Made in America: fictions of genetic industry

This dissertation focuses on contemporary American fiction that explores the intertwined histories of genetics and industrialism. I argue that Jeffrey Eugenides, Louise Erdrich, and Richard Powers interpret industrial and scientific texts from the early twentieth century to tell a previously untold history of the era. Emphasizing the connections between emerging understandings of genetics and new methods of manufacturing, they present the story of how the gene made life seem buildable. These writers trace fantasies of the literal mass production of Americans, exposing how immigrants, Native Americans, and women became particular targets of an industrial impulse toward standardization. Yet the novels in my study also recover an alternative history of the gene, in which it possesses a range of abilities enabling it to resist efforts to industrialize not just social, but also organismal, life. Genes are portrayed in these fictions as agents of transformation as well as replication, thus inspiring optimism about the possibility of unsettling the future of corporate capitalism in American life. Chapter One argues that Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex draws parallels between Henry Ford's factory, Thomas Hunt Morgan's genetic laboratory, and the Stephanides family lineage to show how naturally occurring mutations subvert the pursuit of exact reproduction. Chapter Two examines Louise Erdrich's Tracks, and its portrayal of the Pinkham Medicine Company's commercial hybridization of plants. Pointing to the genetic reversion that often accompanies hybridity, Erdrich undermines Pinkham's efforts to cultivate a uniform American populace from diverse racial roots. Chapter Three discusses Richard Powers' depiction of corporatization in Gain, focusing on Procter and Gamble's pursuit of self-perpetuation by crossing not merely into legal, but also embodied, personhood. Turning to chromosomal chiasmus as a mechanism that makes reproduction a process inherently variable, and therefore unstable, Powers portrays the genetic body as a dubious model for corporate longevity. Taken together, my central texts address the relationship between fiction and history, literature and science, and human and industrial reproduction.2017-11-18T00:00:00

The Behavioral Paradox: Why Investor Irrationality Calls for Lighter and Simpler Financial Regulation

It is widely believed that behavioral economics justifies more intrusive regulation of financial markets, because people are not fully rational and need to be protected from their quirks. This Article challenges that belief. Firstly, insofar as people can be helped to make better choices, that goal can usually be achieved through light-touch regulations. Secondly, faulty perceptions about markets seem to be best corrected through market-based solutions. Thirdly, increasing regulation does not seem to solve problems caused by lack of market discipline, pricing inefficiencies, and financial innovation; better results may be achieved with freer markets and simpler rules. Fourthly, regulatory rule makers are subject to imperfect rationality, which tends to reduce the quality of regulatory intervention. Finally, regulatory complexity exacerbates the harmful effects of bounded rationality, whereas simple and stable rules give rise to positive learning effects

The Adamic backdrop of Romans 7

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1631/thumbnail.jp

Apostles for Capitalism: Amway, Movement Conservatism, and the Remaking of the American Economy, 1959-2009

This dissertation examines the Amway Corporation, the world’s largest multi-level marketing company. Since its inception, Amway has purported to offer individuals the ability to go into business for themselves and to participate in free enterprise through direct sales. At the same time, many have attacked Amway as a fraudulent pyramid scheme that trades in false promises and leaves its distributors financially and psychologically worse off than before they joined. In addition to running the company for over three decades, Amway’s cofounders, Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel, along with members of their families, have been influential players in the Republican Party and movement conservatism going back to the 1970s. Amway draws our attention to important subtleties in the post-World War II conservative movement. DeVos and Van Andel were prominent avatars of an ideology known as small-business conservatism. Like other champions of free enterprise, small-business conservatives attacked “big government,” but they additionally articulated a critique of corporate capitalism. Amway promoted an economic model known as “compassionate capitalism,” which was premised on the liberating potential of individual proprietorship. Amway also widens the geographic lens of the modern Right, highlighting the role that parts of the American North played in cultivating conservatism. Western Michigan, where DeVos and Van Andel were born and raised, has a long conservative tradition dating back to the mid-nineteenth century and shaped to a large degree by the region’s Dutch-American community, which practiced a particularly conservative strain of Calvinism. DeVos and Van Andel have had a hand in many of the key moments in the history of American Right over the last four decades, underscoring the importance of Grand Rapids to the conservative movement

Spartan Daily, October 24, 2002

Volume 119, Issue 40https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10684/thumbnail.jp

How Firms Turn Middle Managers into Diversity Leaders

In 2007, the Conference Board published a piece calling middle managers “the biggest roadblock to diversity and inclusion” for standing in the way of change efforts. Today, many chief diversity officers report that they have failed both to diversify middle management and to get middle managers involved in promoting inclusion. We explore popular diversity programs that create “paper” or “symbolic” principles for achieving diversity (diversity policy statements and guidelines for hiring, promotion, and discharge), as well as programs that engage middle managers in promoting diversity (special recruitment and mentoring programs, and diversity task forces). “Paper” policies often fall flat, but by getting managers involved in finding new talent, mentoring staff, and designing new diversity initiatives, firms have turned them into champions of diversity. Our quantitative analyses, tracking more than 800 firms over more than three decades, show that “paper” policies often have adverse effects, while manager-led targeted recruitment programs, mentoring programs, and diversity taskforces have been hugely effective at diversifying the ranks of management. Interviews with managers document why these programs are so effective

WPI Journal, Fall 2017

Published quarterly by Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in conjunction with the WPI Alumni Association.https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/wpijournal-all/1060/thumbnail.jp

ABQ Free Press, December 16, 2015

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/abq_free_press/1042/thumbnail.jp