The purpose of this study is to determine what, if any, effect the September 11th terrorist attacks had on national suicide rates in the time following the attacks. Two schools of thought seem to give contradicting proposals. The first is the classical Durkheimian model, which predicts that the national integration brought on by the attacks should cause a decrease in anomie and consequently a decrease in suicides. The opposing view point is that of communal bereavement, which proposes an increase in suicides after a public tragedy due to the tendency of individuals to be emotionally impacted by events which do not involve them directly. To test which theoretical framework prevails, the suicide rates of one hundred days prior to September 11th, 2001 and one hundred days after were compared to the suicide rates of the days within the same time frame in the years 1999, 2000, and 2002 to test if there was a statistical change in the daily suicide rate. A series of regressions were conducted to determine if changes in suicide rates did in fact occur. Data was collected from the Center for Disease Control National Center for Health Statistics mortality database. Analysis showed that suicide rates do not change significantly after September 11th, 2001, as compared to the same time periods in 1999, 2000, and 2002. / Master of Science

This research explores the subtle distribution of power within early American industrial capitalism, as seen in the nineteenth-century company town of Fayette, Michigan. Research methods for the project include GIS-based analysis of the built environment and artifact patterns; the development of a historical ethnography for the town; and archaeological excavations of household refuse excavated from three class-based neighborhoods (an artifact database is attached to this document in CD format). Issues surrounding power and agency are explored in regard to three heuristic categories of power. In the first category, the company imposed a system of structural, class-based power that is most visible in hierarchical differences in pay and housing, as well as consumer behavior. A second category, bio-power, addresses disciplinary activities surrounding health and the human body. The class system extended to discrepancies in the company's regulation of employee health, as observed in medicinal artifacts, disposal patterns of industrial waste, incidence of intestinal parasites, and unequal access to healthcare. In addition, landscape analysis shows how the built environment served as a disciplinary technology to reinforce hegemonic and naturalized class divisions, to regenerate these divisions through symbolic violence and workers' daily practices, and to impose self-regulation. The third ensemble of power relations is pluralistic, heterarcical, and determined by personal identity (e.g., consumer behavior and gender). Individuals drew upon non-economic capital to bolster social status and express identity apart from the corporate hierarchy. This research explores the social impacts of our industrial heritage and the potential repercussions of industrialization today.

Although the patent systems of the United States and Europe have become continuously more similar their underlying legal philosophy continues to be different. This study examines how the two patent philosophies emerged out of different social situations and why and how patent systems can develop similar formal arrangements without experiencing a similar harmonization of underlying philosophy. As patent laws are historically unique to western culture it provides a lens through which to observe its relative social appreciation of industry, technology, commerce, and the role of the law. This study argues that the two separate 'patent philosophies' emerged as results of unique historical situations and that the reason as to why they have been able to maintain their distinct natures is that a similar ideological pressure has not been present since. The patent law of the United States, which is based on an 'inventor philosophy', was the product of the ideological currents of the movement toward American independence. This philosophy is friendly to inventors and entrust them with all responsibility over their inventions. Its individualistic and democratic character resonated well with the country's anti-colonial and anti-monarchical political campaign. A similar ideological pressure to revise fundamental opinions on technology and law has not emerged since. Virtually all European nations are today part of the European Patent Organization which administers the world's only true regional patent office. This European system is based on an 'invention philosophy' which was designed in the late 19th century by German industrialists. This philosophy is anti-monopoly and sees the State as a guardian of the public benefits which arise from technological novelties. Due to German industrial efficiency, it was used to model European patent law. Although both philosophies have proved viable, the case of patent law suggests that the role of legal philosophy must be reduced. Apart from being crucial in the creation of a new legal system, this study argues for the need to drastically reconsider the relationship between substantive and formal law. Both patent philosophies have consistently lost importance over time to the point where they today support two formally very similar systems.

Socially produced risks – ranging from financial crises to climate change – are of fundamental importance to contemporary economic, political, and social life. Given the central importance of these risks, the development of frameworks that analyze the relation between risk, power, and inequality is a key task for sociology. Ulrich Beck’s theory of risk society is a leading and powerful framework for analyzing the growing social production and distribution of risk, but it has fundamental problems in its understanding of the relation between risk and class. Beck has argued that class relations will be dissolved due to the increasingly equal and catastrophic nature of risks, while, in response, his critics have shown that increasing risk does not undermine class. This thesis explores the important, but as yet unasked, question: if class does continue to be a central factor, will it become even more important due to the changes associated with risk society? In pursuing this question, this study shows how the theory of risk society has conceptual resources and explanatory implications that both Beck and his critics have misapprehended. Firstly, it is argued that the processes associated with risk society tend to exacerbate class inequalities rather than simply dissolving or reproducing them. Secondly, it its argued that the theory of risk society is not antithetical to class analysis, but can actually make an important contribution to theorizing the dynamics of existing class relations. By analyzing how the distribution of environmental bads and the social production and distribution of financial risk tend to intensify class inequalities, this thesis substantiates this re-theorization of risk society and class. It thereby makes a fundamental intervention into contemporary understandings of the relation between risk, inequality, and power in the twenty-first century. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-26 11:44:32.979

The work submitted for examination consists of ten items, with the key sole-authored components comprising a book chapter (Winn, 2012) and four peer-reviewed journal articles (Winn, 2013; 2014; 2015a; 2015b). Other, joint-authored work is intended to be supplementary and to provide further evidence of the two persistent themes of inquiry which my work has been concerned with over the last six years: the role and character of labour and property in higher education, or rather, ‘academic labour’ and the ‘academic commons’. Six of the ten publications discuss these themes through a critique of the role of technology in higher education, in particular the way networked technology forms the practical, ideological and legal premise for the idea and forms of ‘openness’ in higher education. Throughout my work, I treat ‘technology’ as a reified and fetishized concept which masks the more fundamental categories of labour, value and the commodity-form that are concealed in the idea and form of the ‘public university’. I start from the observation that advocates of ‘open education’ tend to envision an alternative form of higher education that is based on a novel form of academic commons but neglect to go further and critically consider the underlying form of academic labour. As such, the product is set free but not the producer. In response, through my publications I develop the theoretical basis for an alternative social and institutional form of co-operative higher education; one in which openness is constituted through a categorial critique aimed at the existing commodity-form of knowledge production.

This thesis is about using rather than applying Norbert Elias’s conceptual ideas, and its analytical procedure employs a ‘fair play’ approach to theorists and theory. This is put to use regarding British independent funeral firms by conceiving these as a figuration developing over the long-term, and exploring the accounts of funeral directors placed in dialogue with Elias’s ideas. The thesis examines how the key Eliasian concepts of figuration, sociogenesis, habitus and de/civilising processes play out in context, including over-time developments within the British funeral industry. Its focus is ‘thinking with Elias’ about such matters in relation to the everyday working practices of independent funeral directors. Chapter One introduces Elias’s key conceptual ideas. In beginning its ‘fair play’ analysis it discusses criticisms, debates and uses of his work and explores the substantive literature on death, funerals and the British funeral industry. Building on this, Chapter Two considers analytically the process of methodologically trying out potential approaches to thinking with Elias around one of his core ideas, figuration. Departing from Elias’s retrospective approach, it chases the independent funeral firm figuration as it unfolds in the present. Using figuration in thinking with Elias sets the stage for further analytical use of Eliasian concepts in subsequent chapters. Chapter Three explores how sociogenesis works by examining intersections and departures between the funeral directors’ accounts and the Eliasian view of long-term development. Regarding sociogenesis, the ‘actual’ processes of death-related social change were not of central interest to the funeral directors, who were more concerned with ensuring their firms’ persistence. Chapter Four engages with Elias’s ideas about habitus and the we-identities of the independent directors, shared belief and behaviour traditions within and between firms and the directors, and also sources of conflict. Core to this is the emphasis on traditions, although these are present-time ‘invented’ around the priority of remaining in business. Chapter Five presents Elias’s theory of the de/civilising process as his ‘bigger picture’ of social change, and its analysis engages and contrasts this with the independent funeral directors’ accounts of the bigger picture in discussing perceived trends. They respond to changes as these are unfolding, and explain over-time matters of stasis and change as they experience them in ways that challenge Eliasian thinking. Chapter Six discusses the main contributions of the thesis. In using theory and thinking with Elias rather than against him, I have aimed to be a fair player in doing sociology. First, my thesis recognises the importance of context and that how concepts play out in ‘real’ life will vary significantly. Second, in adopting a fair play approach, the thesis provides a detailed empirical example of how to evaluate theorists on their own terms by following in their suggestions and engaging with their ideas in contextual and reflexive ways. It has neither replicated nor reproduced an Eliasian study, but instead demonstrated how actually using it in a context will play out. Third, the thesis has used the Eliasian key concepts of figuration, sociogenesis, habitus and de/civilising in a present-day setting so as to examine how these unfold in the present and can be explored through people’s accounts. Fourth, it analyses the accounts of the independent funeral directors in a fair play way and establishes that their ideas work as theory, as exploring the dialogue between Elias and the funeral directors has shown. Overall, the thesis is a reply to Elias’s call for sociologists to think for themselves, engage with and expand upon ideas and settings to hand, and to pursue the actual processes at work in society.

Over recent decades there has been significant progress towards gender equality in the workplace and at home. Transformations in work and childcare domains have occurred for families in Western societies, including de-gendered parenting, in which childcare responsibilities are shared equally or assumed primarily by the father. Although these arrangements constitute a recent and rare phenomenon, this increase in proportion has been matched by an academic interest. Using quantitative data from traditional and role-reversed couples, this research aims to explore the social psychological mechanisms underlying non-normative behavioural choices, as well as the consequences for couples' relationship quality, well-being and life satisfaction. Traditional couples are those in which the mother bears primary responsibility for child care while the father is the main breadwinner. In non-traditional role-reversed couples the opposite occurs. A sample of 242 individual parents with children from birth to 12 years old, completed an extensive questionnaire. Involvement in work and childcare, social psychological variables, relationship and life satisfaction, perceptions of their division of responsibilities and socio-demographic characteristics were examined. Results show how social prescriptions and structural characteristics are limiting the intersection between the mother and the father role, and help us understand how both roles can be more similar than different. The findings also disclose how by being involved men are assisting women’s career and help make a distinction between traditional and role reversed women’s views of the appropriate parental role for men and women. Furthermore, the results contribute for a better understanding of how gender ideologies and non-essentialist perceptions differ between couples in different arrangements and how they relate to involvement in childcare and well-being, as well as the role of choice in well-being, life and marital satisfaction.

This thesis contributes to discussion surrounding the importance of reflexivity in social theory and sociology by illustrating some of the paradoxes involved in the development of a reflexive social science. It does this by focusing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, arguably the main advocate of relexive sociology. It is argued that Bourdieu's emphasis on a 'science of practices' limits his ability to be completely relexive because it excludes moral reflexivity. This is ironic, given that Bourdieu believes that reflexivity increases scientificity. The thesis argues that Max Weber's work on religious rationalisation offers an insightful understanding of these paradoxes. His work reveals how and why Modernity witnessed a separation and tension between moral reflexivity and epistemological reflexivity. It also reveals, despite Weber's best efforts to do so, that such a paradoxical tension cannot be overcome. The thesis uses these insights to show the dilemmas and tensions facing any relexive sociology / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study is positioned within existing debates about the meaning and role of academic literacy, how it shapes and then frames the academic and professional writing practices of business students. It explores relationships between literacy, individual writers and the academy. It goes beyond merely locating these relationships, pointing more to the need to understand how particular student and staff groups within the faculty describe academic writing practices, and in turn act upon these descriptions. Current formulations of academic literacy reflect a heavy emphasis by academic and professional communities on the commodity value of 'literacy skills'. This happens despite the fact that not much is known about the details and current culture of literacy practices in Australian universities, and how these are inflected by different disciplinary areas and cross-cultural factors. Given the divergent applications of literacy that exist across the business professions, there remains a distinct lack of consensus over the meaning of literacy in business higher education communities. Institutional responses reflect this lack of consensus, and are expressed as inflections around a perceived 'crisis' in tertiary literacy standards. Business and professional faculties, while simultaneously embracing the economic and policy imperative underlying mass education, are seen to remain scornful of the service obligation this brings. Implicit in current understandings of academic literacy are the taken for granted connections between basic literacy, reading and writing, schooling, education and employment. These connections underwrite the relations of institutional arrangements, everyday practices, policy construction, and the conditions for student evaluation in the faculty. This study begins from where literacy is located 'bodily', and provides in the first instance a content analysis which explicates and presents student discussions on various ways of thinking about, framing and reframing academic writing. The project then turns to contemporary literacy theory for an explanation of how a community discourse of 'academic literacy' is conceived, produced and in turn reproduced. Contemporary literacy theory has embraced three theoretical frameworks in its move away from a traditional uni-dimensional view of literacy, namely critical social theories, discourse and textual studies, and ethnographic research methodologies (Smith 1988). This trinity of frameworks is used in the second instance to examine a series of interviews with student writers. This data makes visible the means by which institutions value certain literacy practices over others, practices which support the naturalized world of writing required by the faculty and its professional communities. Dominant literacy practices are identified, and interpretive procedures from the field of Ethnomethodology are used to account for the ways in which discourses on academic writing both reflect and produce social and community realities. Theories of discourse are used to examine the social construction of student writing practices within this local faculty community by identifying the attributes and assumptions that are attached to different community members to account for aspects of writing practice. The key to understanding academic literacy practices is found in explication of the social processes and practices that organise the 'everyday' world of the business faculty. This project discloses how the subjective world of academic literacy is organised, and how this form of organisation is articulated 'to the social relations of the larger social and economic process' (Smith 1988:152). In the strict context of this study, this means being able to disclose for certain groups of student writers, how their situations and literacy practices are organised and determined by social processes outside the scope of their 'everyday' world. This process of discovery requires the researched to actively construct 'local' referents as categories and concepts which, when applied to a faculty context, can form an observable, local practice as a dialectic 'between what members do in tending the categories and concepts of (an) institutional ideology' on academic writing (Smith 1988:161). The interpretive practices students use to analyse literacy practices bring academic literacy into being. The outcomes of the study show that the relationships between literacy, the individual and the academy are currently explained and understood in terms of the connections that can be made between existing professional and academic community discourses. Here the concept of a 'literacy crisis' resides. It is expressed through informant talk as a perceived fall in academic literacy standards. Informant debate on what has caused this decline is generally expressed through two key positions. One of these holds a rhetorical view of literacy as a somewhat natural and procedural outcome of the higher educational process, positioning literacy within an oppositional framework of deficit cultural and linguistic models. A second view evokes a competitive agenda of limited and limiting academic and professional opportunities. Behind these arguments and their rebuttals, lie assumptions about the 'literate' person as a member of the faculty. In arguing that research into the field of academic literacy has concealed a student sub-text, this study argues that literacy has been constructed, implemented and investigated from the perspective of the institution. It follows that academic literacy can be better understood as a socially constructed and signifying space, one which includes opportunities for students to create their own powerful identities as writers and as members of professional and faculty communities. This project bridges many aspects of student experience, with the major focus upon that which has been excluded by the absence of students from the making of the topics and the relevance of the discourse. For this compelling reason, this project has direct relevance to teachers, researchers, fieldworkers and policy-makers involved in the overlapping fields of literacy and higher education.

Pre-literate children experience written text as a meaningless material object, the word-object, but the compulsory and institutional aspects of reading pedagogy make this an experience from which they cannot escape. Some children begin to associate their own negative experiental sense with the word-object before they are able to learn to read. As reading pedagogy continues, these children begin to read back experiental sense which prevents them from converting the word-object to meaningful text. Experiental sense is repressed because it is psychically painful. It retains qualities of phenomena repressed from childhood: it is active and intractable to reason. The result is an intractable illiteracy which may be interpreted as biologically based �dyslexia.� Further attempts at reading pedagogy in childhood and adulthood generally result in reproduction of the inability because this pedagogy requires learners to attempt to read linguistically which elicits experiental sense. As these children become adults, their avoidance of reading sometimes structures their social relations to accommodate and compound their problems. The method to overcome the problem replaces experiental sense with positive feelings about written language. The power of language to denote emotions of pleasure and affirmation from learners� lives is used. These emotions are enhanced through a technique of affirmative intersubjectivity. Short spoken affirmative texts are made by learners, tape recorded and reproduced as written texts by the literacy worker. Through allowing learners control and autonomy over their spoken and written texts, the positive emotions in them are associated by learners with the written texts. Exercises on the affirmative written texts are used to demonstrate regularities about written language. Learners then progress to reading suitable independent texts and other activities. There are suggestions about how to enhance learners� feelings as competent readers and writers. The thesis uses a methodology of action research and includes five case studies of adults with literacy problems. Concepts from social theory, psychoanalysis and object relations theory are used and adapted to understand written language, schooling and illiteracy.