Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (Umeå Universitet). / Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-298) and index.

Orientador: Gilda Figueiredo Portugal Gouveia / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-15T05:30:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Camargo_OrsonJoseRobertode_M.pdf: 2056289 bytes, checksum: ed24a283a8afd82d09f42e75fd0a6eb5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: O presente trabalho analisa, do ponto de vista contextual, a Medida Provisória nº 114 de março de 2003, convertida em Lei nº 10.696 de julho do mesmo ano, a partir da ótica da elite política brasileira - especificamente a bancada ruralista. A bancada ruralista é tida como um dos grupos conservadores do Congresso Nacional, com forte coesão interna e intensa capacidade de pressão junto ao Executivo e Legislativo brasileiro, para que seus interesses sejam contemplados. O estudo considera a discussão, em plenário, dos parlamentares ruralistas sobre a MPV nº 114/03, que dispõe da renegociação das dívidas do crédito rural e visa analisar como as renegociações dos recursos públicos aplicados no financiamento da produção agropecuária brasileira reproduzem e aprofundam a desigualdade social. Tanto financiamento para a produção agropecuária como a renegociação das dívidas do crédito rural não consideram equitativamente todos os produtores rurais, colocando a discussão diante de questões de justiça social ao não propiciar mecanismos para a redução da desigualdade social / Abstract: Taking in consideration a contextual analyses, this dissertation investigates the March 2003 Governmental Decree 114, which was converted in the Federal Law number 10.696 in July 2003. This study focus on the thoughts and actions of the rural landowners members of the Congress (the bancada ruralista), which are considered one of the most conservative political sectors in the country. The Bancada Ruralista is also considered to be a very strong lobby, with internal cohesion and capacity of pressure on the Executive and the Legislative. The dissertation analyses the debates around the Governmental Decree 114 among the members of the Congress, particularly the bancada ruralista discussion on the defense of the large landowners' interests. The Governmental Decree 114 established new standards regarding the renegotiation of public rural credit and the landowner's federal debts. Therefore it was considered a crucial political issue for the bancada ruralista lobbies. The study demonstrates how the application of the federal resources on the large agribusiness reproduces and deepens the country social inequalities, since the rural producer are not equally considered in these negotiations, clearly favoring the large and most politically powerful rural landowners / Mestrado / Sociologia Politica / Mestre em Sociologia

Abstract: The civic life-styles typology of Charles Adrian and Oliver Williams was tested as to its theoretical utility in explaining empirical patterns of civic life-style items, and its comparability to other forms of urban behavior. The data are from a 1970 survey of 3,025 families by the City of Dallas, Texas. An exploratory factor analysis was done on civic life-style items. The factor index scores were used as dependent variables, and demographic and associational items were independent variables in a step-wise regression analysis. Only two of ten factors were found to be civic lifestyles; both were interpretable using the Adrian and Williams typology. Civic life-style behavior was found to be similar to other patterns of differential participation in urban structures.

Ph.D. / This study is largely comprised of elements stemming from two important approaches to the study of politics ie political leadership studies and political culture studies. The following two assumptions were implicit to this study: 1) The political process largely revolves around the practice of leadership in society, as leaders being part of the elite are directly involved in politics and have to make important decisions. ii) Comprehension of leaders' political beliefs contribute to our knowledge of politics ...

Vancouver's West End, located between Stanley Park and the commercial/administrative enterprises of the central business district, quickly emerged as the city's prime residential neighborhood during the late 1880's. Until approximately 1912 Vancouver's leading citizens resided in the West End, shaping its growth and that of much of the city. Coming predominantly from Eastern Canada and Great Britain and arriving in Vancouver before or just after the turn of the century, Vancouver's West End elite created a residential landscape that reflected the architecture, institutions and urban images of the late Victorian Age. The transplant of a sophisticated and established urban culture to a pristine urban environment allowed Vancouver's upper class quickly to create a comfortable residential environment in a new, West Coast urban setting. In short, the West End was an identifiable neighborhood that reflected the processes of social and spatial sorting common throughout the late nineteenth century industrial urban world, and it provided a secure social and geographical base where the ambitious upper class could build and manoeuver to structure their future in British Columbia. While the West End portrayed status and functioned as an environment in which upper class social interaction and cohesion could be initiated and sustained, it was only part of the larger civic arena within which the elite population operated. This larger setting included the elaborate institutional network of corporations, exclusive clubs and recreational associations within which members of the elite consolidated their socio-economic ascendancy. An understanding of the institutional basis of elite power in Vancouver is essential to gaining an understanding of the elite's impact on the social and geographical environment of the city. Chapter three concentrates on the development of the elite's network of voluntary associations while chapter four examines the corporate connections and activities of the elite. In conclusion, the study examines the beliefs and commitments that helped to endorse the vast socio-economic power of the business dominated elite in early Vancouver. It is suggested that most immigrants to pre-1914 Vancouver saw the city as the land of private opportunity, a place where prosperity could be attained by everyone who adhered to the rules of hard work, thrift and common sense. A widely shared commitment to material progress and urban expansion helped to inspire a deferential attitude towards those businessmen who were leaders of expansion in the city's private sector and, more specifically, it sanctioned the rapid demise of the West End as an upper class single-family neighborhood. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Reviewing the scope and credibility of C. Wright Mills' provocative study, The Power Elite, for a seminar on U. S. in the Sixties prompted my interest in the validity of assessing the historical process by means of the elitist perspective. This coupled with my belief that the New Deal era ushered in a new chapter in the political history of the United States precipitated an investigation of the elitist perspective and how that perspective illuminated the conditions of historical change effected by the New Deal.

The past 45 years have witnessed unprecedented growth in social and economic inequality in the U.S. Much has been studied regarding the economic, sociological, and educational conditions that have led to increasing inequality, but it has mainly focused on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. Recently there has been an increase in research on elites, but one area that has remained relatively understudied is the private, independent school industry. Since the Civil Rights Era of the 1960’s, most of the 1,600 independent schools in the U.S. have attempted to become accessible to more students, mainly by admitting growing numbers of students of color. However, over the last 20 years financial aid relative to school revenue has remained essentially flat, suggesting that “diversity” in independent schools has taken on a particular meaning. This study traces the history of “diversity” and interrogates why “diversity” is a problem worth addressing, how it has been conceived at different times, and what doing so has accomplished for independent schools. Previous literature has relied on Marxist and Bourdieusian structuralist theories to describe the mechanisms of social reproduction in elite schools. Instead, this study employs a Foucauldian framework and discourse analysis to examine the primary industry journal, Independent School, to construct a genealogy of “diversity” discourse since 1976. This approach endeavors to broaden the theoretical perspectives of elite research and reconceptualize independent schools’ role in perpetuating inequities in the U.S. The study finds six distinctive eras of “diversity” discourse within these 45 years, each with its own “diverse” subjectivities. “Diversity” has functioned in two primary modes corresponding to different regimes of truth. The first that spans 1976 to 1998 appreciates “diversity” as a matter of threat that must first be neutralized and then can be harnessed for the benefits of elites. In the second period (1999 to 2021) “diversity” transitions to a series of actions and skills that elites can equip themselves with to better their chances of success in their futures as societal leaders. The implications extend from there that by producing conceptions of “diversity” like these, particularly as matters of race, sexual orientation, and gender, (and not socioeconomic status) the institutional apparatus maintains a moral façade and obscures the role it plays in maintaining social stratification in the U.S.

Historians regularly conceive of “gentlemen” (shi 士) in 7th–14th century China as men belonging to an elite social stratum, defined by their study of the classical and literary canons, participation in the civil service examinations, officeholding in the imperial bureaucracy, engagement in various literary or intellectual undertakings, hereditary status from a patriline, or connection to certain marriage, kinship, or friendship networks. This dissertation seeks to expand as well as complicate this perception of “gentlemen” as a social category, by understanding the label as referring not to an elite social stratum but to an identity, internalized and enacted in a variety of ways by men in low and high social positions alike. Using this framework to analyze the construction of “gentlemanly” identities in various arts and activities that served as leisure for some and livelihoods for others, this dissertation reveals a significant expansion in the repertory of signals and strategies used to create and perform “gentlemanly” identities in these fields, reshaping what it meant to be a “gentleman” in middle period China. Each chapter draws upon extensive source material from libraries, digital databases, and museums, to examine processes of identity construction and presentation in a series of different arts or activities in which both the “gentlemanly” and “non-gentlemanly” participated: painting, music making, practicing medicine, divining, farming and gardening, fishing and woodcutting, and playing the board game weiqi 圍棋 (also known as go). In each of these fields, between the 7th and 14th centuries, new “gentlemanly” identity signals were constructed to distinguish the “gentlemanly” sort from social categories like “artisan” (gong 工) that they viewed as inferior. New kinds of “gentlemen” like the “qin-zither gentleman” (qinshi 琴士), “painting gentleman” (huashi 畫士), and “classicist physician” (ruyi 儒醫) emerged; older labels like “recluse” (yinshi 隱士) expanded to encompass a wider variety of ways of living. New offices and titles at court were created that could signal membership in “gentlemanly” communities despite a close connection with arts like medicine or painting. And beyond these labels, men developed new “gentlemanly” identities through distinct modes of engagement in the respective field: the way one divined others’ fates, the strategies one used to win a board game, the metaphysical elements and ideals expressed in one’s art and discursive artistic judgments, the tools one didn’t use when fishing, and so on. These identity signals were situational, and each chapter draws upon examples of disagreement or doubt over the inclusion or exclusion of certain men as “gentlemen” to explore instances in which such signals were performed with varying degrees of efficacy. In my conclusion, I discuss the connection between many of these “gentlemanly” identity signals and an emerging form of social snobbery that I call the “discourse of ‘gentlemanly’ expertise.” In the 7th century and earlier, if the “gentlemanly” sort compared themselves to “artisans,” it would almost certainly be based on what they did. However, around the 9th–13th centuries, the “gentlemanly” sort became more actively involved (or vocal about their involvement) in the arts, and started to contrast their own practice and appreciation of these arts more actively with the (ostensibly inferior) practice and appreciation of “non-gentlemanly” sorts. In doing so, they began to define and distinguish themselves not by what they did, but by how they did it. They did not stop with simply articulating “gentlemanly” practices as different but equally good; they asserted that their practices and products were superior, claiming expertise in these fields on the basis of their ethical values, cultural norms, aesthetic preferences, and abstract knowledge of the cosmos and the ineffable “Way” (Dao 道). I argue that, ironically, this snobbish discourse of social distinction actually made it increasingly possible for people earning a livelihood in various arts to enact “gentlemanly” identities, by associating symbolic capital with the demonstration or depiction of “gentlemanly” modes of engagement. By focusing on the increasing number of ways in which “gentlemanly” identities were constructed and performed in 7th–14th century China, this dissertation offers insight into how individuals and groups made decisions of inclusion or exclusion, offered or obtained access to resources, and developed a sense of self and place in society. In doing so, it enriches our understandings of both the social forces shaping the middle period Chinese social world, and the individuals and groups who inhabited it.

The Internet and social media have significantly affected democracies around the world. Yet, little is known about their direct impact on political elites. My dissertation posits that the expansion of the internet and social media has increased elite ideological extremism through two channels: i) A growth in voter radicalism, affecting politicians who respond to their constituencies, and ii) a higher reward to extreme politicians on social media. In particular, politicians' higher exposure to a very politicized set of voters and the positive reception of their negative messages on social media results in an increase in their ideological extremism. I test these hypotheses in Chile, conducting four types of analyses. I start by characterizing the profile of the social media and Facebook users in Chile at different periods, corroborating that they are people with sharper ideological preferences than the rest of the voters. Then, I examine whether Chilean members of the Chamber of Deputies pay more attention to Facebook when an increasing share of their constituencies have access to 3G mobile internet. Empirically, I estimate a two-way fixed effect model, regressing measures of Facebook activity ---likes, shares, and total interactions--- on 3G mobile internet coverage using a panel data of Chilean legislators. Here, I found a substantive effect of 3G mobile internet on Facebook activity among politicians, implying that when citizens have more access to the internet, legislators spend much more time interacting on Facebook. Moreover, I analyze if either district-level access to the internet or large levels of Facebook activity enhances the level of ideological extremism among political elites. The use of behavioral outcomes outside the digital world is crucial to understanding the impact of social media on democracies, as such outcomes can have real-world consequences. I decided to use roll-call voting data from the Chilean congress, which allowed me to generate a measure of ideological extremism on the left-right scale. I regressed the measure on several measures of Facebook activity and/or 3G coverage, using two-way fixed effects models and an instrumental variable specification, leveraging the variation in 3G mobile internet as an instrument. In these analyses, I consistently found that higher levels of Facebook interactions increase ideological extremism among Chilean politicians, especially in the initial years of Facebook penetration. This dissertation contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it is one of the few academic endeavors investigating how social media affect political elites in domains outside the digital world. Second, this work speaks to the old discussion about whether politicians lead or follow the public, in this case, regarding extremism. My results show an elite-driven move to extremism due to exposure to social media, regardless of the position of voters. Third, this analysis contributes to the understanding of polarization and democratic backsliding in the global south. Indeed, in the last years, Latin American countries such as Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Chile have experienced increasing levels of elite polarization, as evidenced by the type of candidates disputing the presidential elections. Social media penetration is a plausible driving force behind this phenomenon, as it encourages politicians to spend time chasing "likes," which, as I demonstrate, could eventually have consequences for the functioning of democracy.