UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item "America was Promises": The Ideology of Equal Opportunity, 1877-1905(2009) Goldstene, Claire; Gerstle, Gary; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"`America was Promises': The Ideology of Equal Opportunity, 1877-1905" seeks to untangle one of the enduring ideas in American history--equal economic opportunity--by exploring the varied discourses about its meaning during the upheavals caused by the corporate consolidation of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In so doing, a new framework is proposed through which to comprehend the social and political disruptions wrought by the transition from an entrepreneurial to a corporate society. This framework centers on a series of tensions that have permeated the idea of opportunity in the American context. As an expression of capitalism, the ideology of equal opportunity historically occupies conflicted terrain as it endeavors to promote upward mobility by permitting more people to participate in the economic sphere and emphasizing merit over inherited wealth, while it concurrently acts as a mechanism to maintain economic inequality. This tension allowed the rhetoric of opportunity to animate social dissent among rural and urban workers--the origins of Progressive reform--even as it simultaneously served efforts by business elites to temper this dissent. The dissertation examines the discourses about the ideology of equal opportunity of prominent figures and groups located along a spectrum of political belief. Some grounded opportunity in land ownership (Booker T. Washington); others defined it as control of one's own labor (Knights of Labor); while others connected opportunity to increased leisure and consumption (Samuel Gompers and business elites). As this occurred, the site of opportunity shifted away from entrepreneurship toward competition for advancement and investment within the corporation. Most social activists and reformers stressed the conditions necessary for equal opportunity to thrive. They thus reinforced assumptions about the benefits of economic competition and differentially rewarding individuals, even as they objected to the results of that system. And, certainly, some of these arguments led to progressive changes. But because the necessary outcome of equal opportunity was an inequality of economic result, to move beyond the boundaries of equal opportunity ideology demanded a rare willingness (Edward Bellamy) to question the system of economic competition itself.Item Managerial Search and the Pursuit of Opportunity(2006-04-27) Maggitti, Patrick G; Smith, Ken G; Management and Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the search behavior of CEOs and how this behavior relates to the opportunities they recognize and take action upon. Opportunities are defined in this dissertation as the perception of a novel and appropriate resource combination acted upon or seized for potential gain. As such, recognizing and acting upon opportunities is among the most important roles of a manager. This is particularly true for CEOs since they are most often tasked with setting the strategic direction of the firm. Despite the importance of managers recognizing opportunities, the literature has failed to fully address the behaviors that influence the novelty and appropriateness of the opportunities those individuals recognize. This dissertation examines those behaviors, known as search. I define search as individual behavior resulting in the acquisition of information and knowledge that can be used to recognize and seize opportunities to solve problems. Search is categorized into two broad categories: Search terrain (where the search takes place) and search process (the manner in which the terrain is searched). Searches consists of both a terrain and a process. Search terrains are comprised of three dimensions: Distance, familiarity, and breadth of information sources. Search processes are comprised of 4 dimensions: Effort, exhaustiveness, iteration, and formality. Hypotheses are tested to determine the impact that search has on the novelty and appropriateness of opportunities acted upon by CEOs. The findings offer some valuable information about CEO search. First, with respect to opportunity novelty, CEOs appear to maximize novelty when they are effortful and exhaustive in searching a narrow and familiar terrain. On the other hand, CEOs appear to maximize appropriateness in two ways. First, when searching in distant terrains outside the organization, CEOs need to exhaustively explore that terrain but only focus on information outside the organization that is easily obtained and understood. Additionally, it seems helpful to be informal when undertaking the search - particularly among unfamiliar terrains.