These stories examine the lives of working class people in light of the current economic and social climate. They address and attempt to empathize with the despair and disillusionment many working class Americans express in response to their economic and social realities, and the stories attempt to walk a non-judgmental line regarding the attitudes these characters espouse. Instead of judging the characters or championing a particular moral stance, the pieces attempt to present individuals faced with major failures: child abandonment, guilt over preventable death, overriding selfishness, racism, and shame regarding social status. These failures of character or morality echo the larger failings, as the characters perceive them, of their time and place. Within this worldview of disillusionment and despair, many of the characters in these stories choose to struggle toward self-betterment—not economic or social betterment per se, but individual betterment, a reckoning with themselves and their failures that necessarily reflects and interacts with the world they inhabit. These are stories rooted in the Midwest and its rust-belt inhabitants, but for all their contemporary socio-economic concerns, the stories are first and foremost concerned with the individual and representing each individual portrayed accurately and honestly. / Master of Fine Arts

The present research was a theory building endeavor which utilized the concept of occupational community. This study had a dual focus, causes of occupational communities and occupational solidarity. The causes of occupational communities (work groups which have distinct work and leisure overlap, occupationally based reference groups, and strong sense of separation from outsiders) were specified through an examination of sociological literature on eighteen occupations. The most notable finding from this was that causes of occupational communities were such that we can expect these work structures to emerge well into the future. The second aim was to generate theory about occupational solidarity. Causal factors were integrated into a constructive typology which theorized that solidarity and control were major social facts in occupational communities. Solidarity was seen serving to bind workers to one another, while control secured workers into work roles. Control could be internal or external to the occupational community, depending upon whether or not the workers in the community had power and autonomy to regular their work and enforce boundaries. Solidarity was theorized to be either dynamic or static. Dynamic solidarity was seen as dialectically related to control forces, that is, sometimes conflicting with control, or at least in a state of "anxiety." Static solidarity, the opposite of dynamic, was a type coterminous with control forces and did not offer any resistance. The main conclusion was that the dynamic-static solidarity, internal-external control theory may be applicable to all occupations within a capitalist economic structure. / Ph. D.

Traditional management and public administration literature have failed to recognize the existence of the problem employee in the workforce. The purpose of this study has been to remedy this failure, and, then, to determine if Reality Therapy is an effective strategy for dealing with the problem employee. To this end, an Interactive-Holistic theory which brings together the conceptual streams of psychology and administration has been developed in the form of fifteen propositions. Then an evaluation of Reality Therapy and other methods of dealing with the problem employee has been conducted. Theory development and evaluation of strategies for dealing with the problem employee were a response to the challenge of Chester Barnard that an administrator perform the “function of the executive“ by keeping both the needs and goals of the organization in balance with those of the employee. To explore heuristically the probability that theory propositions are true and to determine the likelihood that Reality Therapy will be an effective strategy for dealing with a problem employee, The Computer Consultant was utilized For the manager, the desired situation in the workplace is that employee behavior contributes effectively to the accomplishment of organizational goals. In determining the probability of this occurring, likely affect of Reality Therapy as a management technique, and the likelihood of other methods being effective, over one hundred conditions were identified as relevant to, and possible detractors from, the accomplishment of organizational objectives. From this input into TCC, the following results were calculated. When all possible conditions are taken into consideration, the likelihood of an employee becoming a problem was calculated to be .62. If a manager has been using Reality Therapy as a management technique, this likelihood is reduced to .40. If an employee becomes a problem and a manager does nothing, the likelihood of the problem being eliminated and the employee contributing to organizational effectiveness is only .01. If an Employee Assistance Program is utilized, the likelihood of the employee's behavior contributing to the accomplishment of organizational goals was calculated to be .48. If Reality Therapy is utilized, this likelihood rises to .71. The use of both the EAP and Reality Therapy increases the likelihood of the employee's behavior changing positively to .84. Thus, it was concluded that Reality Therapy is a viable strategy for managing a problem employee. / Ph. D.

This study was designed to determine if the Employment Readiness Scale (ERS) (Alfano, 1973) can be utilized on a metropolitan study sample, to determine if there is a difference in work attitudes due to membership in an adult employment group and lastly, to determine if demographic variables influence work attitudes of adult employment group members. The sample for this study consisted of employed and unemployed adults from the Richmond Metropolitan Area of Richmond, Virginia. A sample was selected that consisted of the 203 adults. Adults in the sample were later classified as either currently employed (full-time hourly industrial workers), temporarily unemployed (unemployed for 6 months or less), or chronically unemployed (unemployed for more than 6 months). The Employment Readiness Scale (ERS) and the Personal Data Sheet (PUS) were the two instruments used to collect data. Statistical techniques used to analyze the data included factor analysis, one-way analysis of variance, and a multiple regression approach. Two research hypotheses were addressed as well as two corollary hypotheses for statistical significance. The study findings were: (1) There were no significant differences in the work attitudes of employed and unemployed adult groups. (2) Only the demographic variable of income was found to predict attitudes toward work. Those with lower incomes had a more positive attitude toward work than those with higher incomes. Also, the Employment Readiness Scale (ERS) (Alfano, 1973) can be utilized to assess work attitudes of a large metropolitan population. / Ed. D.

丘海雄. / 論文(哲學博士) -- 香港中文大學硏究院社會學學部, 1996. / 參考文献 : leaves 175-182. / Qiu Haixiong. / Chapter 第一篇 --- 理论和方法 --- p.1 / 导言 --- p.1 / Chapter 第一章 --- 相关的理论 --- p.2 / Chapter 第一节 --- 理性选择理论 --- p.2 / Chapter 第二节 --- 劳动力市场及雇佣关系的理论 --- p.9 / Chapter 第三节 --- 中国劳动力市场及雇佣制度的研究 --- p.16 / Chapter 第二章 --- 本文的理论和方法 --- p.22 / Chapter 第一节 --- 理论架构 --- p.23 / Chapter 第二节 --- 研究方法 --- p.25 / 第一篇 注释 --- p.27 / Chapter 第二篇 --- 制度 --- p.33 / 导言 --- p.33 / Chapter 第三章 --- 劳动用工 --- p.35 / Chapter 第一节 --- 招收工人 --- p.35 / Chapter 第二节 --- 用工形式 --- p.39 / Chapter 第三节 --- 劳动管理 --- p.45 / Chapter 第四节 --- 工人流动 --- p.50 / 小結 --- p.56 / Chapter 第四章 --- 工资分配 --- p.58 / Chapter 第一节 --- 工资分配制度改革综述 --- p.58 / Chapter 第二节 --- 企业之间的分化 --- p.61 / Chapter 第三节 --- 内部工资制度 --- p.65 / Chapter 第四节 --- 工资改革的效果 --- p.74 / 小結 --- p.78 / Chapter 第五章 --- 福利保险 --- p.81 / Chapter 第一节 --- 住房分配 --- p.81 / Chapter 第二节 --- 医疗照顾 --- p.87 / Chapter 第三节 --- 劳动保险 --- p.95 / 小結 --- p.108 / 第二篇 注释 --- p.110 / Chapter 第三篇 --- 行动 --- p.124 / 导言 --- p.124 / Chapter 第六章 --- 工作价值和态度 --- p.124 / Chapter 第一节 --- 工作价值和满足感 --- p.124 / Chapter 第二节 --- 对有关改革的评价 --- p.129 / Chapter 第三节 --- 转工和第二职业的意愿和取向 --- p.131 / Chapter 第四节 --- 对工人、工会和企业地位的评价 --- p.133 / Chapter 第五节 --- 对解决问题的途径的评价 --- p.137 / 小結 --- p.138 / Chapter 第七章 --- 工人的行动选择 --- p.139 / Chapter 第一节 --- 一家两制 --- p.139 / Chapter 第二节 --- 一人两制 --- p.146 / 小結 --- p.160 / 讨论和总结 --- p.175 / 第三篇 注释 --- p.175 / 参考文献 --- p.175 / 英文参考书目 --- p.175 / 中文参考书目 --- p.180

Workers' education, a form of adult education, emphasized the study of economic and social problems from the workers' perspective. When the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) created its adult education program in 1933, workers' education classes were included. Between 1933 and 1943 thirty-six states participated in the federal experiment in workers' education. Seventeen of these states, including Indiana, were involved throughout the entire ten years of the program. With as many as two thousand teachers employed at one time, officials conservatively estimated that the program reached at least one million workers nation-wide.Three distinct phases of a federal workers' education program existed: FERA (1933-1935), Works Progress Administration (WPA--prior to separation from the other adult education programs, 1935-1939), and WPA Workers' Service Program (1939-1943). In separate chapters these phases of federal workers' education are examined from both the federal and state perspectives.FERA and WPA workers' education stimulated educational activities within the labor movement. For example, in Indiana this program was particularly popular among the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions. Federal workers' education activities also encouraged union-university cooperation and laid the foundation for labor education at Indiana University. In addition, the WPA Workers'' Service Program served as the model for a Federal Labor Extension Service, similar to the existing federal agricultural extension program, that, for reasons beyond the scope of this study, was never implemented.If nothing else, the FERA and WPA workers' education projects put thousands of unemployed people to work and helped the morale of both the relief recipients and the adults who attended classes. Never supported at levels necessary to reach a majority of the population, federal aid to workers' education was, at the very least, a sincere attempt by liberal relief administrators,educators, and labor leaders to serve the educational needs of American workers.Government documents, correspondence, and manuscript collections from the National Archives, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, and Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, constitute the basic sources for this paper.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-294). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-79).