Article 82 is traditionally analysed as a tool to integrate and liberalise the European Single Market and to protect competition from distortion. As such there is no comprehensive discussion of the tensions that lie at the centre of the objective of protecting competition in the current rethinking of Article 82. With regard to exclusionary abuses, DG Competition has articulated that the main objective of Article 82 is the protection of competition in the market as a means of enhancing consumer welfare and of ensuring an efficient allocation of resources. This statement may conflict with some of the case law protecting the economic freedom of the market players derived from ordoliberalism. The latter is a well respected German legal tradition that holds both that government needs to be restrained from abuse of power, and that the free market has its limits. Economic rights deserve protection and vigilance is needed to ensure economic power is not misused or abused, not only in the interests of consumer welfare, but also in the interests of the economic liberty of the individual. This thesis considers the tension between the goals of protecting economic freedom and the promotion of consumer welfare in the application of Article 82. Presupposing that economic freedom and consumer welfare are in opposition to one another, such tension is only set to intensify and must be given appropriate weight in considering the extent to which DG Competition can or should try to move to a consumer welfare standard. Changing the interpretation of protection of competition from economic freedom to consumer welfare within Article 82 can undermine a fundamental right if economic freedom is considered a fundamental right in the Community legal order. However, consumer welfare can also be seen as an opportunity, if properly debated or agreed to by the ECJ, to adopt a more economics-based approach to Article 82.

This study is based on how ”the dark story” about The Swedish Welfare system during 1900-1950’s is presented in a selection of history textbooks which are adapted for upper secondary school. What I am referring to with ”the dark story” is the sterilizations, the oppression notice against minority groups, the ideal of being well-behaved and the injustice within social classes and gender. I have limited the study to examine history textbooks which are adapted for the current course ”History 1b” and the previous course ”History A”. According to earlier reasearch ”the dark story” about Sweden’s history started to be problematized during 1990’s with the result that the history has started to be impaired in textbooks during 2000’s. Earlier, Sweden’s history in textbooks has been presented as neutral, which has illustrated that no dark or hidden history about Sweden has been written.          The aim in this study is to examine what history is being emphasized in the textbooks and analyze how it is presented as an educational content. To be able to do that I have used a qualitative content analysis focused on examining the textbooks by Niklas Ammert’s analysis model about how textbooks present history. In this study I found out that ”the dark story” is presented in all examined textbooks, but in different ways with different examples. I also found out that the history is thematised depending what history the textbook has emphasized and how it is presented by the authors. Some of the authors have problematized several examples by different perspectives and some of them present one short example. This result shows that ”the dark story” within The Swedish Welfare system is presented different as an educational content.

This thesis enacts a discursive approach to surveillance in the UK, revealing implications for surveillance theory, governmentality theory, and for political and social identity theories. It demonstrates the importance of a discursive approach to surveillance, as an expansion of assemblage models of surveillance. It finds convergence between government, governance, finance and media discourses, sufficient to conceive of these as forming a shared governmental discourse of surveillance. Governmental, financial and media discourses tend to privilege the assumption that surveillance systems are effective and accurate. This ideological function elides the contingent nature of surveillant practices, presenting them as non-political technological functions. Governmentality accounts of surveillance are supplemented by an expanded understanding of identity as a contested concept, or floating signifier, articulated in particular ways in governmental discourses. The discourse theory informed analysis in this thesis points to a distinct articulation of identity – the governmental surveillant identity – a political attempt to fix the meaning of identity, and construct a surveillance-permeable form that draws upon the privileging of technological truth over human truth. Identity is articulated across many of the five discourses studied as socially vulnerable. The core articulation of the problem of governance is that identity is problematised; unreliable for the proper functioning of governance in society. Because identity is vulnerable and because identity’s ontological nature makes it possible, identity must be checked and secured.

The thesis argues for one proposition: 'philosophical assumptions matter'. It uses a contemporary debate about poverty to show how philosophical assumptions matter. The poverty debate pits the Income/Consumption (IIC) approach to poverty against the Participatory (PA) approach to poverty. The philosophical assumptions are epistemological, with implications for methodology, and normative, with implications for conceptions/aspects of well-beinglill-being. It is argued that philosophical assumptions matter in three ways: I) they affect research orientation; 2) they affect conceptual categories in use; 3) they may affect research outcomes (with potential policy implications). The first issue is addressed in Chapter 2 which examines epistemological/methodological links between two different traditions of inquiry in the social sciences, Empiricism and critical hermeneutics, and the IIC and PA approaches to poverty, respectively. It examines both historical and analytical links. The latter establish connections between conflicting epistemological positions concerning knowledge and truth/validity and methodological aspects of the two poverty approaches concerning: determination of well-beinglill-being, measurement of ill-beinglwell-being, stance toward individual preferences, sources of data and prescriptive aims. The second issue is addressed in Chapter 3 which examines links between two different approaches to normative theory, Naturalist Normative Theory (NNT) and Discursive Normative Theory (DNT), and the conceptions/aspects of ill-being used in the IIC and PA approaches to poverty, respectively. As above, it examines both historical and analytical links. The latter establish connections between different modes of normative theory construction and the constituents/aspects of ill-being in the two poverty approaches. The third issue is addressed in Chapters 4 and 5 which compare findings of the IIC and PA poverty approaches undertaken in the Republic of Guinea with a view to determine if they identify different groups as 'poor' or 'worse-off' because they are using different conceptions/aspects of ill-being. Chapter 4 examines the poverty condition of female-headed and male-headed households, the distribution of girls and women in poor households, and the intrahousehold, gender distribution of food and health, to determine if women or girls face greater consumption poverty than men or boys. Chapter 5 presents the results of a Participatory Poverty Assessment which used a variety of techniques to determine if villagers considered women as a group to be 'worse-off than men. Chapter 6 concludes and offers a number of reasons why the central argument matters.

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This study explores children and mothers' perceptions of children's experiences of divorce in Botswana. To illuminate this complex topic, the study draws on two main overlapping theoretical perspectives. These are the social constructionist approach and the sociology of childhood approach. The concept of resilience as well as some concepts of feminist theory, social network theory and family stress theory were also used in the study. A few children believed their experiences had long-term effects on them. These were mainly children who experienced multiple stressors. For example, they perceived: their relations with mothers (who were their custodial parents) as negative, their relations with fathers were not close, they believed they experienced severe economic declines, they changed neighbourhoods and schools many times, witnessed and / or were victims of parental violence either for many years prior to the separation or continued to be exposed to violence even after the legal divorce. This study has explored an issue that remains largely unexplored in developing countries. Some of its findings are similar in broad terms to those of studies that have been conducted in developed countries, but they manifest themselves differently. For example, women in this study stayed in unhappy marriages for many years partly because of lack of services for them, customary laws that make divorce more difficult for women than for men, cultural expectations that require women to persevere in order to preserve their marriages and fear of stigma as well as economic hardships. Therefore when violence occurred, its impact on their children can be much more severe compared to their counterparts in developed countries. Findings of this study are also manifested differently from those of studies from developed countries in relation to children's experiences of economic hardship during the post-divorce period. Studies from both developing and developed countries attest to the low family income in maternal custody families following divorce. However, children in developing countries such as Botswana experience more severe economic hardships than their counterparts in developed countries because welfare programmes in the countries are less generous and the criteria used to determine eligibility exclude able-bodied unemployed mothers. The major policy implications arising from this study that need close attention therefore are: the need to improve the economic circumstances of children, the need to reduce if not eliminate children's exposure to parental violence, as well as the need to educate parents about how they can help their children to cope with the divorce process.

Through a re-examination of the issue of moral panics, with particular reference to sociological work around ideas of ‘risk’ and a ‘culture of fear’, this thesis attempts to examine the emergence of the social problem of ‘antisocial behaviour’. Situated in part within the changing political terrain of the 1990s, the emergence of the politics of behaviour is related to the diminution of the human subject and the development of a therapeutic culture - both trends helping to lay the basis for an engagement by the political elite with the ‘vulnerable public’. These developments are traced through the 1980s and 1990s to illustrate the construction of the problem of ‘antisocial behaviour’, with particular reference made to the shift in left-wing thought from radical to ‘real’. Using the example of the Hamilton curfew in the west of Scotland, empirical research with adults and young people, and media coverage of this safety initiative, are examined to explore the idea of a ‘culture of fear’. The legitimation of the curfew justified by various claimsmakers is examined to indicate the emergence of the new ‘amoral’ absolute of safety. The experience of the curfew for the local people is also analysed and the contradictions between local concerns and those of the authority are contrasted. Finally, through exploring the changing meaning of the term ‘antisocial behaviour’ and its growing politicisation, the emergence of this social problem is related to the deterministic and managerial form of politics that emerged at the end of the 20th century.

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