<p> This study was concerned with investigating the causes of supervisory style. To interpret certain dimensions of supervisory style, the superior-subordinate relationship was viewed as a role system. Four dimensions, which are empirically identified but theoretically related to essential conditions of role systems, were investigated: production orientation, worker orientation, closeness, and time allocation. It was argued that while the way a supervisor performs his role may vary along these dimensions, the range of variability is constrained by the social structure and technology of the work place and the background characteristics of the supervisor himself. The general hypothesis of the study was that supervisory style is the product of the interaction of these three factors. </p> <p> Interviews were conducted with 114 first-line supervisors in seven industries to assess the effect of these factors. A "transitional model" that involved age as a significant variable influencing the closeness of supervision was developed. Three age groups (23-39, 40-49, 50-62) were considered as three periods - initial, transitional, and mature, in correspondence with each age group - which a foreman goes through. In each period the foreman responds to different influencing factors in his environment, so that his supervisory style changes. Two explanations were considered: a "maturational" and a "job security" explanation. </p> <p> It was also found that most supervisors tend to be almost equally production-oriented and worker-oriented. The nature of production in industry, preference of recruitment, and role conflict experienced by the supervisors were cited as explanations.</p> <p> Support was found for the hypothesis that time allocation is influenced by technological factors. Planning and the general increment of paper work caused by technological advancement were considered as reasons accounting for this finding.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Scholarship on Gustav Mahler’s (1860–1911) late works is often overshadowed by the events of 1907: the death of his daughter, his resignation from the Vienna Court Opera, and the diagnosis of his heart condition. The subjective juxtaposition of this biographical detail on his last works—Das Lied von der Erde (1908), the Ninth Symphony (1909), and the Tenth Symphony (1910, unfinished)—has provoked the application of themes of death, transcendence, and farewell as extra-musical elements to his music. While scholars such as Vera Micznik, Henry-Louis de La Grange, and Stephen Hefling have called the acceptance of this program into question, there has yet to be a more objective analysis of Mahler’s last works via the lens of late style theory. This thesis explores two of Mahler’s last works, Das Lied and the Ninth, through the application of Edward Said’s theory of late style. Rather than approaching death with harmony, resolution, and transfiguration, the late artist in Said’s theory evokes “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction”. Instead of a psychological or biographical interpretation of late style, Said’s theory focuses on irreconcilable characteristics that set the artist apart from the age in an anachronistic way. Following his more objective approach of interpreting late style, this thesis relies on the musical elements that characterize Mahler’s late style, categorized as anachronism, disintegration, and evasion of closure. Through the discourse of Said’s late style theory, this thesis reveals alternative means of interpreting Mahler’s late style that avoids the myth of the artist transfigured by death.

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Common authorship attribution is well described by various authors summed up in Jacques Savoy’s work. Namely, authorship attribution is the process “whereby the author of a given text must be determined based on text samples written by known authors [48].” The field of authorship attribution has been explored in various contexts. Most of these works have been done on the authors written text. This work seeks to approach a similar field to authorship attribution. We seek to attribute not a given author to a work based on style, but a style itself that is used by a group of people. Our work classifies an author into a category based off the spoken dialogue they have said, not text they have written down. Using this system, we differentiate California State Legislators from other entities in a hearing. This is done using audio transcripts of the hearing in question. As this is not Authorship Attribution, the work can better be described as ”Conversational Style Attribution”. Used as a tool in speaker identification classifiers, we were able to increase the accuracy of audio recognition by 50.9%, and facial recognition by 51.6%. These results show that our research into Conversational Style Attribution provides a significant benefit to the speaker identification process.

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Thesis advisor: Robert S. Lehman / This dissertation argues that literary modernism is structured by a logic of belatedness—its sense, that is, of having arrived too late. Belatedness thus perceived entails a reconsideration of late modernism, illuminated as it has been by scholars such as Jed Esty, Tyrus Miller, and C.D. Blanton. Because modernism is constituted first and foremost by its fraught relation to time, and, specifically, to the present and its representations, any discussion of late modernism must begin by interrogating the “afterlife” of this temporal predicament. Following Edward Said’s claim that modernism is a late-style phenomenon, Belated Modernism challenges the construct “late modernism” given that the notion of lateness is constitutive of modernism itself. This project necessitates a thinking beyond the generic, nationalistic, linguistic, and disciplinary distinctions that have informed most of the critical discourse on (Anglo-American) late modernism. To that end, Belated Modernism addresses a constellation of European writers whose late style emerges in modernism’s late phase: the strange parenthesis of 1939–1941, when the war had already begun but its magnitude was as yet unknowable. Focusing on the final works of Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism [1939]), Walter Benjamin (“On the Concept of History” [1940]), and Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts [1941]), I argue that the singular conjunction of late style and late modernism reveals, in light of individual and world-historical ends, an intensification of the philosophical problem of belatedness that has haunted modernism since its origins. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

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Chaucer's fabliaux, particularly The Miller's Tale, The Merchant's Tale, and The Summoner's Tale, combine the crude humor associated with the genre with features of ?higher? genres, most notably the courtly romance tradition (for the first two tales), and the homiletic and scholarly debate traditions (for the last tale). The marriage of the scatology present in fabliaux with the characteristics of literary art is Chaucer's unique achievement and differentiates his tales from their analogues. This marriage occurs when characters of one class arrogate the types of discourse usually associated with another class. As a result of this discourse switching, the balancing of art and scatology in these three tales blurs the distinction between crudity and sophistication and makes the tales scatological art.

Distinctive Marksville-style pottery is characteristic of the Middle Woodland period (200 B.C. – A.D. 500) in the Lower Mississippi River Valley and adjacent regions. Marksville material is common in the Lower Mississippi Valley, and the scarcity of similar pottery in northeastern Mississippi and western Alabama has caused claims that Marksville pots were imported into those areas; however, they may have been locally made. To test these alternative possibilities, the elemental composition of some Marksville-style potsherds, other pottery, and clays from various archaeological sites spanning the above regions was characterized using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry. The results show that the analyzed Marksville-style pottery shares similar elemental profiles with locally common wares and local clays in the sample, allowing the conclusion that all of these Marksville specimens were made in the regions where they were found.

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