| Abstract: | This research was a study of the culture of five religiously-affiliated food pantry operations in Brazos County, Texas. This study employed multi-sited, team-based, participant-observation techniques over 34 months, collecting field note data and performing qualitative coding. The findings presented here show how volunteers at food pantries conceive of and embody their religious obligations in their volunteerism, how the organizations structure their operations to enable and constrain agency in line with ideological expectations, how ideology is communicated through the food pantry operation, and how this cultural landscape is shaped by macro-structural forces. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/197795 |
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