This dissertation will examine the Vietnamese communities of Texas and consists of two parts. The first part explores the circumstances that stimulated the growth and eventual dominance of Vietnamese immigrants in two entrepreneurial niches – the nail salon and the shrimping industry. This study is thus a sociological examination of private enterprise, and the first research objective is to investigate the roles of the various market and non-market factors that were crucial in fueling the development of these two businesses. In the sociology of entrepreneurship, a key concern is locating the causal determinants of entrepreneurship. That is, aside from regular market forces, the social conditions associated with patterns of entrepreneurship need to be investigated. This study therefore explores the political, institutional, and cultural circumstances that help to explain the development of the nail salon and fishery businesses in Texas that market forces cannot govern. The second research objective of this dissertation is to use a racial formations framework to investigate the racial implications of the proliferation of these two entrepreneurial niches in their respective communities. The growth and spread of these businesses have had consequences for the loss of traditional community, the construction of racial identity, and the maintenance or reconstruction of new racial identity in the context of a multicultural work setting that includes other racial and ethnic minorities. The following seeks to provide insight into these racial phenomena by way of the case of Vietnamese Americans engaged in entrepreneurship. / text

Thesis advisor: Willaim A. Gamson / What are the class culture differences among US progressive social movement groups? This mixed-methods study finds that activists speak and act differently depending on their class background, current class and upward, downward or steady class trajectory, confirming previous research on cultural capital and conditioned class predispositions. In 2007-8, 34 meetings of 25 groups in four movement traditions were observed in five states; 364 demographic surveys were collected; and 61 interviews were conducted. I compared activists' approaches to six frequently mentioned group problems. * Lifelong-working-class activists, usually drawn in through preexisting affiliations, relied on recruitment incentives such as food and one-on-one relationships. Both disempowered neophytes and experienced powerhouses believed in strength in numbers, had positive attitudes towards trustworthy leaders, and stressed loyalty and unity. * Lifelong-professional-middle-class (PMC) activists, usually individually committed to a cause prior to joining, relied on shared ideas to recruit. They focused more on internal organizational development and had negative attitudes towards leadership. Subsets of PMC activists behaved differently: lower professionals communicated tentatively and avoided conflict, while upper-middle-class people were more assertive and polished. * Upwardly mobile straddlers tended to promote their moral certainties within groups. A subset, uprooted from their working-class backgrounds but not assimilated into professional circles, sometimes pushed self-righteously and brought discord into groups. * Voluntarily downwardly mobile activists, mostly young white anarchists, drew the strongest ideological boundaries and had the most distinct movement culture. Mistrustful of new people and sometimes seeing persuasion as coercive, they had the weakest recruitment and group cohesion methods. Analysis of class speech differences found that working-class activists spoke more often but more briefly in meetings, preferred more concrete speech, and used more teasing and self-deprecating humor. The professional-middle-class (in background and/or current class) spoke longer but less often, preferred more abstract vocabulary, and used less negative humor. Group styles were formed by the interplay of members' predominant class trajectories and groups' movement traditions. Better understanding these class culture differences would enable activists to strengthen cross-class alliances to build more powerful social movements. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Utilizing elements of Lightfoot and Davis’s (1997) portraiture method and life history interviews, this qualitative research study explores the portraits of four Mexican-origin scholarship boys. Two Mexican-origin students and two professors were selected from a snowball sample. A snowball sample consisted of gathering referrals from graduate students and faculty who contacted me through email to comment on their personal identification with the scholarship boy themes discussed in the essay I authored, "Lost in Degree: a Chicano PhD Student’s Search for Missing Clothes" (2007). I use the term “Mexican-origin” as a concept that identifies the subjects of this study as being of Mexican descent. All of the participants were born and raised in low SES, urban settings in the United States and they are children of Mexican-born parents. Hoggart’s (1957/2006) scholarship boy framework serves as the primary theoretical lens guiding this work. Rodriguez’s (1982) seminal work on this topic, Hunger of Memory, enumerates how this concept may apply to Mexican-origin scholarship boys. This study also utilizes Dubois’s (1903) double consciousness and Anzaldúa’s (1999) mestiza consciousness to analyze the ways in which Mexican-origin scholarship boys used culturally situated constructions of giftedness, “ghetto nerd” (Diaz, 2007) masculinities, and philosophical perspectives related to “home” to pursue academic excellence and cope/challenge the microgressions they experienced in K-12 schooling and higher education. The scholarship boys in this research provide critical information germane to the struggles and strategies used by academically successful Mexican-origin students as they negotiate the experiences related to the contrasting working-class culture of their upbringing and the middle-class culture of academia. While studies often focus on academically low-performing Latino students, this work explores the narratives of working-class Latino students who attained a graduate level education. Moreover, this research complicates clean “victory narratives” by unearthing various aspects of loss and gain inherent to the Mexican-origin scholarship boy trajectory. Findings inform scholarship in the areas of pedagogy, education reform, philosophy of education, education policy, curriculum, and revisionist conceptualizations of giftedness and human development. / text

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