Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The story of the AgJobs bill provides a valuable case study for examining various legisprudential theories and their applicability to immigration reform, and for developing a new theoretical framework for analyzing legislative change in the immigration context. The AgJobs bill, an apparent example of pluralism in action, was the result of years of arduous negotiations and a historic compromise between agricultural producers and the United Farmworkers, traditional adversaries. Yet in the waning days of the 108th Congress when the bill was to be introduced as an amendment to the Class Action bill, the Administration brought pressure to bear on the bill's principal sponsor asking him not to introduce it. I will examine the negotiations leading up to the historic bill and the role of different actors, including the United Farmworkers, growers, staffers and members of Congress. I will then analyze developments in both houses of Congress following the bill's introduction in the 106th and 108th Congress, drawing on theories of pluralism and instrumentalism to explain first how the historic compromise was reached, became a Congressional bill, and earned the support of 63 cosponsors, as well as public choice, proceduralist, institutionalist theories of legislation to explain why the bill failed in both the 106th and 108th Congresses.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: We conducted a randomized field experiment in Japan prior to the 2007 upper house election. Our experimental treatment consisted of 2 pieces of mail, which were mailed to reach voters 5 days and 3 days before the election. Drawing from studies of descriptive norms in psychology, which find people adjust their behaviors to conform to what others typically do, we created two messages. One emphasized the descriptive norm of a high rate of citizen participation, which we call "high turnout message", or HTO. The other message suggested non-voting was common, which we call "low turnout message", or LTO. Voters assigned to one treatment group received 2 pieces of HTO mails, while those assigned to the other treatment group received 2 pieces of LTO mails. Consistent with our expectation, the effect of HTO mails on voter turnout was positive and statistically significant. The LTO mails were positively associated with turnout, yet the effect was not statistically significant. While there have been many field experiments measuring the effect of voter mobilization efforts in the United States, this method of research has been employed only rarely in other countries. This is one of the first studies in the Japanese context.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: This paper examines the role of institutions, fields, and industries in the theory development and schools of thought in the field. It draws from extant research on metaphors of the field in organizational communication and organizational studies to argue that macro phenomena such as institutions, regimes, organizational sets, and markets call for new ways of thinking about organizational communication work. It moves away from treating institutions as entities or as networks of organizations to conceptualize institutional practices and discursive constructions in dynamic ways that interface with organizing through a myriad of macro practices and forms.

Publication Type: Poster Presentation
Abstract: Non-point source pollution of surface water with sediment, nutrients, and other agrichemicals is a growing public and regulatory concern. Pollutants exported from agricultural fields are often estimated using computer models and simulated runoff experiments, rather than with actual field measurements. Pioneer Farm, a 430-acre mixed-livestock farm associated with the University of Wisconsin-Platteville is intensively instrumented with USGS flumes and automated samplers to sample runoff at intervals throughout individual storm events. This presentation will describe the annual nitrogen export and speciation from 2004 and 2005 and relate the results to land use.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There are a few scant remarks in Pierre Bourdieu’s work referring to the dynamics by which fields can come into being or disintegrate, for instance in relation to differentiation between the economy and politics, or between the secular and atemporal fields of power. For the most part, however, Bourdieu is content to study the dynamics pertaining to fields that already exist, whether it is the housing market, the political, academic or artistic fields. Moreover, even though there are allusions in Bourdieu’s work to the fact that certain fields are subordinate to others, the economy tends to be dominant in relation to politics, and the academic field is subordinated to that of politics proper, a systematic attempt to investigate how these relations between fields occur and how, as a consequence, some might be seen to be penetrated and even skewed by outside forces is lacking. This paper discusses the extent to which the theoretical tools provided by Boudieu in his conceptualisation of fields especially, but also with reference to habitus and practices, might be deployed to investigate the ways in which domestic political fields might be penetrated by and to a certain extent even skewed by the dynamics of the international field. This discussion will be anchored in an exploration of the empirical case of former Yugoslavia, its dissolution and the reconstitution of sovereign states in the (formerly) Yugoslav political space. Former Yugoslavia was a type of transnational space or field, where the distribution of political and economic rights at the local, republican and federal levels depended on a particular type of insertion in the international political and economic fields. The vulnerability of these sophisticated (and tenuous) equilibria became acute under the strains of restructuring global processes: the collapse of the communist regimes in Europe, the dissolution of the bi-polar security structure and neo-liberal globalisation. The preference of the Western European states for state-consecration by internationally recognised plebiscite as a way of arbitrating between competing territorial claims established nationalist principles as structuring principles in the new polities and accelerated the descent into war. This paper explores the possibility that this process is reversible and argues that successful post-war reconstruction entails the parallel reconstruction of non-nationalistic democratic politics and co-operative inter-state relations in Southeast Europe.