Control in organizations has drawn attention from those seeking to achieve greater efficiencies and productivity in organizations as well as from those skeptical and critical of organizational practices of control. However, despite the conflicting interests, both bodies of research acknowledge that control is fundamental to organizing and both see managers as 'agents of control', i.e., individuals in organizations who are vested with varying degrees of authority to achieve control. But neither has yet examined control from the perspective of these 'agents of control' to provide an understanding of how managers construe control, their attitudes and preferences towards varying aspects of control. To address that gap in the existing literature on organization control, this dissertation examines managerial conceptions of control in organizations. This study used Q-methodology, a research method that uses both quantitative and qualitative techniques to study human subjectivity. In the first phase of the study, fifteen participants from the US and fifteen participants from India were interviewed. In the second phase of this study, a Q-sort was developed from these interviews and from secondary literature. Fifteen participants from the US and fifteen participants from India sorted these Q-sorts online. The sorts were then factor analyzed. The resulting five factors were interpreted as five conceptions of control that were labeled as Autocratic, Bureaucratic, Technocratic, Sociocratic and Democratic perspectives of control. The autocratic perspective of control is characterized by the Theory X assumptions and the classic command and control worldview - "you do as I tell you to do". Lack of trust, close supervision of subordinates and personal power and authority marks this perspective of control. In the bureaucratic perspective of control, the center of control shifts from the individual to the organization and the means of control become more formal. The technocratic perspective takes a cybernetic-like technical approach to control in which the organizational framework, founded on rational rules and policies, is held supreme and everyone in the organization is seen as subordinated to that framework. Formal means of control are preferred, and having technical skills are held as important as having people skills for a manager to achieve control at the workplace. The sociocratic perspective too holds organizational framework as important but does not completely subordinate individuals to that framework; it leaves room for individual discretion and personal values in decision making. It relies on the organizational framework to gain legitimate authority but relies on social informal means to achieve control. The democratic perspective is relationship oriented, is skeptical regarding the effectiveness of formal means of control such as hierarchy and organizational policies, accords greater importance to relationships and trust, and relies on a more participative style of governance.

Saigon has occupied an important place in the American imagination. Captivated by its French colonial past, a diverse array of American writers romanticized the city's "tree-lined streets" as the "Paris of the East" and the "Pearl of the Orient." as the United States extended its influence in Vietnam over the course of the twentieth Century, culminating during the 1960s, Saigon experienced America's growing presence. Americans composed photographs and writings, both personal and published, to make sense of the changing city and the changing public opinion of the war. The juxtaposition of American-occupied French colonial architecture with the visual manifestations of a city at war (such as overcrowding, military personal, and bombed buildings) runs throughout American representations of Saigon. These representations transformed the romantically remembered boulevards into a dystopian vision of the South Vietnamese capital brimming with corruption, street vendors, sex workers, and bars. In order to convey different ideas about Saigon, many media producers and government officials relied on the bodies of the people in Saigon to convey different meanings. This project argues that American understandings of Saigon often relied on a reciprocal relationship between human bodies and the environment around them. Bodies lent meaning to aspects of the city while the city helped construct meanings around people's bodies. In some cases, the bodies in question were those of Western men, but more often, the bodies of Vietnamese women did the work of creating American meanings for the city.

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My dissertation investigates the textual, intertextual, and contextual aspects of the Asian films that I identify as the 'New' Asian female ghost films; I focus closely on the films' visualizations of the monstrous feminine and other gendered/gendering representations. I examine how the Asian countries' traditions of female ghost filmmaking, cultural heritages (such as the religions of Buddhism and Confucianism, folktales, legends, myths, plays, and paintings), and other generic conventions for cinematic horror influence the particular 'hybrid' representational modes of the 'monstrous-feminine' in the 'New' Asian female ghost films. My dissertation also considers the ways in which the newly-revived female ghost films in East Asia and some Southeast Asian countries reflect the local people's anxieties about the 'compressed modernity' that resulted from the Asian economic crisis and some gendered parts of the relevant social discourse. In terms of the Asian genre's hybridity, I examine this significant feature as one of the grounds to explain the films' global popularity, especially in relation to the current trend of Hollywood's remaking of the Asian films. My dissertation, through a case study of four 'New' Asian female ghost films (Ju-On, Shutter, The Eye, A Tale of Two Sisters), responds to the question of how the discussed historical and contextual elements involved with the emergence and development of the 'New' Asian female ghost films and the culturally reciprocal relationships of the Asian films with other American/Western horror films are concretely reflected in the gender representations present in the individual films. I also analyze the American remakes of the four Asian films for the purpose of exploring the specific transformations that take place in the reworked versions, especially in terms of the monstrous feminine images and other representations divided along the lines of sex and gender. I postulate several factors that have influenced the transformations, such as the involved producers' and filmmakers' own readings of the differences and otherness in the original Asian texts; these individuals' own knowledge and assumptions about honor filmmaking; Hollywood conventions of the cinematic horror genre; and Western ideas about the geopolitical place of Asia: Asian cities and nations, and Asian women.

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