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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (295-338). / In this dissertation, I trace methods for organizing skilled workers engaged in creative, limited-term projects in the United States between the nineteenth century and the 1950s. Examining eras of system building in technical fields-civil engineering in the nineteenth century, laboratory administration in the 1910s and 1920s, aircraft design in the 1930s, and electronics in the 1950s-I show that recent discourse on the management of innovation and change is a manifestation of a cyclically recurring conversation. This story complicates prevalent views of management theory and practice before World War II by recovering a thread obscured by emphasis on the organization of integrated, divisional companies and operative labor within them. Applying ideas from recent work in organization studies to distill common aspects of the management problems and labor processes individuals have confronted and theorized, I find common patterns: managers of construction firms, engineering departments, and research laboratories have again and again theorized the fast-moving, knowledge-intensive, relational organization, doing so long before these terms were available. Such thinking has been driven both by practical needs and because external pressures have forced explanation of seemingly uncontrolled, irrational work. Practically, the transferability of management techniques among settings such as construction and research has reflected kinships between labor and communication processes: each has involved skilled workers producing complex artifacts in uncertain physical, technical, and social environments. / (cont.) The need to explain such work, though, has been as much about external representation as internal control. From origins in government oversight of appropriations and military use of esprit de corps to cohere organizations under stress, tools used to manage project-based enterprises have been applied in response to the speed, scale, and complexity of the work itself. At the same time, engineers have explained the management of their work to deflect pressures to apply the logics of factory production and Taylorist scientific management to the organization of skilled labor. As explanations of the differences between building and operating and as delineations of points and terms of physical and cultural contact, representations of engineering work in schedules, budgets, organization charts, and narratives have both controlled and insulated work. / by Benjamin W. Pinney. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-193).

Thesis (Ph.D. in Immunology) -- University of Colorado, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-285). Free to UCDHSC affiliates. Online version available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations;

This thesis argues that a ‘tradition of moral analysis’ between Jane Austen and George Eliot — a common ground which has been identified by critics from F.R. Leavis to Gillian Beer, but never fully explored — can be illuminated by turning to what this thesis calls ‘the reflective tradition’. In the eighteenth century, ideas about reflection provided a new and influential way of thinking about the human mind; about how we come to know ourselves and the world around us through the mind. The belief in the individual to act as his/her own guide through the cultivation of a reflective mind and attentiveness to a reflective voice emerges across a wide range of discourses. This thesis begins with an examination of reflection in the philosophy, children’s literature, novels, poetry, educational tracts and sermons that would have been known to Austen. It then defines Austen’s development of reflective dynamics by looking at her six major novels; finally, it analyzes Middlemarch to define Eliot’s proximity to this aspect of Austen’s art. The thesis documents Eliot’s reading of Austen through the criticism of G. H. Lewes to support a reading of Eliot’s assimilation of an Austenian attention to mental processes in her novels. Reflection is at the heart of moral life and growth for both novelists. This thesis corrects a tendency in Austen’s reception to focus on the mimetic aspect of her art, thereby overlooking the introspective sense of reflection. It offers new insights into Austen’s and Eliot’s work, and it contributes to an understanding of the development of the realist novel and the ethical dimension in the role of the novel reader.