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The increasingly unsustainable relationship between society and the environment is drawing considerable attention across disciplines. In sociology this attention has focused largely on developing theoretical frameworks for explicating how various social processes negatively impact the environment, however what sociology has done less well is develop rich understandings of the other side of this relationship, how ecological change can create instability in social processes. To fill this gap I employ an extended case study of the interplay between the social and ecological processes related to the introduction of Asian carp, an invasive species that has set into motion considerable contestations across political, cultural, economic and scientific social processes in the greater Chicago area as well as the Great Lakes. Through this case study I demonstrate how ecological changes, such as the migration of Asian carp, can impact social processes. I then provide an historical analysis of the 1900 reversal of the Chicago River to show how social responses to the Asian carp invasion are structured through previous histories. My aim is to demonstrate that the Asian carp invasion is not, in itself, a single transformative process, but rather a cumulative development generated and constrained via several connected social and ecological histories. My overall aim is to demonstrate the benefit of examining how social histories and ecological histories combine over time, or the historicity of social and ecological interaction. / 10000-01-01

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Thesis advisor: Zine Magubane / Thesis advisor: Stephen Pfohl / In a series of case studies, I problematize the reification of race in the American Sociology of race from a postcolonial perspective. I argue prominent theories within the American sociology of race tend to essentialize race as a cause of racial inequality in the United States. These theories assume the existence of racial categories and then discuss how other entities become racialized into racialized social systems (Bonilla-Silva 1997), or racial projects (Omi & Winant 1994). These theories emphasize national structures, but occlude empire. I argue the occlusion of empire in the American sociology of race, particularly in theorization of racial categorization, is problematic. Empire is the structure that links race to class inequality, and produces race as a social category of exclusion. Therefore, a sociological theory of American racial inequality, which does not analyze imperialism as a structure that produces race, and rather focuses solely on national-structures, or a definition of capitalism severed from imperialism, cannot provide a thoroughly structural explanation for the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Young women occupy unprecedented space in contemporary society. Their professional ambitions, educational achievements, practices of cultural consumption, and participation in sport and leisure all offer evidence of a new position for young women. This thesis analyzes female snowboarders as exemplars of young women in contemporary society and popular physical culture. Many young women today play sport and engage in physical activity with a sense of enthusiasm and entitlement unknown to most of their mothers and grandmothers. Against this background the female snowboarder is an excellent barometer of the nature of contemporary youth and popular culture, of the changes in those cultures including the development of niche female cultural industries, and of the emerging opportunities available to middle-class women in Western society. Women's snowboarding, however, is a complicated and multidimensional phenomenon interwoven with numerous political, cultural, social and economic events and processes. In this thesis I set out to capture the complexity of female snowboarding by systematically contextualizing and interrogating the lived experiences of female boarders through drawing upon six critical social theoretical perspectives: Marxist political economy, post-Fordism, feminism, hegemonic masculinity, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of embodiment, and Foucauldian theorizing. In applying these theories, I select key concepts and engage them in conversations with my insider cultural knowledge of snowboarding, numerous periods of fieldwork, and an extensive base of artifacts and sources collected over five years. In this thesis I extend academic understandings of female youth culture via the case study of women in snowboarding, and offer a valuable critique of contemporary social theories used to explain many different social phenomena that involve tensions and power relationships between the genders. While no single theory or concept proved adequate to deal with the multidimensional phenomenon of the female boarder, each having its shortcomings and offering quite different insights, several reveal important commonalities in relation to some key concepts in critical sociology, viz, structure, agency, culture, the body and embodiment, gender and power. These commonalities, I argue, offer future directions for theorizing about, and advancing our understanding of, young women in popular physical culture.

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Abstract The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) currently enjoys the status of being the leading predictive tool for testing user acceptance of new technologies. Despite IS researchers and practitioners holding the model in high esteem, this study exposes some of its limitations when applied to a study of shop-floor users in South Africa. In search of an alternative theory explaining why these users so openly embraced the new information system, it emerges that the Critical Social Theory (CST) of Jürgen Habermas provides the most relevant insight. The use of the CST perspective reveals how these users view the new system as a potential means with which to achieve emancipation from their otherwise dreary existence as product inspectors. This thesis argues that this emancipatory potential offered by the new system played a major role in its successful acceptance. / Dissertation (Magister Commercii (Informatics))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Informatics / unrestricted

Syftet med denna studie var att beskriva hur anställda på en kundtjänst i en stor organisation upplever lärande på sin arbetsplats. Studien har en kvalitativ ansats och empirin har samlats in genom semistrukturerade, kvalitativa intervjuer. Totalt intervjuades tio anställda på en kundtjänst i en stor organisation. Intervjuerna transkriberades och blev till 43 sidor data, som sedan kategoriserades och analyserades. Studiens resultat visar likheter med den tidigare forskningen inom området för arbetsplatslärande. Studiens resultat visar även att de anställda på kundtjänsten upplever att individer själva i viss mån behöver ta initiativ för sitt lärande. Vidare visar resultaten att lärande upplevs som en viktig del av vardagen på arbetsplatsen och en viktig del för de anställda för att utvecklas. De anställda upplever också mer formella typer av lärande som viktigt, framförallt för att skapa en grundläggande kunskap. Studiens resultat pekar även på eventuella förbättringsmöjligheter som de anställda upplevde skulle förbättra deras lärande på arbetsplatsen och inom organisationen. / <p>Betygsdatum 2021-06-07</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / A philosophical elaboration of Theodor Adorno's conception of aesthetic form. Adorno's aesthetic theory is presented through a reconstruction of the major concepts in his Aesthetic Theory and via the projects of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics. / 2031-01-01