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- Creators: Arizona State University
- Creators: Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Status: Published
Description
This thesis explores the extent to which entrepreneurship is possible for women in Saudi Arabia, and it's potential to increase Saudi women's socio-cultural autonomy, financial independence, and overall well-being. The study uses interviews and an online surveys to gather information from recognized female entrepreneurs, those officially registered with the Women's Business Center in Alkhober, Saudi Arabia, about how they founded their businesses, the challenges they have experienced, and the effects of business ownership. These women are interesting because their experience seems to run counter to Saudi society, which generally restricts women's activities. The study's findings show that despite their successes, Arab traditions still hinder the success of Alkhober female entrepreneurs, for instance, by requiring male guardianship and prohibiting travel unaccompanied by a man. From an institutional perspective, administrative and legal requirement can prevent women from fully realizing their potential as businesswomen. The existing women's rights legislation lacks authority because political opportunities for Alkhober women are still limited. For Saudi women entrepreneurship remains an alternative to joblessness and dissatisfaction derived from other employment sources. The challenges women entrepreneurs experience while starting businesses are lack of support from the executive branch of government, lack of quality education, and lack of available financial resources, in addition to the cultural barriers caused by Arab traditions restricting the activities of women. However, a key finding from this study is that the women interviewed all showed a high level of resourcefulness and creativity that helped them to circumvent such obstacles. This study recommends that the government provide financial services, or training programs to aspiring female entrepreneurs and offer incentives for women to register their businesses. This will benefit not just Saudi women but for the Saudi economy overall.
ContributorsAlhabidi, Mariam (Author) / C. Parmentier, Mary Jane C. Parmentier Jane (Thesis advisor) / Grossman, Gary M. (Committee member) / Crewe, Katherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Courthouse dogs (sometimes referred to as facility animals) are expertly trained canines which may be used to assist individuals with psychological, emotional, or physical difficulties in a myriad of courtroom situations. While these animals are increasingly used to assist young witness to court, the jury is still out on whether or not they are prejudicial to the defendant. No known research exists in this area, although research is necessary to determine the possibly prejudicial nature of these animals. Using a mock trial paradigm involving a child sexual abuse case, the current study employed a 2 (Witness type: victim vs. bystander) x 3 (Innovation type: courthouse dog vs. teddy bear vs. none) fully-crossed factorial design. It was hypothesized that witness type and innovation type would interact to differentially impact jurors' judgments about the trial, defendant, and child witness. In addition, it was posited that emotions, such as anger and disgust, would also affect judgments and decision-making. Results indicate that courthouse dogs and comfort toys did impact jurors' decision making in some ways. In addition, emotions and witness credibility predicted sentencing, verdict, and other trial judgments.
ContributorsBurd, Kayla (Author) / Mcquiston, Dawn E (Thesis advisor) / Salerno, Jessica M (Committee member) / Schweitzer, Nicholas J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Arizona has become infamous for its strong nativist and anti-immigrant climate, gaining national and international attention for legislation and policing practices that are in violation of civil and human rights. Despite the grave injustices perpetuated against migrants and communities of color, they exist in an environment of acceptance. Applying Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory/ Latina(o) Critical Race Theory, and Chicana Feminist epistemologies, this study interrogates the polarized discourse that has intensified in Arizona, within the immigration movement and across its political spectrum, from 2006 to 2008. I present an auto-ethnographic account, including use of participant action research, narrative, and storytelling methods that explores ways in which resistance is manifested and the implications for creating sustainable social change. I argue that legislation, raids, and local immigration enforcement tactics reinforce the dominant group's fear of the "other," resulting in micro and macro aggressions that legitimize racial profiling and help safeguard and fortify White privilege through the fabrication of racialized identities. Simultaneously, organizing strategies and discourse of immigrant rights advocates reflect an entanglement of perceived identities and a struggle to negotiate, contest, and redefine boundaries of public space. The raids, coupled with protests and counter demonstrations, produced a public spectacle that reinforces anti-immigrant connections between race and crime. Lastly, I apply and introduce Border Crit, a new and emerging theory I propose to better address research in the borderlands.
ContributorsMaldonado, Angeles (Author) / Swadener, Elizabeth B. (Thesis advisor) / Scott, Kimberly (Committee member) / Mckinley Jones Brayboy, Bryan (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
A common concern among musical performers in today'’s musical market pertains to their capacity to adapt to the constantly changing climate of the music business. This document focuses on one aspect of the development of a sustainable, entrepreneurship skill set: the production of a recording. While producing the recording Chocolates, the author examined and documented the multiplicity of skills encompassed with a recording project. The first part of the document includes a discussion of various aspects of the recording project, Chocolates, through an entrepreneurial lens, and an evaluation of the skill sets acquired through the recording process. Additionally, the inspiration and relevance behind the recording project and the process of collaboration between the two composers from whom I commissioned new compositions, Noah Taylor and James Grant, and myself is considered. Finally, I describe the recording and editing processes, including the planning involved within each process, how I achieved the final product, and the entrepreneurial skills involved. The second portion of this document examines a broad range of applications of entrepreneurship, marketing, and career management skills not only within the confines of this particular project, but also in relation to the overall sustainability of a twenty-–first century music-–performing career.
ContributorsStuckemeyer, Mary (Author) / Micklich, Albie (Thesis advisor) / Carpenter, Ellon (Committee member) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Schuring, Martin (Committee member) / Spring, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation project is a legal and policy analysis of California's involuntary psychiatric commitment laws and policy as applied to American Indians (AI). Mental health-based civil commitment and conservatorships constitute some of the most severe intrusions into personal liberties and freedom outside of the criminal justice system. In the context of AI peoples and tribal Nations, however, these intrusions implicate not only individual freedoms and well-being but also larger notions of tribal sovereignty, self-determination, culture, and the dialectic relationship between individual identity and community knowledge related to definitions of health, illness and the social meaning of difference. Yet, in the context of involuntary psychiatric commitments, the law reflects a failure to understand this relationship, alternating between strategic use of the sovereignty doctrine to deny access to services or, alternatively, wholly absenting issues of sovereignty and Indigenous worldviews from legal discourse. This project explores the nuanced ways in which these issues are weaved into the fabric of mental health law and policy and how they function to codify, enact and maintain colonization for AI peoples and Nations.
ContributorsGough, Heather Robyn (Author) / Brayboy, Bryan Mck. J. (Thesis advisor) / Romero, Mary (Committee member) / Molidor, Christian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation examines the role that business counselors in a public entrepreneurial development program play in improving the Entrepreneurial Specific Human Capital (ESHC) of nascent and active entrepreneurs. Through multiple research methodologies, this study identifies the types of ESHC provided by business counselors then compares them to the types of ESHC commonly accepted as necessary for entrepreneurial success. The comparison reveals a number of insights for policy and research, most notably a minimum portfolio of skills necessary for entrepreneurial success. This study also examines the methods counselors use to help entrepreneurs acquire higher levels of ESHC. These methods allow counselors to assist entrepreneurs in recognizing and overcoming common barriers to business growth, and a model of entrepreneurial business growth barriers has been produced which depicts these barriers as conceptual-operational transition points for the entrepreneur. Additionally, this dissertation develops important information about the use of the business plan in entrepreneurial development, and uncovers a number of moderators in the relationship between the use of the business plan and entrepreneurial success. Finally, the study produces detailed information about ESHC which has potential for scale development, and highlights a number of insights for policy and research that have not been identified previously.
ContributorsDahlstrom, Timothy R (Author) / Chapman, Jeffrey I. (Thesis advisor) / Phillips, Rhonda (Committee member) / Knopf, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The jobless recovery of the Great Recession has led policymakers and citizens alike to ask what can be done to better protect regions from the cascading effects of an economic downturn. Economic growth strategies that aim to redevelop a waterfront for tourism or attract high growth companies to the area, for example, have left regions vulnerable by consolidating resources in just a few industry sectors or parts of town. A promising answer that coincided with growing interest in regional innovation policy has been to promote entrepreneurship for bottom-up, individual-led regional development. However, these policies have also failed to maximize the potential for bottom-up development by focusing on high skill entrepreneurs and high tech industry sectors, such as green energy and nanotechnology. This dissertation uses the extended case method to determine whether industry cluster theory can be usefully extended from networks of high skill innovators to entrepreneurs in traditional trades. It uses U.S. Census data and in-person interviews in cluster and non-cluster neighborhoods in Dayton, Ohio to assess whether traditional entrepreneurs cluster and whether social networks explain high rates of neighborhood self-employment. Entrepreneur interviews are also conducted in Raleigh, North Carolina to explore regional resilience by comparing the behavior of traditional entrepreneurs in the ascendant tech-hub region of Raleigh and stagnant Rustbelt region of Dayton. The quantitative analysis documents, for the first time, a minor degree of neighborhood-level entrepreneur clustering. In interviews, entrepreneurs offered clear examples of social networks that resemble those shown to make regional clusters successful, and they helped clarify that a slightly larger geography may reveal more clustering. Comparing Raleigh and Dayton entrepreneurs, the study found few differences in their behavior to explain the regions' differing long-term economic trends. However, charitable profit-seeking and trial and error learning are consistent behaviors that may distinguish traditional, small scale entrepreneurs from larger export-oriented business owners and contribute to a region's ability to withstand recessions and other shocks. The research informs growing policy interest in bottom-up urban development by offering qualitative evidence for how local mechanics, seamstresses, lawn care businesses and many others can be regional assets. Future research should use larger entrepreneur samples to systematically test the relationship between entrepreneur resilience behaviors to regional economic outcomes.
ContributorsAuer, Jennifer Claire (Author) / Chapman, Jeffrey (Thesis advisor) / Johnston, Erik W., 1977- (Committee member) / Jurik, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Immigration courts fail to live up to courtroom ideals. Around 2009, proposals were offered to address the problems of these troubled courts. My study illustrates the inevitable linkage between court reform proposals and conceptions of fairness and efficiency, and ultimately justice. I ask: (1) From the perspective of attorneys defending immigrants' rights, what are the obstacles to justice? How should they be addressed? And (2) How do proposals speak to these attorneys' concerns and proposed resolutions? The proposals reviewed generally favor restructuring the court. On the other hand, immigration (cause) lawyers remain unconvinced that current proposals to reform the courts' structure would be successful at addressing the pivotal issues of these courts: confounding laws and problematic personnel. They are particularly concerned about the legal needs and rights of immigrants and how reforms may affect their current and potential clients. With this in mind, they prefer incremental changes - such as extending pro bono programs - to the system. These findings suggest the importance of professional location in conceptualizing justice through law. They offer rich ground for theorizing about courts and politics, and justice in immigration adjudication.
ContributorsAbbott, Katherine R (Author) / Provine, Doris M. (Thesis advisor) / Cruz, Evelyn H. (Committee member) / Johnson, John M. (Committee member) / Zatz, Marjorie S. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Ethno-nationalist politicians and criminals in Mostar espoused a discourse of ethno-exclusionist sociocultural relations as a superstructure for the public in order to establish ethnocratic kleptocracies where they concealed their criminal colonization of residential and commercial property through manipulating the pre-Bosnian War discourse on property relations. This is not to argue that some or most of these politicians and criminals did not believe in their virulent nationalist rhetoric, but instead that the effects of the discourse created well-used pathways to personal, not community, wealth. Elites used the Yugoslav economic crisis and perceived past grievance to enflame growing tensions between ethnicities and social classes. I use Mostar as an object of analysis to examine the creation of Bosnian Croat and Bosniak ethnocratic regimes in this divided city. However, I focus more on the Bosnian Croat regime in the city because it envisioned Mostar as its capital, making the city the site of its political competition among factions. Even though ethno-nationalist politicians and criminals still hold a level of power in Mostar, the IC did succeed in instituting a high level of property restitution, which does not necessarily imply return, because the IC was able to impose rule of law when it acted in an organized manner. Also, the ethnocratic regimes were weakened due to regional economic and political factors that undercut the regimes' hold over the population.
ContributorsPignotti, Arthur (Author) / Batalden, Stephen K. (Thesis advisor) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Holian, Anna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013