University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Sociology

This dissertation is a legal and cultural history of personal debt in mid-nineteenth-century Moscow region. Historians have shown how the judicial reform of 1864 dismantled an old legal apparatus that was vulnerable to administrative interference and ultimately depended upon the tsar's personal authority, replacing it with independent judges, jury trials, and courtroom oratory. But as many legal scholars will agree, political rhetoric about law and high-profile appellate cases fail to capture the full diversity of legal phenomena. I therefore study imperial Russian law in transition from the perspective of individuals who used the courts and formed their legal strategies and attitudes about law long before the reform. I do so through close readings of previously unexamined materials from two major archives in Russia: the Central Historical Archive of Moscow and the State Archive of the Russian Federation, including the records of county- and province-level courts and administrative bodies, supplemented by the records of the charitable Imperial Prison Society. I also analyze the relevant legislation found in imperial Russia's Complete Collection of the Laws. Specific topics covered in the study include the cultural and social profiles of creditors and debtors and of their relations, the connection between debt and kinship structures and strategies, the institution of debt imprisonment and its rituals, various aspects of court procedure, as well as the previously unstudied issue of white-collar crime in imperial Russia. I have found that debt was ubiquitous in Russian life, as in other pre-industrial societies in which cash was scarce, incomes erratic, and formal credit institutions insufficient. It was also overwhelmingly personal, relying heavily on kinship, acquaintance, and the reputations of borrowers and lenders. My research contradicts the conventional view of Russian society at mid-century as a system of predominantly separate and closed estates. The system of private credit centered in Moscow connected merchants, civil servants, and the landowning gentry, and even wealthy peasants, some of whom lived or owned property in far-away provinces (privately-owned serfs were of course subordinate to their landlords in matters involving property). The credit network was sufficiently extensive and diverse to place an additional burden on Russia's already overworked legal system. The central theme of my study is the engagement of ordinary Russian lenders and borrowers of varying wealth and status, male and female, with each other and with the legal system (and through it with the state) during a crucial turning point in Russia's social and political history. My research also questions the dominant notion of a closed system of inquisitorial justice in pre-reform courts. The cases I examined reveal the pre-reform legal process as messy, incomplete, polyphonic, and open to extra-legal influences, including those of tsarist administrative officials. Private individuals retained significant discretion and initiative both according to the law and in practice, beginning with the way a debt transaction was formalized and ending with the decision to imprison a debtor or to commit an insolvent to a criminal trial. I therefore argue that pre-reform law with all its faults was a site of conflict, cooperation, and negotiation among diverse individuals seeking to protect and promote their property interests and between private persons and government officials. I show the law to be a key tool for Russia's propertied classes for asserting their own rights against other private individuals and/or against the state. Thus, I reinterpret the relationship between individuals and the administration, modifying the commonly held view of the Nicholaevan bureaucracy as a monolith imposing itself on the tsar's subjects. As the only study of imperial civil law in practice, this dissertation offers unique evidence on the operations of state and society in Russia at the key period of the Great Reforms, as well as establishes a basis for understanding subsequent legal developments.

ABSTRACT This paper will detail the process of creating and making the film Everything that Shines is not Gold. This paper divides into four parts: writing process, pre-production, production, and postproduction. The first part will touch on how the story came about and the writing process. The second part will cover the pre-production aspects and how I dealt with a strict deadline. Next, I will talk about directing. In the fourth part, I will discuss the long and tiring postproduction workflow. Last, I will reflect on making and what I learned.

'Corporate warriors' and 'company animals' are common terms used to describe Japanese sarariman ( salarymen ), the former referring to salarymen as the samurai of Japan's post - war economic miracle and the latter suggesting servile creatures of Japanese corporations. This thesis explores Japanese salaryman masculinity, that is, the 'hegemonic masculinity' in Japan. The study collects the life - histories of 39 men across three generations of salarymen, so that the oldest men in my sample were in their 70s and the youngest in their 20s. While research on Japanese masculinities has expanded rapidly in recent years, no other study, to the author's knowledge, explores generational changes. This generational approach allows exploration of maintenance of and changes in hegemonic masculinity over time. This thesis pays attention to the phases of salarymen's lives. In the period of growing up, participants were continually confirmed in their self - worth through a hierarchy grounded on age and gender in the settings of the family, school and neighbourhood. Across the three generations, participants grew up in a homosocial and heterosexual world, barely mixing with the opposite sex and focusing on educational outcomes for successful careers after their schooling. Despite their immersion in comradeship, most participants ensconced themselves comfortably in the institution of marriage. While a few unconventional families emerged in the sons' generation, the traditional gendered division of labour is reproduced across the three generations. Many participants rejected equal opportunities for women in the workforce and participated very little in housework and childcare, claiming that providing the family income was their 'childcare'. Participants understood themselves as corporate warriors, or elite male workers, rather than company animals. Nevertheless, some young respondents evinced a tinge of jealousy for increasing number of ' freeters ' ( part - time workers ). Moreover, several men in the grandfathers' generation regretted their current minimal contact with their children and grandchildren as a result of their absence from home while children were growing up. Thus Japanese salarymen in this study expressed aspects of both the corporate warrior and the company animal in reflecting on their experiences. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Social Sciences, 2006.

The growing trend of insurance fraud continues to cost US consumers billions of dollars a year through increased premiums. In 2015, the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud estimated the cost of insurance fraud as being at least $80 billion dollars a year. Even though an increasing number of criminals are drawn to the low risk, high reward of insurance fraud, little criminological literature has explored this topic and the public remains relatively unaware of the extent of the problem. One alarming aspect of insurance fraud is the involvement of organized criminal groups. These organized criminal enterprises are formed for the sole purpose of defrauding the insurance industry. Often, these enterprises are believed to have ties to traditional organized criminal groups, such as the Italian Mafia or the Russian Mob. In order to combat these criminal organizations, it is important to understand the behavior and motivation of such groups. The present study aims to analyze the generally held belief throughout the insurance industry that organized insurance fraud rings are more likely to operate in states with mandatory Personal Injury Protection (PIP) policies. This analysis was conducted by examining staged automobile accidents reported to the National Insurance Crime Bureau. The results of this analysis were mixed. Although a larger percentage of states with mandatory PIP displayed higher staged accident rate, some mandatory PIP states did not, and multiple non-PIP states also demonstrated a high staged accident rate. In an attempt to better understand this crime, further criminological research is needed.

It has been claimed by some that Hong Kong, the world’s freest economy, is without corruption or other kinds of white-collar crime. Statistical sources suggest that these crimes are indeed rare in the city. This study examined those claims by looking at the practices of Hong Kong’s real estate industry, specifically through the lens of a case study on 39 Conduit Road. The property development known as 39 Conduit Road became the centre of controversy in June 2010 when the developer, Henderson Land, was accused of market manipulation. The study found that many common practices in the real estate industry, such as intimidation and deception, could constitute an abuse of power by real estate developers. The abuse of power, especially when done in the course of an occupation, is a fundamental part of the sociological discourse of white-collar crime. The study concluded therefore that it was not that white-collar crime did not exist in Hong Kong but more that these behaviours were structurally rendered invisible. The study located the failure to observe these abuses in the city’s power structure where the local government used its economic policy of laissez faire to turn issues into non-issues, and in its legal culture where ambiguity in the law was construed as a right to act. / published_or_final_version / Sociology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This study examined the potential moderating effects that the fear of falling may have on potential white-collar crime perpetrators using rational choice and differential association theory perspectives. A self-report, factorial survey measurement tool utilizing three hypothetical vignettes placing respondents in a business situation with the potential to commit insider trading was given to 612 students at a Midwestern university. Results indicate that the fear of falling had no moderating effects, differential association theory was partially supported in Vignette 1, and rational choice theory was partially supported across all three vignettes.