In this dissertation, I provide a qualitative examination of rights-based organizational tensions generated in a crisis over human/labor rights concerns. This project is motivated by two research problems: First, even though rights are often honored, articulated, and acclaimed, the actual organizational practices of rights often result in tensions and contradictions. Second, despite the overwhelming acceptance of rights in political and social domains, rights often become points of conflict and disagreement rather than a means to a resolution. In this project, I analyzed a case of the unionization of parish workers within the U.S. Roman Catholic Church in order to illustrate how individuals used rights to navigate these problems. / The case examines, in particular, how human and labor rights are related and seen as separate or as intersecting, how they are strategically mobilized in organizational settings, and how they are negotiated in larger institutional contexts. Furthermore, this case study observes how participants negotiate and manage the institutional contradictions and tensions they experience in institutionalizing rights discourse. The case, thus, provides an ideal setting for examining rights-based tensions. / Institutional theory and various qualitative research methods provided the theoretical and practical ground from which I engage these problems. Specifically, institutional theory helped me unravel one particular way that individuals experienced these tensions by foregrounding how rights become institutionalized through symbolic negotiation. This theoretical frame was used to address the following research questions: (a) When, how, and by whom are labor rights treated as human rights? (b) How do individuals manage the contradictions they experience regarding various applications of rights? I engage these questions through in-depth moderately scheduled interviews and archival research. / The ensuing analysis explores how participants' understanding of rights enable particular movements of discourse and how participants went about negotiating the contradictions they experienced. Ultimately, I argue that rights served as a type of organizing discourse that is fragmented and contingent rather than stable and constant. This shows that when individuals institutionalize a symbol, the process is often one of discursive alignment and misalignment.

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s the expansion of neo-liberal development policies that focused on the liberalization of markets and the creation of export-oriented economies produced large disparities of inequality throughout many countries resulting in a massive increase massive increase in the number of people from Southeast Asia and South American immigrating to Japan. During this period there was a sharp increase of female migrants causing a feminization of international migration drawing into care-based sectors involving work in the entertainment industry and increasingly nursing and elderly care. / The changing demographics of Japan's aging population and declining birth rate have led to public discussion and debate about the future of the country. Over the past twenty years civil society has grown in strength and number with numerous nongovernmental organizations advocating and supporting immigrants and migrants in Japan. This thesis is a multi-level analysis of the impact of migration in Japan. Based on in depth ethnographic field work conducted during the summer of 2010 this thesis also provides a close examination of twelve nongovernmental organizations supporting migrants in the Kanto and Kansai regions and focuses in depth on three case studies. This research shows that Japanese society is directly impacted by the work of these organizations. They organizations not only support migrants in their most vulnerable moments but they also work to promote and educate Japanese society about the positive possibilities of a multicultural co-existence.

According to Fama (1980), the agency theory states that in order to avoid issues of moral hazard and adverse selection problems, executive compensation should be in alignment with performance. However, it is difficult to identify specific performance measures that are both precise and sensitive, especially when concerning corporate executives who typically do not give out public information. In order to analyze the validity of the agency theory, this study uses the scope of NCAA Division I-A football to analyze the relationship between pay and performance with respect to head coaches. We investigate factors that various literature on executive compensation have identified as associated variables such as organization size, job complexity, market competition, ability to attract talent, and mentorship. Through multiple regression analysis, results showed that size, ability to attract talent (recruiting ability), competition, and academic success were significantly positively associated with coach compensation. There was no significant association for winning games or mentorship, however. Because winning had no effect on salaries, we concluded that the agency theory did not hold for the specific context of Division I-A college football.

Due to the planned economy, the labor relations in China had been merely an extension of the administrative relations for long. Led by collectivism, collective labor relations based on individual interests actually did not exist in China. In fact, the labor relations, aimed to protect individual labor interests, turned out to be a complex of labor interests, trade unions, and the administration. Although the factors such as labor interests, trade unions, and governmental regulations could be found in China¡¦s labor market, the causes of them were quite different from those in western countries. Accordingly, the conceptions derived from Taiwan or other developed countries couldn¡¦t be entirely applied when we analyzed the labor relations in China. The transition of the legal system of labor relations in modern China can be grouped under the two categories: preventive regulations and remedy measures. The former contains the implementation of labor standards, the enforcement of collective labor contracts, and the administration of labor contract system while the latter covers labor supervision and labor disputes resolution regulations. During the establishment of China labor laws, the regulations of the labor dispute resolutions tend to correspond with labor condition rules. Different from the policies of dealing labor disputes in western countries, the labor dispute regulations in China strictly follow the three stages: mediation, arbitration, and litigation. In such an inflexible procedure, the clients have no freedom to choose preferred methods or measures. Most of all, since labor litigation is the final stage of the procedure, the judicial interpretation of the supreme civil court has a great impact on the results of labors¡¦ relief-seeking. In other words, it plays a crucial role in the field of labor dispute resolutions. To have a full understanding of the labor dispute resolution system in China, the research begins with labor litigation and systematically examines the relations between arbitration and judicial review.

It has been a trend that employees of new generations pay much more attention to individual leisure than before. Job is no longer the only essential issue for lives, work-life balance has become a leading topic for human resource management. Compare to foreign enterprises which usually provide well employee benefits, the local companies in Taiwan, especially for the high-tech industry, had also attach importance to provide well-planned employee benefits to foster a dynamic and fun work environment for employees. Production or performance is not the only successful factor for running companies, keeping talents within organizations is significant as well. No matter economic or non-economic employee benefits, the business owners never stop thinking for providing innovative and various employee benefits to attract talents. It was obviously for high-tech industry that the employees are under high job pressure and intense competition. Moreover, to have well employee benefit programs for employees could not only help employees achieving work-life balance to improve well-being for reducing business cost, but also enhance labor relations which is no doubt the substantial element for successful companies. This study examined the relationship between employee benefits and labor relations through questionnaire survey on 228 employees from the first 1500 companies in Taiwan. The results indicated that: 1. Employee benefits satisfaction was positively significant to labor relations. 2. Employee communication was positively significant to employee benefits satisfaction and labor relations. 3. Employees with different personal features show different satisfaction at employee benefits, except for marital status and job position. 4. Employees with different personal features show different satisfaction at labor relations, except for seniority and job position. 5. No differences were found within different industries toward employee benefit satisfaction.

While federal deregulation of the trucking industry had little impact upon the truck drivers serving the Acadian oilpatch, recent legislation deregulating intrastate transportation yielded vast changes in the structure of the occupation. In the past, success as a trucker in the oilpatch depended upon an individual's entrepreneurial drive, as well as the social and familial networks upon which that individual could rely. Intrastate deregulation allowed several truck companies to dominate the industry; these companies grew via a complex series of alliances between transportation companies, service companies, and large oil concerns. These alliances disrupted the process by which individuals transformed social capital into economic capital. The foremost impact of these changes is a rapid drop in trucker's income---many now exist on the brink of insolvency. At the same time, the period of crisis has opened the sector to previously inconceivable options, including forays toward unionization, as well as the entry of women, blacks, and outsiders into the labor pool.

This study explains why, beginning in 1976 and continuing into the 1980s, unions lost power in Mexico. The recent loss of power in Mexico is consistent with a worldwide convergence towards declining union power. Few would dispute that declining union power is related to globalization. But how does globalization affect union power? This study demonstrates that the prevailing approach to globalization and union power, the market pressures approach, cannot explain why labor unions lost power in Mexico. This suggests that in countries, such as Mexico, where unions rely on political support rather than organizational resources to attain power, increased exposure to market pressures may not explain declining union power. Only unions in advanced industrial societies enjoy the market conditions that make it possible to gain power via their organizational resources. I propose that, in countries where organized labor derives its power from its relationship to the state, globalization affects union power via the domestic instantiations of globalization. The way that global economic shocks and the interests of foreign investors shape the interests of domestic economic elite constitute the domestic instantiations of globalization. My approach builds on the International Political Economy research tradition. This study shows that labor lost power in Mexico for two nested reasons. First, labor lost power because it lost access to decision-making in the state. Second, labor lost access to decision-making because global economic crisis and new foreign investment strategies created a new internationalist elite oriented towards foreign credit and global markets. Disillusioned with the existing political leadership and their "national" economic project, the internationalist elite promoted the rise to power of new political leaders that favored neoliberal economic reforms. Bureaucrats, allied with the internationalists, undermined labor along with other advocates of the "national" project, as part of a struggle for power. This study delineates the aspect of the state-labor alliance in Mexico that granted labor unions power historically and reveals the importance of globalization in determining labor's recent fate in Mexico. It contributes a new model of globalization and union power, raising questions about how sociologists conceptualize globalization and state-society relations more generally.

This dissertation explores the interplay between industrial racial hiring practices and the following institutions and transitions characterizing the inter-war period: unionization, institutional change among unions, business cycle activity, government anti-discrimination policy, and high-wage policies. The degree to which industrial racial hiring practices differed across manufacturing and mining industries and the impact that this industrial segregation had on black workers is explored. During World War I, when many northern employers first hired black workers, there was a significant difference in how black and white workers were distributed across industry. However, the segregation decreased significantly over time and it was not a contributor to the black-white income differential among industrial workers. Black workers were not employed disproportionately by industries with low wages, with low capital-to-labor ratios, or that were disproportionately dangerous. However, industrial segregation exposed them to greater unemployment risk, explaining a portion of their disproportionately high unemployment rates. The third chapter identifies some of the forces that shaped and mitigated industrial segregation. The way that black workers were distributed across industries was a function of union density, union affiliation, and tight wartime labor markets. The craft based unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor were notorious for discriminating against black labor. The industrial unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) actively promoted the organization of black labor. Consequently, the mean probability that a randomly selected employee in an industry was black was negatively associated with general unionization and positively associated with CIO affiliated unionization. A government agency explicitly created to aid black workers in obtaining employment in defense industries during World War II, the Fair Employment Practice Committee, did not have a significant impact on industrial segregation. The fourth chapter of the dissertation assesses the impact that the high-wage policies of the Great Depression had on black unemployment. During the inter-war period, increases in workers' share of company revenues and unionization increased black workers' share of cyclical employment. By successfully increasing these factors, the Great Depression high-wage policies caused a disproportionate share of the employment downturn to be allocated to black workers.

Private, non-governmental programs for certifying companies as environmentally or socially responsible emerged in the 1990s in response to problems of sweatshops in the global apparel industry and deforestation in the forest products industry. The similarity between certification programs in each field is striking but has received little attention to date. Neither pure self-regulation nor traditional public regulation, certification programs embody a type of "private regulation by information." Why did this same regulatory form emerge in these two very different fields? Theories focusing on consumer demand, the globalization of production, threats of state intervention, and cultural diffusion all fall short of explaining the emergence of certification systems in both the apparel and forest products fields. This dissertation develops an integrated institutional approach to the emergence of certification systems, focusing on three dimensions of institutional emergence--political, organizational, and cultural. This approach calls for careful attention to historical process, macro-meso linkages, institutional embeddedness, and the dynamics of political contestation--with particular emphasis on the place of social movements in organizational fields. The project uses a comparative case study methodology, drawing on data from 37 in-depth interviews with individuals involved in the creation of certification programs, comprehensive content-coding of four trade journals from 1987-2000, and some archival and secondary materials. An analysis of the political processes through which certification associations initially emerged reveals two important factors--social movement campaigns that targeted companies and a neo-liberal institutional context. These led states, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and some companies to build or support private certification programs, and foreclosed some other options. An analysis of organizational founding shows how dynamics of innovation and challenge produced multiple certification programs competing for legitimacy in each field. The cultural aspect of institutional emergence is captured through an analysis of how the meanings of certification and monitoring changed over time in the industry discourse, as these practices got theorized and re-framed by a variety of actors. By utilizing an integrated institutional approach, this research illuminates the interactions of macro-level changes (like globalization) and the concrete actors (institutional entrepreneurs) that produced certification initiatives.

This project examines the creation and implementation of sex discrimination law in the United States during the mid-twentieth century by egg the experiences of women who worked as flight attendants in the United States airline industry. The presentation of female bodies was a critical marketing strategy for the airline industry, and the result was the creation of a series of gender based discriminatory policies. Airlines manipulated women's sexuality through regulations such as a marriage ban, age ceiling, and weight/appearance regulations. An analysis of airline ads, which presented flight attendants as sexually desirable to attract male customers, combined with archival sources that trace discrimination in the industry, reveal the manipulation and presentation of women's sexuality as essential to the labor market practices of the airline industry and the efforts made by flight attendants to combat both the image and the discrimination. This dissertation reveals the constructed nature of women's sexuality by exploring the relationship between cultural representations of women's bodies, labor market practices, and public policy formation. An examination of 1960s anti-discriminatory legislation reveals the link between the regulation of sexuality and policy formation. Dismantling of sex discrimination through policy was problematic because gendered and sexualized work patterns were central to corporate employment structures. The solution was the inclusion of the bona fide occupational qualification clause in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This clause protected employers' ability to retain gender based discrimination if they demonstrated that economic loss would result from a restructuring of employment practices. Flight attendants were among the earliest group of women workers to utilize this legislation, and as a result they contributed to the interpretation and development of sex discrimination law in the United States. This project also reveals the complex interaction of resistance to and intention of sexual norms and gender discrimination. Flight attendants often internalized cultural constructions of sexuality and saw their ability to fulfill dominant cultural notions of beauty as empowering, thus they had difficulty articulating a clear definition of sex discrimination. Despite this difficulty, flight attendants became among the most politically active women in America during the 1960s and 1970s.