshot its usefulness. Thus I reconsider the myth of Ghosts in order to engage with the distortions of Ibsen, of theater, of disease and of England itself in the early 1890s. Ultimately, I trace the transmission of modern dramatic innovation from Ibsen to Arthur Wing Pinero. Pinero writes a series of plays in the 1890s distinctive both for their seriousness and their seeming similarity to Ibsen. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith establish Pinero as both a popular and a serious writer, something Ibsen could never quite accomplish. Although it is unfair to lay the "improvements" in Pinero's method solely at the feet of Ibsen, it is fair, I think, to demonstrate that without Ibsen's boundary-breaking work, Pinero could never have produced these important plays.

As the capital of Belgium and the headquarters of the European Union, present-day Brussels is a paradoxical city, defined by its multitude of governmental functions and characterized by its cultural and linguistic ambiguity. The city's history is marked by a unique linguistic metamorphosis that in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed Brussels from a historically Dutch-speaking city into a predominantly Francophone urban setting with an official bilingual status. This study presents a comparative and historically situated analysis of the literary representations of Brussels produced in Flemish literature between 1830 and 1932. It concentrates on the changing position of Dutch in Brussels as a result of the frenchification of the city and the creation of a socio-linguistic urban hierarchy, in which French was the language of the ruling elite and Dutch became considered as an unsophisticated idiom, spoken by the lower classes. The investigative focus of this dissertation is on how Flemish authors have responded to these socio-linguistic developments and in what way these events have shaped their narrative construction of the city. The Flemish urban narratives are examined within the context of Brussels' linguistic, political and cultural history and within the framework of a linguistically polarizing Belgium. The chronological scope of this research begins in 1830 with Belgian independence and ends in 1932 when Brussels officially becomes a bilingual city. Its methodological approach is based on notion of the city as representation and on Michel Foucault's concept of 'heterotopia.' Considering these works of urban literature as heterotopian texts that hold up a critical mirror to the existing urban complexity enables one to recognize their ability to challenge and intervene in dominant urban discourses and to generate new and critical perspectives on the city. The literary representations of Brussels studied in this dissertation represent powerful narrative interventions in the socio-linguistic and political hierarchies that came to define the urban order in Brussels after 1830. The inextricable connection between language and class in Brussels makes these Flemish urban novels imaginative expressions of resistance to the linguistic inequality and social and political discrimination of the city's Dutch-speaking population.

abstract: This study investigates three issues that are relevant for the development of multinational investment banks in China. The first is about the domestic market conditions that are necessary for a country to develop multinational investment banks. The second issue is about the degree to which China has met these conditions. The last issue focuses on the potential strategies Chinese investment banks can undertake to become multinational corporations. To address the first issue, I draw an important distinction between international investment banks and multinational investment banks. For an international investment bank to be regarded as a multinational, I propose that it must have a strong presence (i.e., holding at least one percent of the market share) in at least two of the seven major capital markets in the world. Using this criterion, I identify 25 multinational investment banks. I then analyze their home countries’ domestic market conditions and propose that the following six factors are important to the development of multinational investment banks: the size of the home country’s gross domestic product (GDP), the total capitalization of its domestic security market, the number of its Global 500 firms, the volume of its foreign direct investment (FDI), the internationalization of its currency, and the openness of its capital market to foreign investors. By comparisons, I find that China’s domestic market conditions are comparable to the home countries of multinational investment banks with respect to the size of GDP, total market capitalization, the number of Global 500 firms, and the volume of FDI. What China lags behind are the internationalization of currency and the openness of capital market to foreign investors. Given the current trends of development, it is very likely that China will be able to catch up on the latter within ten years, thus meeting all the conditions necessary for the development of multinational investment banks. Based on the above findings, I suggest that Chinese investment banks seize this historical opportunity, speed up the internationalization of their businesses, and learn from the experiences of global industry leaders to become truly multinational corporations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2015

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