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.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Public Administration
- Creators: Maroulis, Spiro
To address these theoretical gaps, this dissertation focuses on the Khawaja Sira of Pakistan – a marginalized group culturally defined as neither men nor women – to empirically investigate the multiple intersections between government and life on margins of the state. Specifically, this dissertation explores research questions related to legal and self-identity of the Khawaja Sira, impact of their changed legal status, their informal institutional experiences, and their interaction with front-line government workers through an interpretive research methodology.
The research design consisted of a ten-month long person-centered ethnography in Lahore, Pakistan during which in-depth person-centered interviews were conducted with 50 Khawaja Sira. I also conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 frontline workers from National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), social welfare department, and a local NGO and a group interview with 12 frontline workers of police. I coded the data collected from the fieldwork using qualitative thematic content analysis in MAXQDA. I then analyzed the main themes from the data using multiple theoretical perspectives to develop my findings.
My analysis shows that the legal identity of the Khawaja Sira, as conceived by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, has limited relevance and benefits for the Khawaja Sira most of whom instead choose to register as men. The analysis of administrator-citizen interactions reveals that the Khawaja Sira are exposed to hyper-surveillance, moral policing and higher administrative burden during these interactions. These interactions are also strongly mediated by formal public policy, social discourses about gender identity and informal institutions. I discuss the implications of my analysis that can contribute to a more inclusive society for the Khawaja Sira. In doing so, my research makes important contributions to research on administrative burden, everyday citizenship, and social equity in public administration.
The second essay expands on the first one to incorporate the organizational environment and model the adaptive system. Combining an agent-based model and qualitative interviews with key decision makers, the study investigates how adaptation occurs over time in multiplex contexts consisting of the natural hazards, organizations, institutions and social networks. The study ends with a series of refined propositions about the mechanisms involved in public organization adaptation. Specifically, the analysis suggests that risk perception needs to be examined relative to risk tolerance to determine organizational motivation to adapt, and underscore the criticality of coupling between the motivation and opportunities to enable adaptation. The results further show that the coupling can be enhanced through lowering organizational risk perception decay or synchronizing opportunities with extreme event occurrences to promote adaptation.
The third essay shifts the gaze from adaptation mechanisms to organizational outcomes. It uses a stochastic frontier analysis to quantify the impacts of extreme events on public organization performance and, importantly, the role of organizational adaptive capacity in moderating the impacts. The findings confirm that extreme events negatively affect organizational performance and that organizations with higher adaptive capacity are more able to mitigate those effects, thereby lending support to research efforts in the first two essays dedicated to identifying preconditions and mechanisms involved in the adaptation process. Taken together, this dissertation comprehensively advances understanding about public organization adaptation to extreme events.