Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Ohio University, 2019, Business Administration

High-growth industrial clusters can be engines of economic growth through the development of human capital, knowledge spillovers, and early-stage investment. For the past 50 years, Stanford University has been a catalyst in developing Silicon Valley as a global center for technology innovation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ohio University now has the opportunity to leverage the Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) and Russ Research Center (RRC) to play a similar role in producing an industrial cluster centered around emerging technologies in aerospace and defense in the greater Dayton, Ohio area. A significant gift from noted alumni Fritz and Dolores Russ provided Ohio University with the RRC in Southwest Ohio, and Ohio University's usage of this facility could result in significant financial and social return on investment for the University and the State of Ohio. This work looks to explore the structures and components of industrial clusters, the economy of the greater Dayton region and Ohio University's potential role in the Dayton ecosystem through the RRC. The overall objective is to provide decisionmakers at Ohio University with a comprehensive foundation to facilitate discussion surrounding utilization of the RRC. In 1994, Fritz and Dolores Russ (Ohio '42) presented plans to donate property in Beavercreek, Ohio to Ohio University when current tenants' leases expired. As part of this $124 million gift, which remains the largest donation to any public or private engineering school in the country, Ohio University named the College of Engineering and Technology after the Russ family (Keller, 1996). When Fritz and Dolores passed away in 2006 and 2008, respectively, Ohio University took ownership of the property and renamed it the “Russ Research Center.” In addition to the gift, the Russ family's professional legacy carries significant weight. After working at WPAFB, Fritz and Dolores Russ founded a leading electronic and automation corporation called Syste (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Paul Benedict MBA (Advisor); Raymond Frost PhD (Advisor) Subjects: Economic Theory; Economics; Geography

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

Throughout Appalachian Ohio, residents in small post-industrial cities grapple with redefining themselves as a place and a people in order to compete in the global economy. Young people caught in the middle of this economic transition—those born after the major factory closings in the early 1980s—struggle to negotiate their relationships with their hometowns, which typically offer limited career options beyond the service sector. Listening to the stories of college students and residents from postindustrial Appalachian Ohio helps us understand the ways in which place, economics, and identity intersect in their lives. In a region where cooperation regularly makes up for a lack of resources, leaving to attend college becomes a fraught decision. Moral geographies of the region—the ways in which people position themselves in relation to people and place—are thus filled with reflections from elsewhere, constructions of self and community that are responsive to the expectations of peers, outsiders, and discourses of success and failure that influence everyday choices. Reflections from elsewhere work in two ways in this dissertation: they are both the lived negotiations of self in response to the expectations of others as well as the ways that students and residents reflect upon, evaluate, and tell stories about the ruptures that have shaped their experiences. Students' negotiations of place reveal the tensions they experience in coming from a place that is impossible to return to without the stigma of failure and to which continued belonging is possible only by habitually traversing the long-worn road home. Road stories, then, become all the more important as units of analysis, and force us to consider notions of place that cannot be defined in terms of a single locale. Contextualizing the students' evaluative discourse, I examine critical positionings staked out by the university and home communities that shed light on the ways in which economic instability strains st (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Amy Shuman (Advisor); Dorothy Noyes (Committee Member); Katherine Borland (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Folklore; Higher Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Geography

Scholars, politicans, and planners posit entrepreneurship and cultural industries as central to economic growth. My examination of crafters' mentalities, practices, and material conditions for starting and maintaining their businesses shows that such faith in entrepreneurship requires critique. When entrepreneurs try to start new businesses they not only produce new monetary value in a calculated quest for profits, but also consume goods and services within the urban economy and beyond in an effort to earn multiple types of fulfillment (e.g. personal satisfaction, autonomy). Crafters' consumption yields income for others, signifying their importance in the circulation of capital, even if they reap little to no monetary rewards themselves. Thus, the majority of aspiring craft entrepreneurs experience entrepreneurship as a consumer industry that is booming on their backs rather than a new paradigm for economic growth and sustainable livelihoods. They consume more monetary value through their purchases than they earn from their sales, thereby resulting in a credit debt. Aspirants see through their neoliberal subjectivities these failures to earn a livelihood as personal faults, which can be corrected by self-disciplining for stricter adherence to discourses built on market logics. Craft economies serve as one example of what I call `aspirational economies,' systems of production and consumption of resources that embed multiple notions of value, and are practiced by people who focus more on experience and hope for future successes than on immediate material gains. I mean for this concept to trouble the static categories associated with professionalized occupations and consider the lengthy and uncertain trajectories people negotiate in order to establish and sustain livelihoods. Researchers tend to focus on professional artists and formal arts events when studying arts economies, but examining only professionals obscures the informal arts economy and an often larger (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nancy Ettlinger Dr. (Advisor); Malecki Edward Dr. (Committee Member); Munroe Darla Dr. (Committee Member); Gibson Chris Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Gender Studies; Geography

MCP, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Community Planning

High tech industry plays a significant role in the economic growth of any city. Cities compete against each other for attracting such high-tech industries. Everyone wants it, but not everyone can get it. After all, there will be some winners and some losers. The consequences of this scenario for unsuccessful cities raise some issues that should be a concern for planners and policy makers.How can a city determine whether is should pursue tech-based economic development, if at all, before investing critical resources. The goal of this study is to help cities assess their potential for attracting hightech industries. A city needs to compare its attributes with specific requirements of High-Tech industry to find its strengths and weaknesses, most of which depend on the geographical location of any city. For this evaluation, knowledge of all the factors which contribute to attract high-tech industry is necessary. Such knowledge would then help a city to prioritize the future development goals and objectives.This study involves collection of factors which attract high-tech industry based on prior research and literature review. The collected factors are then ranked based on expert opinions. In addition, a set of hypotheses are formulated for these factors stating their contribution in attracting high-tech industry. A correlation analysis is conducted to determine the strength of relationship with high-tech status of cities. The results are used to summarize characteristics of high-tech cities. Additionally, the results are tested against the set of hypotheses to determine if the literature findings are supported by statistical tests or not. These findings are used to evaluate the significance of various factors for attracting high-tech industry and the extent to which they influence high-tech industry locations.

Committee: Carla Chifos (Advisor) Subjects: Urban and Regional Planning

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2002, Arts and Sciences : Geography

Latin American cocaine trafficking organizations comprise an indigenous, globally competitive, multinational industry. Their business operations are deeply integrated within the economic and political systems of countries throughout the region. Because the drug trade confers clear economic benefits to parts of Latin America, local authorities are often reluctant to attack the industry at its roots.The widespread adoption of market-oriented economic reforms has re-drawn the region's economic, political, and social landscape. Drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have responded to these challenging conditions far more successfully than the region's licit firms, which have had little success to date in international markets. Expanded international flows of goods and capital offer DTOs numerous opportunities to exploit licit channels to move product and profits across borders. Such opportunities reflect a fundamental tension between economic liberalization and drug prohibition, the policy regimes most deeply influencing the cocaine trade.The model of the cocaine industry presented in this research is schematic and conceptual rather than formulaic. It is inspired by a catholic view of modeling that sees them as structured syntheses of data, rather than as formal laws or equations. The schema developed here reflects the contextual landscape within which traffickers operate. The proximate environment (both geographic and industrial) of a DTO poses opportunities and challenges that require strategic responses. While criminal enterprises operate in a more complex and uncertain setting than licit firms, their competitive success is determined in fundamentally similar ways. Models developed by geographers to explain the spatial behavior of licit multinational firms are profitably applied here to the operations of DTOs. No single model can account for the dynamism and variability found in economic systems. Accordingly, this research uses a variety of conceptual tools and resear (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Robert South (Advisor) Subjects: Geography