As an historio-sociological novel The Octopus is important because it synthesizes several features of late nineteenth century America, especially naturalism and the political preponderance of the Southern Pacific railroad. An analysis of this novel provides a better understanding of its features and adds a dimension to the perspective of history.

African countries in general have registered improved socio-economic and economic growth and development for the past 20 years since the 1990s. Of particular interest is southern Africa which has recorded a period of unprecedented political stability and economic growth in the wake of South Africa’s change to a democratic dispensation in 1994. Economic growth has brought with it an increase in the number of families counted in the middle class and therefore as prospective domestic and outbound tourists. This study examined the extent to which both the private and the public sectors in southern Africa, created with a focus on overseas or international tourists, have recognized this regional tourist market. The study used the core-periphery relationship as the conceptual framework to determine the difference ways in which core and periphery dynamics influenced the recognition of the regional tourist as a tourism market. The research found that the regional market has been recognized to different extents by the public and the private sector in the four case study countries. The core country, South Africa, has shown the most comprehensive recognition by dedicating resources to research into and planning around how to capture or retain market share. The peripheral countries have dedicated few if any resources to understanding the regional market; their systems and investors continue to focus primarily on the international market, and because the international and regional markets have different needs, find it difficult to switch their focus to this emerging market. The study also found that having a core country as an immediate neighbor pulls all those with the willingness and ability to travel towards itself, to the detriment of domestic tourism development in the short-term. The study suggests that to access the existing regional market, the three case study countries of the periphery would be well served to adapt to their circumstances the data-driven approach of South Africa.

In this study I analyze how college students transition to adulthood. Based on 38 semi-structured interviews with young adults, I found that two groups appeared: emerging adults and accelerated adults. Emerging adults were more likely to come from economically privileged families and had the social and economic resources to focus on education, pursue a fulfilling career, and have fun while in college. In contrast, accelerated adults had adopted adult responsibilities during their childhood or teenage years and struggled to succeed in college due to inadequate guidance, lingering emotional anguish over childhood events, and lack of financial support. Although enrolled in the same university, these groups transitioned to adulthood very differently. I discuss the implications for each type of transition, as well as the implications of my findings for public policy and for future sociological research. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Trata o presente trabalho de um estudo sociológico que tem por objeto a Saúde Pública abordada através de um de seus principais pontos de estrangulamento: o poliqueixoso. São levadas em consideração as condições de saúde/doenca desses doentes na situação de atores sociais culturalmente envolvidos pelas regras determinadas tanto pelas Políticas de saúde, quanto pela rotinização dos seus hábitos. A compreensão ampla desse processo visa evitar o reducionismo dos fatos, buscando compreender a relação existente entre os sujeitos adoecidos e a realidade sócio-histórica que os cerca, configurando seu cotidiano, imiginário e sistema de representação sociais. Na condição de usuários dos Serviços de saúde, os poliqueixosos aqui referidos são identificados a partir da especlalidade Cardiologla, ocasião em que apontam sintomas não clinicamente diagnosticados ou organicamente confirmados, o que, no entanto, não os afasta do continuado processo de busca pela saúde. Na medida em que rotinizam suas ações em nome do alcance de tratamentos eficazes e de cura, ritualizam seus corpos e as doenças que neles se instalam, edificando imaginários e identidades, enquanto constroem \"metáforas\" típicas ao seu estado adoecido, numa narrativa também adoecida, tomadas neste trabalho como fundamento do discurso sobre saúdc, doença, tratamento, cura, articuladas segundo as regras da contradição, da desesperança e da alienação. O poliqueixoso ora apontado como objeto de análise sociológica, à medida em que articula em metáforas uma riqueza linguisticamente enunciada, denuncia suas condições miseráveis enquanto espécie humana. / This paperwork comprises a sociological study that has its object the Public Health brought up through one of its main blocking point: the \"poliqueixoso\". It has been taken into considerations the health-sick conditions of all sick people, as if they were social actors culturally involved by the sanitary rules imposed, not only by the health policy, but also by their daily routine habits. The ample comprehension of this process aims to avoid the minimization of the facts, seeking to understand the existing relation between sickened people (or individuais) and the social and historical sorrounding reality, confiauring their everyday and imaginary life and all systems of social presentations. As users of all healthy services the \"poliqueixoso\" here described are identified, beginning from heart specialists, when and where they point out the symptoms not clinically contihuous process of seeking for health. As they routinize their actions as an effort to reach efficient treatment and cure, they ritualize their bodies and sickness, building up imaginary facts and entities, while they create typical metaphors of their sickened state, in a sickened narrative too, taken in this paperwork, as the foundation of a speech about health, sickness, treatment and cure based on the rules of contradiction, hopeless and alienation. The \"poliqueixoso\" here pointed out as an object of socilogical analyses, as he enunciates himself in metaphors a richness linguistically uttered, he reveals his miserable conditions as a human being.

Educational credentials are clearly linked to economic success, but the reasons for this link are not clear. Common theoretical approaches provide explanations but lack direct employer perspectives on credentials' meaning and the context in which employers make sense of credentials. In this study, I used an alternative perspective based in Meyer's (1977) theory of education as an institution, labor market sociology, the sociology of work, and organizational theory to examine the role of social context in how employers make sense of the associate degree for IT technician jobs. I conducted comparative case studies of contrasting labor markets: Detroit and Seattle. I interviewed 78 hiring managers in 58 organizations of varying types about their perceptions and ways of using degrees in hiring IT technicians. Hiring managers' perspectives on associate and bachelor's degrees for IT technician jobs reflect their ideas of degree holders' social roles. They expected associate degree holders to be eager to please and to lack ability, skill, and initiative relative to the bachelor's degree holders. In contrast, they expected bachelor's degree holders to feel entitled. These expectations of traits found in different degree holders illustrate the relative status differences between these credentials and degree holders' reaction to these differences. Hiring managers held ideas about associate degrees specific to their local labor market. Detroit hiring managers more commonly expected associate degrees to signify commitment to career, while Seattle hiring managers more commonly expected them to signify lack of ability, skill, and initiative. These differing views may be associated with the level of education in the local population and the reputation of local community colleges. Some evidence indicates that bureaucracy in hiring may also influence the use of educational credentials. Further research is needed to understand the role of organizational context. The key finding of this study is that credentials exist in a relational context. Degrees take on meaning in relationship to social context, including: other degrees, the occupation, the local labor market, and potentially the organization. This finding exists in contrast to common theories that propose standard meanings associated with educational credentials but miss these more specific, situated meanings.

Over the last generation changes in the social structure of the family and children's command of an increasing share of family spending have led marketers to cultivate children as an important consumer demographic. The designation "tween," which one marketer refers to as kids "too old for Elmo but too young for Eminem," has become a catchall category that includes kids as young as four and as old as fifteen. Music marketed to children--led by the Disney juggernaut, which promotes superstar acts such as the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus across television, radio, film, DVDs and CDs, and branded toys, clothing, and electronics--represents a rare "healthy" area of the music industry, whose growth has paralleled the expansion of portable media technologies throughout U.S. consumer culture. The increasing availability of portable media devices, along with the widespread installation of Internet terminals in schools and educators' turn toward corporate-produced "edutainment" for lessons, has reconfigured schools as central sites of children's media consumption. Off-brand MP3 players packaged with cheap and brightly colored earbuds have become more and more affordable, and marketers increasingly target kids with celebrity-branded music devices and innovations like Hasbro's iDog series of toy portable speakers, which fit naturally among children's colorful and interactive collections of toys. At the forefront of the "digital revolution, children are now active--even iconic--users of digital music technologies. This dissertation argues that tweens, as prominent consumers of ascendant music genres and media devices, represent a burgeoning counterpublic, whose expressions of solidarity and group affiliation are increasingly deferred to by mainstream artists and the entertainment industry. We appear to be witnessing the culmination of a process set in motion almost seventy years ago, when during the postwar period marketers experimented with promoting products directly to children, beginning to articulate children as a demographic identity group who might eventually claim independence and public autonomy for themselves. Through long-term ethnographic research at one small community of children at an elementary school in southern Vermont, this dissertation examines how these transformations in the commercial children's music and entertainment industry are revolutionizing they way children, their peers, and adults relate to one another in school. Headphones mediate face-to-face peer relationships, as children share their earbuds with friends and listen to music together while still participating in the dense overlap of talk, touch, and gesture in groups of peers. Kids treat MP3 players less like "technology" and more like "toys," domesticating them within traditional childhood material cultures already characterized by playful physical interaction and portable objects such as toys, trading cards, and dolls that can be shared, manipulated, and held close. And kids use digital music devices to expand their repertoires of communicative practices--like passing notes or whispering--that allow them to create and maintain connections with intimate friends beyond the reach of adults. Kids position the connections and interactions afforded by digital music listening as a direct challenge to the overarching goals around language and literacy that structure their experience of classroom education. Innovations in digital media and the new children's music industry furnish channels and repertoires through which kids express solidarity with other kids, with potentially transformative implications for the role and status of children's in their schools and communities.

This study examines an interesting phenomenon: the educational gap between boys and girls in the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on literature in sociology of gender, sociology of education, and Middle East Studies, this dissertation explores who is and who is not academically achieving (defined through exams results, event drop out rates, and intention to graduate from secondary school) in the United Arab Emirates. Additionally, student and teacher beliefs about the meanings of schooling were investigated. The study begins with a broad picture of academic achievement in the United Arab Emirates then focuses on one emirate, Ras Al Khaimah. Ministry of Education data from the 2007-2008 school year, 42 teacher interviews, and 117 student questionnaires provided data for this study. Ministry of Education data were analyzed using chi square tests to determine which boys and which girls are achieving academically in the United Arab Emirates. This analysis confirmed earlier studies that indicated boys are more likely to drop out and to fail exams than their female counterparts. In addition, non-Emirati boys were found to outperform their Emirati peers. The remainder of the study focused on 9th grade boys and girls and their teachers in Ras Al Khaimah. Through logistic regression of data from the questionnaire, student academic self-concept was found to be a significant predictor of student intent to graduate. In addition, the study sought to examine the purposes of schooling according to teachers and students. Results showed that teachers saw the purpose of school as providing increased employment opportunities for girls and for non-Emirati boys. However, teachers did not think school was for employment for Emirati boys. Students reported different ideas about school. They saw school as a means to learning, as a social outlet, and as link to employment opportunities. The dissertation concluded with implications for theory, research and practice.

Literature on community-based youth programs generally depicts these spaces as valuable settings that support the academic, social, and emotional development of young people (Eccles & Gootman, 2002; Ginwright, 2009; McLaughlin, 2000). However, little research has explored how these organizations and youth workers "frame" and "imagine" the youth they serve. This study employed a critical ethnographic methodology at Educational Excellence (EE), a non-profit community-based educational program, to understand how youth workers' understanding of social, political, and educational problems inform their framing and imagining of Black youth. Participant observation data were triangulated with semi-structured interviews with all youth workers at EE (N=20), focus groups, and document analysis of organizational literature. Findings indicate that multiple tensions in the framing and imagining of Black youth exist among youth workers at EE, which thusly, shapes how they think, what they say and what they actually do. Additionally, findings from this study show that youth workers have to navigate their feelings regarding how society and the educational system imagines and frames Black youth as deficient "problems to be fixed," and their own deep understanding of the multiple ways society and the educational system have failed Black youth. Further, findings also indicate how the current trend toward deficit framing is directly linked to the current neo-liberal educational market, which incentivizes community-based educational spaces to frame youth as socially, culturally, and intellectually deficient in order to successfully compete with charter schools for funding. This study also demonstrates that both an increasingly privatized educational market, as well as youth workers' sense making about the world - causes them to unconsciously perpetuate the deficit imagining of Black youth they strive to erase. The implication of this finding speaks to the individual and organizational struggles of many youth workers, activists, scholars, and educators engaged in social justice work.

Bullying, harassment, and horizontal violence (BHHV) is commonly reported by student nurses during their clinical education. Despite decades of mention in the literature, no instrument is available to specifically measure the student nurse’s experience of BHHV during clinical education. Purpose: The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the experience of BHHV in a population of student nurses matriculating during their clinical education in New York. The experience of BHHV is measured with the BEHAVE Survey, the instrument developed and tested for this purpose. Methods: This dissertation is presented in three-manuscripts: (1) a comprehensive review of the literature using The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Statement as the methodological guide, (2) the initial psychometric testing of BEHAVE (Bulling, harassment, and HorizontAl ViolencE) for validity and reliability at a university-based school of nursing in New York, and (3) a descriptive, quantitative survey of baccalaureate nursing students at a university-based school of nursing in New York completed as a field test of the BEHAVE. Results: Despite variations in methodology, measurement, terms, definitions, and coding of behaviors and sources of BHHV, the findings of this literature review indicate that student nurses are common targets of BHHV during clinical education, regardless of demographic characteristics, disability, sexual orientation, geography location, academic institution or program type. Psychometric testing indicated: scale-level content validity index among experts 0.89, r = 0.97, a Cronbach’s α 0.94, and percent agreement 93% in test-retest reliability. BEHAVE was administered to a total of 32 participants (96.7% participation rate). Approximately 72% reporting current experienced or observed BHHV with 46.8% (36/77) of incidents originated from a nurse. Conclusions: The evidence from both the literature and this field trial suggests that BHHV is a common experience among nursing students. This is significant because student nurses are vulnerable to BHHV and studies including students have been limited to date. Therefore, it behooves the research community to continue to explore the impact of BHHV on the student nurse’s socialization into the professional nursing role. Further knowledge may inform targeted interventions to reduce BHHV and improve the ability of nursing students to minimize the impact of BHHV should it occur.

The current thesis attempts to discuss, critique, and repair the idea of public sociology as a public discourse and a professional practice. Emerging in the writings of C W. Mills and Alvin Gouldner in the late 1950s and 1970s, “public sociology” was given its name in 1988 by Herbert J. Gans, before it was popularised by Michael Burawoy in 2004, reflecting a recurring desire to debate the discipline's public relevance, responsibility and accountability to its publics: academic and extra-academic alike. Resisting a trend in the relevant literature to treat the term as new, it is argued that the notion of making sociology “public” is as old as the discipline itself, suggesting that the recent public sociology debate does not describe a modern predicament, but an enduring characteristic of sociology's epistemic identity. A detailed critical review of recent controversies on public sociology is offered as a compass with which to navigate the terms and conditions of the term, as it has been espoused, critiqued and re-modelled to fit divergent aspirations about sociology's identity, status and function in academia and the public sphere. An invitation to understand the discipline beyond a language of crisis concludes the thesis, offering eleven counter-theses to M. Burawoy's approach that seek to reconstruct sociology's self-perception, while also suggesting ways of making it public in the context of intellectual life at the 21st century.