The roles of American Universities/colleges assets, knowledge and partnerships with local governments during disasters and emergencies become more important but have not been emphasized sufficiently in the scholarship community. Universities/colleges have provided disaster services in partnership with local government through different ways: providing facilities and logistical support (e.g., disaster sheltering), critical knowledge support (e.g., disaster information forecasting), and human resources and special expertise support (e.g., university hospitals and voluntary work of nursing and medical students/faculty). Through 34 interviews with emergency managers from both universities/colleges and local governments, and a national survey of 362 university emergency managers, this dissertation finds that: First, previously established partnerships between universities/colleges and local governments can reduce coordination costs when disasters happen and can facilitate new partnerships on disaster preparedness. Second, local government capacity gap in responding to disaster needs is a critical precondition for universities/colleges to participate in the disaster service co-provision, which is not specified or examined by other co-production, co-creation, or co-management theories. Third, internal coordination efforts within universities/colleges can facilitate external coordination activities with local governments to guarantee efficient disaster service provision. Fourth, a disaster resilience culture needs to be facilitated within universities/colleges to develop a robust disaster response plan. Furthermore, first response providers’ health and wellbeing should get more attention from universities and local governments to maintain a sustainable and healthy workforce as well as efficient disaster response.

Over the last few hundred years, best practice in some fields of human action—e.g., the treatment of heart disease, the transportation of persons, goods, and messages, and the destruction of landscapes, structures, and lives—has become dramatically more effective. At the same time, best practice in other fields, e.g., the amelioration of poverty or the teaching of reading, writing, or math, has improved more slowly, if at all. I argue that practice and technology (“know-how”) can only improve rapidly under rather special conditions: that, at any given point in time, some fields are more “progressible” than others.I articulate a conceptual framework describing several characteristics of practice in a field that may facilitate rapid progress. These characteristics, while not fixed, tend to remain fairly stable for long periods of time. I argue that know-how can improve more quickly 1) when offline “vicarious trial” of variations in practice is feasible and useful; 2) when practice is formal and standardized; 3) when practice is substantially performed by artifacts rather than by humans; 4) when outcomes of variations in practice may be rapidly evaluated; 5) when goals of practice are consistently agreed upon; 6) when contexts and objects of practice may be treated as, or have been made, consistent for the purposes of intervention; 7) when components of task systems are not heavily interdependent; and 8) when labor is finely and sharply divided. I illustrate and elaborate this framework through comparative case studies on efforts to improve practice in three differentially “progressible” fields. I examine rapid improvement in a COVID-19 testing lab, inconsistent improvement in undergraduate algebra instruction, and ambiguous improvement in regional water modeling to support municipal water management. These cases indicate that my theory may inform judgments about the plausibility of rapid advance within a field of practice, absent disruptive change in methods or problem formulation. My theory may also shed light on which varieties of innovative effort may and may not foreseeably contribute to improving practice in a given field—more formal, theoretical, and context-independent work in high-progressibility domains, more tacit, grounded, and localized work in low-progressibility ones.

Previous studies of turnover have focused mainly on factors influencing turnover intention or turnover behavior. Fewer studies delve into career outcomes after individuals’ turnover. However, turnover is not the end of the decision-making process. Due to the boundaryless career (Arthur, 1994) and extensive job mobility in the modern workforce (Stewart, 2002), it is timely to know the effect of turnover on individual career evolvement. The three essays in this dissertation will delve into turnover and career outcomes using data of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) personnel in the United States. The first essay explores the effect of past voluntary and involuntary turnover on individuals’ job satisfaction, salary, and number of people supervised. The second essay compares gender differences in voluntary turnover patterns and the effects of voluntary turnover on career outcomes. The third essay delves into STEM personnel job mobility across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, with a focus on sector switch and job satisfaction change.

Research and Development (R&D) tax credits are one of the most widely adopted policies state governments use to incentivize R&D spending by firms operating in a state. R&D spending is associated with increases in firm productivity, innovation, and higher wages. However, most studies into these tax credits examine only the effect the credit has on firm-based R&D spending and assume the increases in R&D spending mean states are receiving the social and economic benefits endogenous growth theory predicts. This dissertation connects R&D tax credits with the expected outcomes of R&D spending increases to evaluate the efficacy of the tax credits. Specifically, the dissertation connects R&D tax credits to the movement of researchers between states, innovative activity, and state fiscal health. The study uses a panel of U.S. PhD graduates and a fixed-effects linear probability model to show R&D tax credits have a small but statistically significant impact on PhDs moving to states that have the tax credit. Using a structural equation model and a latent innovation variable, the dissertation shows R&D tax credits have a small but significant impact on innovative activity mediated by R&D spending. Finally, the dissertation examines the effect of R&D tax credits on a state’s short- and long-run fiscal health by using a distributed lag model to illustrate R&D tax credits are associated with decreases with fiscal health.

Theories related to social identity provide insight on how gender may be meaningful in organizations. This dissertation examines how psychosocial outcomes for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty are influenced by the proportion of women in productivity, support, and advice networks in gendered academic institutions. Psychosocial outcomes are defined as the psychological and social perspectives of the organizational environment. Gendered aspects in organizations are of theoretical importance because they provide opportunities to investigate how STEM faculty attain psychosocial outcomes. An underlying argument in gender literature is that women, compared to men, are more likely to provide emotional support. As women’s presence in STEM departments increases, STEM faculty are likely to rely on women to provide emotional support which may influence psychosocial outcomes of the work environment.

Universities are considered to be gendered organizational environments, where masculine and feminine characteristics are evident within their processes, practices, images, and through distribution of power. Universities are broadly categorized as two types: research focused and teaching focused universities. Both university types are deeply involved with the education of students but promotional standards for faculty members and the primary focus of these universities is dictated by the categorization of research versus teaching. University structuring is gendered, making them an ideal setting to investigate questions related to identity and psychosocial outcomes. Drawing from gendered theory, social identity theory, social network theory, and social capital theory, I ask the following research question: Does the proportion of women in informal networks influence psychosocial outcomes within gendered university settings?

To examine how psychosocial outcomes are influenced by informal networks, I use survey data from a 2011 National Science Foundation funded national survey of STEM faculty across universities in the United States (U.S.). I find that psychosocial outcomes vary by university type, faculty gender, and a high proportion of women in three types of academic informal networks. I conclude with a discussion about what the results mean for practice and future research.

One of the theoretical cores and values of good governance is the accountability of public employees, where the citizens expect the public employees to maintain professional standards, avoid conflicts of interest, respect the principles of fair and impartial treatment, and use public money wisely. However, are these unique moral standards to which only public employees are held? The dissertation seeks to examine how the public evaluates the unethical behaviors of public and private leaders differently to better understand the sources of public and private sector differences in the public’s normative evaluations.

Based on a randomized online vignette experiment with 1,569 respondents residing in the United States collected in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, the dissertation confirms that public authorities face different levels of public tolerance relative to business managers. More specifically, the unethical behaviors of a public manager are less likely to be tolerated than the same misconduct of a business manager, while ethical offenses of elected officials are least likely to be tolerated by the public. However, the public is relatively much less tolerant of public managers’ and elected officials’ petty violations relative to business managers than they do for more egregious violations of public authorities.

The dissertation further finds that public evaluations are contingent upon the respondents’ work experience in different sectors. Individuals working in government are more likely to be tolerant of petty unethical behaviors, regardless of whom they evaluate, but they become much less tolerant of public managers’ and elected officials’ grand ethical violations. The longer individuals work in for-profit organizations, the less likely they are to tolerate public authorities’ petty violations of organizational rules while consistently being more accepting of the unethical behaviors of business managers.

Using an experimental design, the dissertation finds the importance of a fair and legitimate use of tax money in the public’s moral evaluations of public leadership and further discusses the potential sources of public skepticism of the public sector. Furthermore, the public and private sector comparison provides theoretical and practical implications for ethics reform in the era of collaborative governance.

Each of the three essays in this dissertation examine an aspect of health or health care in society. Areas explored within this dissertation include health care as a public value, proscriptive genomic policies, and socio-technical futures of the human lifespan. The first essay explores different forms of health care systems and attempts to understand who believes access to health care is a public value. Using a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. citizens, this study presents statistically significant empirical evidence regarding values and other attributes that predict the probability of individuals within age-based cohorts identifying access to health care as a public value. In the second essay, a menu of policy recommendations for federal regulators is proposed in order to address the lack of uniformity in current state laws concerning genetic information. The policy recommendations consider genetic information as property, privacy protections for re-identifying de-identified genomic information, the establishment of guidelines for law enforcement agencies to access nonforensic databases in criminal investigations, and anti-piracy protections for individuals and their genetic information. The third and final essay explores the socio-technical artifacts of the current health care system for documenting both life and death to understand the potential for altering the future of insurance, the health care delivery system, and individual health outcomes. Through the development of a complex scenario, this essay explores the long-term socio-technical futures of implementing a technology that continuously collects and stores genetic, environmental, and social information from life to death of individual participants.

The amount of time and effort that university researchers spend writing grants and executing grant administration responsibilities is one of the biggest challenges for science policy. This study aims to explore the complexity of the phenomenon of burdens in the administrative procedure for principal investigators (PIs) in sponsored research. The findings make a theoretical contribution to the study of burdens and red tape by closely examining the processes in which the burdens emerge, increase, and decrease; in doing so, this research will lay the groundwork for future studies of burdens and sponsored research systems. This study assumes that burdens are embedded in the social process, not merely in the number of required documentation or time spent on the procedure. The two overarching research questions are as follows: (1) What do researchers perceive or experience as a burden in grant proposal preparation and submission in sponsored research? (2) What are the possible factors or hypotheses to explain the generation, increase, and decrease of burdens? This single case study of a large research university examines the burdens faced by university researchers as they prepare and submit grant proposals. Primary data comes from semi-structured interviews with thirty-one PIs in science and engineering schools, and four interviews with research administration staff. Based on the interview data and theoretical arguments, this study illustrates the burdens in two categories: Burdens related to the proposal system, rules, and requirements; and burdens PIs experience with pre-award staff and relations. In addition, this study assesses each PI’s burden level in terms of the number of tasks in the proposal process, and the quality of the pre-award staff and services the PI experiences. This study further examines possible contributing factors and tentative hypotheses of burdens. In the discussion, this study develops theoretical arguments about the nature and consequences of burdens and fundamental issues in the grant system, and discuss prescriptions for PIs, universities, and sponsored research systems.

The three essays in this dissertation each examine how aspects of contemporary administrative structure within American research universities affect faculty outcomes. Specific aspects of administrative structure tested in this dissertation include the introduction of new administrative roles, administrative intensity (i.e. relative size of university administration), and competing roles between faculty, administrators, and staff. Using quantitative statistical methods these aspects of administrative structure are tested for their effects on academic grant productivity, faculty job stress, and faculty job satisfaction. Administrative datasets and large scale national surveys make up the data for these studies and quantitative statistical methods confirm most of the hypothesized relationships.

In the first essay, findings from statistical modeling using instrumental variables suggest that academic researchers who receive administrative support for grant writing and management obtain fewer grants and have a lower success rate. However, the findings also suggest that the grants these researchers do receive are much larger in terms of dollars. The results indicate that administrative support is particularly beneficial in academic grant situations of high-risk, high-reward. In the second essay, ordered logit models reveal a statistically significant and stronger relationship between staff intensity (i.e., the ratio of faculty to staff workers) and faculty stress than the relationship between executive intensity (i.e., the ratio faculty to executive and managerial workers) and faculty job stress. These findings confirm theory that the work of faculty is more loosely coupled with the work of executives than it is with staff workers. A possible explanation is the increase in administrative work faculty must take on as there are fewer staff workers to take on administrative tasks. And finally, in the third essay results from multi-level modeling confirm that both role clarity and institutional support positively affect both a global measure of faculty job satisfaction and faculty satisfaction with how their work time is allocated. Understanding the effects that administrative structure has on faculty outcomes will aid universities as faculty administrative burdens ebb and flow in reaction to macro trends in higher education, such as unbundling of faculty roles, unbundling of services, neoliberalism, liberal arts decline, and administrative bloat.

Grief reaches across all human differences and boundaries. Grief, when it does not resolve on its own, is known as complicated grief. Parents of children who die are at increased risk for experiencing complicated grief. This case study seeks commonalities and possible contributing factors for the creation of a non-profit in reaction to the death of a child. This study finds that previous achievements such as completing a marathon or graduating from a graduate program may indicate the presence of characteristics like resilience that result in the creation of a non-profit.