In the last five years there has been great public interest in Hollywood’s “gender problem,” namely its unequal representation of women in key creative roles such as director, producer, and studio head. Yet, in the long history of women in film and television, comedians have had the greatest success and degree of agency over their work. From silent film comediennes like Mabel Normand to Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and more recently Tina Fey and Amy Schumer, women comedians have resoundingly had success behind-the-screen as well as in front of it. In order to comprehend the disjuncture between the data and the women comedians’ success, we must account for the women at the center of contemporary popular culture who seem to have successfully navigated highly gendered structures of media. This dissertation offers an extension of the existing scholarship on the industrial practices of women mediamakers. This dissertation offers a historical production study of gender. This dissertation opens up ways of exploring the range and complexity of gendered practices in Hollywood. It shows how these actions operate within discursive frames and institutional frameworks that generally serve to perpetuate the exclusion of women. I suggest that cultural industries like film and television, when examined simultaneously as creative spaces and business enterprises using a political economy approach blended with cultural studies, offer revelatory sites for the study of gendered labor practices in Hollywood.

You Don’t Have to Be a Bad Girl to Love Crime uses archival research, textual analysis, and industrial and cultural studies frameworks to re-evaluate women’s representation in post-World War II American radio and television crime dramas. It complicates popular and scholarly understandings that postwar broadcasters simply responded to audience desires by marginalizing women across their schedules and removing recurring female characters from crime dramas altogether. Rather, the three major networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) that dominated the broadcast industry’s transition from radio to television joined conservative religious and anti-communist groups to silence public debate over women’s roles. While late-1940s network radio programming incorporated varied opinions about postwar women’s desire and potential to expand their influence in the workplace and politics, postwar television naturalized a vision of passive housewives embracing husbands’ patriarchal authority. Women who chose to fight crime challenged this authority by claiming the right to enforce the law and judge their fellow citizens. This dissertation is organized into two parts: The first explores the industrial and cultural discourses that set the stage for postwar restrictions on women in crime. Network executives and anti-communist conservatives did not see each other as natural allies, but they mobilized complementary gender discourses emphasizing women as passive consumers rather than public actors. Archival industry research shows network executives ignored evidence female audiences liked crime programming, especially series featuring active, sympathetic women. Instead, executives and vocal conservatives framed such women as a sexualized threat to men, children, and themselves. Networks tolerated crime-curious women on radio and early television, when they struggled to retain and build a female audience. However, by the mid-1950s, executives feared such women would undermine their commercial emphasis on domestic consumption and attract regulation or censorship. Part two explores three major types of crime-curious women who appeared on postwar radio and television programming. Investigative wives and detectives’ secretaries investigated crimes with male husbands or employers. Female detectives, however, directly challenged men’s control over criminal justice, the most overt sign of patriarchal social power. All three types gave female audiences a powerful model of feminine agency within patriarchal society. They also established representational norms that endure in modern crime dramas.

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This dissertation examines streaming media both as a technological innovation and cultural practice that co-configures audience and industry. Strategies and tactics provide a theoretical framework for understanding streaming media. Streaming is theorized as a tactic; wherein audiences momentarily buck against the strategic logic of media conglomerates and copyright regimes. However, streaming, concomitantly, is an audience tactic and a strategic logic of an emergent streaming industry. This results in the blurring between first and third party and sanctioned and unsanctioned streaming. In this dissertation, I parse out what are the nascent streaming logics within this burgeoning industry and how they constitutively shape and re-shape audiences and traditional broadcasting logics. Five typologies of streaming serve as conceptual tools for deepening our understanding of streaming media and technology. The first is streaming as a recent technological advancement, divided into software and hardware categories. The second conceptual framework is a typology of streaming that divides streaming into first and third party sanctioned and unsanctioned streaming. The third is streaming as an emergent industry. The fourth is streaming as a discourse, and the final typology divides streaming based on geography as transnational streaming, national streaming, and diasporic streaming. All of these classifications lay the groundwork for the further conceptualization of this important and emergent socio-technical practice.

In my dissertation entitled “The Critical Eye: Re-Viewing 1970s Television,” I argue that TV scholars would benefit greatly by engaging in a more nuanced consideration of the television critic’s industrial position as a key figure of negotiation. As such, critical discourse has often been taken for granted in scholarship without attention to how this discourse may obscure contradictions implicit within the TV industry and the critic’s own identity as both an insider and an outsider to the television business. My dissertation brings the critic to the fore, employing the critic as a lens through which I view television aesthetics, media policy, and technology. This study is grounded in the disciplines of television studies, media industries studies, new media studies, and cultural studies. Yet because the critic’s writing reflects the totality of television as an entertainment and public service medium, the significance of this study expands beyond disciplinary concerns to a reconsideration of the impact of television upon American culture. This project offers a history of the television critic during the 1970s, a decade in which the field of criticism professionalized and expanded dramatically. Methodologically, I am incorporating three approaches, including historical research of the 1970s television industry, textual analysis of critical writing, and interviews with critics working during that decade. I’ve identified the 1970s for a variety of reasons, including its parallels with today’s significant technological and industrial transformations. My central texts will be the industry trade publications, Variety and Broadcasting, and national daily newspapers including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. Viewing TV criticism as a profession, a historical source, and a site of scholarly analysis, this project offers a series of interventions, including a consideration of how critical writing may serve as a primary source for historians and how television studies has overlooked the significance of the critic as an object of analysis in his/her own right.

This paper reviews and summarises the results of selected studies on performance gaps between multinational enterprises and their domestic counterparts. Performance gaps arise in such fields as productivity, technology, profitability, wages, skills and growth. While these gaps are often attributed to foreign ownership of the affiliates, the theory of the Multinational Enterprise argues that these gaps are due to being a Multinational rather than the nationality of the firm. Empirical evidence on the existence of performance gaps between foreign and domestic firms is supportive of this view: foreign ownership turns out to be a much less important explanatory factor than normally assumed. Firm-specific assets and firm characteristics like industry, size, parent country and multinationality per se are more important. Such results are broadly consistent with those derived in the literatures on ownership change, on foreign entry and on spillovers. We conclude that there is little case for foreign direct investment promotion policies to discriminate between firms on the basis of ownership. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

From 2001 to 2011, there were a number of significant changes, such as increased audience fragmentation and new media technologies, which impacted the television industry and continue to threaten the financial strength and success of cable television networks. The cable television industry employed branding as a major combatant to manage such challenges. Branding is the most important tool in the post-network era, yet networks use it in ways that challenge previously held scholarly assumptions about the cable television industry. Cable television network branding functions in two main ways – one as a performance intended for competitors, distributors, and other key industry players; and two as a means of rationalization, essentially a tool that network executives can wield whenever they want or need to justify a decision, action or behavior. Through interviews with television industry executives, attendance at major industry events and an analysis of trade publications, I examine the branding and promotional strategies of TBS, TNT and HBO. Industrial strategies in the post-network era are fragile and uncertain with regards to technology, partnerships, economics, programming and distribution. Thus, cable networks turn to branding as a mechanism to work through institutional, industrial, economic and technological issues that have been and continue to shift. In this analysis of how and why cable networks use branding, I explore the currently evolving post-network era and television’s future.

Submitted by Rafael Vasconcelos (vasconcelos.rafael@hotmail.com) on 2014-12-31T15:44:39Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Rafael Vasconcelos - Tese.pdf: 1669958 bytes, checksum: 0d7df5a7de8d68323d6e45bdf4e2e441 (MD5) / Rejected by Suzinei Teles Garcia Garcia (suzinei.garcia@fgv.br), reason: Prezado Rafael, Mesmo o trabalho sendo inglês o aluno deve seguir os padrões. Modelos de trabalhos na biblioteca digital. Att. Suzi 3799-7876 on 2015-01-05T11:50:00Z (GMT) / Submitted by Rafael Vasconcelos (vasconcelos.rafael@hotmail.com) on 2015-01-05T13:00:46Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Rafael Vasconcelos - Tese.pdf: 1674420 bytes, checksum: b3c457b2228daea171615c74e2259974 (MD5) / Rejected by Suzinei Teles Garcia Garcia (suzinei.garcia@fgv.br), reason: Rafael, conforme conversamos ao telefone. Att. Suzi on 2015-01-05T13:32:36Z (GMT) / Submitted by Rafael Vasconcelos (vasconcelos.rafael@hotmail.com) on 2015-01-05T16:30:29Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Rafael Vasconcelos - Tese.pdf: 1673341 bytes, checksum: 4bea9946d11d3c9f028f38a48edf5280 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Suzinei Teles Garcia Garcia (suzinei.garcia@fgv.br) on 2015-01-05T16:32:57Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Rafael Vasconcelos - Tese.pdf: 1673341 bytes, checksum: 4bea9946d11d3c9f028f38a48edf5280 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-01-05T16:36:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rafael Vasconcelos - Tese.pdf: 1673341 bytes, checksum: 4bea9946d11d3c9f028f38a48edf5280 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-12-17 / This dissertation is a conjunction of three essays on the economic growth field. The first essay investigates the existence of resource misallocation in the Brazilian manufacturing sector and measures possible distortions in it. The second essay demonstrate that there is a distinct pattern of structural change between economies and this pattern differs because there are some factors that distort the relative prices and also affect the output productivity. Finally, using a cross-industry cross-country approach, the third essay investigates the existence of an optimal level of competition to enhance economic growth. / Essa tese é composta por três ensaios sobre crescimento econômico. O primeiro ensaio investiga a existência de resource misallocation no setor manufatureiro brasileiro e mensura as possíveis distorções ocasionadas. O segundo ensaio demonstra que existe um padrão de mudança estrutural distinto entre países e esse padrão difere porque existem fatores que distorcem os preços relativos e que também afetam a produtividade do produto. Por último, usando uma abordagem cross-industry cross-country, o terceiro ensaio investiga a existência de um nível ótimo de competição que eleve o crescimento econômico.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) is a massive ongoing franchise that began as a 1984 self-published comic book created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Its history is intertwined with the creators' rights movement and the Creator's Bill of Rights (CBR), which rejected work-for-hire contracts, wherein creative laborers—creative authors—cede authorial control of their labor. Because the production of comic books and their franchises is highly collaborative, intellectual property (IP) rights are often consolidated in a single rights holder—a corporate author—via work-for-hire contracts. Eastman and Laird, as both creative and corporate authors, initially maintained strict control of TMNT licensees, but allowed their employees to retain IP rights over creative contributions to TMNT. However, in 1992, Eastman and Laird sent retroactive work-for-hire contracts to all current and former employees. This TMNT case study illustrates how the CBR represented the conflicting interests of publishers and creative laborers and ultimately reinforced the individualistic view of authorship that undergirds work-for-hire doctrine. Additionally, because IP legal infrastructure uses individualistic discourse to consolidate control of media franchises in one entity that allows authorized individuals access to a shared database of creative expressions that workers can borrow from or add to, media franchises resemble folklore and are made via a database mode of production. The romantic vision of authorship (and authorial control) upon which the CBR was founded ultimately went on to serve publishers rather than creators working for media properties, repeating a pattern that has existed since the inception of copyright and authorship.

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