Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Sociology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Person-environment interactions are the rule, not only for development but also for moment-to-moment experience. Knowledge about environmental influences on the manifestation of psychological symptoms is an important area of research, particularly with regard to social anxiety where symptoms vary dramatically depending on the social context. Like other forms of anxiety, social anxiety is thought to have evolved to help us pay attention to, assess, and respond to potential (in this case, intra-species) threats. The current study was based on (1) the theoretical proposition that social anxiety represents an adaptation to hierarchical, or agonic, modes of social organization; (2) the observation that in the non-hierarchical hedonic systems seen in some of our closest primate relatives, submissiveness is not required for group functioning, and (3) more recent empirical data showing that social anxiety symptoms are dependent on contextual factors. The current study integrated these three ideas and examined whether participating in a hedonic system, as compared to an agonic system, diminishes social anxiety, and whether social context moderates the relationship between trait social anxiety and activation of state anxiety. Participants of all different levels of trait social anxiety were randomly assigned to play a group game, the context and rules of which were consistent with either agonic or hedonic social structures. Self-reported anxiety and behaviors associated with social anxiety were then measured. Results from the experiment were mixed, sometimes seemingly conflicting, and therefore difficult to interpret. The more hierarchical, agonic social system was associated with higher anxious affect. However, the type of social system did not appear to affect self-reported submissive behavior, social comparison, or social behavior. Additionally, experimental condition did not moderate the effect of trait social anxiety on these variables. Although our findings were mixed, they hint at the role of social structure in the activation of anxious affect. / Psychology

<p> "The Center of His Existence: Domestic Architecture &amp; Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century Lincoln County, Tennessee" presents the Whitaker family of Lincoln County, Tennessee as an example of a middle class forming in the rural South during the Antebellum period. In showing the family's interests in economic diversity in the fields of agriculture and industry, religious involvement, and Northern-style progress, this thesis makes the case for a wider class-identity taking shape in provincial areas of the South. Moreover, it shows that the originating culture of the Whitaker family impacted their migration patterns and shaped the culture of their final location of choice. Finally, it argues that architectural expression, particularly pertaining to the family home, should be considered a primary source in considering how past peoples viewed their own socio-economic standing within their time and place. In the case of Newton Whitaker, whose home is under examination here, the blending of high style and vernacular variations overlaid upon the common I-house design stands to show that he saw himself somewhere in the middle of the economic and social stratum. Locally, other houses show a similar mentality, particularly the home of Alexander Greer, a man of similar age, lineage, and upbringing. This thesis shows that although class-identity takes years to fully form, one's beliefs, values, and place in their local community is revealed through their choice in artistic expression, namely the family home, a place where all the community sees a reflection of its owner in its design and style. </p>

<p>This dissertation is an investigation of trends in the current US system of education, as informed by historical movements for autonomous education in the period of Reconstruction and in the 1960s and 70s. The driving questions of the dissertation are 1. How to understand the system of education in the US as having a historical and current role in the preservation of an existing structure of power, 2. How did historical movements that focused on the creation of autonomous forms of education challenge the given order of society?, and 3. What would a renewal of movement for autonomous education look like in the current moment? </p><p>I examine historical, theoretical and literary texts in my analysis of the role of education in US society. My theoretical framework for the dissertation comes from the collective work of El Kilombo Intergaláctico, an organization in Durham, North Carolina, and the work of Alvaro Reyes on the crisis of capitalist society and Blackness as a political alternative. In my historical and literary research, I focus particularly on educational policy documents that demonstrate the ways in which movements for autonomous education shaped state education, and literary texts that share a vision of collective autonomous education in the US in a way that both recalls past movements and gestures toward new possibilities for movement.</p><p>Ultimately, I argue that the tradition of the creation of autonomous forms of education in the US, and existing forms of autonomous education in social movements in Latin America, have the potential to once again provide insight toward the creation of alternative forms of education in the US now that would be different from earlier and current forms of US education for domination and control.</p> / Dissertation

This research has modeled the development and fertility relationship under trade dependency of Asia and Hispanic America following Hout's (1980) conceptual model. The findings from the analyses show that the initial effects of development were positive and significant, which were consistent with the theory, and as predicted by Hout's model. In all the empirical equations, all of the dependency terms, measured as the top commodity concentration, the top three commodity concentration, or the partner concentration, were positive and significant. This is consistent with the theory and consistent with Hout's (1980) findings. The results of the development squared term suggest that the well known long-term negative effect of development may have been misspecified in Hout's equation. As a result, the long-term fertility reducing effect of the development on fertility would have to be alternatively modeled. In this investigation, using 1950-1990 data generated by sample of both Hispanic American and Asian countries, Hout's (1980) positive interaction term was not replicated. In fact, the interaction term was just the opposite. Significant negative development-dependency interaction terms were found in every empirical analysis. A very stable result in terms of the development dependency interaction was obtained by using all three measures of dependency. While the commodity concentration measures were more important in Asia and the partner concentration (P) was higher and more important in Hispanic America, the negative interaction resulted in all analyses--including the overall best empirical equations in all of the analyses. The results consistently indicated that as dependency increased, the long-term negative effect of development on fertility increased in magnitude. This long-term effect is explained by an alternative theory linking the relationship between fertility on the one hand, and development and dependency on the other hand, as an interaction. According to this alternative theory, the interaction assumes that development and dependency can vary somewhat independently of each other. Thus, high levels of dependency should strengthen the negative long-term influence of development on fertility. While the results are consistent with the theoretical interpretation of the negative development-dependency interaction, the detailed implications of the alternative theory need to be investigated.

No description available.

<p> This case study researched the learning of financial literacy in a five-generation family business. Stones&rsquo;s (2005) strong structuration methodological framework was used to explore the external structures of context and the internal structures of disposition or habitus and knowledge in the social learning of financial literacy defined as a combination of awareness, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors. Case study data were collected from two-part life history interviews, historical records, documents, websites, video, and observations. The research participants included 10 members from two generations of the family.</p><p> Through the theoretical lens of Stones&rsquo;s (2005) strong structuration theory, the study identified meso-level structural features and patterns of interactions across three generations that shaped the five dimensions of financial literacy of agents at the micro level. Bandura&rsquo;s (1986) social cognitive theory supplemented strong structuration to consider the interactions, generative conceptions, anticipatory capabilities, and self-efficacy of agents-<i> in-situ</i>.</p><p> The study concluded that regional or locally implicit norms became family financial norms through patterns of social structuring. Strongly reinforced family norms were salient in financial attitudes and behaviors throughout the life course. Structuring patterns of interaction, including traditional family roles for men and women, were found to influence agents&rsquo; general dispositions and generative conceptions of their capabilities. Case evidence suggested that differences in enactive experiences influenced the financial self-efficacy of agents.</p><p> Power in position-practice relations was found to reinforce information asymmetries among agents, which can affect financial attitudes and financial decision behaviors. Altruism and agents&rsquo; risk dispositions can lead to firm-level inertia and lead to risk exposure for individuals.</p><p> The sociological approach of this study demonstrated that to gain an understanding of the applied nature of financial literacy as active agency at the micro level, inquiry focused solely on financial outcomes is insufficient. The research showed that the five dimensions of financial literacy arise in dynamic combinations in the shaping of external and internal structures through social interactions.</p>

This thesis examines organizing and controlling mechanisms within the network structure of Korean business groups, chaebols, for the family-based corporate ownership and control under environmental uncertainty. Research focuses on the groups' changing patterns of inter-firm network structures, the maneuvering strategy by utilizing relational configurations of business groups for the family members' robust control, and the effect of network structure on the corporate performance of affiliated firms. Considering the financial crisis of 1997 in South Korea and the aftermath of this crisis as a natural experiment, social network analysis is used for analyzing each of the 178 cases for 28 chaebols during 1997 to 2003. Although retaining a centralized, hierarchical form of group structure with the tau statistic, the overall inter-firm configurations of each business group, as result of concrete but simplified images of network configurations by blockmodel analysis and the comparison of them with idealized models by simple matching analysis, show the existence of variations within a monolithic form in synchronic comparison and the changing trend to be a less centralized, hierarchical form along with stable transitive patterns in diachronic comparison. Family-based corporate control, by strategically intertwining affiliated people as vicarious agents to carry out the interests of family members and sending these combinatorial equity ties to a few major firms occupying core positions, is guaranteed without losing its substantial controlling power. It is argued that, borrowing from Bourdieu's "condescension strategy," this strategically contrived control is a proactive and reactive strategy in response to environmental pressure even though this strategy is effective in certain intercorporate conditions. The estimated influence of inter-firm network structure on the corporate performance of affiliated firms is minimal in multilevel analysis. In contrast, affiliated firms having direct connections with family members show relatively better corporate performance than those that do not have these connections. The implication of this result is that the network structure of chaebols tend to be shaped, maintained, and reorganized for family-based, effective, overarching corporate control at the business group level rather than for efficient corporate performance of affiliated firms at the firm level. Finally, this thesis suggests that corporate control and corporate gain do not always go hand in hand, and economic practices need to be understood by the simultaneous consideration of pecuniary and not necessarily pecuniary but still related interests, such as control and social relations where economic practices are anchored in.

This thesis builds the micro foundations of the first modern social movement: the movement for the abolition of the slave trade in the early 19th century British context. I derive theories of action from the historical literature, and use work from historical sociology and movement theory to understand the decision to petition for abolition. Two major empirical undertakings are employed to adjudicate between different theories of action accounting for abolitionist petitioning. First, zooming in on Manchester, I deploy the signatures of an abolitionist petition to find the social-structural drivers of abolitionist mobilization. Through a careful reconstruction of the city’s historic geography, I place over 10000 residents in physical space along with important buildings, such as churches, inns and taverns: focal points that provided the basis of associational life and early civil society, places where politics was done at the time. I delineate the limits of the impact of the Quaker congregation, and demonstrate that in fact these focal points induced the spatial-clustering of abolitionist petitioners. Furthermore, I reveal that economic interests are not among key drivers of abolitionist petitioning, as no clear occupational-gradient is found among petitioners. Besides the theoretical contributions, I use innovative ways to test which social relationships were crucial for petitioning. Second, zooming out on the national petitioning campaign I use self-collected data on petitions form the Journals of the British Parliament to study the movement at the macro level. The analysis shows that contact with the London-based central movement-organization was key for the success of the first campaign, but it also reveals that the second campaign relied more on "horizontal" connections rather than hierarchical ones tying provincial towns to London. Second, I confirm that non-conformist religious organizations were pivotal for the inception, and scaling of the national campaign, but the Quaker church seem to exert more important and continuous influence compared to the Wesleyan Methodist organization. Last but not least, I show that industrialization plays a key, and increasingly important role in the campaign for abolition.

While leaders are constantly called to manage conflicting priorities in today’s fast-changing environments, there is little research that examines how leaders can effectively explore new opportunities while simultaneously exploiting current advantages. Yet, management researchers have long shown that organizations that are ambidextrous—by balancing exploration and exploitation activities—are more innovative and successful. However, this concept of ambidexterity has not been investigated at the leadership level to a great extent, which poses limited practical implications for organizations. Further, there has been a lack of clarity around what constitutes and how to operationalize ambidexterity in the literature. The current research attempts to address these gaps by proposing a preliminary model of ambidextrous leadership. This model is then embedded in a leadership process model to help understand the underlying process of what may predict and result from ambidextrous leadership. The pilot and Study 1 leveraged self-report and experimental vignette survey methods, and the results from these studies provided preliminary evidence for the validity of the two constructs, exploration and exploitation. The results also demonstrated the impact of a promotion and prevention regulatory focus on exploration and exploitation, respectively, while showing almost no support for the effects of switching on leadership perceptions. The results from Study 2—which leveraged CEOs’ letters to shareholders in the annual reports of S&P 500 companies—provided limited support for the positive effects of achieving high levels of exploration and exploitation compared to being high on only one of them or low on both. Finally, based on the findings from three studies, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.