Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "Sociology"
Now showing items 1-20 of 45
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A Sociocultural Paradigm for Pricing: How Status, Cognitive Authority, and Professional Culture Qualify Market Values
(2017-04-18)Two economic paradigms—neoclassical orthodoxy and behavioral heterodoxy—dominate modern price theory. Especially in actual practice, economics monopolizes discussions around pricing with most market actors paying little ... -
The Achievement Gap, Revisited: An Empirical Assessment of What We Can Learn from East Asian Education
(2012-10-23)International mathematics assessments have established students in East Asia as among the best in the world and their U.S. counterparts as mediocre. What is not clear is why this “achievement gap” exists. The last major ... -
Advocacy and Anti-Racism: How Institutions Shape Organizational Responses to Racially Biased Policing in France and the United States
(2017-05-13)Racially biased policing has captured the attention of citizens across the globe. This preoccupation with racial justice and policing is not unique the United States; these questions are on the rise across the Atlantic as ... -
Art, Crime, and the Image of the City
(2014-02-25)This dissertation explores the symbolic structure of the metropolis, probing how neutral spaces may be imbued with meaning to become places, and tracing the processes through which the image of the city can come to be - ... -
Attitudes and Beliefs about Distributive Justice in China
(2014-02-25)This dissertation examines the patterns of popular attitudes and beliefs about economic inequality and distributive justice in contemporary China. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework on social cognition and ... -
Birds of a Feather: Patterns, Heuristics, and Constraints of Cross-Boundary Marriage Sorting
(2017-05-13)I examine of the patterns, heuristics, and constraints of contemporary marriage sorting across various social boundaries and the resulting implications for understanding social openness and closure. Using a combination of ... -
The Causes of the Divergent Development of Banking Regulation in the U.S., Canada, and Spain
(2016-05-02)Why did different countries create different systems of banking regulation in the years leading up to the recent global financial crisis, despite adhering to the same transnational regulatory agreement, the 1988 Basel ... -
Collateral Consequences: How Increased Incarceration Rates Transform Parenting and Partnership in Low-Income Boston Neighborhoods
(2018-05-02)The War on Drugs and subsequent growth of the U.S. prison system has disproportionately affected low-income individuals living in inner-cities. Since the 1980’s, men of color without a high school degree have been ... -
Courting Trouble: a Qualitative Examination of Sexual Inequality in Partnering Practice
(2017-05-11)Sociology recognizes marriage and family formation as two consequential events in an adult’s lifecourse. But as young people spend more of their lives childless and unpartnered, scholars recognize a dearth of academic ... -
Dealing with the Past: History and Identity in Serbia and Croatia
(2013-02-12)This project analyzes the influence of history and myths in the construction of ethnic identity narratives by intellectuals and elites, as well as the appropriation and negotiation of these identities among contemporary ... -
Defining Female Achievement: Gender, Class, and Work in Contemporary Korea
(2018-05-11)Understanding how women transition to adulthood and make decisions about family, employment, and parenting have long been central questions in gender and family scholarship. Korea offers a particularly compelling context ... -
Dying of Encouragement: From Pitch to Production in Hollywood
(2013-10-08)Social scientists have long held that the media has a profound effect on modern societies. However, the cultural production of motion pictures and television shows has largely been neglected as a topic of inquiry. The ... -
Essays on Place and Punishment in America
(2016-05-14)This dissertation consists of three essays on the spatial and neighborhood dynamics of incarceration in the United States. In the first essay, I apply theories of social control and urban inequality to study prison admission ... -
Expertise Diversification and the Transformation of the Field of Contemporary Chinese Art: 1979-2012
(2013-10-18)The decentralization of cultural production in China coincided with the introduction of economic and political reforms in 1979. The subsequent shift from a system of state propaganda production towards a market-oriented ... -
Food Production during the Transition to Capitalism: A Comparative Political Economy of Russia and China
(2012-09-14)The principal analytical objective of this dissertation is the assessment of changes in the political economy of food production during the transition from socialism to capitalism in Russia and China. The dissertation is ... -
For Richer and Poorer: Disentangling the Association Between Income Inequality and Health
(2017-10-11)People tend to be sicker and die younger in places with high economic inequality than in places with low economic inequality. This fact is widely accepted, but the reasons for the relationship are disputed, partly because ... -
Historical Origins of Racial Inequality in Incarceration in the United States
(2014-10-21)This dissertation consists of three essays on the historical roots of racial disparity in incarceration in the United States. The first essay examines the origins of racial inequality in convict leasing in the postbellum ... -
I Go, You Go: Searching for Strength and Self in the American Gym
(2016-05-12)This ethnography is based on 48 months of detailed participation, interviews, and observation with active gymgoers at three middle-class gyms in Chicago. It is a study of a particular social institution that, despite its ... -
Innovating in Education: NGO Interventions in New Delhi Government Schools
(2018-02-23)This dissertation examines three education non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in New Delhi that attempt to innovate within the Indian government school system. The author uses immersive ethnography to understand how ...