UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item PREDICTING POLICY: EXAMINING PERCEPTIONS OF ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, COLOR-EVASIVE RACIAL ATTITUDES, AND BELIEFS ABOUT CAPITALISM(2022) Sharma, Rajni; Kivlighan, Dennis; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how beliefs about capitalism, color-evasive racial attitudes, and perceptions about wealth distribution predict redistributive economic policy preferences. I hypothesized that beliefs about capitalism, perceptions of wealth distribution, and color-evasiveness predict policy preferences when controlling for Satisfaction With Life (SWLS) and that critical consciousness action (CA) will moderate this relationship. Approximately 510 individuals completed the Costs of United States Corporate Capitalism (CCC) scale, Colorblind Racial Attitudes Scale (COBRAS), the Critical Action subscale of the Critical Consciousness Scale, ratings of wealth distribution, and questions about their policy preferences through an online survey distributed through MTurk. Results indicated that the CCC and COBRAS subscales predicted policy preferences, over and above demographic variables. Findings from this project may inform how individuals make decisions about policy preferences and on a broader scale, inform solutions for decreasing inequity in the U.S. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.Item The Development and Validation of the Costs of United States Corporate Capitalism Scale(2018) Sharma, Rajni; Shin, Richard Q; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within the field of counseling psychology, which promotes values of social justice, the discussion of United States corporate capitalism (USCC) is limited. I provide evidence for the development and validation of the Costs of USCC Scale (CCC), a 24-item, self-report measure assessing the degree to which an individual attributes the cause of social problems in the U.S. to be structural (i.e. USCC) or individualistic (i.e. individual failure regarding work ethic, lack of motivation, effort, or ability). 1,010 individuals completed the CCC scale through an online survey distributed through MTurk. A three-factor structure emerged: a) USCC as Structural Cause of Costs, b) Individual Failure as Cause of Costs, c) Disagreement with Temporary Solutions to Costs. The CCC has acceptable criterion and discriminant validity, and reliability estimates for the full scale. Findings from this project may help inform future research on attitudes regarding USCC and their relationship with economic policy change.Item Broken City: Race, Property, and Culture(2018) Casiano, Michael; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Broken City: Race, Property, and Culture is an interdisciplinary study situated within the fields of urban history, African American Studies, and ethnic studies that examines Baltimore City during a period that roughly spans the late-nineteenth century to the mid-1950s. Using archival sources and close readings, this study examines city law, newsprint, popular culture artifacts, public health periodicals, reform publications, and social scientific production to narrate how, during this period of massive urban growth, theories of black life and culture manifested in city policy around the question of property and its regulation. This dissertation’s contribution to similar studies around the question of black geographic exclusion and containment is to highlight the ways that property controls—and the bases of municipal power itself—were bound up in the intentional criminalization, pathologization, and destruction of black communities, all of which were justified by persistent cultural critiques of black fitness for civil life centered on gendered and sexualized assumptions. The dissertation’s interrelated local investigations narrate social dramas that both exhibited culturally-specific interpretations of black life and precipitated institutional mandates guided by—or reproductive—of those interpretations. One investigation analyzes the discourses of black deviance that animated Baltimore’s crusade against the “cocaine evil” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to demonstrate how municipal power grew during this period to account for Jim Crow-era investments in disciplining black Baltimoreans and white desires to justify residential exclusion. Another investigation charts how, in the city’s racial covenants, black people became indexed as “nuisance,” a legal maneuver that allowed developers and white homeowners to categorize black people as a hazardous land use whose exclusion was protected under property rights. All told, these investigations demonstrate how, in Baltimore, the basis of municipal power and development, rooted in the protection and maintenance of property, was and continues to be based in the containment of black life through cultural prescriptions of black deviance.Item Faith in Markets: Christian Business Enterprise in America, 1800-1850(2017) Slaughter, Joseph; Sicilia, David; Ridgway, Whitman; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Faith in Markets: Christian Business Enterprise in America, 1800-1850, answers the question of how theologically conservative Protestants approached business in the expanding market economy of the early national period. Recent Supreme Court cases (such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.) have cast light on an important and controversial intersection of capitalism and religion in the United States: the Christian Business Enterprise (CBE). Three CBEs of the early nineteenth century form the core of my study: George Rapp & Associates (the Harmony Society of Western Pennsylvania/Southern Indiana), the Pioneer Stage Coach Line (upstate New York), and Harper & Brothers (New York City). These proprietors embraced the most influential strains of Christianity in early America: Pietism, Calvinism, and Arminianism while attempting to create an ethical marketplace. Their efforts produced three distinct visions of a moral economy in the early national period: Christian communal capitalism, Christian reform capitalism, and Christian virtue capitalism. Faith in Markets challenges the prevailing notion in the historiography that concludes CBEs were the product of twentieth century Bible Belt Protestants reacting to the New Deal, World War II, or the Cold War. Instead, Christian Business Enterprise has a deeper history, that dates back to the earliest decades of the American republic. Melding the new history of capitalism with the revived field of American religious history, Faith in Markets demonstrates how individuals’ religiously motivated choices shaped market activity, as well as the market itself. The Methodist Harper brothers, for instance, rose to prominence as the most powerful publishers of the nineteenth century, dramatically shaping American culture with their middle class Victorian literary products, all while serving as a model of trustworthy business in an age of anonymous market exchange. Ultimately, whether reforming the market by successfully limiting the workweek to six days, presenting an alternate vision for republican industry and community, or fostering middle class Victorian values, the key figures in Faith in Markets illustrates how Christian Business Enterprises indelibly shaped antebellum American culture.Item A TALE OF TWO MODERNITIES: A LIBERAL ALTERNATIVE TO A LIBERAL MODERNITY FROM VICO TO HAVEL(2014) Otruba, Alexander Peter; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The resurgence of the political theory of Marx, Lenin and even Communism itself is increasingly seen in left political theory as the only means of successfully mobilizing the "energy and rage" of the people against capitalism in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. It also threatens to draw politics and political theory back into the dangerous territory of twentieth-century illusions. This dissertation--taking its cue from Jeffrey Isaac's 1995 article in DISSENT condemning the "strange silence of political theory" regarding the revolutions of 1989--looks to introduce the political thought of 1989 into contemporary left political theory. The work of Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel and Gyorgy Konrad are representative of a political theory that consciously works to avoid the ideological traps and illusions packaged within modernity's displacement of the authority of the natural world with the Cartesian promise to be able to both know, order, and modify that world. This dissertation places the east and central European dissident theorists of 1989 in conversation with Giambattista Vico--who in his oration On method in contemporary fields of study (1710) recognized the presence of this tension that would undergird modernity--and the Italian antifascist theorists Benedetto Croce, Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, whom he would later inspire. Through their similar confrontations with modern totalitarian states, both the Italian antifascist theorists and the theorists of 1989 identified within modernity a rupture between "truth", concrete reality, and humanity itself. A rupture that produced regimes and politics that promised humanity's emancipation from absolutism, while normalizing its subjugation in new and increasingly sophisticated ways. Their revised theoretical approach to modernity sets aside the ideological illusions of the twentieth-century in a compelling manner, and instead offer a principled foundation for the active preservation of democracy and human autonomy. Read collectively they represent more just a critique, but also a sophisticated set of political ideas that answer those who would otherwise approach them as naïve revolutionists or even defenders of the status quo.Item LABORING IN STONE: THE URBANIZATION OF CAPITAL IN THE QUARRY TOWN OF TEXAS, MARYLAND, AND ITS EFFECTS, 1840 TO 1940(2014) Fracchia, Adam; Brighton, Stephen A; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Capitalism is founded on the unequal relationship between capital and labor, a relationship that along with the expansion and accumulation of capital and labor power has come to influence everyday life and values. The quarry town of Texas, in Baltimore County, Maryland, offers an opportunity to explore this important relationship between labor and capital. Established in the mid-nineteenth century to quarry and burn limestone at a time of expanding industry and an expanding nation. The town was created to house the workers, primarily Irish immigrants and later African Americans hired to toil in this hazardous industry, and a community was formed and eventually destroyed. This study examines the logic and process of capitalism, drawing on David Harvey's theoretization of the urbanization of capital to understand how life at Texas was influenced by capitalism. The role of and changes to the quarry industry's operations are studied along with their impact on life in Texas and how industry aligned social relations in town to facilitate capitalism through the manipulation of material culture and space. Through an analysis of the built landscape and artifacts of everyday life, such as ceramic tableware and smoking pipes, in their social context, daily interactions can be studied within a wider framework and scale. Studying Texas in this manner demonstrates the utility and necessity of using a totalizing approach, as suggested by Harvey, to examine capitalism in historical archaeology.Item Subjacent Culture, Orthogonal Community: An Ethnographic Analysis of an On-Line Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fan Community(2013) Ali, Asim; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents an ethnographic analysis of the community of fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer whose members frequented the online linear posting board known as The Bronze. Buffy originally aired from 1997 until 2003, but the community that formed at the official Buffy fan site in 1997 continues on in real life and on line, having survived the end of Buffy and the closure of all three of its official posting boards. This study uses an interdisciplinary combination of textual analysis and ethnographic techniques (interviews, participant observation, autoethnography, cyberethnography) to ascertain the importance, relevance, and meaning of The Bronze community to its members, known as Bronzers. I argue that the nature of the linear posting board allowed Bronzers to form a unique and long-lived community by using The Bronze in creative and imaginative ways. In particular, language--to some degree appropriated from Buffy--was used by Bronzers to write a better world for themselves on line. Hence, the community is built on (and maintained by) language that is used in an unusually postmodern manner. As a group, Bronzers tend to be highly educated, literary, and artistic. To Bronzers, much of Buffy's appeal was its emotional realism and imaginative depth. Unusually for television, these elements were combined with strong female leading roles, a cast of bookish and somewhat countercultural characters, and a foregrounding of emotionality and interpersonal relationships. Bronzers were drawn to these aspects of Buffy--which formed its "gothic aesthetic"--and in turn created their own somewhat countercultural community, one that came to reflect their own close ties and emotional attachments. I argue that The Bronze community exists subjacent to mainstream cultural formations, and orthogonal to real life communities. Using this framework, a number of implications emerge for computer-mediated communication in general, including an explanation for the prevalence of hostility in online communication. Furthermore, when situated in its broader context, The Bronze can be seen as a meager palliative to the damaging effects of contemporary post-industrial capitalism, one that nonetheless illumines the brightly stultifying commonplaces that lead people to seek shelter in dimly-lit imagined spaces.Item BECAUSE WE WILL IT: THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY IN LATE MODERNITY(2006-07-25) Olson, Lawrence James; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Cornelius Castoriadis' life can be characterized as one of engaged dissent. As a founding member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, Castoriadis maintained a consistent position as an opponent of both Western capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism during the Cold War. This position also placed Castoriadis in opposition to the mainstream French left, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, who supported the French Communist Party and defended the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the group, Castoriadis continued to assert the possibility of constructing participatory democratic institutions in opposition to the existing bureaucratic capitalist institutional structure in the Western world. The bureaucratic-capitalist institutional apparatus of the late modern era perpetuates a system where the individual is increasingly excluded from the democratic political process and isolated within the private sphere. However, the private sphere is not a refuge from the intrusion of the bureaucratic-capitalist imaginary, which consistently seeks to subject the whole of society to rational planning. Each individual is shaped by his relationship to the bureaucracy; on the one hand, his relationships with other become subjected to an instrumental calculus, while at the same time, the individual seeks to find some meaning for the world around him by turning to the private sphere. Furthermore, a crisis of meaning pervades late modern societies, where institutions are incapable of providing answers to the questions posed to them by individuals living in these societies. As a result, when individuals are able to participate in the democratic process, they tend to carry political ideas constructed in the private world into the public sphere, often to the detriment of the democratic process itself. Castoriadis seeks to reconcile liberty and broad public participation through the inclusion of the imaginary in democratic theory. He contends that it is possible to construct an autonomous society that emphasizes the creativity of the individual and the collective in the construction of the institutions that govern it. However, democratic theory conceived in this fashion must construct limits to political participation in order to insure that the democratic process itself is not destroyed by the emergence of political ideas antithetical to democracy.Item The Big Issue of Small Businesses: Contract Enforcement in the New Russia(2005-06-08) Vinogradova, Elena; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation explores the problem of institution-building in nascent capitalist economies, with the emphasis on the role of culture in the genesis of new institutional forms. To help better understand the nature of the post-communist transformation in Russia, I address the questions of organizational adaptation and change in business practices resulting from the changing role of the state in the economy and society, focusing specifically on the problem of contract enforcement among small firms. The main source of data was the empirical research that I conducted in St.Petersburg, Russia, where I interviewed owners and/or managers of forty-five firms in 2001 and 2002. When firms perceive state institutions as unable to guarantee the enforcement of contracts and property rights, they rely on alternative (non-state) ways of enforcing their agreements. My research shows that these strategies can be either based on a given firm's own resources (financial or social), or come from various agencies that offer enforcement services for sale, which vary from government licensed private courts to criminals. Non-state enforcement strategies are rooted in preexisting institutions and cultural practices, and develop in response to specific kinds of state failure to provide contract enforcement. My research findings demonstrate a proliferation of non-state strategies of contract enforcement and dispute resolution, as well as the significance that state contract enforcement institutions have for economic exchange and building of market institutions. The lessons concerning the powerful structuring role of enforcement institutions which my dissertation draws from Russian experience have wider implications not only for analysis but also for policy, and contributes to the literature on the role of the state in capitalist development, and cultural neo-institutionalism. The evidence that I have collected contradicts the neo-liberal belief in the sufficiency of self-regulating markets for the smooth functioning of an economy. It supports an argument that that the capability to provide independent enforcement services for businesses is an indispensable feature of the modern state, and essential to the creation of successful modern capitalism. This is an argument of central importance not only for developing and "transition" countries, but for the long-term future of developed societies as well.Item Building the Stained Glass Prism: The Development of the Polish Catholic Church's Electronic Media Properties 1989-2003(2004-11-24) Burns, David Paul; Hiebert, Ray E.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the Polish political, economic, and social transition from 1989 to 2003 from communism to capitalism, specifically its impact on a powerful Polish institution the Roman Catholic Church - and by extension, the Church's electronic media properties. As Poland changed from an eastern-looking collectivist society to a more western individualist society, its conservative Catholic Church likewise moved from a more autocratic, cohesive force towards a more liberal, Post-Vatican II approach to worship supported by the first Polish pontiff, John Paul II. Various Catholic religious orders with political viewpoints ranging from liberal to ultra-conservative managed the Church's radio, television and Internet properties and shaped the Church's mediated messages along their own religious ideology. This divisiveness was similarly reflected in fragmentation within the Church hierarchy, with individual Polish bishops supporting the media properties that most closely espoused their viewpoint.