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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- All Subjects: Communication
Description
Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), airport security has become an increasingly invasive, cumbersome, and expensive process. Fraught with tension and discomfort, "airport security" is a dirty phrase in the popular imagination, synonymous with long lines, unimpressive employees, and indignity. In fact, the TSA and its employees have featured as topic and punch line of news and popular culture stories. This image complicates the TSA's mission to ensure the nation's air travel safety and the ways that its officers interact with passengers. Every day, nearly two million people fly domestically in the United States. Each passenger must interact with many of the approximately 50,000 agents in airports. How employees and travelers make sense of interactions in airport security contexts can have significant implications for individual wellbeing, personal and professional relationships, and organizational policies and practices. Furthermore, the meaning making of travelers and employees is complexly connected to broad social discourses and issues of identity. In this study, I focus on the communication implications of identity and emotional performances in airport security in light of discourses at macro, meso, and micro levels. Using discourse tracing (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009), I construct the historical and discursive landscape of airport security, and via participant observation and various types of interviews, demonstrate how officers and passengers develop and perform identity, and the resulting interactional consequences. My analysis suggests that passengers and Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) perform three main types of identities in airport security contexts--what I call Stereotypical, Ideal, and Mindful--which reflect different types and levels of discourse. Identity performances are intricately related to emotional processes and occur dynamically, in relation to the identity and emotional performances of others. Theoretical implications direct attention to the ways that identity and emotional performances structure interactions, cause burdensome emotion management, and present organizational actors with tension, contradiction, and paradox to manage. Practical implications suggest consideration of passenger and TSO emotional wellbeing, policy framing, passenger agency, and preferred identities. Methodologically, this dissertation offers insight into discourse tracing and challenges of embodied "undercover" research in public spaces.
ContributorsRedden, Shawna Malvini (Author) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Thesis advisor) / Corley, Kevin (Committee member) / Alberts, Janet (Committee member) / Trethewey, Angela (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
For fifty years, inquiry has attempted to capture how groups of people experience microaggression phenomena through multiple methodological and analytic applications grounded in psychology-influenced frameworks. Yet, despite theoretical advancements, the phenomenon has met criticisms trivializing its existence, falsifiability, and social significance. Unpacking possible interactive factors of a microaggressive moment invites a revisitation of the known and unknown pragmatic conditions that may produce and influence its discomforting situational “content.” This study employs an intentional, game-theoretic methodology based on brief, publicly-recorded, everyday conversation segments. Conversation segments of social interactions provide a means to conduct a mathematically-solid, computationally-tractable analysis of explaining what is happening during encounters where disability microaggressions are likely the result of partial (non)cooperation between communicators. Such analysis extends the microaggression research program (MRP) by: (1) proposing theoretical consequences for conversational repair phenomena, algorithmic programming, and experimental designs in negotiation research; and (2) outlining practical approaches for preventing microaggressions with new communication pedagogy, anti-oppression/de-escalation training programs, and calculable, focus-oriented psychotherapy. It concludes with an invitation for scholars to “be” in ambiguity so that they may speculate possible trajectories for the study of microaggressions as a communicative phenomenon.
ContributorsReutlinger, Corey Jon (Author) / de la Garza, Sarah Amira (Thesis advisor) / Alberts, Janet (Committee member) / Lanchier, Nicolas (Committee member) / Cherney, James L. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The aim of this research was to better understand the experience of bereaved individuals following their return to work, and the ways in which they communicatively negotiate their relationships at work and at home. One of the most salient facts of life is that everyone will all experience the death of a loved one. The amount, frequency, type, and recovery response for the bereaved may be vastly different, but inevitably everyone has to cope with death. Even though it is an integral part of life, the bereavement experience often is acknowledged as one of the most traumatic and stressful processes that occurs in individuals’ lives (McHorney & Mor, 1988; Miller & McGowan, 1997). In fact, roughly 5% of the workforce is affected by the passing of a close family member each year, and this number excludes those who experience the deaths of close friends (Wojcik, 2000). Evidence suggests that bereavement affects the physical and mental health of survivors, many of whom are in the workforce (Bauer & Murray, 2018; Hazen, 2003, 2008, 2009; Wilson, Punjani, Song, & Low, 2019). In order to explore how work-life roles are integrated into the lives of bereaved individuals, this dissertation qualitatively analyzed 36 interviews with bereaved employees (12), cohabitants (12), and coworkers (12). Through the use of procedural coding (Saldaña, 2009) and emergent codes, this dissertation answered the five posited research questions and their sub-questions. The results of this analysis have numerous implications for social support, emotion at work, grief, and bereavement leave policy. The following dissertation delineates the significance of this research, the literature review providing rationale for study of bereaved employees, qualitative methodological design, analysis of the data, and conclusions about bereavement and work-life relationships.
ContributorsGiannini, Gino Anthony (Author) / de la Garza, Sarah Amira (Thesis advisor) / Alberts, Janet (Committee member) / Mingé, Jeanine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020