This thesis examines the personality, social, and physical needs of children attending the second grade at Horace Mann School in Amarillo, Texas.

This dissertation analyzes how cultural and behavioral frictions affect decision-making in labor markets of developing economies. It studies factors that have received relatively little attention in economics—namely concerns about preserving identity, cognitive strain from financial stress, and gender norms—and examines their impacts on labor supply and productivity. Field experiments in the state of Odisha, India are used to provide direct empirical evidence on these relationships. Chapter 1 investigates how identity—one's concept of self—influences economic behavior in the labor market, focusing on the effect of caste identity on labor supply. In the experiment, casual laborers belonging to different castes choose whether to take up various real job offers. All offers involve working on a default manufacturing task and an additional task. The additional task changes across offers, is performed in private, and differs in its association with specific castes. Workers' average take-up rate of offers is 23 percentage points lower if offers involve working on tasks that are associated with castes other than their own. This gap increases to 47 pp if the castes associated with the relevant offers rank lower than workers' own in the caste hierarchy. Responses to job offers are invariant to whether or not workers' choices are publicized, suggesting that the role of identity itself—rather than social image—is paramount. Using a supplementary experiment, I show that 43% of workers refuse to spend ten minutes working on tasks associated with other castes, even when offered ten times their daily wage. Results indicate that identity may be an important constraint on labor supply, contributing to misallocation of talent in the economy. Chapter 2—joint work with Supreet Kaur, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Frank Schilbach—tests for a direct causal impact of financial strain on worker productivity. The experiment randomly varies timing of income receipt among laborers who earn piece rates for manufacturing tasks: some workers receive their wages on earlier dates, altering when cash constraints are eased while holding overall wealth constant. Workers increase productivity by 5.3% on average in the days after cash receipt. The impacts are concentrated among poorer workers in the sample, who increase output by over 10%. This effect of cash on hand on productivity is not explained by mechanisms such as gift exchange, trust in the employer, or nutrition. The chapter also presents positive evidence that productivity increases are mediated through lower attentional errors in production, indicating a role for improved cognition after cash receipt. Finally, directing workers’ attention to their finances via a salience intervention produced mixed results—consistent with concerns about priming highlighted in the literature. Results indicate a direct relationship between financial constraints and worker productivity and suggest that psychological channels mediated through attention play a role in this relationship. Chapter 3 examines whether gender norms lead women to hold back their potential in the labor market. While the existing literature has shown that women tend to earn less than their husbands, there is limited direct evidence on whether women actively avoid earning more than their spouses and the determinants of such behavior. The experiment engages married couples working as casual laborers in a short-term manufacturing job that pays piece-rate on output. The experiment provides women an extra hour to work without this difference being salient, making it likely that they could earn more than their husbands. After husbands finish piece-rate production, women are randomized into one of three conditions in which 1) the wife is informed of her husband’s production and expects both spouses to learn how much each spouse has produced, 2) the wife is informed of her husband’s production and expects that only she will learn how much each spouse has produced, or 3) both spouses are only informed of their joint total production. Results show that women in the last two conditions achieve on average one hour’s worth of production more than that of their husbands, suggesting that women do not face intrinsic concerns about earning more than their husbands. However, this productivity gap substantially decreases when husbands are expected to learn about individual production. This finding suggests that norms in marriage may be an important factor contributing to gender inequality in the labor market.

Bibliography: pages 105-116. / The present study investigated the relationships between work stressors, three moderator variables, and a variety of affective, behavioural and health outcomes. More specifically, it was hypothesized that the work stressors would be significantly associated with adverse affective, behavioural and health outcomes. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that personal and situational variables, in the form of the Sense of Coherence (Antonovsky, 1979, 1987), Job Decision Latitude (Karasek, 1979), and Participation in Decision Making, would moderate the relationships between work stressors and a variety of outcomes. The data were obtained from a sample of 111 male, white, blue collar workers at a large chemicals manufacturing organization from a questionnaire compiled for this study, and organizational records. The data were subjected to correlational analysis, supplemented by a form of moderated multiple regression analysis. It was found that the relationships between work stressors and outcome variables were insignificant which led to the conclusions that firstly, a priori specification of stressors may ignore the specificity of persons' appraisals of and responses to stressors, and secondly, consideration must be given to the affective meaning ascribed by subjects to job demands. The moderating effects of the Sense of Coherence, Job Decision Latitude and Participation in Decision Making were inconsistently related to outcome variables, frequently operating in the unexpected direction. It was, however, demonstrated that the main effects of the moderating variables which operated in the expected direction, outweighed the unanticipated negative interaction effects. It was observed that the inclusion of personality variables and situational variables in future studies of occupational stress are necessary, a conclusion which is consistent with more recent findings.

In the course of my degree studies it became apparent that there was little historical evidence of British working-class women writers. This led me to the question whether such women actually wrote or whether it was the case that their writing was not deemed good enough for publication. (Merelyn Cherry 75) In her essay entitled Towards a Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers, Cherry discusses the omission of these writers in literary studies. She concludes that their (supposed) underrepresentation is not a matter of publication, but is due to the fact that these authors are largely ignored by Western academics (cf. 115-118). In fact, there is sufficient evidence of women writing about the working classes. Relevant examinations of the British working-class novel that include female authors are Mary Ashraf’s Introduction To Working-Class Literature in Great Britain (1978), Gustav Klaus’ The Socialist Novel in Britain (1982), Pamela Fox’s Class Fictions (1994), Merylyn Cherry’s Towards a Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers (1994) and some excerpts from Ian Haywood’s From Chartism to Trainspotting (1998). Merylyn Cherry lists some of the writers whose works will be discussed in my thesis; however, she does not specify what is to be understood by “British working-class women writers”. Various questions arise at this point. What are the distinctive features of a contemporary working-class novel written by a woman author? Which narrative strategies are employed to create the literary working-class world of female characters? What type of work is performed by such characters? The difficulty in finding answers to these questions lies in the attempt to determine a typology of such novels. The text corpus of working-class fiction is clearly male-dominated, both in terms of male authorship and the depiction of working-men characters and their living environments in the novels. Women authors, who frequently produce(d) female counterparts to the working-men characters, have fallen into oblivion even within working-class studies. Ian Haywood, for instance, ignores three significant Welsh women writers of this category, even though his anthology entitled Working-Class Fiction, From Chartism to Trainspotting (1998) focuses on British writers. Uncovering these female writers and demonstrating the development of their fiction will be part of this thesis. Each traceable narrative of the kind shall be mentioned in chronological order. This is the first step to grasp the essence of these texts. It will become clear that a contemporary woman’s working-class novel emerged out of a “patchwork” of various writing traditions; and that the typology which I endeavor to establish does not cover the matter of common characterisations in this text corpus. None of the characters in my anthology can be labelled a “prototype”, since the characterisations vary greatly across the novels. In a second step, I will analyse twelve novels written between 1974 and 2008, which I will approach thematically. This way, I can converge a typology more closely. The three main topics which frequently appear across the novels are women’s class-consciousness, the mother-daughter relationship, and trauma caused by battering and sexual abuse. Hereby, I raise no claim to completeness. I have chosen twelve texts which I consider to be representative; and I will precede like the literary critic Gustav Klaus, who argued in his anthology entitled The Socialist Novel in Britain: “I have chosen to introduce many writers, limiting myself, however, to the discussion of one work each. This approach can best disclose the breadth and variety of fictional devices” (Klaus 1). I have chosen 1974 as a starting point of my analyses, since this is the publication year of Buchi Emecheta’s vanguard novel Second-Class Citizen. Being the first post-colonial woman author to write a novel about domestic violence against a Black and female working-class character, she may be considered a pioneer writer. Particularly against the background that the text was written during the years of second-wave feminism, which was “spearheaded by white middle-class women” (Louis Weis 246), the novel is a groundbreaking piece of working-class aesthetics. With this introduction of post-colonial women’s writings to the British literary scene in the early 1970s, representations of women’s lower-class life became enriched by a different writing tradition. New narrative forms and voices and various culturally determined characterisations were introduced to the literary scene. Out of this body of writing emerged a considerable phenomenon. In addition to the fact that they are also (like the “White” British texts) written from a “perspective of poverty”, a principle of postcolonial theory manifests itself in these texts: Frantz Fanon’s concept of the “schizophrenia of identity”. This “schizophrenia”, enacted via the powerful imposition of the dominant culture’s values onto the colonised subject, can also be detected as an underlying theme in the British working-class novels under discussion. The three main common topics which appear across the twelve novels to be analysed illustrate that this “schizophrenia” –a form of division– is a central textual element in most narratives under discussion. The female working-class character becomes a split subject at various levels. This division is, for instance, also caused by the male gaze and the violation of the female body, the character’s upward mobility and the consequent clash of working-class background and the “newly acquired” middle-class identity. It shall also be illustrated how this mechanism of splitting apart influences not only the themes, but also the stylistic devices employed in this body of writing. The idea of a division within female working-class characters has –tentatively– been raised by the literary critic Pamela Fox. In her book entitled Class Fictions she demonstrates how the white women characters are torn between the shame about their working-class background and the resistance to adjust to the cultural codes of the middle and upper classes. I will elucidate the concept of “division” and illustrate why it functions as an effective reading strategy to analyse the fictional texts. By deepening the idea of the split female subject against the background of gender, class and ethnicity, I endeavour to develop a contemporary approach to understanding these texts and to hereby draw closest to a typology of the novels. With the assistance of postcolonial critics and feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon, I will repeatedly demonstrate how “class” intersects with the concepts of gender and ethnicity. Also, it shall be discussed if and how the idea of schizophrenia can perhaps be understood as a continuation of the most essential division in the context of working-class life: the division of labour. Works Cited Cherry, Merylyn. “Towards a Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers.” Writing on The Line. 20th Century Working-Class Writers. Eds. Sarah Richardson et al. London: Working Press, 1996. 75-119. Klaus, Gustav. The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. Brighton: Harvester Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. Weis, Lois et al. “I’ve Slept in Clothes Long Enough. Excavating the Sounds of Domestic Violence among Women in the White Working-Class.” Domestic Violence at the Margins. Readings on Gender, Class and Culture. Eds. Sokoloff, Natalie & Christina Pratt. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 227-248.

Social scientists examining the police role have typically assumed that the individual police officer or department is relatively free to implement social policy as he/she or it sees fit. This assumption is reflected in many police studies which stress the importance of police chiefs, police discretion, and police personalities as being the decisive factors in police behavior. A more tenable approach to studying the police would be to examine police behavior in terms of the place of the police in class conflict. This approach would focus mainly on how conditions outside of police organizations have shaped police response. To date there have been few attempts to systematically collect and analyze data on the police role in any kind 0f class conflict. A potentially rich area of study involves the police response to the pitched battles fought between labor radicals and the dominant political and economic interests. Two key empirical issues in this area are: 1) What do the police do in times of worker rebellion and revolution? and 2) Why do they act the way that they do? These type of queries have rarely been subjected to critical examination. Such a task was undertaken in this dissertation. More specifically, this dissertation was an exploratory study of the response of the urban police to labor radicalism. The purposes of the inquiry were to develop a conceptual framework that allowed for a more precise examination of police response than is currently feasible and to apply the framework in a comparative analysis of the responses of the city police in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington to radical labor unrest during the period of 1912-1920. An exploratory approach was necessary because the theoretical work pertaining to police response is not sufficiently developed yet to generate rigorous hypotheses for testing. Additionally, the literature on this subject is limited and widely spread about in articles and books in the fields of labor history, policy history, urban history, criminology and criminal justice; these studies have yet to be combined into a single conceptual scheme. Hence, it was imperative to first systematize the knowledge of the area and to formulate "working" propositions; this made it possible to then conduct a more definitive investigation of the cases of the Portland and Seattle police. The product of this approach is a dissertation in three main parts. In part one, a theoretical frarrework is explicated for the analysis of the police response to labor radicalism. The second part consists of an empirical study of the response of the Seattle and Portland police to the protest and unrest of labor radicals in 1912-1920. Finally, in the concluding section, the theoretical concepts and propositions in the first part of the dissertation are checked in terms of their applicability to the empirical data in the second part.

No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of the study is to investigate high school students’ attitude towards masculinity, and whether the attitude differs depending on the students’ class background and gender. The study has been conducted through a quantitative method where paper surveys have been distributed to a school in Norrbotten county. The theoretical framework used in the study is two ideal types of masculinity that I have developed based on both Raewyn Connell’s understanding of the hegemonic masculinity positions and Lucas Gottzén’s description of the two positions that today dominate the hegemonic masculinity. In addition to these, previous research that concerns masculinity and school has also contributed to the construction of the ideal types. This study will name the ideal types as the older masculinity and the new masculinity. The older masculinity places a greater focus on manual work, the body and the distinction to the feminine. The new masculinity can adopt feminine-coded chores without risking losing masculinity. The result showed that class more rarely was a factor in relation to how the respondents related to masculinity, on the other hand, gender more often turned out to be a factor that explained how the respondents related to masculinity. Middle-class and working-class boys often had a common understanding and experience in relation to masculinity, on the other hand, working-class and middle-class girls’ understanding and experience of the importance of masculine traits in boys and girls differed. In several cases, working-class girls considered it more important to maintain a distinction between male and female than boys did, which in this study showed that they were involved in reproducing hegemonic masculinity.

No description available.

No description available.