Library: Best sellers

This dissertation reports the results of a sociological analysis of the narrative form and functions of revolutionary discourse. Chapter I poses two questions: How do representations of death function in political processes? How do signifiers of violent death function in the structure of revolutionary statements? Chapter II reviews relevant sociological concepts and articulates a dramatistic political-sociology of death, concepts mainly derived from Emile Durkheim, Robert Hertz, and Arnold van Gennep on death and the sacred, Max Weber on violence and politics, and Burke, Duncan, and Edelman...

The literary expression of Afro-Americans has been scrutinized and criticized in exhaustive detail, yet historically perceived by many American and English literary scholars as qualitatively and quantitatively underdeveloped. This was the view held by many literary scholars until the late 1960s when Afro-American literary scholars and black students argued forcefully and convincingly in favor of the plays, short stories, poetry and novels written by Afro-Americans. Despite such noteworthy efforts, however, few scholars have investigated the uneven and sporadic appearance of publications, or th...

This dissertation analyzes the current status of emergency management professionalization in the United States and Florida using a qualitative case study. I investigate the efforts of various organizations at the national and state levels in the private and public sectors to organize emergency management as a profession. I conceptualize emergency management professionalization as occurring in two phases: the indirect institutionalization of the occupation of emergency management and the formal advancement toward an emergency management profession. The legislative, organizational, and proced...

(Complete work in Spanish) The doctoral thesis contributes to some related Management Control areas such us Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and the informal components of Control Systems. The objective of the research was to analyse how this process of business concentration may impact on the Management Control System of the acquired firm. For this purpose an alternative theoretical model have been developed from the review of Management Control literature and M&A in Management Accounting. This model builds on contingency theoretical insights and extends it with elements of informal control. T...

This study provides a policy analysis of publicly funded school voucher programs. This research provides an analysis of voucher programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee and of political, legal, and programmatic constraints facing voucher programs. A synopsis of student test score analyses and parental surveys provides a basis for analyzing the effect of programs on participants. A survey of 30 individuals working with the Cleveland and Milwaukee public schools or voucher programs clarifies the effect of the programs on the overall educational environment. A review of financial data from the prog...

This interdisciplinary dissertation explores the archetype of the "ape-man" from a phenomenological perspective, with its genesis and present continuation dependent on extant and accreted human behavior and morphology. In order to ascertain the embedded components of the ape-man archetype, an identikit ape-man as a discrete phenomenon is derived after the examination of cross-cultural examples world-wide. Next, this discrete phenomenon and its constituent parts are compared both to extant ape species' behavior and morphology and the paleoanthropological evidence to determine in what ways --...

"Liberal order and software-agents" - long-established ideas and modern technology are bridged. The impulse for undertaking this effort comes from the observation that it becomes difficult for computer science alone to create order for and within machines. The growing complexity of computer systems, open networks like the Internet, and the increasingly social role of software entities push the traditional quest for total global control out of reach. Economic theory of social order offers extensive experience with such conditions, so that it can complement and guide research in computer science...

AIDS has become a ubiquitous disease of catastrophic proportions. In this 'sex study' included as part of the Advocate magazine in 1994, attitudes and sexual activities of 13,000 gay men nationwide were surveyed. A set of research hypotheses were made, these were: that there would be a relationship between various sociodemographic, intepersonal and relational, substance use, sexual, experiential, and health care variables and high-risk sexual behavior. Some of these hypotheses were confirmed, while others were not. The particular value of this study is that it was nationwide, contained large ...

This dissertation studied the correlation between the number of hours spent by seniors on the internet in three categories of online activities and the seniors' levels of depression. The subjects were men and women age fifty-five and older living in an active retirement community. The three categories of online activities were communications activities, information-gathering activities, and personal transactions. Number of hours spent online was measured by a self-reporting questionnaire. Level of depression was measured by administration of the Beck Depression Inventory-II. Spearman's rho was...

There is a genre of literature in which the work is purposely written within the diary format; this type of writings known as diary fiction. Diary novels traditionally reflect what the authors think real diaries are or are written as a parody of the diary as a negative model. The authors of diary novels choose the diary form because its artistic quality expresses a greater sense of immediacy to the reader than other forms of literature. The diary novel emphasizes the time of writing rather than the time that it is written about, so the diarist usually writes about events of the immediate past...