Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Abstract

Generations of American Rhodes Scholarship winners have attained significant positions governing political, economic, and cultural institutions in the country. This analysis of 874 Scholars elected between 1947 and 1992 focuses on how these exceptional academic elites have obtained positions of leadership role, wealth and fame. The study finds that access to cultural resources enabled them to gain access to status hierarchy, namely credentials from elite schooling. The higher the position in status hierarchy, the greater the likelihood of having access to social ties and social networks in corresponding value dimension. Transforming cultural capital to social capital is the key to their success and their ability to monopolize social institutions.

Over the past fifty years, winners of Rhodes Scholarship have gained powerful public leadership roles as a result of accumulating cultural capital through elite schooling at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, an influence of an Oxford education over one’s awareness of international and public issues, and prestigious credentials from elite law schools, which enabled them to have access to corporate and civic boards, and social connections to governmental and social institutions.

The pathways to wealth among Rhodes Scholars once again were influenced by their education at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Their most prestigious form of higher education helped them to acquire professional credentials in law and medicine. As in the case of power, their credentials from elite professional schools led them to opportunities to monopolize corporate and civic boards. These decidedly enabled them to accumulate wealth.

The impact of elite credentials from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton along with their social connection to governmental and cultural institutions became an immensely important means to achieve fame and symbolic recognition.

The paper discusses important implications of these findings in light of the expanding democracy and a rising tide of meritocracy in higher education.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Scholars engaged in the field of 'empowerment' research-that is, research that has an overriding commitment to improve conditions of marginalized groups-will agree that, in the past decade or so, there has been a perceptible shift towards heuristic and interpretative frameworks that use both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The gains of this paradigmatic shift are well acknowledged: through use of methods such as narrative analysis, in-depth interviews and reflexive writing, the voices of the disadvantaged, their experiences and needs, and their solutions to their own situations have a better opportunity to be articulated. In reality, however, the conduct and outcomes of qualitative research is anything but uniform across institutional settings, and tends to satisfy a range of agendas, some of which reify rather than destabilize power relations. This paper is an attempt to reflect on the author's own experiences and observed use of qualitative research, and seeks to ask the questions: When does qualitative research become interpretative or critical? And, realistically, when does critical research become empowering? These questions highlight some of the tensions in doing 'relevant' research, that which has policy applications as against a loyalty to post-modern and critical approaches. Researchers often are confronted with the need to compromise between process and end-outcome of the work they do, and in doing so, reframe empowerment from within the interests of their institutions. The author will draw on her experiences in academic and government-sponsored research in the fields of (a) gender and development and (b) evaluation policy research in New Zealand.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A theoretical framework was employed to examine the goal detection process in the interactions of close-friend and unacquainted dyads wherein one conversationalist (pursuer) sought a goal unbeknownst to the other (detector). The extent to which the pursuer’s goal was cognitively associated with the relational type of the dyad was manipulated. The pursuer’s level of efficiency in reaching their goal was assessed from the videotaped interactions. In an anticipated three-way interaction, efficiency, relational type, and relationship-goal linkages interacted to determine the accuracy of detectors’ goal inference. In line with hypotheses, efficiency was unrelated to accuracy when the pursuer’s goal was strongly associated with the relational type (e.g., a pursuer seeking an avoid-awkwardness goal in an unacquainted dyad); yet, efficiency was correlated with accuracy when the pursuer’s goal was not strongly linked to the relational type (e.g., a pursuer attempting to avoid-awkwardness in a close-friends dyad). Results regarding the onset latency and certainty of goal inferences, however, did not generally support hypotheses.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper attempts to conceptualize the “active” audience in the digital age. It is not a paper to conduct statistical tests to support theoretical propositions, but a paper to explicate a concept to challenge for a new way of thinking. Describing the audience studied in the conventional communications research as “passive” and/or “pseudo-active,” the current paper suggests the materialization of a “truly active” audience that has not yet been clearly discerned. To reach such a conclusion, the author largely recapitulates the previous approaches to audience studies in terms of “audience activity.” Then, while certain phenomena in the digital age are attributed to the audience in this paper, the “new” audience is conceptualized as a truly “active audience” that is not only an active critical thinker, but also an active participant to shape media content or agenda.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Traditionally the identification and apprehension of active serious offenders has relied on information from the public, the targeting of ‘known’ offenders and current knowledge of offending patterns. More recently, the method of offender self-selection has been offered as an additional identification tool, where certain minor infractions have been found to be ’triggers’ for uncovering serious criminality – self-selection because the individual has broken a law in the first place. This paper details a police operation – ‘Operation Visitor’ – focused on visitors to a young offenders institute, to explore whether minor offences committed – either whilst at, or en route to the institution – can be used as trigger offences to indicate serious criminality. One third of visitors caught offending had criminal histories, several considered serious active offenders.