Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, History

This dissertation explores roots of the current urban crisis in the United States. Most scholarly explanations associate the problem, particularly of high levels of African-American poverty, with deindustrialization, which has stripped cities of the factory jobs that once sustained working-class communities. My account deviates from the standard tale of black male unemployment by focusing on shifting patterns of African-American women's labor—both paid and unpaid. Using Baltimore as a case study, it argues that public rather than industrial-sector employment served as the foundation of Baltimore's post-World War II African-American middle and working classes. Women outpaced men in winning government jobs. Concentrated in social welfare agencies, they used their new influence over public policy to improve the city's delivery of public services. Black women's efforts to build an infrastructure for sustainable community development put them at odds in municipal policy-making battles with city officials and business leaders intent upon revitalizing Baltimore through investment in a tourism industry. The social services workers scored some important victories, helping to alleviate poverty by shifting to the government some of the responsibility for health, child, and elder care women earlier provided in the private sphere. The conservative ascendancy of the 1970s and 1980s, reversed many of the gains African-American public-sector workers had won. Intent upon resuscitating the United States' status in the global economy, American presidents, influenced by conservative economists and their elite backers, made macroeconomic and urban policy decisions that justified extensive public-sector retrenchment and cuts or changes to social programs. Public-sector workers and their unions, most notably the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), fought with limited success to prevent the transformation of American public policy. Neoliberal policies ero (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kevin Boyle (Advisor) Subjects: History, United States

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Sociology

For decades the study of unemployment has been dominated by psychologists and economists and has largely been overlooked by sociologists. When the world economy entered a period of prolonged economic decline in the fall of 2007, this began to change. During this period many workers found themselves facing extreme economic hardship as they were involuntarily unemployed for extended periods of time. Yet even as the Great Recession forced sociologists to rediscover the topic of unemployment, most of this research followed the traditions set forth by economists and psychologists by focusing on macro-level factors associated with the decline or the psychological responses of unemployed workers. While this research is important, it provides little insight into the lived experiences of unemployed workers and their families. In the following paper I begin addressing this gap by utilizing qualitative methods to explore the lived experiences of unemployed and underemployed workers during two of the most devastating economic collapses in U.S. history: the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Data on the experiences of workers during the Great Recession come from eighty-four semi-structured interviews with displaced workers in Columbus, OH conducted between 2012 and 2013. In contrast, the experiences of unemployed workers during the Great Depression are explored using research conducted by E. Wight Bakke and his team during the 1930s. The current analysis focuses primarily on the material responses of workers during both periods. Material responses are conceptualized as the strategies individuals and families employ in order to maintain their standard of living in the face of economic hardship. Given the substantial technological, industrial, and institutional changes that have occurred since the start of the Great Depression, one would expect there to be significant differences in the material responses of workers during both periods. Yet, the current analysis discovers t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steven Lopez (Advisor); Rachel Dwyer (Committee Member); Vincent Roscigno (Committee Member) Subjects: Social Research; Sociology