Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Steven Aragon. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-195) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: B, page: 3830. Adviser: Nicole E. Allen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-92) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> The tenets of representative bureaucracy suggest that the composition of the bureaucracy should mirror the people it serves including women in order to influence the name, scope, and implementation of public policies. Women account for the largest segment of the workforce and have attained more education and advanced education than men. Although there have been steady increases in executive leadership positions, management positions, professional and technical positions in most occupations, women are still underrepresented in mid-to-upper management in male-dominated occupations. When women are under-represented in mid-to-upper levels of management in government, there are implications regarding representative bureaucracy. </p><p> Through the use of qualitative methods, this study examined the career progression experiences of women who were successful in reaching mid-to-upper levels of management in male-dominated occupations in state government. Specifically, the study explored how women perceive various occupational factors including their rates of participation, experiences, gender, roles within the bureaucracy, interactions with their coworkers, leaders and organizational policies, personal influence, and decision-making abilities. </p><p> The findings revealed that women experience various barriers to career progression in male-dominated occupations, but find mechanisms to navigate obstacles imposed by the negative consequences of tokenism. The findings indicate that although women have been successful in reaching mid-to-upper level management in male-dominated occupations, they do so in institutions, regional, district, field or offices with fewer overall employees where they have less opportunity to have influence on overall agency-wide policy decisions. The decision-making power is limited to implementation strategies of agency-wide policies within their smaller domains or geographical area of responsibility.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines the intergenerational effects of maternal early health, the intergenerational effects of maternal education and the distributional effects of school size. </p><p> Chapter 1 is an introduction that summarizes the contributions made in this dissertation. Chapter 2 examines a new question with important implications: Does a mother's early health affect her child's human capital development? My coauthor and I use two extremely different and established methodologies to identify variation in mothers' early health: variation in early life disease environment and variation in early life economic environment. We connect children to the environments experienced by their mothers using the state, month and year of maternal birth that appears on each child's birth record. To identify children's outcomes later in life, we connect their birth records to their 3^rd through 10^th grade school records using a high quality algorithm that relies on first and last names, exact dates of birth and social security numbers. We find that a one standard deviation improvement in maternal early health improves 10^th grade test performance in the following generation by .07 to .08 standard deviations. </p><p> Chapter 3 examines the intergenerational effects of maternal education. My coauthor and I use variation in compulsory schooling laws across states and over time to identify exogenous variation in maternal education; we estimate local average treatment effects using Two-Stage Least Squares instrumental variables estimations. We connect children to the environments experienced by their mothers using the state, month and year of maternal birth that appears on each child's birth record. To identify children's outcomes later in life, we connect their birth records to their 3^rd through 10^th grade school records using a high quality algorithm that relies on first and last names, exact dates of birth and social security numbers. We find an additional year of maternal education improves 3^rd grade test performance in the following generation by .31 standard deviations on average and that this relationship is driven by children born to white mothers. </p><p> Chapter 4 uses state-wide, student-level data from Illinois to examine the distributional effects of school size. I apply two established strategies to identify variation in school size; I use population-level panels of data to identify year-to-year changes in enrollment within schools and I exploit variation induced by school openings. I find smaller schools simultaneously improve average ACT achievement in 11^th grade and close achievement gaps between more and less advantaged students. Specifically, a 20 percent decrease in school size improves students' ACT performance by 1 percent on average and improves ACT performance by 1.5 percent on average for African American students that receive free or reduced price lunch.</p>

The relationships surrounding well-being, spiritual perspective, self-transcendence, health status, and fatigue in homeless persons have not been studied from a nursing perspective. This original descriptive study explored relationships among well-being, spiritual perspective, self-transcendence, health status, and fatigue in a sample of 61 homeless men and women in two shelters. A conceptual model based upon Rogers' Science of Unitary Human Beings and Reed's Theory of Self-Transcendence was constructed and tested. Multiple significant correlations were calculated between the study variables indicating that health status and spiritually-related variables correlate positively with well-being. Additionally, sell-transcendence and health status were significant predictors of well-being in this sample. Significant differences were also found between the long-term and short-term housed participants on spiritual perspective, self-transcendence and well-being. Clinical implications and research recommendations are provided.

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.

Mental Health service provision organizations have strong professional norms of cooperation, which exert pressures on organizational actors to integrate and coordinate services to better, serve clients. Pressures to integrate services sometimes run counter to the funding mechanisms employed in delivery systems. This is especially true for managed care. This study examined whether integration increased or decreased as a result of the introduction of risk-based managed care in one community. Data were collected at two points in time, 1996 and 1999, in order to assess changes in services integration over time. Survey instruments and field interviews were employed to collect the relevant data. Standard network analysis techniques and simple content analysis were used for the analysis. The theoretical portion of this dissertation sought to determine which set of literature better described what occurred in a normatively cooperative network with competitive, managed care incentives. I reviewed literature in organization theory, common pool resources, and mental health to support a cooperative view of mental healthcare delivery, and reviewed principal-agent theory and managed care to support a non-cooperative view of mental healthcare delivery. I found that despite the competitive incentives introduced into the mental health delivery network, integration increased over a three-year period. Integration was measured using network measures such as density, degree centrality, cliques, core provider analysis, and blockmodels. The network findings were further supported by the qualitative analysis performed on the interview data. The latter part of the dissertation develops a model that explains collective action in interorganizational networks. It draws upon the organizational theory literature by describing the determinants necessary for network formation and using the concepts of communication, norms, time, and context. The common pool resource literature contributes a diagnosis stage to the model that assists in explaining how networks change and develop desirable characteristics over time, while supplementing the OT literature's perspective on communication, context, and time. I also suggest ways in which this dissertation contributes to practice, focusing on the systems design of mental health delivery systems.

Food Security is defined as the condition in which an assured, sustainable supply of enough nutritionally proper food is available for people to lead healthy, productive lives. The condition in which any of these requirements is missing is known as "Food Insecurity." In this paradigm, absolute food security as enjoyed by most people in the United States is at one end of the food security continuum and Famine is at the other; different levels of food insecurity make up the rest. The above definitions mandate that any analysis of why regions or populations are vulnerable to different levels of food insecurity must consider more than just the availability of food. The "Indicator Approach" to these analyses is based on the collection and analysis of diverse types of data, from multiple sources, which address socioeconomic, agroecological, demographic, environmental, agricultural and political factors in order to come to a more comprehensive understanding of food security conditions and their underlying causes in the areas studied. The hypotheses of this research are (1) That some of these "indicators" are correlated to measures or proxies for vulnerability and food insecurity at statistically meaningful levels, and (2) That the indicators so related will, in general, vary at the subnational level. The data set for this research consists of about 70 indicator and outcome parameters from different aspects of life in the Republic of Malawi, in Southern Africa. The analysis was performed through the following sequence of steps: (1) Definition of four national level proxies for Vulnerability and Food Insecurity, (2) Decomposition of Malawi's 154 EPAs into six non-overlapping EPA clusters, and (3) Independent analysis of each EPA cluster and the nation for each proxy variable with three analytic approaches (Bivariate Correlation, Regression Trees, and Multiple Linear Regression). The results of these 84 separate "mini-analyses" confirmed the research hypotheses and led to other conclusions about vulnerability assessments in general, and conditions in Malawi in particular. These results independently confirm that very small landholdings, female heads of household, and the lack of adequate employment opportunities are among the primary correlates of vulnerability and food insecurity in Malawi.

Why was national alcohol Prohibition repealed in the United States? Prohibition's repeal is unique in several respects. Alcohol Prohibition is the only American drug prohibition to ever be repealed, and the only constitutional amendment to ever be repealed. Furthermore, the volatility of Prohibition policy serves as a useful case for political sociology, which tends to focus on stable policies and government agencies. Prohibition's repeal is important substantively because it is the only American drug prohibition to be repealed. The question of repeal requires examination of several theoretical issues. First, is the process of creating a new policy fundamentally different from the process of dismantling an existing policy? Second, what effect does an exogenous crisis (like World War I or the Great Depression) have on state actor's response to the demands of a social movement? Third, what is the role of elites in a social movement? Fourth, what effect does the implementation of a policy have on those constituencies supporting it? I examine the substantive and theoretical issues of Prohibition's repeal using a variety of primary and secondary sources. National Prohibition resulted from the combined effects of crisis and elite social movement activity. Both were necessary for passage of the 18th Amendment. Implementation of the amendment proved difficult and had a destabilizing effect on Prohibition's supporters. Repeal of Prohibition resulted from the combined effects of implementation and crisis. The passage and repeal of Prohibition were the result of very different processes, suggesting that dismantling a policy is a different kind of political project than creating a policy.

The system of human subjects' protections has recently gone through many changes. Overtly, the structural and functional changes are justified by rhetorical claims of increasing protections for research subjects. Yet, change represents an opportunity for a restructuring of the system in ways not immediately obvious. So, despite rhetorical claims of increased protections for subjects, what problems are delineated and how is the system of human subjects' protections constituted? Examination of the structure and functioning of the system, utilizing a blend of social constructivism, science and technology theories, and power theories, as well as a multi-layered, multi-dimensional examination of the system of human subjects' protections points to multiple social actors with many different interests. Many of these actors claim to speak for the subjects; however the subjects themselves do not speak in venues where policy is decided. Many problematic aspects of the system of human subjects' protections are delineated; however, few of the problematic aspects were addressed by the recent structural and functional changes made to the system. Overall, the current structural and functional aspects of the system of human subjects' protections do not necessarily support rhetorical claims of increased protections for subjects. As the system came under pressure from public scrutiny, the adjustments which followed tended to benefit institutional interests rather than human subjects.