<p> This dissertation uses a relational approach and a contentious politics framework to examine the archaeological record. Methodologically, it merges spatial and social network analyses to promote a geosocial archaeology. Combined, the articles create a counter-narrative that highlights how environmentally focused investigations fail to explain how and why societies in the Southwest often reorganize horizontally. The first article uses geosocial networks, which I argue represent memory maps, to reveal that the socially important, and sophisticated, act of forgetting was employed by people in the Gallina region during A.D. 1100&ndash;1300. A concomitant community level, settlement pattern analysis demonstrates similarities between the arrangement of Gallina and Basketmaker-era settlements. These historically situated settlement structures, combined with acts of forgetting, were used by Gallina region residents to institute and maintain a horizontally organized social movement that was likely aimed at rejecting the hierarchical social atmosphere in the Four Corners region. The second article proposes that as ideologically charged material goods are consumed, fissures within past ideological landscapes are revealed and that these fissures can demonstrate acts of resistance in the archaeological past. It also contends that social and environmental variables need to be combined for these conflicting religious and political practices to be correctly interpreted. The third article applies many of the ideas outlined in the second article to a case study in the Greater Southwest during A.D. 1200&ndash;1450. Fractures in the ideological landscape demonstrate that the Salado Phenomenon was a religious social movement formed around, and successful because of, its populist nature. Based on variations in how the Salado ideology interacted with contemporaneous hierarchical and non-hierarchical religious and political organizations it is probable that the Salado social movement formed around desires for the open access to religious knowledge.</p>

<p> The convergence of material donations following disaster events is well documented in the literature. This influx of goods is often dubbed a &ldquo;second disaster&rdquo; with non-priority and unnecessary goods causing transportation and storage challenges to the community of survivors. Interviews were conducted following Hurricane Sandy in 2013 and two tornadoes outside of Oklahoma City in May 2013. By utilizing the Triple-A model (agility, adaptability, and alignment), which has previously been applied to commercial and humanitarian supply chains, and the social construction paradigm, this dissertation investigates how stakeholders understand donations and the roles of the features of the Triple-A model in the disaster relief supply chain. Findings illustrate conflicting views about the necessity for agility, adaptability, and alignment. From a broader perspective, the findings reveal that individuals involved in the supply chain differentially assign value in the donations process, including if they value donor needs over survivor needs, and if cash or materiel items are of greater value to the donors and survivors. Agility, the timing, flexibility, and reaction time in the supply chain, was viewed as necessary to a healthy supply chain, however there was not a universal understanding of how to achieve an agile supply chain. Overall, alignment of donor interests and survivor interests was constructed as necessary by stakeholders in the disaster affected community, however donation drive coordinators lacked a clear understanding of how to align the interests of survivors and donors. Lastly, adaptability to structural changes was constructed as necessary, except in the cases of individuals and organizations that placed a higher value on donor generosity over survivor interests. Further research is necessary into the social construction of the value of donations, as well as how agility, adaptability, and alignment are understood in the disaster relief supply chain.</p>

<p> This thesis examines the discourses and practices of professionals who work with survivors of sex trafficking. Professionals include social workers, therapists, and nonprofit workers. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted through participant observation at public meetings that were held to counter human trafficking, by shadowing a professional and through volunteer work with a nonprofit organization that houses adolescent female survivors of sex trafficking. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with eight different professionals. Interview and fieldwork data were analyzed by identifying the discourses professionals use when discussing their work with survivors. Additionally, professionals&rsquo; discourses were analyzed to understand the ways in which human trafficking is referenced and characterized in the social and political realm. This thesis exposes the ways professionals discursively construct their experiences working with survivors and how they position themselves in their attempts to help others. The analysis also considers the ways in which professionals view the resources available for survivor reintegration and the role that these resources play in combating human trafficking. Findings include areas of tension with language use amongst the counter-trafficking movement and the different models of agency and self-positioning that professionals take when working with their clients. Additionally, the analysis reveals different perspectives on the process of a survivor&rsquo;s reintegration into society and the resources that are needed to achieve this process. Lastly, this research contributes to combatting the issue of human trafficking as it illuminates professionals&rsquo; challenges and experiences when assisting survivors of sex trafficking in the process of survivors&rsquo; reintegration into society.</p><p>

<p> The new economy, which is information-centric, enabled by the computerization of business, social, and communication tools, and globally scaled by networking technologies, is fueling high rates of workforce mobility. Careers are shorter and more diverse, with individuals flowing sequentially from organizational socialization episode to episode, at a rapid pace, into different cultures, even cultures that may be in conflict with each other. </p><p> To expand our understanding of this phenomenon my study examined the plasticity of human socialization. It focused on the practices that enable individual, situated socialization flow between organizations. I chose &ldquo;chameleon&rdquo; hackers who adaptively flow between hacker and corporate InfoSec socialization episodes for my study population. </p><p> I used qualitative methodology to study this situated socialization phenomenon and modified grounded theory to build my theoretical models. Using practice theory with habitus as a sensitizing concept and life course theoretical orientation, my study examined the processes that constitute the situated socialization practice used by my informants which they call &ldquo;code switching.&rdquo; I used autoethnographic case studies from my participation in five hacker conventions that spanned over 4 years, semi-structured interviews with 17 highly accomplished and corporately socialized chameleon hackers, and archived data sources. </p><p> My study identified that my informants possess seven core internal habitus attributes that are essential to the accomplishment of hacker work tasks. These core attributes do not vary as the organizational socialization episode varies. My informants&rsquo; code switching consists of a reflexive habitus adaptation practice that is cued to their situated socialization flow and guided by the same five phases hackers use to execute a hack. When plotted over time, these episodes form a unidirectional chain of socialization over their lifetime. My chameleon hacker informants use metacognitive strategies framed by an empathetic stance to reflexively adapt an outward facing set of habitus attributes to achieve socialization congeniality with the situated organization. This cued socialization flow is catalyzed by the potential for an exchange of economic or social capital or the award of symbolic capital between the organization and the chameleon hacker. The chameleon hacker also uses a similar metacognitive strategy to enter a state of flow to accomplish individual-based hacker work tasks. </p><p> This study expands the unit of analysis for organizational socialization to include what happens before and after a socialization episode and begins a theoretical conversation on the &ldquo;how to&rdquo; of adaptive reflexive habitus practice.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation presents three sociological essays analyzing advertising agencies through the lens of cultural economic sociology. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research and 81 interviews across four American advertising agencies, this dissertation presents three explorations of how meaning-making processes are central to the various processes of advertising production. </p><p> The first essay explores how market intermediaries help other market actors see the market and their opportunities for action within it. The essay article illustrates how advertising practitioners provide their clients with visions of what the market is and what opportunities for action lie within it, developing advertising campaigns to match that vision. These accounts of the market and its opportunities are dynamically negotiated, both reflecting and shaping the identities of the clients, their target audiences, and the intermediaries themselves. Because intermediaries dramaturgically perform these interpretations of the market for their client in micro-level interactions, they must also deal with disagreement, contestation, and negotiation over their visions of the market.</p><p> The second essay explores how advertising agencies consume and produce consumer research. Taking a relational approach to the production of advertising, this essay conceives of the work agencies do as part of establishing viable exchange relationships with their clients in which the client exchanges money for the agency's ideas for campaigns. The analysis shows how agency employees&mdash;in particular, account planners&mdash;first negotiate what kinds of consumers matter with their clients, then produce consumer research in ways that helps them generate particular types of qualitative materials. Agency employees then use those materials to craft aesthetic, material representations of the consumer that can serve as exchange media to facilitate the broader exchange of campaign ideas and money.</p><p> The third essay takes adopts a pragmatic sociological framework to examine conflict in advertising agencies, suggesting such conflicts can be better understood as inevitable clashes between different regimes for justifying the value of advertising work. The article examines three such regimes that advertising practitioners use to justify the work they do: the regime of <i> partnership</i>, the regime of <i>expertise</i>, and the regime of <i>brokerage</i>. Each regime supposes its own definition of what is good advertising work, how that work is evaluated, and how that work should be done, as well as what relationships there should be between the agents who do the work and their clients. Furthermore, each regime has its critiques of the others, and compromises between regimes are unstable and temporary. The different types of conflicts that arise from clashes between these regimes can be understood as the outcome of threats to the different social bonds supposed by each of those regimes.</p><p> These articles are prefaced by a broad discussion of the intellectual projects of economic sociology, in which the literature is divided into two camps: one that studies the economy <i>of</i> culture, and one that studies the economy as culture. After reviewing the different conceptualizations of production and consumption in each, as well as considering the role of materiality and the relationship between the economic and the social, this discussion concludes with a commitment to studying the economy as the enactment of cultural intentions, opting for an analytical strategy that preserves the relative autonomy of culture in exploring how narratives and codes structure economic activity.</p><p>

Using Indigenous epistemology blended with qualitative methodology, I spoke with forty-five Indigenous people about navigating the problematic processes for multiple American Indian identities within different contexts. I examined Indigenous identity as the product of out-group processes (being invisible in spite of the prevalence of overt racism), institutional constraints (being in the unique position where legal identification validates Indian race), and intra-ethnic othering (internalizing overt and institutionalized racism which results in authenticity policing). I find that overt racism becomes invisible when racist social discourse becomes legitimized. Discourse structures society within the interactions between institutions, individuals, and groups. Racist social discourse becomes legitimized through its normalization created within social institutions--like education, media, legislation, and family. Institutions shape social norms to make it seem right to enact racial violence against, and between, Indigenous Peoples, using stereotypes, racist labels, and laws that define "Indian" race by blood quanta. Ultimately, Indigenous Peoples can reproduce or contest the legitimized racism of Western social norms. Therefore, this work explores the dialectical and reciprocal relationship between notions of structure and agency as represented in negotiations of Indigenous identity.

<p> The intent of this research is to reveal and understand the symbolic meanings of cultural and ethnic identity that cultural creators and receivers perceive through their involvement in mariachi. This study&rsquo;s shows the way those involved in mariachi perceive their cultural and ethnic identity while living in a city that infuses Mexican and Texan cultural sensibilities. A mixed-method approach was taken between in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation. Participant observation was utilized as a means to build a stratified snowball sample of the various cultural producers and receivers of mariachi. The cultivation of this sample was guided by Griswold&rsquo;s cultural diamond framework. Reliance on semi-structured in-depth interviews as the primary research method of inquiry illuminated the various horizons of meaning that mariachi performers, instructors, gatekeepers, and aficionados held in regards to their efforts to preserve a long standing cultural musical art form in San Antonio, Texas. Some findings include various stories and perspectives on cultural and ethnic identity in mariachi, varying strategies undertaken to preserve mariachi music in the twenty-first century through technology, its institutionalization into a public-education setting, the varying gender dynamics among mariachi performers, the question of authenticity and hybridization in mariachi music, and cultural politics in the mariachi music scene.</p>

One of the most troubling features of the contemporary critical scene is the near-total absence of "non-western" theories. My thesis investigates how this absence is constructed not through institutional discursive, or disciplinary constraints, but through the content of hegemonic theories. This requires exploring two main questions, namely, "what makes elite theories imperialist?" and "how can we rearticulate "indigeneity" so that the project of reconstructing indigenous theories is not a nativist project"? Instead of reducing the imperialism of elite theories to their geographical or cultural origins, I look at what they do within specific cross-cultural contexts. No unique definition of cultural imperialism is assumed. Theories become imperialist through a variety of tropes, within specific contexts. One of the predominant ways in which this occurs is by situating the West as Theory, and East as Evidence. This is based on the interpretation of the "indigenous" as necessarily nativist, authentic, ahistorical, pure and autonomous. My thesis also demonstrates how processes of "contextualization," "displacement," "historical erasure," "dislocation," and "homogenization" become tropes of cultural imperialism, silencing the other as theory, in theory. The relationship between theory and cultural difference, central to the project of reconstructing indigenous theories is usually understood in terms of the notion of determination. If problems of reductionism are to be avoided, I argue that it is important to reformulate the relation in terms of the notion of "location." Rasa, a theory indigenous to the Indian context is discussed in order to demonstrate that the absence of "non-western" perspectives is ideologically constituted. All theories are indigenous, that is, local, particular, and situated within specific social and historical contexts. It is in this sense I argue, that the margins of theory need to be reinterpreted so as to reconstitute the heterogeneity of postcolonial space and time.