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The Occupy Wall Street Movement on September 17, 2011 that involved public protest and the occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district, is an important example of mass public dissent in American history. The conflict that lies at the heart of the protests is between two parties identified in the data as the 99% and the 1%. An abductive, grounded research strategy to explore the language used in interpreting the circumstances and details of the event, is used in conjunction with a theoretical framework provided by C. Wright Mills (1959) and Jock Young (2011), to uncover the motivations behind the 99%’s decision to protest. What is revealed upon completion of the analysis are two broad motivations for public protest by the 99% related to issues of fairness and access, set within an historical context of growing dissent against corrupt economic institutions and the governments that sustain them.

This qualitative study was designed to identify factors that might affect the psychological and educational wellness of nontraditional students in nontraditional graduate programs in Education. Specifically, informants were selected purposefully from three Oregon State University extended-campus graduate programs in Education. Student informants were working professionals with family obligations. Faculty informants were selected because of their extensive involvement in the delivery and instruction of these programs. The informants shared their experiences and opinions in focus group and in-depth interviews. The initial focus group interview yielded basic concepts and categories that guided subsequent in-depth interviews with nine students and three faculty members. Transcripts of the in-depth interviews, along with focus group data, were crafted into narrative profiles of the informants. Analysis and comparison of the informants' profiles enabled examination of patterns and commonalities that appeared to be present among their experiences. The following conclusions were generated from the findings: 1. Family support and involvement are foundational factors in the attainment of the degree. 2. Financial implications must be of prime concern in the student's preliminary plans to enroll in a graduate program. 3. Wellness, both psychological and physical, can be significantly impacted by preoccupation with the academic demands of the program. 4. Time management is basic to successfully balancing family and career responsibilities and the institutional demands of higher education. 5. Workplace support and the field application of course work are critical elements in maintaining career momentum while undertaking a meaningful learning experience. 6. Institutional and program requirements must be clearly understood by the student at the time of admission. 7. The program coordinator and the student's major professor are the main agents for institutional interface and outcome attainment. 8. Flexibility is required on the part of all stakeholders in these programs. This is especially important in three areas: (a) scheduling, (b) delivery, and (c) curriculum and instruction. 9. The cohort model provides a "second family" that is generally the best coping mechanism within the program. This study has implications for all stakeholders in nontraditional higher education: administrators, faculty, students, and employers. / Graduation date: 1998

Meanings when consuming sport are socially constructed, culturally patterned, and cognitively organized. In order to identify common elements and explore national differences in the meanings of sport consumption, this study used the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) to interview fans of professional basketball in the United States and China. Sixteen fans of professional basketball from each country were interviewed. Six categories of themes emerged from the interview data. They were: fanship socialization, fanship in life, the NBA/CBA interpretation, sport definition, identity orientation, and experience orientation. A model of fanship meaning and structure was then developed to represent fanship across the two national cultures. The model reveals that sport fanship can be conceptualized as mental maps with largely universal and interconnected cognitive constructs substantiated with meanings woven into fabrics using threads derived from the fans’ social and cultural contexts. Because of this social and cultural embeddedness, there is substantial cross-cultural variation in the ways that sport is interpreted. In particular, the two national groups have developed different definitions of what it means to be a fan. Americans focus on the team’s symbolic representation of their home city whereas Chinese see their connection with basketball-as-a-sport to be central to their fanship. This is a result of variation in the ways that fans were socialized into sport, the social significance of sport, and the fact that most Chinese fans follow NBA teams. The differences in fanship definition consequently exert cascading effects on the ways fans identify with basketball and experience the game. Findings of this study piece together different research streams to render a holistic conceptualization of fanship across the social, cultural, and psychological spheres. Based on the findings, a research program for a Sport Consumption Culture Theory (SCCT) was conceptualized. It is proposed that an emphasis on symbolism enabled by sport for identity construction and the characteristics of sport as consumption objectives form the core of a SCCT research program, and distinguish it from the general consumer research. / text

The problem of the investigation was to ascertain the contributions of various sociological theorists to a sociology of emotions. Emphasis was to be placed on the symbolic interactionist school. The method employed was that of a literature review, with an evaluative analysis of each of a number of writers as each contributed to a sociology of emotions. The study had the purpose of remedying the long-standing neglect of emotions by sociologists. This purpose was accomplished by indicating the distinctive contributions of each theorist and areas of convergence among theorists. The investigation was organized according to groups of theorists. Each theorist was examined for conceptions of human nature and of the relationship between the individual and society. Chapter I discussed the problem in general; the remaining chapters analyzed the theorists. Chapter II discussed the classical theorists Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Talcott Parsons. Chapter III presented the views of the symbolic interactionists George Herbert Mead, Charles Cooley, Herbert Blumer, Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, and Erving Goffman. Chapter IV treated contemporary theorists: Arlie Hochschild, Theodore Kemper, Susan Shott, and Norman Denzin.

Law enforcement agencies are faced with the problem of how to reduce crime in the most economical method possible without violating the law. Since drug offenders also engage in a disproportionate amount of non-drug crime, then drug enforcement is considered as an acceptable general crime control method. Unfortuantely, this is an expensive option because incarcerating offenders is both costly and ony a short-term solution to the problem. A review of existing research examining the prior criminal histories of drug offenders compared to their previous involvement in violent and property crime is conducted to evaluate this relationship.

This research tests the descriptive validity of Ouchi's model of organizational control when it is applied to auditing firms. An analysis of Ouchi's model and other writings indicates that the selection-socialization type of control (or clan control or control by a strong organizational culture) would be expected to be used in auditing firms and that it would he evidenced by similarities in values perceived to be held by clan members. Empirical evidence is gathered from graduating students who are accounting majors and from professional staff in auditing firms using SYMLOG to measure perceived values. This evidence provided some support for the descriptive validity of Ouchi's model, but the evidence is mixed. The sets of perceived values found in staff of auditing firms do not appear to come from a single set, but the perceived values of each firm are different. Offers do appear to be made to individuals who have different sets of perceived values when compared to people who did not receive offers. No evidence was found to indicate that length of association within firm results in more similar sets of perceived values being held by firm members.

This dissertation studies China's first industrializing efforts to transform its navigation, cotton textiles and banking in the late nineteenth century, and analyzes the paradoxical roles of the state and culture in achieving development. It argues that successful late development is dependent on state policies that emphasize state-society connectedness and tradition-modernity continuity. In late Qing China, the state-midwifed industrial projects faced both intensive competition from foreign firms and resistance from domestic vested interests. Because key resource factors such as capital, production technology, and management skill were scarce and distributed unevenly across multiple sectors, the state officials had to redirect the resource flows in order to found new industries. The state had to perform an essential function of creative destruction, without which social groups in non-state sectors would be less likely to embrace changes, but the ultimate success of new industries depended on a societal consolidation that redefined the state-society relationship. This study also shows that culture was a double-edged sword with great potential for lubricating industrial transformation. The promoters of development created myths, symbols and beliefs to legitimize their industrializing efforts. They made a constant effort to reinterpret tradition in order to find compatibility between the foreign and domestic systems. The distinctive sectoral paths taken by navigation, cotton textiles and banking represented different patterns of state-society cooperation for achieving development. Each sector had distinct production technologies and product structure, and was endowed with distinct sectoral institutions and other legacies. These endowments constrained choices of every new industry, but it was a combination of structural factors and industry's responsive strategies that explained why some enterprises succeeded while others failed. A project was more likely to succeed if there was greater state-society connectedness and cultural compatibility. Steam navigation was the most successful among the three, followed by cotton textiles. Banking was the least successful.