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This dissertation compares and analyzes the relationship of design-build (DB) and design-bid-build (DBB) project delivery methods with performance metrics of large highway projects. Project performance is measured in terms of cost, schedule, safety, change orders, and quality on these two types of highway projects. The performance benchmarking methodology used here is derived from work done on a Texas Department of Transportation (TX DOT) study of the State Highway (SH) 130 Project. Because SH 130 is the first DB highway project in Texas and is being built under a new contractual concept called the Comprehensive Development Agreement (CDA), this dissertation establishes a framework for evaluating the performance of large DB highway projects. The CDA approach is an innovative form of the DB project delivery method that allows the contractor to simultaneously undertake right-of-way acquisition, utility adjustment, design, and construction activities. Because this approach is being used for the first time on a state highway project in Texas, it is beneficial to track highway project performance in order to assess whether this project delivery method is a better alternative for building high priority highways. The main objective of this dissertation is thus to compare the performance of large recent DB highway projects (in the context of SH 130) with similar on-going instate DBB highway projects. The research hypothesis is to determine whether there is a statistical difference in mean performance between DB and DBB highway projects. For large, recently built DB highway projects (Federal Highway Administration, Special Experimental Project Number 14 & Cost > US $ 100 million) and four of the largest, most recently built in-state DBB highway projects are identified for comparison purposes. This dissertation provides a detailed methodology to collect data and gives the results of performance benchmarking of these large DB and DBB highway projects. It also investigates associations or relationships between project characteristics (input variables) and project performance (output variables) of large highway projects. While previous analyses of DB and DBB methods have included a wide range of construction projects as varied as buildings and industrial facilities, this dissertation isolates the analysis of these two delivery approaches for large highway projects. It also helps to develop a method to collect data for benchmarking of large highway projects. This research should help TX DOT choose the appropriate delivery method for large future highway projects. / text

In late 20th-century Texas, during decades of rapid economic growth and abrupt social transformation, traditional state institutions and other features of a less affluent Southern past persisted side by side with the modern and newly developed. Criminal justice, in Texas as in other states, became a realm that was fiercely contested politically and in the courts. Sentencing and corrections, in particular, bore the brunt of changes promoted by the frequently conflicting forces of federal grant aid to states and federal judicial intervention. In the case of Texas, comprehensive reforms ordered by federal courts became a crucial, if limited, impetus for change that challenged the resistance of the political establishment. The courts typically sought to compel state institutions to meet standards of service provision set by professional experts and certifying organizations. The lead role played by federal courts--rather than Texas professionals themselves and their statewide organizations--in advocating for reforms indicates that in a state political environment marked by a tendency toward concentrated power, and with few independent, politically insulated institutions of their own, Texas doctors, lawyers, academics, and other professionals had few active roles to play. As examples of courtordered reform, the cases of prison medical care and juvenile confinement both display the chronic abasement of professional standards by state institutions, the limits of effective judicial intervention over time, and the long-term cyclical patterns of state politics. Other episodes of attempted reform--the use of federal grant funds originally intended to upgrade criminal justice agencies, and a succession of initiatives to change the criminal sentencing code--demonstrate the prevalence of political pressures over state-supported professional expertise. The particular importance of physicians--and the absence of state medical organizations--in promoting the revival of a modernized death penalty is emphasized by a comparison with England, where doctors asserted a professional interest in criminal justice policies and preempted the medicalization of capital punishment. Ultimately the fate of each of these initiatives in the realm of sentencing and correction reflects the pressures tending against the creation and maintenance of independent professional authority in Texas.

This dissertation examines the impacts of shifting federal and state regulation on localities and on their efforts to extend public access to new technologies by exploring how libraries, diverse community sites and commercial hotspots have configured their services and programs in Austin, Texas in the last decade. Historically, regulation to ensure public access to communication and information systems have been regarded in the United States as an expression of government's concerns about preserving the public interest in the media. Since the early 1990s, diverse policy initiatives promoting public access to information and communication technology (ICT) sought to fulfill ideals of equity and democracy in the information age. However, an increasing preponderance of neoliberal ideology in current policy discourses, coupled with the explosive growth of high-speed, mobile networks, and individual-based, social software applications are challenging traditional notions of public access in communication policy. Since 2002, federal and state governments have ended a decade of direct government support to local, non-profit and community-based programs that facilitated public access to ICT. Over the same period, they have increasingly pursued a market-oriented approach to broadband access through the unlicensed spectrum, encouraging private enterprises to provider WiFi and wireless services to consumers in restaurants, airports, and other public places. Such changes bear significant implications for issues of governance, participatory democracy and equity in the information age. The comparative case study of Internet access initiatives in Austin seeks to answer three interrelated questions. First, how has public policy facilitating the transition toward convergent media environments framed public access to information and communication technologies (ICT)? A framing analysis of federal, state and local regulation of public ICT access indicates increasing fragmentation of policy discourses on access. Second, what are the main characteristics of the field of public access to ICT in an American technopolis? Austin, a modern American Technopolis and pioneer of Internet access in the country serves as a site to assess the impact of fragmented regulation on public ICT access. Third, how has public access to new technology through the unlicensed spectrum been conceptualized by different access cultures in a shifting regulatory environment? A survey of Wi-Fi hotspots in Austin, interviews with stakeholders and secondary data are employed in analyzing how non-profits, private firms and the local government are configuring high-speed Internet access through the unlicensed spectrum.

This dissertation is an ethnography of U.S. women negotiating the shifting terrain of reforms to federal welfare policies. Chapter one reviews literature relevant to the dissertation themes. I discuss the work of anthropologists relevant to understanding U.S. welfare reform and gender, public policy and kinship, as well as the concepts of neoliberalism and neoconservativism which frame my analysis of the ethnographic material. In chapter two, I introduce a context for understanding everyday life in San Antonio for low-income women. After providing a brief historical context for understanding the public housing and urban poverty in San Antonio, I parse out events and themes related to public housing that punctuate and constrain the lives women, including the disparities among different City neighborhoods and significance of public housing in women's lives. Chapter three critiques flexibility as a strategy to meet the requirements of welfare reform and attain economic self-sufficiency. I describe gendered and classed perspectives on the marriage promotion component of welfare reform and contextualize these programs with women's lives and relationship choices. In chapter four, I look at marriage and marriage promotion as a component of welfare reform. I review complications and obstacles that women associated with marriage, such as blended families, domestic violence, and barriers to continued public assistance. These factors all affect women's considerations about marriage as a timely and appropriate choice or a way to improve their social and economic situation. Chapter five explores child care dilemmas encountered by women receiving and leaving welfare for employment. While subsidized child care is an option for some women, the employment opportunities available to them require a high degree of individual flexibility are frequently inconsistent with the surprisingly inflexible available formal and informal child care arrangements. Without subsidies, women are often unable to secure and maintain low-wage jobs that are available to them. I understand this predicament in the broader context of the gendered aspects of neoliberalism and welfare reform.

Using a sequential, explanatory mixed methods design, this dissertation study compared students who persist in the biology major (persisters) with students who leave the biology major (switchers) in terms of how their pre-college experiences, college biology experiences, and biology performance figured into their choice of biology and their persistence in or departure from the biology major. This study combined 1) quantitative comparisons of biology persisters and switchers via a questionnaire developed for the study and survival analysis of a larger population of biology freshmen with 2) qualitative comparison of biology switchers and persisters via semi-structured life story interviews and homogenous focus groups. 319 students (207 persisters and 112 switchers) participated in the questionnaire and 36 students (20 persisters and 16 switchers) participated in life story and focus group interviews. All participants were undergraduates who entered The University of Texas at Austin as biology freshmen in the fall semesters of 2000 through 2004. Findings of this study suggest: 1) Regardless of eventual major, biology students enter college with generally the same suite of experiences, sources of personal encouragement, and reasons for choosing the biology major; 2) Despite the fact that they have also had poor experiences in the major, biology persisters do not actively decide to stay in the biology major; they simply do not leave; 3) Based upon survival analysis, biology students are most at-risk of leaving the biology major during the first two years of college and if they are African-American or Latino, women, or seeking a Bachelor of Arts degree (rather than a Bachelor of Science); 4) Biology switchers do not leave biology due to preference for other disciplines; they leave due to difficulties or dissatisfaction with aspects of the biology major, including their courses, faculty, and peers; 5) Biology performance has a differential effect on persistence in the biology major, depending on how well students perform in comparison to other courses or other students. / text