Community, Power, and Colonialism: The U.S. Army in Southern Arizona and New Mexico, 1866-1886

Empire is central to U.S. history. When we see the U.S. projecting its influence on a global scale in today s world it is important to understand that U.S. empire has a long history. This dissertation offers a case study of colonialism and U.S. empire by discussing the social worlds, labor regimes, and culture of the U.S. Army during the conquest of southern Arizona and New Mexico (1866-1886). It highlights some of the defining principles, mentalities, and characteristics of U.S. imperialism and shows how U.S. forces have in years past constructed their power and represented themselves, their missions, and the places and peoples that faced U.S. imperialism/colonialism. Using insights from postcolonial studies and whiteness studies, this work balances its attention between discursive representations (army stories) and social experience (army actions), pays attention to silences in the process of historical production, and focuses on collective group mentalities and identities. In the end the army experience reveals an empire in denial constructed on the rule of difference and marked by frustration. White officers, their wives, and the white enlisted men not only wanted the monopoly of violence for the U.S. regime but also colonial (mental/cultural) authority and power, and constructed their identity, authority, and power in discourse and in the social contexts of the everyday through difference. Engaged in warfare against the Apaches, they did not recognize their actions as harmful or acknowledge the U.S. invasion as the bloody colonial conquest it was. White army personnel painted themselves and the army as liberators, represented colonial peoples as racial inferiors, approached colonial terrain in terms of struggle, and claimed that the region was a terrible periphery with little value before the arrival of white civilization. Officers and wives also wanted to place themselves at the top of colonial hierarchies as the refined and respectable class who led the regeneration of the colony by example: they tried to turn army villages into islands of civilization and made journeys, leisure, and domestic life to showcase their class sensibilities and level of sophistication. Often, however, their efforts failed, resulting in frustration and bitterness. Many blamed the colony and its peoples for their failures. The army itself was divided by race and class. All soldiers were treated as laborers unfit for self-government. White enlisted men, frustrated by their failures in colonial warfare and by constant manual labor, constructed worlds of resistance, whereas indigenous soldiers sought to negotiate the effects of colonialism by working in the army. As colonized labor their position was defined by tension between integration and exclusion and between freedom and colonial control.

A Comparison of Managers’ Perception of Short-Termism in Finland, Sweden and the U.S

Increased media exposure to layoffs and corporate quarterly financial reporting have created arguable a common perception – especially favored by the media itself – that the companies have been forced to improve their financial performance from quarter to quarter. Academically the relevant question is whether companies themselves feel that they are exposed to short-term pressure to perform even if it means that they have to compromise company’s long-term future. This paper studies this issue using results from a survey conducted among the 500 largest companies in Finland. The results show that companies in general feel moderate short-term pressure, with reasonable dispersion across firms. There seems to be a link between the degree of pressure felt, and the firm’s ownership structure, i.e. we find support for the existence of short-term versus long-term owners. We also find significant ownership related differences, in line with expectations, in how such short-term pressure is reflected in actual decision variables such as the investment criteria used.

Problems of Proto-Slavic Historical Nominal Morphology : On the Basis of Old Church Slavic

In this study I offer a diachronic solution for a number of difficult inflectional endings in Old Church Slavic nominal declensions. In this context I address the perhaps most disputed and the most important question of the Slavic nominal inflectional morphology: whether there was in Proto-Slavic an Auslautgesetz (ALG), a law of final syllables, that narrowed the Proto-Indo-European vowel */o/ to */u/ in closed word-final syllables. In addition, the work contains an exhaustive morphological classification of the nouns and adjectives that occur in canonical Old Church Slavic. I argue that Proto-Indo-European */o/ became Proto-Slavic */u/ before word-final */s/ and */N/. This conclusion is based on the impossibility of finding credible analogical (as opposed to phonological) explanations for the forms supporting the ALG hypothesis, and on the survival of the neuter gender in Slavic. It is not likely that the */o/-stem nominative singular ending */-u/ was borrowed from the accusative singular, because the latter would have been the only paradigmatic form with the stem vowel */-u-/. It is equally unlikely that the ending */-u/ was borrowed from the */u/-stems, because the latter constituted a moribund class. The usually stated motivation for such an analogical borrowing, i.e. a need to prevent the merger of */o/-stem masculines with neuters of the same class, is not tenable. Extra-Slavic, as well as intra-Slavic evidence suggests that phonologically-triggered mergers between two semantically opaque genders do not tend to be prevented, but rather that such mergers lead to the loss of the gender opposition in question. On the other hand, if */-os/ had not become */-us/, most nouns and, most importantly, all adjectives and pronouns would have lost the formal distinction between masculines and neuters. This would have necessarily resulted in the loss of the neuter gender. A new explanation is given for the most apparent piece of evidence against the ALG hypothesis, the nominative-accusative singular of the */es/-stem neuters, e.g. nebo 'sky'. I argue that it arose in late Proto-Slavic dialects, replacing regular nebe, under the influence of the */o/- and */yo/-stems where a correlation had emerged between a hard root-final consonant and the termination -o, on the one hand, and a soft root-final consonant and the termination -e, on the other.

We Are All Georgians : The Neoconservative Narrative on the Russia-Georgia War

In this thesis I examine the U.S. foreign policy discussion that followed the war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. In the politically charged setting that preceded the presidential elections, the subject of the debate was not only Washington's response to the crisis in the Caucasus but, more generally, the direction of U.S. foreign policy after the presidency of George W. Bush. As of November 2010, the reasons for and consequences of the Russia-Georgia war continue to be contested. My thesis demonstrates that there were already a number of different stories about the conflict immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. I want to argue that among these stories one can discern a “neoconservative narrative” that described the war as a confrontation between the East and the West and considered it as a test for Washington’s global leadership. I draw on the theory of securitization, particularly on a framework introduced by Holger Stritzel. Accordingly, I consider statements about the conflict as “threat texts” and analyze these based on the existing discursive context, the performative force of the threat texts and the positional power of the actors presenting them. My thesis suggests that a notion of narrativity can complement Stritzel’s securitization framework and take it further. Threat texts are established as narratives by attaching causal connections, meaning and actorship to the discourse. By focusing on this process I want to shed light on the relationship between the text and the context, capture the time dimension of a speech act articulation and help to explain how some interpretations of the conflict are privileged and others marginalized. I develop the theoretical discussion through an empirical analysis of the neoconservative narrative. Drawing on Stritzel’s framework, I argue that the internal logic of the narrative which was presented as self-evident can be analyzed in its historicity. Asking what was perceived to be at stake in the conflict, how the narrative was formed and what purposes it served also reveals the possibility for alternative explanations. My main source material consists of transcripts of think tank seminars organized in Washington, D.C. in August 2008. In addition, I resort to the foreign policy discussion in the mainstream media.

Essays on Stock Option Compensation and the Role of Incentives and Risk (summary section only)

Managerial pay-for-performance sensitivity has increased rapidly around the world. Early empirical research showed that pay-for-performance sensitivity resulting from stock ownership and stock options appeared to be quite low during the 1970s and early 1980s in the U.S. However, recent empirical research from the U.S. shows an enormous increase in pay-for-performance sensitivity. The global trend has also reached Finland, where stock options have become a major ingredient of executive compensation. The fact that stock options seem to be an appealing form of remuneration from a theoretical point of view combined with the observation that the use of this compensation form has increased significantly during the recent years, implies that research on the dynamics of stock option compensation is highly relevant for the academic community, as well as for practitioners and regulators. The research questions of the thesis are analyzed in four separate essays. The first essay examines whether stock option compensation practices of Finnish firms are consistent with predictions from principal-agent theory. The second essay explores one of the major puzzles in the compensation literature by studying determinants of stock option contract design. In theory, optimal contract design should vary according to firm characteristics. However, in the U.S., variation in contract design seems to be surprisingly low, a phenomenon generally attributed to tax and accounting considerations. In Finland, however, firms are not subject to stringent contracting restrictions, and the variation in contract design tends, in fact, to be quite substantial. The third essay studies the impact of price- and risk incentives arising from stock option compensation on firm investment. In addition, the essay explores one of the most debated questions in the literature, in particular, the relation between incentives and firm performance. Finally, several strands of literature in both economics and corporate finance hypothesize that economic uncertainty is related to corporate decision-making. Previous research has shown that risk tends to slow down firm investment. In the fourth essay, it is hypothesized that firm risk slows down growth from a more universal perspective. Consistent with this view, it is shown that risk not only tends to slow down firm investment, but also employment growth. Moreover, the essay explores whether the nature of firms’ compensation policies, in particular, whether firms make use of stock option compensation, affects the relation between risk and firm growth. In summary, the four essays contribute to the current understanding of stock options as a form of equity incentives, and how incentives and risk affect corporate decision-making. By this, the thesis promotes the knowledge related to the modern theory of the firm.

We Are All Georgians: The Neoconservative Narrative on the Russia-Georgia War

In this thesis I examine the U.S. foreign policy discussion that followed the war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. In the politically charged setting that preceded the presidential elections, the subject of the debate was not only Washington's response to the crisis in the Caucasus but, more generally, the direction of U.S. foreign policy after the presidency of George W. Bush. As of November 2010, the reasons for and consequences of the Russia-Georgia war continue to be contested. My thesis demonstrates that there were already a number of different stories about the conflict immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. I want to argue that among these stories one can discern a “neoconservative narrative” that described the war as a confrontation between the East and the West and considered it as a test for Washington’s global leadership. I draw on the theory of securitization, particularly on a framework introduced by Holger Stritzel. Accordingly, I consider statements about the conflict as “threat texts” and analyze these based on the existing discursive context, the performative force of the threat texts and the positional power of the actors presenting them. My thesis suggests that a notion of narrativity can complement Stritzel’s securitization framework and take it further. Threat texts are established as narratives by attaching causal connections, meaning and actorship to the discourse. By focusing on this process I want to shed light on the relationship between the text and the context, capture the time dimension of a speech act articulation and help to explain how some interpretations of the conflict are privileged and others marginalized. I develop the theoretical discussion through an empirical analysis of the neoconservative narrative. Drawing on Stritzel’s framework, I argue that the internal logic of the narrative which was presented as self-evident can be analyzed in its historicity. Asking what was perceived to be at stake in the conflict, how the narrative was formed and what purposes it served also reveals the possibility for alternative explanations. My main source material consists of transcripts of think tank seminars organized in Washington, D.C. in August 2008. In addition, I resort to the foreign policy discussion in the mainstream media.

Paradigms in Statistical Inference for Finite Populations; Up to the 1950s

Modern sample surveys started to spread after statistician at the U.S. Bureau of the Census in the 1940s had developed a sampling design for the Current Population Survey (CPS). A significant factor was also that digital computers became available for statisticians. In the beginning of 1950s, the theory was documented in textbooks on survey sampling. This thesis is about the development of the statistical inference for sample surveys. For the first time the idea of statistical inference was enunciated by a French scientist, P. S. Laplace. In 1781, he published a plan for a partial investigation in which he determined the sample size needed to reach the desired accuracy in estimation. The plan was based on Laplace s Principle of Inverse Probability and on his derivation of the Central Limit Theorem. They were published in a memoir in 1774 which is one of the origins of statistical inference. Laplace s inference model was based on Bernoulli trials and binominal probabilities. He assumed that populations were changing constantly. It was depicted by assuming a priori distributions for parameters. Laplace s inference model dominated statistical thinking for a century. Sample selection in Laplace s investigations was purposive. In 1894 in the International Statistical Institute meeting, Norwegian Anders Kiaer presented the idea of the Representative Method to draw samples. Its idea was that the sample would be a miniature of the population. It is still prevailing. The virtues of random sampling were known but practical problems of sample selection and data collection hindered its use. Arhtur Bowley realized the potentials of Kiaer s method and in the beginning of the 20th century carried out several surveys in the UK. He also developed the theory of statistical inference for finite populations. It was based on Laplace s inference model. R. A. Fisher contributions in the 1920 s constitute a watershed in the statistical science He revolutionized the theory of statistics. In addition, he introduced a new statistical inference model which is still the prevailing paradigm. The essential idea is to draw repeatedly samples from the same population and the assumption that population parameters are constants. Fisher s theory did not include a priori probabilities. Jerzy Neyman adopted Fisher s inference model and applied it to finite populations with the difference that Neyman s inference model does not include any assumptions of the distributions of the study variables. Applying Fisher s fiducial argument he developed the theory for confidence intervals. Neyman s last contribution to survey sampling presented a theory for double sampling. This gave the central idea for statisticians at the U.S. Census Bureau to develop the complex survey design for the CPS. Important criterion was to have a method in which the costs of data collection were acceptable, and which provided approximately equal interviewer workloads, besides sufficient accuracy in estimation.