Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, City and Regional Planning

In the past two decades, a group of prominent foundations has shifted their grantmaking from supporting social services toward directly engaging in urban development, leading significant planning and implementation processes largely outside of formal governmental structures and processes. Despite the prominence of this grantmaking and emerging interests in the urban studies and planning scholarship, systematic research on the changing forms and extent of foundations' engagement in urban development is scarce. In this three-essay dissertation, I investigate why and how prominent foundations increasingly pursue their own visions for the future of cities by directly engaging in urban development. I also tease out the implications for incorporating diverse interests in the planning and implementation of foundation-backed development schemes. In the first essay, I identify six distinctive community and economic development (CED) grantmaking patterns among large place-oriented foundations by integrating statistical and qualitative analyses. I further demonstrate that CED grantmaking by place-oriented foundations is primarily driven by organizational interests, particularly those of senior leaders and board members while being constrained by foundations' missions and the makeup of their donors. In the second essay, I investigate an attempt to implement a model of urban development based on a highly transactional view of urban development—“Capital Innovation” model—by a network of high-profile national foundations. By looking into tensions around knowledge of investment capital, scale, and representation in decision-making, I uncover challenges and conflicts around the implementation of a national model of urban development that prioritizes capital investment and financial expertise in a particular historical and institutional context. In the third essay, I analyze two prominent foundations that shifted their engagement in urban development in response to comparable socioec (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mattijs van Maasakkers (Advisor); Edward (Ned) Hill (Committee Member); Bernadette Hanlon (Committee Member) Subjects: Organizational Behavior; Public Policy; Urban Planning

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Sociology

Finance plays a markedly greater role in our lives than in the recent past. This “financialization” process in which more value is accumulated within financial channels has enormous implications. Financialization appropriates more resources and drains money from productive use, it reallocates money from labor to capital, and occasional crises cause serious socio-economic disruption. The power of financial capital is a core feature of contemporary capitalism. For as much attention as financialization receives though we know surprisingly little about it empirically. Most studies focus on the United States, the United Kingdom, and a handful of European states. Our limited geographic scope is compounded by the use of inconsistent and non-comparable measures. There has also been less focus on explaining this transformation comparatively. In this dissertation, I address these issues in an in-depth study of financialization. I do so with a unique firm-level database I have constructed with information on more than 47,000 non-financial and 12,000 financial sector companies in the 37 largest economies. This covers firms in diverse contexts from the global capitalist core, “development states” in East Asia, semi-peripheral economies like Argentina to South Africa, as well as emerging powers like China and India. I assess financialization in these countries from 1991 to 2014 – a period I call the “long 1990s” At the beginning of this period, neoliberal architects optimistically promoted global financial integration and openness. By the end of it, the world was marred from the devastating consequences of financial “exuberance.” In six chapters, I investigate the causes and consequences of financialization in this historic era. Following an introductory chapter, I detail my dataset, propose measures, and stylistically showcase them in Chapter 2. My results show unevenness in financialization measures across time and place and that firms with international operations are mo (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tim Bartley (Committee Co-Chair); Vincent Roscigno (Committee Co-Chair); Rachel Dwyer (Committee Member); Michael Vuolo (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Comparative Studies

Contributing to Victorian novel studies, literary theory, and gender studies, this dissertation studies individual indebtedness and speculation as testing-grounds of the management of the self, highlighting the role of novelistic narrative in the attendant subjective experiences and practices. Its central conclusion is that self-government in the credit economy takes the form of a uniquely temporal sensibility or form which is here named “diachronic binding.” Diachronic binding, as is shown, consists of a continuous motion between speculation and austerity, where the violence and disciplining of the latter often takes on particularly gendered expressions. In the Introduction, the historical-comparative dimensions of the project are discussed and its contours charted through a reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting Found. Following Chapter 1, which is devoted to outlining the theoretical basis of the argument concerning time, gender, and the credit economy, Chapter 2 opens on to an engagement with the Victorian novel, starting with an analysis of the figure of what is here called the “rootless woman.” Living in a state of constant suspense and flight, is is considered how Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair personifies the haunting presence of an irreducibly unpaid quantitative gap at the heart of capitalist value production. The rootless woman, it is concluded, simultaneously stages the general fear of failing to profitably engage temporal market forms and the desire to exclusively associate women with these failures so as to rhetorically legitimate their exclusion from the market and subjection to domestic patriarchy. The analysis of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, in Chapter 3, continues to consider the unevenly gendered enactments of value. In contrast to Daniel's successful engagement of the binding dynamic between future speculation and past validation, it is considered how Gwendolen is set up to fail in her motion from speculation to austerity. The `Hermione' epis (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Eugene Holland (Committee Chair); Philip Armstrong (Committee Member); Jill Galvan (Committee Member); Ethan Knapp (Committee Member); Katherine Hayles (Committee Member); Gudni Elisson (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Comparative Literature; Gender Studies; Icelandic and Scandinavian Literature; Literature; Modern Literature; Social Research

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, Sociology

The American economy has become increasingly financialized over the past 30 years. Prior research on financialization has been conducted within separate theoretical traditions, has focused on macro explanations, and employed totalizing conceptualizations of financialization. It has not seriously considered the meso-level processes propelling financialization or engaged in the divergent theories commonly used to explain it. This study seeks to adjudicate between two theories—political economy and neo-institutionalism—to hone in on key determinants of financialization at the firm level. I do so with a unique panel data set and longitudinal data techniques to predict financialization at the firm level. Results lend support for both theories, especially political economy. From this vantage point, financialization is not the sweeping force that earlier work has described but a localized and contingent process.

Committee: Tim Bartley (Advisor); Randy Hodson (Committee Member); Andrew Martin (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Sociology

Income inequality has been rising in the U.S. in recent decades. Prior scholarship generally links increasing income inequality to labor market and demographic changes. However, these changes alone cannot explain the growing concentration of income at the very top of the income distribution nor the rising importance of financial income for wealthy households. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that financial income, which is the returns to wealth, has come to account for the majority of overall income inequality in the last decade. This dramatic shift is a result of financialization, a set of interrelated processes that include financial deregulation as well as changes in the consumption and investment patterns of firms and households. This finding underscores the need to study property relations when examining income inequality.

Committee: Rachel Dwyer Dr. (Committee Chair); Hodson Randy Dr. (Committee Member); Martin Andrew Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology