ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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Scholars have written much about home and meaning, yet they have said little about the professionally furnished model home viewed as a cultural artifact. Nor is there literature addressing how the home building industry uses these spaces to promote images of family life to increase sales. This research notes that not only do the structure, design, and layout of the model home formulate cultural identity but also the furnishings and materials within. Together, the model home and carefully selected artifacts placed therein help to express specific chosen lifestyles as that the home builder determines. This thesis considers the model home as constructed as well as builder's publications, descriptions, and advertisements. The research recognizes the many facets of merchandising, consumerism, and commercialism influencing the design and architecture of the suburban home. Historians of visual and cultural studies often investigate these issues as separate components. By contrast, this thesis offers an integrated framework of inquiry, drawing upon such disciplines as cultural history, anthropology, and material culture. The research methodology employs two forms of content analysis - image and text. The study analyzes 36 model homes built in Phoenix, Arizona, during the period 1955-1956. The thesis explores how the builder sends a message, i.e. images, ideals, and aspirations, to the potential home buyer through the design and decoration of the model home. It then speculates how the home buyer responds to those messages. The symbiotic relationship between the sender and receiver, together, tells a story about the Phoenix lifestyle and the domestic ideals of the 1950s. Builders sent messages surrounding convenience, spaciousness, added luxury, and indoor-outdoor living to a growing and discriminating home buying market.
ContributorsGolab, Coreen R (Author) / Brandt, Beverly K. (Thesis advisor) / Bernardi, Jose (Committee member) / Schleif, Corine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Consumers search before making virtually any purchase. The notion that consumers engage in costly search is well-understood to have deep implications for market performance. However to date, no theoretical model allows for the observation that consumers often purchase more than a single product in an individual shopping occasion. Clothing, food, books, and music are but four important examples of goods that are purchased many items at a time. I develop a modeling approach that accounts for multi-purchase occasions in a structural way. My model shows that as preference for variety increases, so does the size of the consideration set. Search models that ignore preference for variety are, therefore, likely to under-predict the number of products searched. It is generally thought that lower search costs increase retail competition which pushes prices and assortments down. However, I show that there is an optimal number of products to offer depending on the intensity of consumer search costs. Consumers with high search costs prefer to shop at a store with a large assortment of goods and purchase multiple products, even if the prices that firm charges is higher than competing firms' prices. On the other hand, consumers with low search costs tend to purchase fewer goods and shop at the stores that have lower prices, as long as the store has a reasonable assortment offering. The implications for market performance are dramatic and pervasive. In particular, the misspecification of demand model in which search is important and/or multiple discreteness is observed will produce biased parameter estimates leading to erroneous managerial conclusions.
ContributorsAllender, William Jacob (Author) / Richards, Timothy J. (Thesis advisor) / Park, Sungho (Committee member) / Hamilton, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
I compare the effect of anonymous social network ratings (Yelp.com) and peer group recommendations on restaurant demand. I conduct a two-stage choice experiment in which restaurant visits in the first stage are informed by online social network reviews from Yelp.com, and visits in the second stage by peer network reviews. I find that anonymous reviewers have a stronger effect on restaurant preference than peers. I also compare the power of negative reviews with that of positive reviews. I found that negative reviews are more powerful compared to the positive reviews on restaurant preference. More generally, I find that in an environment of high attribute uncertainty, information gained from anonymous experts through social media is likely to be more influential than information obtained from peers.
ContributorsTiwari, Ashutosh (Author) / Richards, Timothy J. (Thesis advisor) / Qiu, Yueming (Committee member) / Grebitus, Carola (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation integrates humanities with social science methodologies within a critical framework, seeking to explore the relationship between the neoliberal restructuring and the intersection of gender, class and heteronormativity in contemporary China. In this project, neoliberalism is conceptualized as an art of governance centering on the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality to create market subjects and sustain market competition. Focusing on China's recent socio-economic and cultural upheavals, this dissertation tries to address these questions: 1. How have class inequalities, binaristic gender and heteronormative discourses been employed intersectionally by the Chinese state to facilitate China's social transformation? 2. How has this process been justified and consolidated through the intersection of gender, class, sexuality and race? 3. How do the marginalized groups respond to these material and cultural practices? Building on the discursive analysis of China's televised 60th anniversary ceremony and If You Are the One, a popular Chinese reality show, as well as the data from the interview, focus group and participant observation of more than 100 informants, it is found that the intersection of gender, class and heteronormativity is central to China's neoliberal transition. A group of flexible and cheap laborers have been disarticulated and rearticulated from the population as the voluntary servitude to China's marketization and re-integration with the global economy. New controlling images, such as the bourgeois nucleus family, are created to legitimize this process. However, these disparate material and discursive practices have entailed contradictions and conflicts within the intersectional biopolitical system, and created contingent spaces of ungovernability for the marginalized groups. Building on these discursive analyses and empirical data, I reconceptualize intersectionality as a multi-dimensional-and-directional network to regulate and manage power for social organization and regulation, which grounds the biopolitical basics for the neoliberal economy. Thus I argue that we need to engage with the dynamics between the intersectional biopolitical structure and people's emerging experiences to construct a grounded utopia alternative to the neoliberal dominance for substantive social changes.
ContributorsZhang, Charlie Yi (Author) / Quan, H. L. T. (Thesis advisor) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Thesis advisor) / Martinez, Jacqueline M. (Committee member) / Lee, Charles T. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Gender and sex are often conflated. Our laws, policies, and even science establish sex and gender as intrinsically linked and dimorphic in nature. This dissertation examines the relationship between sex and gender and the repercussions of this linked dimorphism in the realms of law, politics, and science. Chapter One identifies the legal climate for changing one's sexual identity post-surgical reassignment. It pays particular attention to the ability of postsurgical transsexuals to marry in their acquired sex. Chapter Two considers the process for identifying the sex of athletes for the purposes of participation in sex-segregated athletic events, specifically the role of testing and standards for categorization. Chapter Three explores the process of identifying and assigning the sex of intersex children. Chapter Four examines the process of prenatal sex selection and its ethical implications. Chapter Four also offers an anticipatory governance framework to address these implications.
ContributorsParsi, John (Author) / Crittenden, Jack (Thesis advisor) / Guston, David H. (Committee member) / Marchant, Gary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
There have been multiple calls for research on consumers' responses to social issues, regulatory changes, and corporate behavior. Thus, this dissertation proposes and tests a conceptual framework of parents' responses to government regulations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) that address juvenile obesity. This research builds on Attribution Theory to examine the impact of government regulations and CSR on consumers' attitudes and their subsequent behavior. Three pilot studies and three main experiments were conducted; a between-subjects and randomized experimental design being used to capture the effects of regulations and corporate actions on product satisfaction, company evaluations, and behavioral intentions, while examining the mediating role of attributions of responsibility for a negative product outcome. This research has implications for policy makers and marketing practitioners and scholars. This is the first study to offer a new perspective, based on attributions of blame, to explain the mechanism that drives consumers' responses to government regulations. Considering numerous calls for government actions that address childhood obesity, it is important to understand how and why consumers respond to such regulations. The results illustrated that certain policies may have unintended consequences due to unexpected attributions of blame for unhealthy products. Only recently have researchers tried to address the psychological mechanism through which CSR has an impact on consumers' attitudes and behavior. To date, few studies have investigated attributions as a mediating variable in the transfer of CSR associations on consumer responses. Nonetheless, this is the first study that concentrates on attributions of responsibility, per se, to explain the impact of CSR on company evaluations. This dissertation extends previous research, where locus, stability, and controllability mediated the relationship between CSR and attributions of blame; the degree of blame being consequential to brand evaluations. The current results suggest that attributions of responsibility, per se, mediate the impact of CSR on company evaluations. Additionally, attributions of blame are measured as the degree to which consumers take personal responsibility for a negative product outcome. This highlights a new role of the CSR construct, as a moderator of consumers' self-serving bias, a fundamental psychological response that has been neglected in the marketing literature.
ContributorsDumitrescu, Claudia (Author) / Shaw Hughner, Renée (Thesis advisor) / Schmitz, Troy G. (Committee member) / Seperich, George (Committee member) / Shultz, Ii, Clifford J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The lack of food safety in a grower's produce presents the grower with two risks; (1) that an item will need to be recalled from the market, incurring substantial costs and damaging brand equity and (2) that the entire market for the commodity becomes impaired as consumers associate all produce as being risky to eat. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the leafy green industry, where recalls are relatively frequent and there has been one massive E. coli outbreak that rocked the industry in 2006. The purpose of this thesis is to examine insurance policies that protect growers from these risks. In doing this, a discussion of current recall insurance policies is presented. Further, actuarially fair premiums for catastrophic revenue insurance policies are priced through a contingent claims framework. The results suggest that spinach industry revenue can be insured for $0.02 per carton. Given the current costs of leafy green industry food safety initiatives, growers may be willing to pay for such an insurance policy.
ContributorsPagaran, Jeremy (Author) / Manfredo, Mark R. (Thesis advisor) / Richards, Timothy J. (Thesis advisor) / Nganje, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, colleges and universities transformed their thinking of the body as they institutionalized physical education, recreational activities, and especially physical exercise. In this study, I examine the historical discourse on physical exercise and training during this period. I employ the theoretical and methodological practices of Michel Foucault's archeological and genealogical work to write a "history of the present." I challenge the essential narrative of physical fitness on college and university campuses. I also discuss nineteenth century notions of ethics and masculinity as a way of understanding twenty-first century ethics and masculinity. Ultimately, I use the historical discourse to argue that institutionalization of recreation and fitness centers and activities have less to do with health and well-being and more to do with disciplining bodies and controlling individuals.
ContributorsWells, Timothy (Author) / Carlson, David L. (Thesis advisor) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Committee member) / Margolis, Eric (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This study investigates how well prominent behavioral theories from social psychology explain green purchasing behavior (GPB). I assess three prominent theories in terms of their suitability for GPB research, their attractiveness to GPB empiricists, and the strength of their empirical evidence when applied to GPB. First, a qualitative assessment of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Norm Activation Theory (NAT), and Value-Belief-Norm Theory (VBN) is conducted to evaluate a) how well the phenomenon and concepts in each theory match the characteristics of pro-environmental behavior and b) how well the assumptions made in each theory match common assumptions made in purchasing theory. Second, a quantitative assessment of these three theories is conducted in which r2 values and methodological parameters (e.g., sample size) are collected from a sample of 21 empirical studies on GPB to evaluate the accuracy and generalize-ability of empirical evidence. In the qualitative assessment, the results show each theory has its advantages and disadvantages. The results also provide a theoretically-grounded roadmap for modifying each theory to be more suitable for GPB research. In the quantitative assessment, the TPB outperforms the other two theories in every aspect taken into consideration. It proves to 1) create the most accurate models 2) be supported by the most generalize-able empirical evidence and 3) be the most attractive theory to empiricists. Although the TPB establishes itself as the best foundational theory for an empiricist to start from, it's clear that a more comprehensive model is needed to achieve consistent results and improve our understanding of GPB. NAT and the Theory of Interpersonal Behavior (TIB) offer pathways to extend the TPB. The TIB seems particularly apt for this endeavor, while VBN does not appear to have much to offer. Overall, the TPB has already proven to hold a relatively high predictive value. But with the state of ecosystem services continuing to decline on a global scale, it's important for models of GPB to become more accurate and reliable. Better models have the capacity to help marketing professionals, product developers, and policy makers develop strategies for encouraging consumers to buy green products.
ContributorsRedd, Thomas Christopher (Author) / Dooley, Kevin (Thesis advisor) / Basile, George (Committee member) / Darnall, Nicole (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Arnold Schoenberg's 1908-09 song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten [The Book of the Hanging Gardens], opus 15, represents one of his most decisive early steps into the realm of musical modernism. In the midst of personal and artistic crises, Schoenberg set texts by Stefan George in a style he called "pantonality," and described his composition as radically new. Though stylistically progressive, however, Schoenberg's musical achievement had certain ideologically conservative roots: the composer numbered among turn-of-the-century Viennese artists and thinkers whose opposition to the conventional and the popular--in favor of artistic autonomy and creativity--concealed a reactionary misogyny. A critical reading of Hanging Gardens through the lens of gender reveals that Schoenberg, like many of his contemporaries, incorporated strong frauenfeindlich [anti-women] elements into his work, through his modernist account of artistic creativity, his choice of texts, and his musical settings. Although elements of Hanging Gardens' atonal music suggest that Schoenberg valued gendered-feminine principles in his compositional style, a closer analysis of the work's musical language shows an intact masculinist hegemony. Through his deployment of uncanny tonal reminiscences, underlying tonal gestures, and closed forms in Hanging Gardens, Schoenberg ensures that the feminine-associated "excesses" of atonality remain under masculine control. This study draws upon the critical musicology of Susan McClary while arguing that Schoenberg's music is socially contingent, affected by the gender biases of his social and literary milieux. It addresses likely influences on Schoenberg's worldview including the philosophy of Otto Weininger, Freudian psychoanalysis, and a complex web of personal relationships. Finally, this analysis highlights the relevance of Schoenberg's world and its constructions of gender to modern performance practice, and argues that performers must consider interrelated historical, textual, and musical factors when interpreting Hanging Gardens in new contexts.
ContributorsGinger, Kerry Anne (Author) / FitzPatrick, Carole (Thesis advisor) / Dreyfoos, Dale (Committee member) / Mook, Richard (Committee member) / Norton, Kay (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012