This thesis explored the effects of social exclusion on the sense of control. We indexed the sense of control using the sense of agency. The sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over our actions and the outcomes of those actions. We experience the sense of agency at an implicit, pre-reflective level. In other words, we routinely make movements that impact some sort of change in the environment, and simply just know that our actions cause an effect. Experimentally, we can measure the sense of agency using the intentional binding effect. Intentional binding is a temporal illusion in which we perceive the time between our voluntary action and the outcome of that action to be shorted compared to when the same effect is caused by an involuntary action. We conducted three experiments. In experiment one, we used an episodic memory recall task to prime participants to feel socially excluded or socially included. In experiment two, we used a different manipulation of social exclusion and social inclusion called Cyberball. We found that in both experiments, intentional binding was significantly reduced following social exclusion compared to social inclusion and baseline. In experiment three, we investigated the pre-reflective sense of agency in eating disorders. Eating disorders are highly associated with chronic social exclusion experiences and an altered sense of control in life. We found that individuals with higher eating disorder symptomatology experience a lower sense of agency, compared to healthy individuals. Overall, this thesis is the first to demonstrate that social exclusion has observable effects on the sense of agency. We were able to triangulate these findings using another social exclusion manipulation as well, strengthening our original findings. Lastly, we showed that a disorder characterized, in part, by social exclusion, reduces the sense of agency / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the attitudes, expectations, and evolution of early experiences of Trinidadian adolescent girls as they navigate physical and emotional intimacy, their capacity to conceptualize and/or enact sexual desire to develop their own sense of agency. Using Trinidad and Tobago (TandT) as a case study, it examines whether attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors pertaining to sexual agency are influenced by socioeconomic factors or key life events, adverse experiences, and the influences of family, community, and broader societal structures. Emerging scholarship on sexuality in the Caribbean explores how women navigate sexual relationships and exercise their agency within the social and economic contexts of the Caribbean. The lived experiences of Caribbean people, particularly women and girls, are important, worthy of exploration, and necessitate permanent documentation. An examination of Caribbean society – a confluence of diverse and complex natural and social environments will enrich scholarship on the worlds shaped by people in this region, particularly by youth who will form the society of the future. Using transnational, Caribbean, and Black feminist frameworks, this study seeks to understand sexual awareness, desire, actions, and motivations in their early stages by conducting interviews with a diverse sample of adolescent girls in TandT. / Doctor of Philosophy / The purpose of this study is to investigate the attitudes, expectations, and evolution of early experiences of Trinidadian adolescent girls as they navigate physical and emotional intimacy, their capacity to conceptualize and/or enact sexual desire to develop their own sense of agency. Using Trinidad and Tobago (TandT) as a case study, it examines the factors that influence adolescent girls' behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs, about sexual, and how their behaviors demonstrate their agency and independence of thought. Emerging scholarship on sexuality in the Caribbean explores how women navigate sexual relationships and exercise their agency within the social and economic contexts of the Caribbean. The lived experiences of Caribbean people, particularly women and girls, are important, worthy of exploration, and necessitate permanent documentation. An examination of Caribbean society – a confluence of diverse and complex natural and social environments will enrich scholarship on the worlds shaped by people in this region, particularly by youth who will form the society of the future. This study seeks to understand sexual awareness, desire, actions, and motivations in their early stages by conducting interviews with a diverse sample of adolescent girls in TandT.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-77). / (cont.) This thesis seeks to answer the following questions: * What organizational features (i.e. types of leadership, structure, etc.) are significant in executing successful urban redevelopment projects? * To what extent does organizational capacity make certain projects successful? Primary research question: What aspects of organizational capacity contribute to the positive or negative outcomes of urban redevelopment projects and in what way? Organizational capacity is defined as how well an agency organizes its human, social, financial, and technical resources. These questions are answered through an in-depth case study of the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (CRA) with respect to its redevelopment of the Crenshaw Center, a regional shopping center built in the late 1940s, into the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, a mail completed in 1988. The mall is once again the target of new, extensive redevelpment plans. Research was conducted through theoretical and archival research, supplemented by interviews with those involved with the development and execution of the project, as well site observation. What emerges from the fieldwork and empirical research is a strategic understanding of organizational capacity that is useful in diagnosing key features of an organization that pursues urban redevelopment, and in suggesting areas for strengthening the organization's capacity. The key features of organizational capacity for CRA are cultivating internal leadership, concretely defining mission and central tasks, negotiating power-balanced relationships, and managing their network of actors. / by Virginia Flores. / M.C.P.

yes / Individualisation theory misrepresents and romanticises the nature of agency as a primarily discursive and reflexive process where people freely create their personal lives in an open social world divorced from tradition. But empirically we find that people usually make decisions about their personal lives pragmatically, bounded by circumstances and in connection with other people, not only relationally but also institutionally. This pragmatism is often non-reflexive, habitual and routinised, even unconscious. Agents draw on existing traditions - styles of thinking, sanctioned social relationships, institutions, the presumptions of particular social groups and places, lived law and social norms - to ‘patch’ or ‘piece together' responses to changing situations. Often it is institutions that ‘do the thinking’. People try to both conserve social energy and seek social legitimation in this adaption process, a process which can lead to a ‘re-serving' of tradition even as institutional leakage transfers meanings from past to present, and vice versa. But this process of bricolage will always be socially contested and socially uneven. In this way bricolage describes how people actually link structure and agency through their actions, and can provide a framework for empirical research on doing family. / ESRC

no / One of the major shifts in the form and experience of contemporary family life has been the increasing insertion of the ‘expert’ voice into the relationship between parents and children. This paper focuses on an exploration of mothers’ engagement with advice around the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Much of the previous literature utilises a ‘decision-making’ framework, based on ‘risk assessment’ whereby mothers’ decisions are conceptualised as rooted in complex belief systems, and supposes that that by gaining an understanding of these systems, beliefs and behaviour can be modified and uptake improved. However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which mothers negotiate such advice or the ways in which advice is mediated by positionings, practices and relationships. Analysis of data from a focus group with five mothers identified three themes: (i) Sourcing advice and information, (ii) Constructing ‘Mother knows best’ and (iii) Negotiating agency. Despite the trustworthiness of advice and information being questioned, an awareness of concerns about the MMR, and health professionals being constructed as remote, ultimate conformity to, and compliance with, the ‘system’ and ‘society’ were described as determining MMR ‘decisions’. / Full text was made available at the end of the publisher's embargo period: 1st Aug. 2015

This qualitative study examined how 14 young women's sexual desire and agency was influenced by the messages communicated from their parents and the quality of the parent-child relationship. Previous research results were supported, such as: parents do not communicate about sex frequently, or only about limited topics; mothers communicate more frequently than fathers, and peers communicate more sexual information. Utilizing a postmodern, feminist position, themes of parental transmission of patriarchal social controls were found, such as: fear of being viewed as a slut, gender roles that demand female passivity, sex is scary, and young women are not to have sex, or only in the context of committed relationships. Implications for parenting practices and the importance of developing sexual agency are discussed. / Ph. D.

In the U.S. Congress, the authorization-appropriation process is the formal model that establishes the separation between legislative and funding bills. Additionally, it determines the jurisdiction of the congressional committees that oversee those bills. However, a number of scholars have concluded that the authorization-appropriations dichotomy is substantially different in practice than the model suggests. Research in this area has shown that broad changes over the years have altered the roles of the authorization and appropriations committees. At different times, members of the appropriations committees have been regarded as guardians of the federal treasury, advocates of federal funds for their congressional district, or partisans in support of a political agenda (Adler, 2000). In addition to these roles, appropriators evidently have become more active in policymaking -- a role that traditionally has been the domain of the authorizing committees. To further explore the policymaking role of appropriators, this dissertation used a case study approach that traced appropriators' interactions with the executive branch, focusing on a federal agency and its links with the appropriations subcommittees that have oversight and funding jurisdiction over the agency's programs. Specifically, the study analyzed the relationship between the House and Senate Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (L/ HHS) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) during the period from 1989-2009. Through an examination of critical incidents and contextual elements, this dissertation examined whether the Subcommittees on L/HHS increasingly have become significant players in shaping AHRQ's policies and direction. In addition, the dissertation examined the impacts on AHRQ and possible reciprocal [Agency] influences on the Subcommittees. This research has the potential to build on existing works related to the dynamics of the authorization-appropriations process. Moreover, this research could provide a conceptual framework for analyzing the roles that the other congressional appropriations subcommittees play in relation to the executive branch agencies under their jurisdictions. / Ph. D.

Communities of color in particular have experienced a traumatic history of structural violence, interpersonal racism, segregation, and oppression. The unjust history of structural violence and the deleterious treatment of people and cultures in the U.S., that in part stems from neoliberal policies and rationality, continues to plague communities and people within the food system. Many people and communities are working to actualize the social-ethical ideal of a non-violent 'beloved community' to counter this unjust history and expand the boundaries of what is possible for individuals and society. Historical and systemic injustices ramify the adverse experiences and trauma affecting vulnerable people's lives. The effects and pervasiveness of individual and collective trauma at a global scale has highlighted a serious need for broader-scale awareness and adoption of a trauma-informed care approach by community food work organizations, practitioners, and social change leaders. A trauma-informed care approach was developed as a health care framework based on the importance of adverse childhood events to poor distal health and mental health outcomes. Without a deeper understanding of how extensive the collective impact of such trauma and injustice is on people and the food system; community food work researchers and practitioners may reify uninformed responses that result in continued trauma and injustice. However, there are few examples of community food work organizations using a trauma-informed care approach as an organizational change process to promote community transformation and resilience. This research examined and specifically analyzed how a community food work organization that is engaged in mutual aid and social-ecological activism embodies trauma-informed care; engenders an agential change space; and grapples with the aspirations and tensions of being an organization seeking to ameliorate the effects of anthropogenic trauma and expand the boundaries of what is possible individually and collectively. A narrative inquiry methodology was used to critically explore and study the perceptions and thoughts of 17 study participants of how a trauma-informed approach to care is embodied and agential change space provided as mutual aid and community food work. The seventeen study participants' narratives were coded and analyzed using the Principles of a Trauma-Informed Care Framework defined by SAMHSA (2014), Bowen and Murshid (2016), and Hecht et al (2018). The narrative inquiry of seventeen narratives demonstrated that an integrated trauma-informed care approach as an organizational change process is essential to the formation of agential change space and has wide-reaching applicability to mutual aid efforts and community food work pedagogy and praxis, especially as organizations and practitioners confront ongoing systemic trauma and injustices that have resulted from structural violence and continue to persist due to the dominant hegemonic neoliberal framing that exists in relation to race, gender, and socioeconomic class. / Doctor of Philosophy / Communities of color in particular have experienced a traumatic history of structural violence, interpersonal racism, segregation, and oppression. The unjust history of structural violence and the deleterious treatment of people and cultures in the U.S., that in part stems from neoliberal policies and rationality, continues to plague communities and the food system. Many people and communities are working to actualize the social-ethical ideal of a non-violent 'beloved community' to counter this unjust history and expand the boundaries of what is possible individually and collectively. Without a deeper understanding of how extensive the collective impact of such trauma and injustice is on people and the food system; community food work researchers and practitioners may reify uninformed responses that result in continued trauma and injustice. However, there are few examples of community food work organizations using a trauma-informed care approach as an organizational change process to promote food system transformation. This research examined the ecotonal nature of community food work and specifically analyzed how a community food work organization that is engaged in mutual aid and social-ecological activism embodies trauma-informed care; engenders an agential change space; and grapples with the aspirations and tensions of being an organization seeking to ameliorate the effects of anthropogenic trauma and expand the boundaries of what is possible individually and collectively. A case study and narrative inquiry methodology was used to critically explore perceptions and thoughts of 17 study participants and stakeholders of meaningful support as embodying a trauma-informed care approach and participative interaction as engendering agential change space as mutual aid and community food work. The seventeen study participants' narratives were coded and analyzed using the Principles of a Trauma-Informed Care Framework defined by SAMHSA (2014), Bowen and Murshid (2016), and Hecht et al. (2018). The narrative inquiry of seventeen narratives demonstrated that an integrated trauma-informed care approach as an organizational change process is essential to the formation of agential change space and has wide-reaching applicability to mutual aid efforts and community food work as pedagogy and praxis, especially as organizations and practitioners confront ongoing systemic trauma and injustices that have resulted from structural violence and continue to persist due to the dominant hegemonic neoliberal framing that exists in relation to race, gender, and socioeconomic class.

Economic theory and empirical research suggests product market competition can result in both positive and negative capital market effects. Specifically, research suggests competition reduces agency costs, but also reduces profitability. I examine the relation between product market competition and firm value in an international setting, focusing on how the relation varies with firm- and country-specific characteristics. I document lower values for firms in more competitive industries. However, the negative relation between competition and firm value is less pronounced for firms with higher firm-level liquidation risk, stronger country-level investor protection mechanisms, and higher firm-level transparency. These findings are consistent with an agency cost benefit resulting from product market competition. / Ph. D.

Neoliberalism, as the influence of economic considerations within the political process, has impacted environmentalism on a variety of levels. Without regulation, the neoliberal capitalist drive to maximize production, consumption, and profits is antagonistic to environmental sustainability. The influences that corporations and economic elites have within modern democracies holds substantial implications for the rigor and enforcement of environmental policies. Particular to the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency offers numerous illustrations of neoliberal influence within its history and policy practices. These influences inevitably impact the Agency's ability to accomplish the goals of their mission and purpose statements. As seen through regulations such as the Clean Water Act, neoliberal pressure has altered the priorities of government on a federal level to prioritize economic well-being over that of other social goods, such as environmental protection. The Clean Water Act prioritizes economic profitability over environmental protection through cap and trade policies, such as NPDES permits, and legitimizes pollution-causing behavior through TMDLs. Further, the act was weakened by neoliberal forces with the non-point source exemption created for the sake of avoiding economic harm to large industries and its shortcomings are visible within many of the nation's waterways, including the Chesapeake Bay. Through a case study, this project demonstrates how the neoliberal influences impacting the Environmental Protection Agency has resonated in its policies, like in the abilities of the Clean Water Act to sufficiently clean-up the Chesapeake Bay within its proposed timeline. / Master of Arts