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Research Papers in Economics

 
 
 
 
Current Information: 
Dissertation Abstracts 
 
 
Journal of Rural Cooperation 
 
Vol. 32   No. 1   2004 
 
       
 
 
CURRENT INFORMATION 
DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS 
ProQuest Digital Dissertations 
Case studies of homeschool cooperatives in southern New Jersey 
Order Number AAT 3103755 
Vaughan, Pamela Anne, Ed.D., the Widener University, 2003, 112 pp. Adviser: Wright, Robert. 
Homeschooling is a growing alternative to traditional schooling throughout the nation. In the 
United States, the right of parents to homeschool their children is established in every state. In 
New Jersey, the number of homeschooled children is accelerating due to fact that there is 
virtually no regulation of this educational option by public agencies. Thus, there are no guide-
lines for curriculum, parent-teacher education, or required student testing. Homeschooled 
students are performing well academically and have been admitted to over 500 colleges across 
the nation. Educators criticize this practice, arguing that home schooling provides for neither 
the socialization needs nor the extra curricular experiences offered by the public schools. The 
development of homeschool cooperatives attempts to address these needs. Homeschool coop-
eratives provide small group instruction, participation in extra curricular activities and 
experience learning activities specifically designed for their needs and interests. This study 
utilized descriptive, qualitative methods and a series of three case studies to examine the fol-
lowing research question as to what the motivating reasons are for homeschooling parents of 
southern New Jersey to use a homeschool cooperative? This study specifically addresses the 
following: (1) To determine why parents elected to homeschool and leave public schools; (2) 
To determine if home school cooperatives were not available, would there continue to be the 
decision to school in the home; (3) To determine how parents articulate and interact with 
homeschool cooperatives; (4) Reaction of public school officials to emerging data of the 
study. Data collection involved a combination of responses from participant interviews with 
69 homeschool cooperative parents. Participant observation of the three homeschool coopera-
tive sites, and participation in facilitated parent planning sessions completed the triangulation 
of data. Conversation interviews with open-ended questions were held with 58 homeschool 
cooperative students. Evaluation of emerging themes from this data was also discussed for 
reactions with public school officials. Findings of this study indicated a unique culture of 
parents, who feel a strong need to control their children's educational and social environ-
ments. This educational milieu was comprised of small class sizes and strong oversight by 
parents that contributed to virtually no disciplinary distractions. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
JOURNAL OF RURAL COOPERATION, 32(1) 2004:69-71 ISSN 0377- 7480 © 70  Dissertation Abstracts 
 
Setting nets on troubled waters: Environment, economics, and autonomy among 
nori cultivating households in a Japanese fishing cooperative 
Order Number AAT 3104720 
Delaney, Alyne Elizabeth, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 2003, 280 pp. Adviser: Scaglion, Richard. 
Fishing Cooperative Association (FCA) members in Tohoku, Japan cultivate Scaglion Rich-
ard nori seaweed for the personal autonomy and quality of life this maritime-based occupation 
provides. However, their fishing territories are severely degraded, their occupational income 
is unpredictable, and their production expenses remain high. Given such uncertainties, more 
than 85% of the peak FCA nori growers' population made the rational choice (in neoclassical 
economic terms) to quit nori  cultivation. The remaining members made the rational choice 
(in substantivist terms), to continue this way of life in large part because it enables them to 
“not lower their heads”; and “make decisions themselves”. Results are based on 18 months of 
research in Shichigahama, Miyagi Prefecture, using ethnographic interviews, participant ob-
servation, archival research, and demographic survey. All Japanese maritime resources are 
managed under a common property regime. Therefore, FCA members cannot grow their nori 
elsewhere when their fishing territories become degraded, except by personal agreement with 
other fisherfolk. Research revealed Shichigahama FCA members do in fact use their social 
networks to gain access to fishing territories outside of their communities. They rent and bar-
ter for access to healthy fishing territories and show a partiality for friendship and horizontal 
relations over kinship and hierarchical ones. By “helping one another out” with exchanges to 
fishing ground areas, Japanese fisherfolk are able to continue working on their own, rather 
than resorting to wage labor and endangering their autonomy. Common property theorists 
often cite Japan as a useful example for developing common property institutions elsewhere, 
yet there is little ethnographic information available on the local level fishing cooperatives 
that actually manage this common property. This case study of a Japanese fishing cooperative 
and its nori cultivators, through its consideration of harmful marine pollution, economic in-
stability, technology change, social networking, and autonomy, is important for understanding 
the lives of the Japanese who continue this way of life. The adaptability, flexibility, and indi-
vidual decision-making shown by these men and women are crucial for understanding the 
management of marine resources at the local level. 
 
 
The rural cooperative movement and problems of modernizing in tsarist and 
post-tsarist southern Ukraine (New Russia), 1871–1920 
Order Number AAT 3106626 
Dillon, Alexander, Ph.D., Harvard University, 2003, 593 pp. Adviser: Szporluk, Roman. 
In the history of cooperation in southern Ukraine, a type of activism with a comparatively 
modest scope became one with aims broad enough to destabilize the social and political order 
of which it was part. Cooperation evolved from an experiment to solve the problem of the low 
creditworthiness and buying-power of the grain-producing peasantry, into a vast institutional 
network that addressed fundamental questions concerning the state-society order and even the 
national identity of southern Ukraine and its people. Ultimately, cooperation became a build-
ing-block of the early Soviet order. The rise of the rural cooperative movement is thus a case 
study of the intelligentsia's disillusionment with the tsarist regime and its adoption of alterna-
tive visions for a post-tsarist order. This study contributes to both the body of scholarship    Dissertation  Abstracts  71 
 
concerned with the emergence of Ukraine, and that concerned with the degree to which the 
political vocabulary that was essential to state-building projects on former Imperial Russian 
territory developed before the fall of the tsar. Such convictions as the wish to build the na-
tional economy without private capital, the enlistment of “social forces” in serving the needs 
of the populace, the rationalization of institutional structures set up to make this enlistment 
possible, and-ultimately-the incorporation of these structures into an exclusively state-based 
nation-building project (that of the Soviet regime) appeared at various stages of the coopera-
tive movement's development. Finally, as cooperation in southern Ukraine grew, its 
leadership were forced to make choices bearing upon the national belonging of their region. 
They had to choose the linguistic-cultural package that cooperatives were to promote among 
the peasantry, as well as the geographic extent of the community that was to benefit from 
what they felt was the area's most precious commodity: peasant-produced grain. Thus, the 
cooperative movement's development helps us understand why intelligentsia in southern 
Ukraine found it thinkable that their region was not part of Russia at all, but of Ukraine. 
 
 
 

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