Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Manitoba (Canada), 2005. / (UnM)AAINR08771. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3770.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [75-79]).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [75-79]).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [75-79]).

This dissertation examines the new emphasis on childhood in France that came from the destructiveness and trauma of the First World War. After the Great War, the French sought to rebuild their nation by redefining both young people's social responsibilities and adults' duties towards children. Politicians, educators, scientists, a social activists sought greater control over what seemed to be an increasingly valuable and potentially volatile social group. From 1918 to 1949, I argue, in public debates about the fashioning of a new, post-war youth culture, traditionalist, idealist, and scientific conceptions of childhood were competing alternatives. Each of these ways of thinking and talking about the social and cultural role of the next generation expressed different visions of the French nation in response to national crisis. Through the schools, family legislation, and leisure culture such as youth groups and the children's press, the younger generation assumed a new social and cultural position. French youth began to be seen as a national community, set apart by their age status from the rest of society, yet reflecting patriotic ideals and deeply-rooted French values. The new and distinct youth culture developed as part of post-war recovery served to mediate young people's relationship the nation, circumventing the earlier primacy of family relationships as the basis for social identity. During this time, French children were pulled out of the more private space of the family. This increased the sense of the power of youth as a collective entity, which also contributed to new fears of youth rebellion. These underlying tensions, between tradition and science and between heroism and rebellion, also led to the implementation of official regulation of French youth culture, notably through the passage in 1949 of a law censoring children's periodicals. Throughout this period, with state support, scientific theories gained the greatest authority over constructing the French child's world, but this new public space retained a deep-seated connection to adult-envisioned national ideals. In reforming the role of the younger generation after the war, the French found grounds for hope and national rejuvenation.

The Knights of Labor was 19th century America's largest and most successful labor organization, yet historians have given it scant attention. Much of the work that has been done concentrates on the Knights' decline and seeks to justify its demise. Aside from several superb community studies, few works have analyzed the Order's achievements or given it credit for the legacy it bequeathed to future working class movements. The last national survey of the Knights of Labor was completed in 1929. My study seeks to address the imbalance. The Knights organized more than a million workers in the 1880s and 1890s. What made it so successful? What were the experiences of those who joined? What did future organizers learn from the Knights? To answer these questions, I have turned to manuscript sources, the labor press, memoirs, 19th century commentary, and a variety of 20th century scholars and theorists. In the pages that follow I sketch a portrait of Knights' culture from both a local and a national perspective. I find that the Knights' rich culture--embracing ritual, ideology, music, poetry, fiction, material objects, leisure activities, and religion--defined the essence of Knighthood, and was an element of the Order's success. I identify five overlapping phases of Knights' cultural development, each of which was an amalgam of working class and popular cultures. Ultimately, though Knights of Labor culture was creative and strong, it could not overcome two larger problems facing the Order, internal factionalism and external oppression. Though the Knights of Labor faded quickly after 1890, it left a brilliant legacy upon which future working class movements were able to build.

Anthropologists studying sociocultural evolution are interested in the processes that contributed to social ranking in egalitarian societies. Individual agents must overcome the inertia of communalism to extend their authority into various domains of social life by controlling resources, people, and places essential for social reproduction. Native North Americans maintained relatively equal access to resources through reciprocity. Under some conditions, however, agents undermined reciprocity to establish privileged positions of status. I develop a political-economic model to explore how social inequality is created and perpetuated through labor mobilization and resource monopoly from archaeological remains in central Arkansas. The model explicitly articulates social negotiation and hierarchy formation with strategies and tactics of surplus extraction and its resistance to explicate how the material world is implicated in experimental social forms. I analyze the changing form, function, and distribution of settlements and artifacts associated with the establishment and abandonment of the Toltec Mounds site--the paramount center of Plum Bayou culture in the Arkansas River Lowland. Longitudinal trends in settlement patterns, mound construction, exchange relations, and the organization of technology are compared with expectations derived from the model to interpret the archaeological record. There is meaningful spatial-temporal variation in the distribution of people and objects which reflects fluctuations in social organization within and between regions. This interpretation contrasts with that of a gradual, linear trajectory of growth and development. Furthermore, changing population integration relates to political and economic processes that operate over large spatial arenas that transcend ecological, stylistic, and social boundaries. Mounting empirical evidence suggests that social ranking harbored contradictions between generosity and accumulation which allowed individuals the opportunity to resist surplus extraction. The result is a cyclical pattern of social integration and disintegration associated with diachronic shifts in central places suggesting that the processes that contributed to incipient social ranking were tenuous and politically unstable in central Arkansas. Ranking does not represent a reorganization of egalitarianism within all realms of life, nor do elite strategies to mobilize labor and monopolize surplus operate as a totality. Institutions of egalitarianism seem to lie immediately beneath the veneer of power and authority in rank societies.

<p> A central feature of Christianity is the observable historical fact that the gospel of Jesus travels across cultural and geographic boundaries, influencing and transforming each new culture and place it touches. Postcolonial migration, urbanization, and the simultaneous development of global communication and transportation technologies have radically increased the frequency and duration of cross-cultural contact worldwide. </p><p> This study explores hybrid identity construction in a multicultural church in the Paris Region in order to understand the influence of the gospel within transnational French-speaking networks. I found that French hegemony, historically rooted in the colonial project, contributes both to the cohesion of multicultural churches and to the cross-cultural spread of the gospel within French-speaking networks. </p><p> Cultural hybrids serve as bridge people within transcultural, transnational, French-speaking networks. They maintain identities and social networks on both sides of given cultural, linguistic, geographic, and national frontiers. Unique hybrid identities offer equally unique opportunities to influence for Christ on both sides of a given boundary. </p><p> Cultural hybridity can be a privileged in-between space where the distinct nature of Christian faith becomes manifest. When observing one&rsquo;s original culture as an outsider and taking on a new culture as an insider, both cultures are relativized. This critical posture unmasks totalistic ideologies and sends the cultural hybrid in search of a coherent identity, which participants found in Christ and his church. </p><p> While transnational French-speaking networks and cultural hybridity contribute providentially to the spread of the gospel, they can also be pursued as strategic resources for the mission enterprise. Transnational French-speaking social links can be intentionally followed across missional boundaries. These networks take many forms, each pregnant with unique opportunities. Cultural hybrids can lead strategically between diverse peoples for specific missional purposes within transcultural and transnational French-speaking networks. Hybrid leadership stands on a two-way bridge, bringing diverse peoples across in both directions for reconciliation, for cross-cultural collaboration, and to announce the good news where Jesus is not yet known.</p><p>

This dissertation analyzes the conditions that explain the dynamism of socio-territorial systems of firms and examines how these systems can foster local industrialization and reduce urban poverty in Peru. The theoretical argument builds upon the concepts of external economies, industrial districts and the social embeddedness of economic action, providing an alternative interpretation of the informal sector. It draws on field research and case studies conducted in Peru between August 1991 and August 1992. The findings support the view that the dynamism of small-scale manufacturing results from the development of collective entrepreneurial capabilities and new forms of cooperation and competition. Cooperation takes various forms such as subcontracting, joint marketing, and the sharing of inputs, tools and information. When firms compete on product design and the search for new markets rather than by lowering wages, there is scope for self-sustained expansion. In the first case study (El Porvenir, Trujillo) inter-firm cooperation was based upon ethnic homogeneity, kinship bonds and social norms of equity and reciprocity. Learning experiences within two larger shoe factories stimulated the organization of spin-off firms and networks of complementary specialized producers. These networks subsequently outcompeted the larger factories, expanded their share of the national market and are now exporting part of their output to neighboring countries. In the second case (Villa El Salvador, Lima) the state, foreign donor agencies and producers' associations played a more prominent role. The construction of an industrial park and service centers was sought to generate scale economies in the provision of productive services and entrepreneurial functions that were beyond the reach of individual producers. The main challenges were associated with the definition of property rights and the generation of stable institutional structures to operate these centers as self-sustained organizations. The study suggests that specialized support should be directed to those clusters of firms with higher growth potential and stronger linkages with the local economy. The constitution of quasi-public organizations can strengthen local leadership and nurture the formation of political entrepreneurs. The dissertation underscores the dynamism of socially embedded enterprises and institutions as the foundation for democracy and development.

This dissertation examines the achievements of Spanish prose fiction in the last two decades and focuses mainly in the works of Luis Mateo Diez, Luis Landero and Antonio Munoz Molina. These authors, as well as many others, reapproach the Civil War and the Post War period with a different technique than their predecessors. Instead of employing social realism or experimentalism, they adopt new styles incorporating elements which have been absent from Peninsular literature for a long time, such as myth and fantasy. The study argues that the passage from realism to fantasy is part of the evolution of prose fiction as a genre. However, this development is triggered by social, cultural and historical events. Therefore, the analysis covers a historical review of the origins of the genre giving special attention to the mythical and chivalric aspects which contemporary novels borrow from the early works. The socio-cultural elements of the context are considered at the time the action takes place and also during the era in which the books were written. By combining these approaches one can bring out the literary truth of the texts which as claimed by Stephen Greenblatt is embedded in a text since its moment of conception. The literary truth of these fictions is that Spaniards have surpassed the historical division of the two Spains, and their efforts are now targeted at the search of new identities more according with individual subjectivity. This comprehensive analysis also enlightens the peculiar relationship between prose fiction and history.