Browsing by Author "Lin, Nan"

The global diffusion of neoliberal economic policies is one of the most significant events in modern history. This research applies current knowledge on policy diffusion to the analysis of the diffusion of two major neoliberal urban policies among Chinese cities, namely land banking and privatization of urban infrastructures. Both policies are believed to have contributed greatly to the rapid growth of China's urban economy, and reflect the idea of capitalizing a city's tangible assets and utilizing market institutions to manage them so as to achieve economic gains.

Borrowing insights from existing diffusion theories developed by scholars from different background, this research explores the determinants of the policy innovation decisions by utilizing three theoretical models: (1) The internal determinants model, which presumes that the factors causing a local state to adopt a new policy are political, economic, and social characteristics of the local state. (2) The regional diffusion model, which posits that the geographical proximity affects diffusion by encouraging emulation and competition among neighboring states. (3) Institutional diffusion model, which proposes that a new policy may be adopted to prove the legitimacy of the organization, to cope with environment uncertainties by modeling others, to conform to the will of other organizations on which the adopters depend.

This study emphasizes the role of the Chinese states, both at the central and local levels, in building neoliberal market institutions. It pays particular attention to the effects of provincial governments' pressure, and shows that local states' dependency on higher level authorities has limited the effectiveness of such interventions. Moreover, I highlight the influence of horizontal intergovernmental relations, such as competition and emulation, on the diffusion processes, and argue that it is an important factor that has promoted the national-wide expansion of neoliberal policies. The results of this study enrich our understanding on how local policy makings are influenced by complex intergovernmental relations, and how do local states balance between local economic interests and political loyalty to higher levels when they formulate local development agenda.

Social capital has so far been suggested to enhance the career outcomes of disadvantaged immigrants by compensating for their lack of human capital. Contrastingly, by examining labor market outcomes by immigrant groups, my dissertation argues that social capital can actually serve as a source of disadvantages for immigrants in the labor market, especially for a socially disadvantaged immigrant group like Mexican immigrants. Specifically, the dissertation proposes three kinds of social capital processes through which social status and network processes interplay to disadvantage disproportionately a low-status immigrant group in the job attainment process: access, activation, and return deficit of social capital. Using data from the 2005 U.S. Social Capital-USA survey, I examine these three kinds of social capital deficit across three ethnic immigrant groups: Mexican, non-Mexican Hispanic, and non-Hispanic immigrants. The first chapter explores the inequality of social capital across immigrant groups. The result shows that among the three immigrant groups, Mexican immigrants are the only immigrant group who have smaller, less diverse networks than the native-born. This access deficit of social capital for Mexican immigrants is driven primarily by their relative lack of human capital compared with other immigrant groups. The second chapter investigates whether ethnic enclaves constrain the access to social capital of enclave immigrants. The result shows that the constraining effect of ethnic enclaves on the social capital building of enclave immigrants is found only for the ethnic enclave of Mexican immigrants. This is because the ethnic enclaves of disadvantaged immigrants facilitate social connections to other coethnic enclave immigrants with similar socioeconomic traits, while constraining them from extending their networks beyond the enclaves. The access deficit of social capital for Mexican immigrants will eventually aggravate their job prospects because they cannot mobilize social capital for their job finding as much as other immigrant groups do. The third chapter examines the activation and mobilization of social capital in the job attainment process across immigrant groups. The result shows that Mexican immigrants activate and reap the benefit from mobilizing social capital for their job finding in ways that are different from those of the native-born as well as the high-status immigrant group. Due to their access deficit of social capital and negative stereotypes about them, Mexican immigrants are obliged to use a less rewarding job search method (i.e., using information passed from job contacts) rather than use a more rewarding job search method (i.e., using invitations from job contacts). Although Mexican immigrants benefit to some degrees from using information passed from job contacts in getting low-tier occupations, their heavy reliance on such a job search method can also prevent them from attaining middle- or top-tier occupations. By illuminating these serial processes of social capital in the job attainment for disadvantaged immigrants, my dissertation, therefore, sheds light on a new role of social capital as a source of immigrant disadvantages in the labor market.

Abstract

This dissertation is a case study of processes of inequality in disaster response in neighborhoods recently devastated by natural disaster. The context is New York City beginning from the immediate aftermath of Superstorm Sandy on October 29, 2012. Specifically, this is a multilevel, multi-process comparative examination of emergent racial and class inequality (1) between two storm-impacted neighborhoods on the Rockaway peninsula and Brooklyn, and (2) two adjacent neighborhoods within The Rockaways. The fulcrum of the study is to understand a cumulative process by which racial minority and urban poor residents residing in cities fare worse after a disaster relative to their white and non-poor neighbors. To examine this question, over the course of two years this study collected data through interviews with 120 respondents who are residents, community leaders, field-site managers, workers and volunteers from various disaster relief entities (FEMA, New York State agencies, a large NGO, and local NPOs including small and Large Churches) working and living in these post-disaster contexts.

The first part of the analysis traces how the spatial organization, practice and culture of federal and state institutional actors privilege white and middle class residents over minorities and the poor. For this analysis, I comparatively analyze the process of response building through agency and organizational ties across Canarsie in Brooklyn and Westville and Eastville in "The Rockaways." The aspects of response that I compare primarily focus on decisions, actions, beliefs and expectations of management of these relief centers run by FEMA, Churches and local state governmental agencies in the respective neighborhoods. These managers are "on the ground" field site managers for the various centers.

Drilling down from the institutional to the social network environment, a significant part of this research focuses on relational-level comparisons of resident-responder interactions and informational and resource exchanges in and around warming and distributional centers of one central large NGO and one central local NPO located in Westville and Eastville, on the Rockaway Peninsula. This part of the study uses the setting of a natural disaster to examine how and why poor and minority residents living in proximity to affluent and white residents are less inclined to convert social network opportunities into social capital. Although these neighborhoods receive similar types of aid through a large NGO and FEMA, the combination of racial and class characteristics of these neighborhoods and their residents influence the relational dynamics of response, with race and class consequences in receiving disaster assistance.

The main conclusions from this research are (1) at the institutional network level, organizational social capital through organization agglomeration, hosting and coalition building led to a "nucleus of relief" in communities endowed with spatial privilege and the presence of large churches. (2) At the social network level, while all residents generate and benefit from crisis capital, which has short term benefits, whites are better positioned to create social capital which has long-term benefits, despite desegregation of interactional space.

Together these findings challenge current explanations of minority network disadvantage which emphasize macro-level segregation and deficient networks. The findings of this research in fact suggest that despite opportunities for "mixing," inequalities emerge through racialized interactions that inhibit translation and development of new social ties into lasting resources among low-income minorities who are living and surviving in the same areas as whites. The findings also contribute to the disaster literature by showing how race infiltrates institutional and spatial aspects of response that are different from arguments of prejudicial discrimination or merely poor coordination. The emphasis on structural racialization processes is also a much needed consideration in disaster research which tends to focus on quantifying disaster outcomes by racial characteristics of individuals or community demographic composition.

Does social capital, resources embedded in social networks, influence health? My dissertation examines whether social capital directly impacts depression, and how it interplays with other established structural risk factors linked to depression. I analyze unique data from the thematic research project "Social Capital: Its Origins and Consequences," collected in 2004-5 in the United States. I measure social capital through one recently developed network instrument, the position generator. I use structural equation modeling to test the direct, mediating, and moderating effects of social capital on depressive symptoms. I also use the instrumental variable method to verify the causal order in the relationship between social capital and depression. Results show that social capital is associated with the level of depression in four ways. Social capital is associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms net of other variables. Part of the effect of social capital on depressive symptoms is indirect through subjective social status. Social capital mediates the associations of age, gender, being black (versus being white), marital status, education, occupation, annual family income, and social integration with depression. Social capital also interacts with gender, being black (versus being white), education, annual family income, and social integration. This research indicates that social capital is an important social antecedent of disease and illness.