College for Design and Social Inquiry

This thesis examines the scope of the plastic waste management and housing problems in Haiti. It makes a case for plastic waste to be recycled into sustainable housing as a solution to both issues. For better understanding, it first analyses the scope of the plastic waste pollution and housing problems in developing countries. It then ascertains innovative ways waste managers, and planners have solved it in these nations. Thirdly, based on case studies in Colombia and India, this thesis ascertains how using plastic waste in construction, is a potential solution for better waste management and better housing in Haiti. In the end, this thesis recommends the construction of a plastic waste recycling plant in Port-au-Prince to help solve both their waste and housing problem. Since Port-au-Prince lacks a central sewage system, this thesis also recommends investment in water infrastructures to eliminate the need for plastic bottles in the long run.

This dissertation investigates how government affects stigmatization processes. This line of inquiry is important for two reasons. First, existing models of stigmatization leave government out of stigma processes, or only mention government as a sanctioning body that comes in after stigma processes are complete. Organizational theory research therefore underplays the extent to which government action can influence its citizens.
Second, stigma research in public administration and government research is limited to examining how government can assist stigmatized groups, and not on how government affects stigma processes. This inadvertently gives the impression that government is not part of stigma processes. While this may be due to the bulk of stigma theory research being located in the management literature, it is nonetheless a significant omission. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine how government can influence the proliferation of stigma to then find government’s location in the stigma process.

Suburban sprawl, automobile dependency and the current parking requirements have led to an ineffective and inefficient use of land which presents added cost to land owners and residents. The current standards often have limit quantitative reasoning and often exceed the peak demand for parking. The current requirements may seem as a necessary evil to address transportation and consumer habits, but in actuality it is only further facilitating the dependency on the automobile. Modifications to the current standards such as the amount of parking required and the required size of parking spaces will help decrease the amount of land and cost related to parking facilities. Other alternative modes of transportation also need to be invested in to make these options more convenient. The continued support of the automobile through parking regulations will accentuate the effects of urban sprawl and in the end, this is not environmentally or financially feasible.

It is an axiom among both researchers and the public that American perceptions of the police are racially divided. Previous studies have traditionally focused on interracial perceptions, and have found support for social variables (e.g. education) and legal variables (e.g. prior arrest). The current study seeks to determine if legal oppression or social oppression are better predictors of negative attitudes toward the police among a sample of black university students. Ordinary least squares regression seeks determine which set of factors better predict police perceptions. This intra-racial examination allows future research to parse nuances among police perceptions in the black community. The implications of these results and future directions are discussed, in particular for the continued development of a black criminology (Unnever, Gabbidon, & Chouhy, 2019).

Public higher education increasingly relies on performance-based funding (PBF) policies to enhance accountability. These policies attempt to steer institutions towards successful outcomes via performance indicators, such as graduation rates. Nationally, PBF policies continue to grow in popularity despite limited evidence that they are effective (Hillman, Tandberg, and Gross, 2014).
Motivated by the apparent conflict between the widespread adoption of PBF policies and the lack of evidence that they actually improve outcomes in higher education, this dissertation investigates the perceived impacts of PBF policies. Florida’s public university system serves as the setting for the study due to its uniquely punitive PBF policy design and the model’s non-standardized performance indicators.

While the lack of affordable housing is a problem across the United States, the situation is particularly dire in Miami-Dade County, FL. As of 2017, 49% of all households in Miami-Dade County were housing cost-burdened (defined as paying more than 30% of household income on housing). Now ranked as the fifth least affordable housing market in the nation, the trend is worsening and negatively impacting workforce retention, wealth creation, and economic mobility (Greiner, 2017).

This dissertation explored the lives of women with disabilities who have to suffer more than men with disabilities despite prevailing disability policies in Nepal that emphasize nondiscrimination against people with disabilities. The study explored the idea that there are policy gaps between disability policies and the narratives of women with disabilities. This dissertation used critical sexual theory and postcolonialism as critical frameworks and narrative analysis as a method to analyze the disability policies and narratives of women with disabilities to explore policy gaps and the need for supportive gender policies. The researcher analyzed the literary works of five female Nepali authors with disabilities: Radhika Dahal, Jhamak Ghimire, Sabitri Karki, Parijaat, and Mira Sahi, in Nepal. With the support of NVivo qualitative research software, and the use of the frameworks and methodology, the researcher discovered the policy gaps and underscored the need for supportive gender policies to address the emotional and psychological needs of women with disabilities.

This dissertation investigates and further develops organization health theory in the context of public organizations. This is an important line of inquiry for two reasons. First, the healthy organizations literature and healthy organization theory is inchoate and lacks overall coherence (Dejoy et al., 2010), especially in public organization theory and research. As such many organization theorists have called for expansive solutions and insist this requires consideration of the collective and systemic interactive levels of analysis (Salanova et al., 2012; Schein, 2006). Second, we notice organizations now devoting considerable resources to nurturing individual and organizational health and wellness (Dale & Burrell, 2014; Parks & Steelman, 2008). Ostensibly, this is because health has been demonstrated to enhance or compromise a myriad of organizational outcomes including satisfaction, performance, sustainability, and survival (Pfeffer, 2010; Cooper, 1994). Moreover, organizational health and individual health share a vicarious and interdependent relationship (McHugh & Brotherton, 2000). In response to this “healthy exigency” and in effort to enhance the health of our public organizations, this dissertation employs an interdisciplinary lens to investigate healthy organizations at the systemic interactive level of analysis. The overarching purpose of the study is to provide theoretical contributions and empirical evidence concerning the key factors necessary for the development of healthy public organizations. To accomplish this, I assemble a holistic organizational wellness (HOW) theoretical framework. The HOW framework supports development of a Wellness Quotient (WQ) with data from the 2017 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS). The WQ represents the dissertations main contribution, as currently no standardized measure of public organization health (or wellness) exists. Through a process of discovery and analysis which includes multiple iterations of confirmatory factor analyses and a regression analysis, it is found that the WQ has a significant impact on organization performance and satisfaction. The results also confirm this studies hypotheses the WQ may be useful as a proxy for future healthy public organizations research. In sum, the HOW framework and WQ not only contribute to theoretical and empirical development of healthy public organizations, respectively, but they both may serve as useful tools for public organizational health design and development.

Public service motivation (PSM) encompasses self-sacrifice (SS), compassion
(COM), commitment to public values (CPV), and attraction to public participation (APP)
as part of a public service ethic. The public and non-profit sectors are purported to consist
of individuals possessing other-directed, communal values, rather than self-directed,
agentic values characterizing private sector organizations. However, PSM’s positive, or
prosocial bias often discounts self-interested motives and mixed motives. Garnering
insights from personality psychology may further the development of PSM from
multidisciplinary angles. Malevolent personalities in organizations have been evidenced
by decades of research in the private sector. Yet, similar efforts delineating malevolent
types in public and non-profit organizations remain lacking. While a battery of
personality scales access general personality disorders, none has been administered
across sectors to determine if disordered individuals are more likely to be found
employed in a particular sector. The communal narcissism scale is distinct from other malevolent scales because it measures communal traits as a function of domain
specificity. Unlike the agentic version of narcissism, in which self-aggrandizement is
almost immediately apparent to others, in communal narcissism, the self-aggrandizement
component is hidden by a ‘saint-type bias’ and self-proclaimed other-orientation. Some
communal narcissism traits may mimic dimensions of the PSM scale. If a malevolent
personality can mimic public service motivation, then this research would be among the
first to illustrate a dark side of PSM, as recently suggested by PSM scholars.
This research found that CNI was, indeed, associated with PSM, particularly the
self-sacrifice, public participation, and compassion dimensions. Additionally, PSM was
positively associated with the non-profit sector and negatively associated with the private
sector. CNI, in contrast, was indirectly influenced by sector. Specifically, CNI was
positively associated with non-profit sector and negatively associated with the private
sector. An empirical analysis of two studies is presented and future research directions
are discussed.

As part of the education reforms of the 1990s, charter schools were proposed as a
private alternative to public education, offering parents and their children greater choices.
Publicly financed but privately operated, charter schools have now grown in numbers and
influence. While there are many studies of student outcomes in charter schools
demonstrating mixed results, one negative outcome of charter schools has been less
examined. Since inception, 23% of charter schools nationally have closed and these
closures are disruptive to parents, children, and their school districts. This paper
addresses charter school closures from an organizational perspective. Applying theory
from population ecology and resource dependency theory, the population of nonprofit
charter schools is examined. What are the primary determinants of charter school success
and failure?
Florida, with the third highest number of charter schools nationally and, at the
same time, the highest number of charter school closures in the United States, is a paradox. This study identifies the significant variables that are related to school survival
and failure in the state of Florida over the years 2015-16 through 2015-16.
Variables tested in this study, using Survival Analysis (SA), include age,
management structure, size, school performance, grants, and density. All variables except
density at founding were significant in explaining the unique variance in survival rates
among charters. Charter schools sub-contracted by for-profit educational management
organizations (EMOs) were larger, achieved higher grades, secured more grants and
achieved higher survival rates than their counterpart nonprofit, independent, and charter
management organization (CMO) led schools. These results contribute to our
understanding of charter school survival and failure, thereby informing public policy
options to strengthen the charter school population and the nation’s public education
system overall.