Sociology Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
In a Dark, Dark Wood: Morality, Politics, and Ecological Inaction In Russia
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Listrovaya, Liudmila; Norton, Matthew
This dissertation delves into the complex socio-environmental issues that lay at the intersection of natural resource governance, environmental injustice, and environmental discourse in Russia—a nation with an economy profoundly reliant on revenues from natural resources. Employing environmental sociology as its core analytical framework, this dissertation provides an analysis of the Russian case-study, underscored by a deep-rooted history of settler colonialism and extraction politics, diverse ethnic demographics, and centralized environmental governance. This dissertation consists of three empirical chapters that are written in the article style to be able to serve as standalone research projects while building upon one another to form a cohesive narrative that helps understand the state environmental affairs in an authoritarian Russian state. Using mixed methods—ethnographic fieldwork in the Russian Northwest, critical discourse study of the federal newspapers, and statistical analysis of the Rosstat and Census data—the three dissertation chapters provide a comprehensive analysis of forestry, politicization of environmental discourses, and the increasing role of extraction in shaping environmental disparities across the Russian regions. This dissertation aims to serve as a starting point for an academic conversation about the largely overlooked by environmental sociology Russian case-study, and it further calls for the much-needed development of this area of research.
Open Access
International Trade, the Environment, and Networks: Building Relational Understandings of Global Environmental Problems
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Theis, Nicholas; York, Richard
This dissertation uses social network analysis to integrate the relationality of nation-states more fully into quantitative macro-environmental sociology. Specifically, I am interested in the following questions: How can social network analysis help develop more relational understandings of global environmental problems? And, how does global trade network position and integration provide meaningful contexts for better understanding relationships between domestic economic and technological factors and emissions? I answer these questions by conducting empirical investigations of case studies such as global end-of-life vessel exchanges; global crude oil extraction, trade position, and oil-related emissions; and the effects of global economic integration for renewable energy effectiveness in reducing emissions. I argue that methodological approaches incorporating network methods have important substantive implications for macro-environmental sociological questions. For ecologically unequal exchange theory, use of network simulations shifts the focus from value of commodities exchange to tie centralization, potentially a useful approach for understanding the global organization of disposal-side trade relations, which may involve only a few sites. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, operationalizing the theory using network methods to classify countries based on trade position emphasizes extractive sites through trade relationships, more in line with the underlying theoretical foci relative to conventional approaches emphasizing national income bifurcations and export intensity to high income nations. For research on the economy-environment relationship, I depart from the vast majority of work that focuses on domestic measures, most significantly economic development. By employing network methods, a relational measure of international trade integration is produced, centering the research design not on the expansionary tendencies of capital, but rather on national integration into its global expansion. In this way, a novel conceptualization is applied to the question of the circumstances or contexts in which renewable energies reduce emissions. The use of network methods innovates research designs within quantitative macro-environmental sociology, more fully integrating the relationality of nation-states in the global economy and expanding the research space to ask questions surrounding how national positionality in trade networks modifies the effect of social, economic, and technological factors on environmental change.
Open Access
Ruling Class Governance: Capitalist Class Political Blocs, Labor, and PAC Co-donation Networks, U.S. House of Representatives, 1990–2018
(University of Oregon, 2024-03-25) Labuza, Andrew; Dreiling, Michael
Most contemporary political theories argue that the state is autonomous from the hegemony of the capitalist class. This project tackles the question of the relative autonomy of the state through a novel approach of converting political action committee (PAC) data into a co-donation network and applying community detection algorithms to identify class based collective political action. The project finds that PACs tend to cluster according to economic interests as defined by their location in the network of production. Such an approach identifies campaign contributions as a ‘mechanism of relative autonomy’ and enables researchers to take snap shots of the horizontal and vertical class struggle. The results reject political theories organized around state autonomy in favor of Marx and Engels’ historical materialism and political theories advocating for the relative autonomy of the state.
Embargo
"Living Symbols of the Historic and Pioneer Spirit of the West": Impacts of Settler Colonial Logics on the Management of Range Equines in the United States
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) De'Arman, Kindra; York, Richard
Legally required federal management of horse and burro (donkey) populations on the American West rangelands has proven to be a challenge for the United States government. Federal management has resulted in more than desired population numbers, environmental impacts, legal contestation, and unsustainable operating costs. Ultimately, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency tasked with overseeing most herds through their Wild Horse and Burro (WHB) Program, is tasked with “maintaining healthy horses on healthy rangelands”. However, for many of their herd management areas, they have been unable to achieve these goals. As horses and burros are socially imbued with different cultural meanings, there are many factors that constrain or enable different social and managerial approaches to addressing concerns about horse and burro overpopulation. In this dissertation, I provide one way to think about federal lands management challenge by orienting within the social history and context of settler colonialism. The analyses reported in this dissertation come from a portion of a larger BLM-approved empirical research project focused on WHB Program decision-making more broadly. Over the course of 22-months, I engaged in interviews, field observations, and textual analyses as part of an institutional ethnography on WHB program decision-making. This dissertation shows that settler colonialism is ongoing and structured into the BLM’s WHB Program through organizational, political, and legal mechanisms. These mechanisms were developed long before current WHB Program personnel and largely exist outside of their decision-making discretion. Through this dissertation I problematize the settler colonial context as that which has informed environmental, cultural, and structural contexts for which people are concerned.
Embargo
How Can Low-Carbon Energy Dematerialize the Economy? Technological Transitions and the Political Economy of Electricity Generation
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Sikirica, Amanda; York, Richard
This dissertation addresses features of the displacement paradox in the context of electricity generation, both at the cross-national level and within one region of the United States. The displacement paradox is the empirical phenomenon of substitutes to a specific product, here fuels used to generate electricity, do not necessarily replace incumbent products in a 1:1 ratio thus increasing total resource consumption, and in some examples are observed to increase consumption of the incumbent product. Chapter 1 describes how the displacement of fossil fuels with non-fossil fuels varies based on a nation’s social structural position within the global capitalist world-system. I find that semiperiphery nations have higher predicted displacement of fossil fuels, possibly due to the dynamics of domestic elites. Chapter 2 asks how multiple dimensions of domestic inequality (gender inequality, economic inequality, and colonial history) may create landscapes of inequality on which nations are or will attempt to move away from fossil fuels. I find that much of the variation in national-level displacement of fossil fuels with alternatives can be attributed to the additive effects of each dimension of inequality, though there is some portion of variation which can be attributed to multiplicative effects. Chapter 3 traces the development of hydroelectricity in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, and subsequent growth of the region’s consumption of fossil fuels. This history illustrates an example of the displacement paradox, whereby the growth of an alternative fuel (hydroelectricity) contributed to the growth of fossil fuels in the region. This chapter points out the role of institutional continuance, grid management, and neoliberalization of the electricity industry in the growing reliance of the region on fossil fuels. In total, this dissertation demonstrates the roots of the displacement paradox in social organization and the distribution of social power as mediated by capitalist production.
Open Access
Kinship and Class: A Study of the Weyerhaeuser Family
(University of Oregon, 1977-03) Dunn, Marvin Glenn
This study is an attempt to increase our understanding of the class structure and political economy of the United States, through a detailed examination of one extended family of great wealth. Focusing on a single case, the study analyzes the multigenerational and inter-institutional linkages of this kinship group. Through use of a genealogy, kinship ties are traced through five generations. The genealogy also provides a medium for identifying the family's links to corporations, foundations, political processes, and institutions of the upper class. By demonstrating how one wealthy family coordinates its activities for the purpose of maintaining its social and economic position in society, this study suggests that other upper class families may operate in a similar manner. The study will show how the family, through a variety of institutions, coordinates its activities. The Family Office, the annual Family Meeting, various foundations, and several holding companies are examined as mechanisms of internal cohesiveness and of external control over other institutions. The potential for external control and influence also extends itself to several large corporations, to trade associations, the candidate selection process, churches, and schools.
Open Access
The Status of the Blind in the State of Oregon
(Univeristy of Oregon, 1940-06) Satchwell, Wayne
The state of Oregon has long been interested in the problems of the blind. In 1872 a school for the blind was established in Salem; in 1921 the Oregon Employment Institution for the Blind (now the Oregon Blind Trades School) first began to function as a state institution; in 1936 the state first began to provide pensions for the blind. Although there have been a number of investigations of the two state institutions which care for a portion of the blind in Oregon, there have never been any thorough studies made showing their purposes or accomplishments in detail.
Open Access
The Content of California White-Collar Union Contracts
(University of Oregon, 1962-06) Kleingartner, Archie
From the wealth of data which might be gathered on any particular subject, every social investigation must specify what material will be used and for what purpose it will be used. Any subject can be approached from a variety of different viewpoints, and, depending on the viewpoint taken, certain aspects will be brought into the fore and others only slightly treated or ignored. The subject of this study is white-collar unionism. The aspect of white-collar unions with which it will be concerned is the collective bargaining contract. In any union-management relationship, the written agreement can be viewed as a formal document which "consists of a statement of restraints upon managerial prerogatives and limitations on the freedom of employer conduct and, by its terms, substitutes bilateral rules of conduct for unilateral employer action."
Open Access
The Socialized State.
(University of Oregon, 1921-04) Bain, Read
During the last ten years the reorganization of state government has been one of the liveliest subjects in political science. A great deal has been written about it, but little has been done to remedy the defects pointed out. Some progress has been made, however, and doubtless the next few years will see the widespread adoption of many recommendations investigators recently have proposed. We are just entering upon the period of construction which normally follows the period of criticism.
Open Access
Innovation and Fringe Benefits
(1960-06) Koval, John P.
The focus of this particular study is on collective bargaining, or more generally, industrial sociology. Fringe benefits, the particular aspect of collective bargaining in question, were chose not so much for their present popularity as for their ability to characterize specific instances of innovation in a particular setting – collective bargaining – and for the opportunity to investigate the relation of innovative fringe benefits to the labor imporovement.
Open Access
Off-time Illness: When Young Adults get Illnesses Associated with Old Age
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Norton-Smith, Kathryn; Vasquez-Tokos, Jessica
This dissertation explores the lived experiences of young adults with cancer through qualitative methods, including 40 in-depth interviews and participant observation. This dissertation extends sociological inquiry to an under examined population, young adults with cancer. This dissertation focuses on how age and life course state shape illness experience, with attentiveness to variations based on race, class, and gender. Young adulthood is socially constructed as a period of health, and cancer as a disease of old age. Such assumptions shape age-specific social support systems, medical practices, and perceptions of young adult bodies, impacting young adult experiences of illness. This manuscript analyzes themes of young adults’ experience of diagnosis. Young adults experience diagnosis as a multi-sited process encompassing self-diagnosis and professional diagnosis. A central theme in these accounts was the difficulty navigating the age-specific construction of young adulthood as a period of health and cancer as a disease of old age. Second, this project explores the experience of the body for young adults with cancer, focusing on the experience of aberration or out of placeness. Shaped by the institutional environment, aberration represents both the embodied experience of the young adult patient and the positionality of a young adult patient in medical knowledge. This aberration resulted in a loss of agency, especially regarding reproductive autonomy. A third research aim explores the impact of a cancer diagnosis on education, occupation, family formation, and the role of institutions in supporting or exacerbating this disruption. My findings demonstrate universal disruptions in education, occupation, and family formations. The timing of this disruption during the transitional period of young adulthood resulted in potentially long-term, cascading impacts. Finally, this project explores life after a cancer diagnosis. Young adults expressed uncertainty and a recognition of mortality independent of their health status. In response, young adults employ strategies informed by common sense narratives and ideologies, including bodily labor, family work, and support work.
Open Access
The Hands that Feed Us: Endemic Precarity and Pandemic Resistance Among Migrant Food Processing Workers
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Loustaunau, Lola; Scott, Ellen
This dissertation research examines how precarity was experienced and resisted by migrant food processing workers in the Pacific Northwest, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenging the exceptionalizing narratives of precarity that emerged during the global health crisis the research brings to the front what I called endemic precarity: the usually uneventful and unrecognized bodily and emotional harm and maiming that is endemic to the industry and that was constantly present in the workers’ own words and formal complaints, even at the height of the pandemic. Drawing upon interviews with 60 migrant and second generation workers employed in 20 food processing companies in Oregon and Washington, the content analysis of all the complaints filed with LNI from March 1st to December 31st 2020 regarding these companies, and interviews with 15 managers, labor and community organizers and others stakeholders, this research 1) reconstructs workers’ migratory and employment trajectories to the Pacific Northwest; 2) exposes the organized disregard for their bodies inside and outside the packing plants before COVID-19; and 3) discusses the particular shape that this previous endemic precarity took in the midst of the pandemic, and the ways in which migrant and now “essential” food processing workers organized collectively to resist their disposability and to be able to build forms of collective care.
Open Access
The Harvest of Farmworkers Never Ends: Farm Labor Contractors and the Reproduction of Precarity in the Willamette Valley
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Contreras-Medrano, Diego; Scott, Ellen
Farm labor contractors are third-party employers and critical components ofinternational labor chains that prevail worldwide through the recruitment and management of temporary workers. While the public often focuses on the dichotomy between farmworkers and growers, the agriculture industry's reality is more complex. This dissertation analyzed the reproduction of precarious labor conditions among farmworkers employed by farm labor contractors in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Through on-site observations and in-depth interviews, I analyzed agricultural contractors’ and workers’ migration process with their experiences of labor conditions that lack standardized arrangements, job security, living wages, union representation, nondangerous workplaces, and well-funded enforcement institutions to prevent employers’ illegal practices. I address the reproduction of precarious labor in the agriculture industry by asking: first, how do farm labor contractors reproduce precarious labor conditions? The secondary questions I ask are: how does the process of becoming a contractor reproduce precarious labor? What entrepreneurial and managerial strategies do contractors design to reproduce precarious labor? What are farmworkers’ tactics to survive precarity through contractors’ employment? The Willamette Valley offered a unique context for the study of precariousness in agriculture: Oregon has some of the most significant agricultural productions in the country, an industry where farm labor contractors provide from one to two-thirds of the employment, unfunded enforcement institutions that lack personnel to punish abusive employers, as well as state regulations that deny farmworkers’ access to labor benefits, union representation, and collective bargaining. Through the lenses of borders epistemology, I addressed different research questions to understand how precarious labor conditions are reproduced in agriculture, and analyzed the multiple borders that farmworkers and farm labor contractors have crossed and those that have represented constant limitations: the borders between countries and states, between strategies and tactics, between formal and informal economy, and between precarity and standardized labor conditions.
Open Access
Roles of the Dice: Culture and Community in Roleplay Games
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Alexander, Michelle; Light, Ryan
Here I bring together Game Studies, Sociology, and Women's and Gender Studies to explore the scope of digital and analog roleplaying communities. Using interviews conducted with 50 participants who reported playing the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons or the digital roleplaying game World of Warcraft and my own experience of games I present evidence and develop theory in existing literature on 3 major axes. The first is women and marginalized identities' participation in the game space. I detail the ways in which women have participated in not only the play of these games since their inception but also how they have held key roles in the development of roleplaying games. The second is how white, male-identified players navigate rule systems based on unexamined, racist assumptions about rules which are in conflict with their understandings of race. Additionally, I discuss the ways in which players who are subject to cultural ‘othering’ in their lived experiences embrace even further othered bodies in virtual spaces. The third articulates a theory about how gamers have thrown open the "gates" of the pastime, but practice mostly at "kitchen tables" which are highly exclusive which creates a divide between the public "face" of gaming, and it's private "heart." These smaller groups operate simultaneously to the larger discourses on the public face of gaming. In these spaces, players can control their environment, who they game with, and thus create safe gaming spaces where they do not have to confront toxic or aggressive discourses in the larger gaming community. Using this I add nuance to larger theories of cultural practice communities which opt instead of forming hierarchies dependent on the ‘right’ way to do things of self-definition and ousting players who do not fit at their tables.
Embargo
Ecological Imperialism: A Holistic Analysis of the Guano Trade in Nineteenth-Century Peru
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Betancourt De la Parra, Mauricio; Foster, John
Theoretical studies of imperialism, dependency, unequal exchange, and world-systems have commonly overlooked the ecological foundation of cross-national trade and relations. More generally, in the social sciences the influence –or even the very existence– of external nature upon or beyond society has often been neglected, despite constituting the basis of economic flows. In addition, despite their valuable contributions, environmental sociology notions such as unequal ecological exchange remain undertheorized. Seeking to address these issues and drawing on data from archives in Peru, Great Britain, and France, as well as on primary sources available online and on an exhaustive analysis of secondary sources, this work provides a historical, sociological, and theoretical account of ecological imperialism (understood as the expropriation of the ecological wealth of one country by another) by means of examining a case study of the 19th-century guano (bird dung) trade between Peru and Britain. The lens in this study is derived from ecology in the natural sciences and historical materialism in the social sciences, drawing for their interface on Karl Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift, i.e. the loss of soil nutrients that are drained into cities where they are discarded as waste. This work gives a holistic understanding of the siphoning of Peru’s nutrients into Europe and the United States, provides firsthand archival evidence about the atrocious living conditions of the guano diggers in Peru (chiefly Chinese bonded laborers), and emphasizes environmental conditions as much as social relations vis-à-vis center-periphery dynamics. This way, this study shows how the guano trade can enhance our understanding of the ecological, social, and unequal development effects of imperialism, both historically and today; how further analyses of socioecological phenomena can be carried out; and the importance of history for comprehending current socioecological inequalities within and across nations.
Open Access
The Silicone Self: An Ethnography of the Love and Sex Doll Community
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Hanson, Kenneth; Pascoe, CJ
This dissertation is an empirically grounded study of the love and sex doll community. Conducted over 14 months of digital ethnographic research, this dissertation draws from participant observation, in-depth interviews, content analysis, and mixed methods to analyze the interactional dynamics of love and sex doll owners in digital spaces. Drawing from the sociology of sexualities, deviance, symbolic interactionism, and new media, this dissertation examines how technology can become a central part of people’s sexual lives. The concept of the silicone self is put forth as a way of understanding how people become socialized into doll ownership as a collective group. The silicone self is employed in three situations. First, the self-ing process whereby people reflect on their previous sexual and romantic experiences before deciding to become a sex doll owner. This reflexive process reveals shifting ideas about the centrality of marriage for heterosexual men in contemporary society. Second, the silicone self is employed to show how sex doll ownership requires material considerations specific to this sex practice. Because sex dolls are relatively rare objects, interested owners must learn from one another how to use their dolls properly. Investment in the community is shown to refract into other interest, such as erotica photography. Finally, the silicone self is used to explore the role of play and personification. Sex dolls are unlike other sex toys because they approximate an entire, rather than partial, human. As such, sex doll owners imagine their dolls as having personality traits which they animate via social media and other creative faculties. These experiences are theorized to provide outlets for heterosexual men to escape the strictures of heteronormative masculinity. The dissertation concludes by way of critically interrogating a central tension in the human-robot interaction—whether sex dolls are just sex toys or represent something more. Implications for generating a social, rather than technologically deterministic, theory of futuristic sex toys are discussed.
Open Access
Women’s Empowerment through Polio Eradication: Agency and Representation of Lady Health Workers in Pakistan
(University of Oregon, 2022-02-18) Ahmed, Sarah; Dreiling, Michael
Pakistan remains one of the two countries wherein Polio remains endemic. Central to the Polio Eradication project, led by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), are female community health workers. These women--who call themselves Lady Health Workers (LHWs)— deliver Polio vaccines door-to-door in their communities. This dissertation examines how the gendered labor of LHWs speaks to broader intersections of gender, development and global health. How does gendered work, necessary to polio eradication, affect local norms and representations within the healthcare industry? How does women’s agency manifest when realized by a woman working in the polio eradication initiative as an LHW? In asking these questions, my dissertation traces the development and constructions of gender identity and norms for women on the ground. My analysis is informed by five years of follow up interviews, yielding theoretical contributions that depict tensions between gendered expectations and women’s agency over time.
Open Access
Taylored Flexibility: Agile, Control, and the Software Labor Process
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Petrucci, Larissa; Harrison, Jill
This dissertation research examines the work arrangements of software workers in high-technology industries in order to raise questions, dispel myths, and develop a labor process theory of knowledge-based work in the 21st century. Software work is largely regarded as a “sunrise” occupation: full of opportunities for interesting work in a flexible environment. Moreover, software production, like other forms of knowledge-based work, is presumed to pose challenges to managerial control methodologies, because of employers’ increasing dependence on software workers’ skills and creativity and the difficulty of subjecting complex, immaterial, and cognitive work like software production to traditional methods of control. As a result, knowledge-based work appears to require new forms of control, distinct from those used in manufacturing settings. This research, however, reveals continuities between managerial methodologies used in manufacturing-based settings and those used to organize software work through an analysis of Agile, a popular project management methodology. Agile’s roots are in Toyota’s lean production processes, though Agile also draws upon tenets of Taylor’s scientific management as well as High-Commitment Management schemes. Drawing upon 45 interviews with workers and managers who use Agile, as well as content analysis of Agile training videos, I show how Agile aims to achieve what I call Taylored Flexibility: an attempt to maintain flexibility to respond to the complex and turbulent nature of knowledge-based work alongside strategies to render invisible and immaterial work like software production more calculable and predictable. This dissertation also explores collective organizing strategies of software workers, emphasizing how struggles over control may not take the traditional form of conflict over pay, benefits, or the conditions of work, but of the outcomes of labor. Through this research I show that managerial strategies used to achieve Taylored Flexibility complicate common understandings about control over knowledge-based work in the new economy, showing how hybrid control regimes can operate as powerful mechanisms to render knowledge-based work more productive.
Open Access
The Concept "Situation" as a Sociological Tool
(University of Oregon, 1941-06) Bales, Robert Freed
Open Access
Politicizing Embodied Violence: Emerging and Diverging Frames of Self-Defense
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Cupo, Dimitra; Norton, Matt
This study bridges the gap between self-defense classes whose founders, instructors, and students are predominantly white, advocating for an individualistic and embodied self-defense, compared to the self-defense practiced by women of color that took a different form, communal and armed. Given this disparity I ask, “What happens to women’s bodies as they “do” self-defense”? Do their bodies change given the tools acquired from a self-defense class? I found that racial differences significantly intervene in the self-defense classroom. I also asked, “How is a body implicated in a class dedicated to changing its capacities?” Two components proved to be crucial in turning a feminine body into a fighting body, fear and failure accompanied with laughter and expulsion of real harm. Taken together, this research asks, “What is the relationship of the self-defense body to communities that produced them?” Historically, quite different types of self-defense emerge, differing by the class and racial makeup of surrounding communities. How is this history embedded in the body? Overall, this project brings together historical as well as contemporary iterations of self-defense to ask, what does self-defense ask of the body, and what in turn does it do to it?