<p>Among the most significant changes to the agricultural sector in the twentieth century include a sharp decline in employment and the numbers of farms, a decline in the proportion of total value that accrues to agricultural producers, and an increase in farm level and regional specialization. Within the U.S., substantial differences in the characteristics of agricultural producers and the spatial distribution of production persist amid industry change. These changes coincided with changes in global markets, domestic consumption, consolidation and concentration within the processing and retailing sectors, and government policy. The causality that lies behind these developments is the key puzzle that this study addresses. </p><p>This study advances an institutional explanation of industry formation across locations within the U.S. Differences in industry constitution at the local level produce different impacts of and responses to global markets, reflected by economic changes and policy developments, as actors work to secure stability and advantage in markets (Fligstein 2001). This study uses the global value chains' definition of the industry, which incorporates the network of actors arrayed along a process of production, to capture the set of actors with the capacity to affect industry operation (Gereffi 1994). An assessment of the relative importance of local economic characteristics, global markets, organization and coordination within industries, and government policies to where production locates in the primary objective of the study.</p><p>The pork and non-cigar tobacco industries across several states within the United States from 1959 through 2005 allow for a contrast along the key changes identified above. Within case comparison is used to construct causal narratives of industry change at the state level. Panel and pooled time series analysis assess the relative importance the factors to agricultural change.</p><p>Local economic characteristics largely fade from significance with the inclusion of the theoretical perspectives. Total and net trade in agricultural and manufactured products is generally significant across industries for production, although this is not the case for specific tobacco types. The proportion of farms composed of small farms is significant for production and for farm structure in both industries. The presence of manufacture is significant for hog production and could not be assessed for tobacco. While federal policies are broadly significant for the tobacco industry, identified state policies exhibit few consistent effects for hog production. Importantly, farm structure measures were only available for Census years, which reduces sample size. Second, many of the measures are industry-specific, which reduces comparability.</p> / Dissertation

The "New Institutionalism" (DiMaggio and Powell 1991) posits a Theory of Practical Action as the basis for persisting social arrangements in economic life. In this project, I use this perspective to explain the social construction and organization of the life insurance industries of New York and Arizona. I develop an institutionalized-strategies explanation of industry organization. Research by Dobbin (1994b) showed the influence of embedded "institutional logics" in shaping rational responses to the economic business of railroads in Britain, France, and the United States. I combine Dobbin's argument with recent research on the development of state-level economic policies in the United States. Leicht and Jenkins (1994) identified three distinct "strategies" employed by states in implementing economic policies, and they imply that the strategies differ mainly in their "assumptions about the nature of economic growth and the role of the state" in economic development (1994:257). 1 argue that these findings suggest that states adopt a particular strategy--a set of similar Policy tools ("tactics") for specific policy targets. Applied to the insurance industries of New York and Arizona, an institutionalized-strategies view proposes that variation in state insurance laws reflects the meanings lawmakers associate with the economic enterprise of "life insurance." Different public conceptions of life insurance as a business led to different meanings for policymakers, and these meanings defined what tactics of control are legitimate and appropriate. These meanings derived from the economic and cultural legacy in the state--cultural heritage and economic history gave meaning to images of life insurance as a business enterprise. The legitimate, rational actions (tactics) of policymakers followed from the cultural legacy of the two states, and they constituted overall strategies directed at controlling life insurance companies. The sociocultural and historical embeddedness of meanings associated with the business of life insurance makes the lines of action rational in the minds of policymakers. In addition to showing how this process operated in the two states, I document the outcomes of such organizing activity--different rates of organizational dynamics and industry trajectories as reflected in rates of foundings, entries, and failures of life insurance companies.

With automation, every aspect of office work becomes streamlined, on-line, and universally accessible. This eliminates the need for a hierarchical work structure, and for spatially and temporally bounded offices. When traditional cultural constructs are abandoned through telecommunication and electronic technologies, both home and work need to be redefined. Because the workplace is being transplanted into the home, workers must establish boundaries between these two worlds to substitute for the loss of office social interaction and to balance professional and personal life. Social and architectural theories, statistics and case studies, have alternately made both dire and optimistic predictions about the repercussions of telecommuting. This thesis tests these predictions through case studies which examine how actual people are coping with this new way of working and living. It uses the resulting information to focus on the ways that home design is affected by these phenomena.

Even before the current economic meltdown, waves of downsizing, starting in the late 1970s, had swept corporate America, eroding workers’ expectations of economic security. But not only did downsizing become more prevalent during this period; its basic nature changed. Previously, firms had cut jobs temporarily, to adjust the size of their workforce during a downturn. Since the late 70s, firms have increasingly cut jobs in both good and bad times, in order to boost stock price. My dissertation examines the inter-group power dynamics underlying the transformation of workforce downsizing as a shareholder-value strategy. Examining both downsizing announcements from more than 700 leading U.S. corporations between 1981 and 2006, and actual implementation of the announced downsizing plans, I find at work in the process a shift in ideology, from an emphasis on corporate growth and conglomeration to an emphasis on profitability and shareholder value, an ideology that both reflects and intensifies the growing influence of shareholders over firms and the declining role of labor. My first empirical chapter examines the role of institutional investors and shareholder-value-oriented managers in the transformation. The second empirical chapter examines the potential resistance from labor unions and shows how the anti-union stance of the public policy regime in the 1980s weakened unions’ power to resist. The last empirical chapter examines the role of investors, unions, and executives in the implementation of announced downsizing plans and demonstrates the contested nature of the implementation process. Together, these three chapters illustrate the class politics simmering under the surface of the acceptance of downsizing for shareholder-value maximization, and emphasize the role of agency and power, as constructed by particular institutional logics, not only in promoting but also resisting the process of institutional change. / Sociology

An inquiry was made as to the cause for the alienated gender relations between men and women leaders at the Cathedral Of Faith Church Of God In Christ. Cathedral is a large church located in the West End section of Atlanta, Georgia. Its members are black. The church is surrounded by Fort McPherson---(a United States Army base), A U C (the Atlanta University Center), and Cascade Heights, the most prominent black neighborhood in the city. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center For Social Change is also near by. The church sits in the midst of a lower-class to low middle-class community. The Pastor's charismatic style of ministry attracts a diverse membership. This setting was ideal for the inquiry. The purpose for the study was to reduce the alienation and to promote reconciliation between some of the leaders of the church. Women and men are presently face to face with the challenges brought on by contemporary role reversals, in the home, in the church, and in the work place. These role reversals have prompted hierarchical social systems to retaliate against these changes in an abusive fashion. Alienated relationships are the result. The Christian Tradition, established through the coming of Jesus Christ, has enabled us to meet these gender role challenges. Relationships can be reconciled through Christ. A doctoral project was designed to get at the root of the alienation which the Cathedral members were experiencing. It was grounded in clinical pastoral educational methodology. Biblical, psychological, and Christian educational content and theories were foundational to the model. Principles of theology, sociology, and church administration were integrated with the basic structure of the project. The multi-disciplinary approach promoted objectivity and helped the group to view the conflictual issues in new ways. A group of eighteen leaders, all members of Cathedral, agreed to wrestle with the issues surrounding their alienated relationships. Six lively sessions were filled with: dialogue, role plays, a story, a movie, a game, and a live presentation by other administrative persons in the church. Dialogue related to issues of: abuse, social justice, sexism, reverse sexism, and hierarchical systems created turmoil at different times. Discussions and exercises related to family life, marital conflict, team work and fair play, created an atmosphere which was usually exciting, and educational. The pastoral model which was assumed, confronted the alienation between the group members with empathy. The empathetic approach was instrumental in beginning a process of reconciliation between the Christian 'Women of Power' and 'Men of Power' at the Cathedral Of Faith Church.

This is an analysis of the task system, the primary form of labor organization used by South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry rice planters. It examines the labor process of rice field hands, analyzes the extent to which gender shaped enslaved men and women's experiences of tasking, and explores some of the ramifications of task work on field women's lives. Conventional interpretations of the task system claim that it provided slaves with more autonomy, control, and opportunities for individual initiative than gang labor did. In contrast, this study finds that tasking was a multifaceted labor regime whose differences from gang labor were less pronounced than previous scholarship suggests. Specifically, structural, seasonal, and managerial constraints profoundly limited slaves' ability to control their work pace and to independently manage their work routines. As a result, slaves' access to own time and autonomy could be quite limited. Significantly, field hands did not experience these limits equally. Since planters did not adhere to one uniform model of rice cultivation, task assignments and labor routines varied across plantations. This heterogenous organization of task labor meant that slaves' ability to realize tasking's potential for greater slave autonomy was disproportionate across plantation boundaries. Gender also affected slaves' access to own time. Field women's control over the length of their work day and hence over access to own time was particularly circumscribed. The origins of these limits can be found in how planters organized their labor force and allocated field work. Given these constraints, slaves clearly did not gain own time easily. Nevertheless, slaves persevered in their quest for any or more own time by trying to circumvent prescribed work routines. Historians have touted slave family assistance as one of the most important of their strategies. While true, such aid was complex, circumscribed, and sometimes gendered. Finally, I link these labor and aid patterns to field women's reproductive histories and find that they help explain the region's high rate of slave neonatal mortality. These findings provide compelling evidence that we need to lower our assessment of the relative benefits putatively enjoyed by slaves who worked in a task regime.

Historically, black women's employment levels have exceeded those for white women. However, looking only at young cohorts of women, the employment levels of black and white women were equal by 1969, and by 1991 white women's employment greatly exceeded black women's employment. If this continues to be true for successive new cohorts, it suggests that, overall, white women will soon be working at significantly higher rates than black women for the first time in history. Identifying the determinants of women's employment today becomes an important issue not only for explaining the factors that affect labor market outcomes but also for explaining the prospects for black and white women in the labor market. Utilizing the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I use event history methods to analyze the determinants of black and white women's employment in the contemporary U.S., and explain any race gaps in employment that emerge. My findings suggest that a race gap in the hazard of part-time employment exists among women in which the rate of part-time employment is lower for black than white women. This gap is explained by race differences in human capital and past welfare receipt. A race gap in the hazard of full-time employment exists among unmarried women in which the rate of full-time employment is lower for black than white women. This gap is explained by race differences in age, human capital, and past welfare receipt. I find that opportunities and constraints provided by the local economic environment, human capital, family structure, and past welfare receipt are an important influence on black and white women's employment.

This dissertation contributes to three major issues in Labor Economics and Econometrics literature. The first contribution is providing new insights into panel-data techniques, the second is new findings on the relationship of women's and men's productivity and pay, and the third is a picture of the remuneration process for professors involved in research and teaching at a Research I University which is based on the detailed data set created for this study. Developing econometric panel data methodology, time-static information is added to a standard fixed effects model. In a setting where no suitable time-varying instruments for the time-static information can be found, it is necessary to calculate the estimates for those in a "second stage" fixed effects estimate. It will be shown that these second stage estimates are exactly equal to the pooled OLS estimates for the same model specification, but that the standard errors are different, and the second stage estimates are biased and inconsistent. Later, new tests for various components of the individual effects are conducted as well as tests to choose the best panel estimation method. Empirically, this work contributes to research on gender discrimination in pay, and its results affect more than the academic environment. So far, most studies were not able to include direct measures of productivity, and have assumed that the estimated gender gap represents an upper bound or overestimation of the real discrimination in pay. The results of this study show that this assumption is not necessarily correct. Looking specifically at the pay structure for university professors involved in teaching and research in a Research I University, several trends have been established. First, structural pay differences between colleges became very apparent, making a strong point against the usage of university-wide regression analysis. For the colleges of Business and Education, seniority lost much of its explanatory power in predicting salaries when publications were added to the analysis. Teaching awards were not rewarded at all in either college, but professors who did not teach were financially penalized.

Since the copper boom of the late nineteenth century, mining companies have been riding "the copper roller coaster." The well being of miners and their families appears to be tied to international market forces beyond their control. This dissertation uses a case study of miners in Cananea, Sonora, to analyze the relationships between changes in Mexican mineral policy from 1960 to 1998 and Mexico's economic connections with the United States. It employs Immanuel Wallerstein's framework of a world-system linked through hegemonic relationships between a core country, a semiperiphery and periphery (C-SP-P), and looks at the economic and political circumstances under which shifts in this system occur. Within this world-system Kondratieff waves are used to depict periods of stagnation and growth. Policy changes are reflected in economic cycles, and policy also shapes copper extraction, production and marketing. Until the 1970s American multinational corporations under privatization extracted surplus copper from Sonora as a peripheral region. However, once Mexico embarked on a policy of nationalization of the mineral industry (1971-1989), the country intentionally delinked from the U.S. In 1990 the Cananea mine was again privatized as part of Mexico's economic restructuring, with production directed toward international markets. Policy changes are evaluated in terms of Mexican development and the well being of the miners. This analysis is based upon the concept of articulation between capitalist modes of production within the world-system. The concept "articulation" includes confrontations and alliances between classes within each region or country as well as the relations between the C-SP-P. In particular, the miners use political linkages with the national union to defend their interests. However, with economic restructuring and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s, the government-labor alliance is supplanted by government-business alliance, and labor conflict and workforce transformation result. Policy turnovers influence everyday practices in gender relations as families face economic crises. Miners' wives form a political front to support their husbands' struggles with the company and to maintain access to potable water. Furthermore, attitudes toward environmental resource use are caught between maintaining the miners' job source and securing a safe and reliable source of water for the region.

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