Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-82)

Thesis (M. P. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Visitors to historic plantation house museums may come for tours of grand manor houses, stories of elite white history, and expensive decorative arts, but once they step outside the main house they are confronted with numerous outbuildings which were once the work and living spaces of enslaved men and women. Perhaps the most popular outbuilding with visitors today, the detached kitchen is the focal point of my study into the interpretations of space at historic house museums. More commonly found at historic sites than smokehouses, privies, and dairies, the detached kitchen has become the primary venue for the incorporation of slavery into the master site narratives. As scholars of plantation landscapes have shown, the detachment of the kitchen was a purposeful choice made by white elites in an effort to control the access enslaved workers had to areas of the white family. This racial segregation meant a plantation household was really a series of households, and my paper argues that the architectural legacy of the kitchenâs detachment from the house complicates the very ability of a site to incorporate and interpret the social structures of the plantation into one inclusive narrative. This paper focuses on Gunston Hall Plantation in Masonâs Neck, Virginia, Tryon Palace in New Bern, NC, and Mordecai Historic Site in Raleigh, NC to highlight the ways the kitchen is interpreted through both the regular tours and special programming.

This thesis examines the interpretation at Somerset Place and Historic Stagville, two North Carolina Historic Sites. While the interpretation of slavery at plantation museums has received increased attention, much remains to be explored regarding the interpretation of women. In addition to examining the interpretation, this thesis explores the history of both Somerset Place and Stagville as active plantations and later historic sites. This thesis proposes that interpretations of race and gender are interconnected but not always concurrent at plantation museums. While the first chapter explores the history of Somerset Place, the second examines Stagville. The final chapter focuses on the current interpretation found at both sites.

The Whitney Museum of American Art founded in 1931 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney offers insight into the role of women patrons in the American art world. Furthermore, the Museumâs contemporary identification with the Museum of Modern Art obscures its unique history and different founding principles. This paper explores the foundation of the Whitney Museum in roughly the first two decades of its existence from 1931 to 1953 to examine how Whitney and the Museumâs first director, Juliana Force, negotiated gender and class ideology and the Modernist discourse to found the first museum solely devoted to American art. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force operated the Whitney Museum based on three main principles: the primacy of the individual artist, the promotion of American art, and the importance of an informal museum space. The Whitney Museum of American Art, staked Whitney and Forceâs claim in a male dominated art world. The Museum was a complex space, representing a modern feminine viewpoint that embraced inclusivity and elitism, masculine and feminine, Modernism and conservatism. Whitney and Force wanted the Whitney Museum to be less formal and more inclusive, so they designed it like a middle class home with intimate galleries, furniture, carpets, and curtains. However, the decor hindered the Whitney Museumâs influence on the modern art canon because critics perceived the Museum as feminine and personal, Modernismâs rejection of the feminine and realism that ultimately led to the exclusion of the Whitney Museumâs collection of realist art from the modern art historical canon.

Evidence suggests that public research universities, especially land grant institutions, can be instrumental in supporting a new kind of economic vitality. The university can serve as a ready pipeline for discovering, and then commercializing, new knowledge for industries. Meanwhile, companies that locate a business on a university campus are willing to pay a premium, because locating their business within close proximity to a university and its resources provides value to the business. This collaborative process of companies working closely with universities, the essence of strategic alliance theory, allows for interactive consumption of intellectual assets. These collaborations can be quite resource-intensive and can be better managed by finding ways to make the process more efficient. Accordingly, the overall purpose of this research is (1) to better understand the factors involved in the creation of a series of these public/private strategic alliances and (2) to find ways to make the process more efficient and effective.

This research addresses an issue little studied in the public administration and political science literature, public policy affecting the transgender community. Policy domains addressed in the first chapter include vital records laws, health care, marriage, education, hate crimes and employment discrimination. As of 2007, twelve states statutorily protect transgender people from employment discrimination while ten include transgender persons under hate crimes laws. An exploratory cross sectional approach using logistic regression found that public attitudes largely predict which states adopt hate crimes and/or employment discrimination laws. Also relevant are state court decisions and the percentage of Democrats within the legislature. Based on the logistic regression?s classification results, four states were selected for case study analysis: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Massachusetts. The case studies found that legislators are often reluctant to support transgender issues due to the community?s small size and lack of resources. Additionally, transgender identity?s association with gay rights is both a blessing and curse. In conservative districts, particularly those with large Evangelical communities, there is strong resistance to LGBT rights. However, in more tolerant areas, the association with gay rights advocacy groups can foster transgender inclusion in statutes. Legislators perceive more leeway to support LGBT rights. However, gay activists sometimes remove transgender inclusion for political expediency. As such, the policy core of many LGBT interest groups is gay rights while transgender concerns are secondary items. In the policy domains studied, transgender rights are an extension of gay rights.

Various workforce and societal changes have made the issue of work-family conflict relevant for employees and organizations alike. The increasing pressures for attracting and retaining talented employees have forced many public and private organizations to develop formal family friendly policies aimed at providing employees with resources to balance their work and family responsibilities. However, the effects of implementing such formal policies are not clearly established. These formal supports are often underutilized and, even when employees use them, they may not always have the intended consequences. It has been suggested that informal workplace characteristics, such as supervisor support and a supportive work-family culture, may be as important as, or even more important than, the simple provision of formal benefits. Prior research on family-friendly policies and cultures and their effects on employees? attitudes and behaviors is limited in that it has focused almost exclusively on the experiences of individuals employed in private sector organizations, with the effects on public sector employees being largely unknown. Thus, the aim of this dissertation was to address this gap by examining and comparing work-family relationships between employees working in the public and the private sectors of the economy. This study uses data from the Families and Work Institute?s 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce, and employs institutional theory, ecological systems theory, role theory, and social exchange theory to investigate how formal support, informal support, and work characteristics may affect employees? work-family conflict, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions. The main objectives of this study were centered on practical concerns, as our investigation seeks to impact public sector?s ability to recruit, motivate, and retain qualified employees. On the whole, the findings of this study suggest both similarities and differences between public and private sector organizations with respect to the constructs measured. Contrary to our expectations and the institutional theory, there were no significant differences in the provision of formal supports between the two sectors. However, consistent with the institutional theory, the results confirmed that public sector employees enjoy higher levels of informal support and HR practices than their private sector counterparts. This study also supports the idea of social exchange between employees and their employers related to work-family issues. By revealing the key role played by the informal support in all three outcomes of interest for this study (i.e., work-family conflict, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions), our findings suggest the importance for organizations to assist their employees in maintaining good work and family relationships. Therefore, both public and private organizations seeking to help their employees manage work and family responsibilities will benefit from knowing employees? perceptions of formal support, informal support, and work characteristics, along with their specific impact on employees? work-family conflict, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions.

The objective of the research has been to determine which internal characteristics of municipal government agencies and which environmental factors of the municipalities across the U.S. affect the quality and the scope of adoption of municipal electronic government (e-government) initiatives. To accomplish this objective, an integrated approach was developed. The approach combined theoretical methodologies of three frameworks applied to the public sector agencies: innovation theory, information and communication technology, and e-government. It was hypothesized that theoretical premises of these frameworks complement each other in their ability to explain municipal e-government initiatives and their combination would help to address the drawbacks that characterize the present research on municipal e-government. The dependent variable in the present research is municipal e-government score. The dependent variable measures the scope and quality of municipal e-government initiatives. The research concentrates on two sets of predictor variables: internal municipal government agency characteristics and external environmental factors of municipalities. Correlation/regression analyses were performed to explore bivariate and multivariate relationships between the dependent and predictor variables and to accomplish the following goals: (1) describe the relationship between the dependent variable and the two sets of predictors (internal municipal agency characteristics and external environmental factors); (2) determine the effects of individual predictors in explaining the rate and the scope of adoption of e-government initiatives; and (3) compare the two sets of predictors in their power to explain the rate and the scope of adoption of e-government initiatives. The results of these analyses demonstrated that external environmental factors are significantly better predictors of the quality and the scope of local e-government initiatives, as measured by the e-government score, both individually and as a set.