The Subaltern Innovates: Shanzhai Mobile Phones, South-South Trade, and Counter-Narratives of Intellectual Property Rights

Cai, Yifan Clark University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

The rise of emerging markets in recent years is reshaping the landscape of the global knowledge economy, with changing trade dynamics that challenge the existing norms, organization, and regulation of innovation. In theoretical terms, actors in the global South engaged in the global knowledge economy remain under-researched. In terms of policy, institutions of innovation capability building need to be (re)configured to cater to the shifting trade dynamics. The success of Chinese-made, affordable mobile phones serves as a good example that showcases new opportunities and challenges arising from burgeoning South-South trade, with implications for inclusive development. To date, Chinese mobile phone companies account for more than half of the market share in Africa, South and Southeast Asia. Most of the now well-known Chinese mobile phone companies however have emerged from a shady past of making counterfeit and knockoff mobile phones known as shanzhai phones.This dissertation investigates the knowledge economy in the developing world by analyzing the production and innovation networks of shanzhai mobile phones. Shanzhai, conventionally known as equivalent to counterfeits and knockoffs, has become an innovation model with commercial successes in the developing world. Bringing together the literatures on economic geography, regional and international development, and technology and innovation studies, this dissertation investigates production networks, formal and informal knowledge linkages, and multi-level regulatory institutions of China’s mobile phone industry. Based on a one-year fieldwork conducted in Shenzhen and the broader Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, a total of 76 interviews have been conducted with various stakeholders including participants from the mobile phone industry, as well as international merchants, government officials, and other informants such as journalists and academics. The three articles explicate, respectively, three aspects of shanzhai mobile phones, including creativity, adaptability, and subalternity. These articles as a whole examine shanzhai phones from production-consumption, regulatory-institutional, and postcolonial-cultural perspectives. The first article focuses on the mobile phone industry in Shenzhen, China, attributing its upgrading to the modular supply chain that has facilitated the localization of core technologies, and thus enabled supplier firms to grow out of the global production network. The second article situates Chinese-made mobile phones in South-South trade, and analyzes how companies have adapted products to address consumer needs arising from distinct environmental, socio-economic settings in emerging markets. The third article investigates the spatial co-location and industrial symbiosis between the formal and informal networks in the mobile phone industry, and examines how the imposed intellectual property regimes have been contested and negotiated by shanzhai firms. Together, the articles provide a first-hand account of the actors, processes, and institutions of the knowledge economy in the global South. Viewing technology as power-laden, value-loaded artifacts, this research argues that the shanzhai model opens up a frontier accommodating counter-narratives to patent-driven innovation and counter-practices of exclusive innovation. This dissertation contributes to a more inclusive understanding of innovation, foregrounding the agency and aspiration of peripheral actors engaged in transnational technology diffusion and adoption. Using shanzhai as a vehicle, this research revisits several conceptual binaries including the center and the periphery, the formal and the informal, and the hegemonic and the subaltern. Methodologically, this study explores new avenues for social science inquiry into innovation in the global South, where patent data are not available due to weakly enforced IPR rules.

Effect of Female Political Representation on Education and Employment

Priyanka, Sadia Clark University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation examines the effect of women’s political representation in India on constituents’ education and employment. I use a similar identification strategy throughout the thesis to identify a causal effect of female politicians elected to state legislatures. Specifically, I use close elections between male and female candidates, won by women, as an instrument for women’s political representation. In the first chapter, I estimate whether exposure to female politicians during young adulthood affect later life female labor market outcomes. Using data on age cohorts 15-24 between 1980-2007, I find that exposure at ages 18-20 leads to an increase in the likelihood of women working in wage employment. The results are consistent with dual channels of a policy and a role model effect in affecting employment outcomes. In the second chapter, I show that exposure to female politicians during adolescence not just increases women’s completion of higher secondary schooling, but leads to a longer-term intergenerational impact on spending on their children’s education, particularly in households with more girls. Given the pro-male bias in educational expenditures in Indian households, the results underscore the importance of exposure to a more gender-equal setting during adolescence in mitigating such biases.The third chapter extends the evidence on education outcomes to show that female politicians lead to better learning outcomes for 8-11 year old primary school-aged children, with increased proficiency in reading and math. The improvements are linked to a combination of health improvements and increased government investment in school inputs and resources. Households also exhibit greater confidence in government schools. Consistent with this change in perception, there are reduced time allocation and spending on private tuition, a common supplementary instruction employed by households. The findings from this dissertation indicate that raising women’s political representation can be important for addressing policy challenges in education and advancing women’s economic empowerment.

A Discursive Approach to Young Women’s Identity Construction in the Workplace

Wolontis, Felicia Clark University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Career identity is commonly viewed as an individual construct that represents who individuals are, or aim to be, in the workplace (Fugate et al., 2004; Hall, 2002; Meijers, 1998); however, an alternative view suggests that career identity may better be viewed as a construct that is discursively co-constructed in social interaction (Fine, 1996; LaPointe, 2010, 2011, 2013; Peltonen, 1998). Research taking a discursive approach to career identity construction is scarce and indicates a need to gain improved understanding of this developmental process by further exploring the diversity, and depth, of individuals’ identity work. The present ethnographic studies investigated how two young women who had recently made the transition from university to the workplace discursively constructed, and reconstructed, their career identities in ethnographic interviews and participant observation. Making use of a fine-grained analytic approach referred to as the narrative practice approach (Bamberg, 2020), the first study showcased how the women positioned themselves as having transitioned from the individual identities they had claimed before moving into the workplace to more of a collaborative identity after having connected with others in their new work environment. It also provided deeper insights into how they made meaning of the uncertainties and ambivalence of their identity changes. The second study showcased how the women reconstructed their career identities after several months had passed by navigating three identity dilemmatic spaces: (1) agency vs. passivity, (2) sameness vs. difference, and (3) constancy vs. change (Bamberg, 2020) as they positioned themselves in terms of social connection and self-determination needs, as well as work fulfillment and well-being. Both studies in concert make important contributions to the bodies of work on career identity construction and the Psychology of Working theoretical (PWT) framework, as well as narrative research and psychology. In addition to this, the first study has practical implications for organizations as it informs them how they can train their employees and improve individual, team, and organizational performance by infusing collaboration into the organizational culture. The second study also has practical implications for organizations in the way that it improves their understanding of employee motivation, satisfaction, and well-being, which can help with employee retention and development.

Three Essays on the Economics of Food Consumption and Beer Markets: Temporal and Spatial Analyses

Marchesi, Keenan Clark University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation examines different aspects of food consumption and beverage markets. The first branch examines the potential short-run effects of the timing of the distribution of federal food support to families on their children’s non-cognitive outcomes. Initial results demonstrate that there are differential impacts on children, identifying potential policy interventions related to the distribution cycle in order to aid children from vulnerable households. The second branch investigates factors that have led to the explosion in craft breweries in New England during the past decade. By using geographic information systems (GIS) and various econometric techniques with a unique spatial database that I developed, I begin to identify specific socioeconomic variables related to brewery location and agglomeration effects. The final branch of my research explores nutritional outcomes in developing countries, with an emphasis on the consequences of conflict. I utilize household panel data pre-and mid- Nepalese Civil War (1996-2006) to examine the effect of conflict on household food consumption. I find that exposure to violence reduces households overall dietary diversity which contributes to long-run nutritional deficiencies. In the first chapter, “The Impact of the SNAP Distribution Cycle on Student Non-Cognitive Outcomes”, I analyze the effect of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) monthly distribution cycle on non-cognitive outcomes for eighth-graders. SNAP is a federally funded means-tested transfer program providing monthly vouchers to low-income households for grocery purchases. In 2017, an average of 41.2 million individuals participated in the program, and for the lowest-income households, these benefits can account for up to 50% of food-at-home spending. My research contributes to a growing literature on the consequences of households exhausting their SNAP benefits before receiving their next distribution. One branch of literature focuses on the impact on children in these households. This area of research exploits individual-level SNAP participation data matched to state-level distribution dates relative to student school-wide examination dates and disciplinary infractions dates and finds that there are negative end-of-the-month effects on both academic achievement and disciplinary infractions and these results can vary by race and gender. My research contributes to this literature in two key ways. First, by expanding the spatial scope of the analysis to 37 states, as previous research focused on individual states or cities. Second, I provide the first analysis of this monthly distribution effect on multiple dimensions of student non-cognitive outcomes: self-reported scores for student's feelings of control over their lives; their self-perceptions about self-worth compared to others; and their levels of anxiety and depression. To perform this analysis, I use a sample of eighth graders in 2007 followed since kindergarten of 1998 from the Institute of Educational Studies’ Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey - Kindergarten (ECLS-K) whose households participated in SNAP in the twelve months prior to the student’s interview. This dataset contains scores for these three non-cognitive outcomes from each student as well as interview date. By temporally matching these data with state-level information on SNAP benefits distribution dates, I created a unique database of the time lag between a family’s SNAP benefit distribution date and the ECLS-K student survey date. I test hypotheses concerning how the potential depletion of SNAP benefits can impact the three non-cognitive outcomes for students in these families. I find that for non-white male students interviewed more than two weeks after the first possible distribution date exhibit worse outcomes across all measures of non-cognitive skills while white male students do not. However, I do not find any similar results for either white or white female students. These findings suggest policy interventions, such as increasing the frequency of SNAP distribution and more broadly, increasing the amount of benefits to the most vulnerable families. The second paper, “A Beershed Analysis of New England: The Supply and Demand of Craft Breweries”, focuses on understanding the dramatic increase in craft breweries in the region. During the past 40 years, there was an over 3,500% increase in breweries in the United States; this astounding growth has inspired research questions in a variety of academic fields, including economics. I have created a novel dataset of all 664 breweries in New England, including addresses and the year opened, and these are linked to the American Community Survey data. Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis, I have begun to investigate the socio-demographic features that affect the location and agglomeration of craft breweries. We find that access to major roadways, higher economic activity, and higher young adult populations are strong indicators that influence brewery location and that there are spatial agglomerations in brewery locations. The last paper, “Conflict and Nutrition: Endogenous Dietary Responses in Nepal”, examines how an important contributor to health, household dietary diversity, changes in the presence of violence. The long-term physical and mental health consequences of large-scale civil violence on children is well documented. However, the nutritional pathways through which these impacts manifest is less studied. Our research focuses on the impact of civil conflict on changes in household dietary diversity, in order to explicitly investigate this linkage, using Nepalese government household panel data on a myriad of socio-demographic and food consumption measures collected pre- and during the Nepalese civil war (1996-2006). Information on village-level conflict, as measured by number of individual causalities and abductions as well total years of conflict was merged with the household data to create the final dataset for analysis. Given the potential selection issues of households moving as a result of exposure to conflict, household panel fixed effects were used in the estimations. The results show that households experience a statistically significant decrease in household dietary diversity in the face of conflict within their village. These results are robust to heterogeneity analysis and different measures of conflict. We find households decrease food purchases and increase their own production of food in response to local conflict.

Hydrosocial Displacements: Climate Change and Community Relations in Chile's Mining Regions : Desplazamientos hidrosociales: El cambio climatico y relaciones comunitarias en las regiones mineras de Chile

Odell, Scott Dennis Clark University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Everyone for Themselves: Population-Level Differences in the Evolutionary Responses of the Threespine Stickleback Host (Gasterosteus Aculeatus) to a Cestode Parasite (Schistocephalus Solidus)

Wohlleben, Anika Marie Clark University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Helminths are common parasites which often drastically reduce host survival and reproductive success and therefore impose strong selection pressure on the hosts to evolve countermeasures (e.g. immune response, behavioral changes). For this reason, it is essential to understand how parasites interact with their hosts to better understand ecosystem dynamics in general. To gain a better understanding of those countermeasures and the underlying mechanisms of host-parasite interactions, I studied the complex interactions between the cestode Schistocephalus solidus and its intermediate host, the threespine stickleback fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus. The primary focus of this dissertation was to determine S. solidus infection dynamics, the timing of infection acquisition, and infection-induced gene expression patterns. My findings provide insight into how unexperienced hosts adapt to new parasite pressures and why different host populations might differ in their adaptations.Analysis of parasite prevalence and infection severity of four stickleback populations from the Matanuska-Susitna Valley of southcentral Alaska (Willow, Rocky, Cornelius, Lazy lakes) over 11 years showed significant between lake and between year variation in infection prevalence but not Parasite Index. All four populations displayed peritoneal fibrosis, a specialized form of parasite resistance. My results suggest that stickleback infection prevalence is likely linked to the feeding strategies of young-of-year stickleback, a factor which should be taken into account when designing future lab infection experiments. Assessment of the timing of infection showed that stickleback from three Alaskan populations get infected within the first few months of hatching. Infection intensity in young-of-year stickleback varied between populations and years. There was also strong variation in the development of the infection prevalence over the winter. My results suggest that stickleback infection prevalence might primarily depend on the feeding strategies of young-of-year stickleback, which needs to be taken in account when designing future lab infection experiments. Comparison of gene expression differences between stickleback from a high-prevalence, low-fibrosis and a low-prevalence, high-fibrosis population showed population-level differences in (immune) gene expression. Infected fish from the high prevalence population showed signs of immune manipulation by the parasite. The fish from the low prevalence population showed a potential for sex-biased infection prevalence. My findings support previous reports of immune manipulation by S. solidus and provide new insight into the genetic makeup of a host population that frequently displays fibrosis. This work demonstrates that several Alaskan stickleback populations have evolved different strategies for coping with the same parasite, ranging from resistance (e.g., immune regulation) to parasite tolerance (e.g., parasite growth suppression).

Three Essays in Health Economics

O'Donoghue, Ashley Clark University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

In chapter 1, I examine the effect of the Medicaid expansions on drug-related foster care removals. Child removals into foster care have increased by 8.6% from 2010 to 2016. With over one-third of children being removed due to a parent with drug dependency, the opioid epidemic has led to an overflow of children being placed into foster care. The Medicaid expansion provided health insurance to many previously uninsured individuals, and existing literature has shown that the expansion increased access to treatment for substance use disorder but also increased access to prescription opioids. This paper is the first to examine the impact of the state-level Medicaid expansions on drug-related foster care removals in the United States. I use yearly data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) on county-level drug-related foster care removal rates from 2010 to 2016. I use variation in the timing of the Medicaid expansions across states to identify the effects of the expansions and find that overall the expansions had no significant effect on drug-related foster care removals, or non-drug-related foster care removals. I find that the West saw large increases in drug-related foster care removals after expanding. I further show that the West saw large increases in prescription opioid painkillers reimbursed by Medicaid and relatively smaller increases in medications used for treatment of substance use disorder. This suggests that the Medicaid expansion in the West led to an increase in access to opioids, without as much of an improvement in substance use treatment, which could explain the increases in drug-related foster care removals in this region.In chapter 2, I explore the effect of naloxone access laws on opioid-related mortality rates. On average, 130 Americans die each day from an opioid overdose. To combat this growing epidemic, every state has passed some form of legislation that aims to increase the availability of naloxone – a prescription drug that can reverse the effect of an opioid overdose. This paper examines the impact of state-level naloxone access laws on opioid-related mortality in the United States, using monthly data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on county-level mortality rates from 2010 to 2017. I use variation in the timing of access laws across states to identify the effects of naloxone access and find that states that passed naloxone access laws prior to 2013 saw reductions in opioid-related mortality. After 2015, states with a naloxone access law saw increases in opioid-related mortality. These findings are consistent with changes in the timing of fentanyl distribution in the United States, suggesting a limited role for naloxone when fentanyl contaminates the heroin supply. Finally, in chapter 3, I study examines the impact of a large-scale workfare program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), on child marriage in India. We use two rounds of data from the District Level Household & Facility Surveys and estimate a difference-in-differences model by comparing changes in child marriage rates between a cohort of young women and a cohort of older women before and after the program was implemented. We find that NREGS is associated with an increase in the probability of marriage before 18 Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effects are largest in districts with higher prevalence of arranged marriages and dowry deaths at baseline, which is consistent with dowry practices affecting marriage decisions when resource constraints are relaxed.