Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper reports research on national environmental strategy as evinced through resource choices. It explores the strategic influences of political alignment, executive bureaucratic leadership, and management thematic emphasis. The results indicate a number of unexpected relationships among strategic choices and institutional actors.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Assisting students in transition to college has become a key institutional function of high school since the majority of high school seniors now go to college. Information about the application process is especially important to college entry because U.S. colleges are not standardized and have localized institutional criteria in the admissions process. Since one of the most important benefits of social capital is information, this study asks if high schools with high level of social capital can contribute better to college entry of their students, in particular to the selectivity of college to which their students are admitted. This study defines high school ties with colleges as complementary in that high schools and colleges share the goal but occupy different position in the division of labor for adolescents’ transition to postsecondary education. High school’s active contact with parents and college for college choice as aligned in that they are directed and specific for the goal of their students’ college going. This study investigates the effects of these two variables as school social capital on college entry, in particular on college selectivity net of school’s academic standing and socioeconomic composition. Results show that high school ties with colleges contribute to both access to college and competition for selective college controlling for school’s academic standing and socioeconomic composition. Active contact with parents and colleges was found to booster the effect of school level academic standing on the selectivity of college to which students are admitted.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Through stories, tellers convey their stance towards what they are reporting. However, given a general interactional preference for recipients to adopt an affiliative stance towards the telling, tellers generally monitor recipients for whether or not they are both a) aligning with the telling activity and b) affiliating with the content of the telling. Conversely, recipients can be observed to display alignment and afffiliation. This paper examines the interactional resources through which participants in story tellings accomplish the respective monitoring and displaying of alignment and stance during story tellings. The primary finding of this paper is that whereas vocal continuers convey alignment with the activity in progress, nods are calibrated to convey preliminary affiliation with the teller and his/her stance towards what he/she is telling about. Nods then can be conceptualized as a “servo mechanism” that works to bring the telling in “on target” achieving recipient affiliation at story completion.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Should U.S. political decision-makers decide to wage a moral war, it is not as easy a merely saying “go do it.” To ensure moral targeting decisions, national political leaders must suffer the costs of monitoring in terms of time and money, and provide not only detailed direction, but also constant oversight to ensure objectives are clear and subordinates carry out directions. Military officers must ensure that their motivations align with those of their principals, and they must ensure that constraining doctrine for planning and executing combat operations is followed. Having satisfied these variables, moral targeting decisions, wherein proportionality of non-combatant casualties is weighed against target necessity, should then be easily attainable.

The process of aligning motivations with respect to desired outcomes, and the process of planning strategies according to doctrine together lead to moral targeting decisions. By following the processes of getting war plans approved according to published US doctrine, a deliberate dialogue is followed with direction and feedback through several steps of planning and approval that result in multiple people working on a product that obtains a sort of corporate “buy-in”. I posit that it is difficult to follow this process and end up with targeting decisions that do not weigh harm to non-combatants against the necessity of individual targets, especially when principals and agents come together to deliberately ensure they align their motivations with respect to objectives.

Through case studies of Desert Storm (the first Gulf War), Operation Allied Force (NATO’s air war over Serbia), and the US War on Terror (campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq), I find that only in the War on Terror were moral targeting decisions made. Furthermore, that was the only case studies wherein both constraining doctrine was present and principal-agent motivations were aligned with respect to objectives. The other two cases showed that the variables were not followed and proportionality-necessity decisions were not made.