Intrinsic and instrumental cultural values have represented core rationales for public cultural policies in the UK. However, the increasing dominance of neoliberal logic in recent decades has increased the tension between these policy rationales, making the question of how to negotiate and define intrinsic cultural values a key concern for cultural practitioners. This thesis investigates the intellectual, historical and sociological basis of intrinsic and instrumental cultural values, encompassing the times of classical Greece to the present day. The role of cultural values in the emergence of UK post-war cultural policy is explored. This aims to reconnect implicit cultural policy assumptions with their conceptual roots, and offer a theoretical perspective from which to appraise contemporary cultural policy developments. The analysis of liberal humanist ideas is complemented with an assessment of the network of discourses informing instrumental policies, in particular, social inclusion and urban regeneration. The thesis suggests that the contemporary instrumental cultural policy approach represents a misappropriation of the liberal humanist cultural discourse. In the neoliberal policy framework cultural and social concerns are usurped by entrepreneurial, managerial and consumerist imperatives, as cultural policies become a social and economic panacea. The neoliberal instrumental framework undermines key principles of public provision, with detrimental effects on social equality, local communities and cultural programming. The theoretical part of this project is complemented by qualitative field research, which is based on semi-structured interviews with 25 cultural managers from across the UK cultural sector. The key finding of this study suggests that cultural managers deflect the tension between intrinsic and instrumental policy rationales by proposing a synthesis between intrinsic and social instrumental cultural values. This recognition allows cultural managers to incorporate competing cultural policy assumptions into a broad cultural political framework. Cultural managers justified cultural policy making by resorting to enlightenment reasoning, public responsibility, cultural democracy and funder's demands. The critique of instrumentalism was deflected in to an opposition to impact-driven and commercial values.

Starting with recent social theory accounts of individualisation, detraditionalisation and how governmentality discourses around enterprise and personal responsibility have shaped young people’s lives, the research examines the experiential nature of contemporary identity and ‘unmapped’ transitions to adulthood. Using in-depth interviews with 20 ‘twentysomethings’ graduates from southeast England it traces negotiations of leaving fulltime education and entering a labour market buoyed by pre-economic crisis optimism whereby they feel overwhelmed with opportunities, choice and uncertainty. Through narrative analysis the thesis charts the struggles and anxieties generated by the ambiguous structural position capitalism casts them into but which ‘demands’ enterprise and adaptability. Their circumstances, however, deny certainty or secure paths forward and generate existential trouble and, for some, mental pathologies as insecurity and self-doubt prevail. The thesis explores how after university individual expectations met indecision and uncertainty. Resulting anxiety was offset through ‘falling’ into jobs, ‘drifting’ and avoiding getting ‘stuck’ in ‘dangerous places’. Twentysomethings, without a secure profession or sense of security, developed new work values: either seeing it as a site of potential to realize themselves or rejecting it; preferring autonomy and authenticity outside of that domain. Identifying ‘critical moments’ in narratives showed how these could liberate desire but also subsume individual subjectivity to new forms of capitalist regulation. Lastly, it explores how ‘strategies’ of thinking uncertainty can stifle individual agency and ‘thinking too much’ generates emotional ambiguities, impeding decision-making compared to those that viewed uncertainty as a positive opportunity. These negotiations testify to the intensification of subjective difficulties in late capitalism and compromise a future-oriented, meaningful self that can adequately withstand them. Presumptions of cognitive responses to uncertainty are misplaced as ‘internal ambiguities’ arising from the weight of responsibility individuals now have for being themselves demonstrate the need to think and understand the contemporary self beyond the rigidity of (economic) rationalism.

This empirical study is based on interviews with 26 grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators, followers and Wehrmacht soldiers and examines how they remember their Nazi family histories and the Holocaust and the Third Reich more generally. Most studies of this ‘third generation’ are framed in the terms of purely constructivist theories of collective (Halbwachs [1925] 1992) or communicative and cultural memory (Assmann 1999) and thus cannot take account of present but unrecognized aspects of the past. In contrast, this thesis draws on the traumatic realism of Dominick LaCapra and others to examine questions concerning the memory and representation of extreme events and makes use of the psychoanalytic notions of working-through and acting-out/mourning and melancholia. It does so to distinguish between what is remembered and what remains dissociated, marginalized and excluded in the grandchildren’s accounts of their Nazi family pasts. It furthermore draws on this non-binary distinction to acknowledge the two interrelated dimensions that remembering the National Socialist past entails in ‘the double “post” of the postmodern and the post-Holocaust’ (Santner 1990: 18): 1) coming to terms with the absence of essential, unfractured and stable identities, i.e. with what Eric Santner and Dominick LaCapra term structural trauma and 2) mourning the suffering caused by the Nazis and countless ordinary Germans, i.e. what both theorists refer to as historical trauma. This study explores how these two dimensions intersect in the generation of the grandchildren to find that the structural dimension has been receding into the background since German unification. This implies that the cultural and official memory of the Holocaust is increasingly either used for the purposes of national identity building, and thus in a redemptive way, or rejected because it is considered to obstruct a return to an essential and pure national identity. In drawing on recent theories of shame, this thesis argues that efforts of ‘coming to terms’ with the NS past can only be ‘successful’ if working-through structural trauma is part of the process.

Drawing on data collected from nineteen qualitative semi-structured interviews with young lesbians and gay men, this thesis addresses the construction of sexual selves by those young people interviewed for this Ph.D. project. The interviews were conducted between January and December 2008. Participants were aged from sixteen to twenty-one, and all were living in the North-East of England at the time. This project is situated within what is considered to be a moment of social change in respect of the construction of lesbian and gay identities, notably due to the ‘normalization’ of those identities. This is a period in which the young lesbians and gay men interviewed for this project may be seen as growing up and coming out in. The study itself explores the ways in which the young people interviewed developed a sense of themselves as sexual, asking about the significance of lesbian and gay identities in the construction of those selves. Theoretically, a symbolic interactionist perspective is adopted, this project exploring the ‘everyday’ processes through which sexual selves were made and maintained. The data collected suggested a number of complex reflexive debates in which the young lesbians and gay men came to understand themselves as sexual. Addressing issues of desire and intimacy, the adoption of sexual identities, negotiations of sameness and difference, and the telling of sexual lives, this thesis discusses the complex, and at times paradoxical, ways in which lesbian and gay sexual selves were made.

This thesis is an original, empirical contribution to the topic of public participation in science and technology (S&T) decision-making. This thesis introduces the Citizens' POLIS (Participatory On-Line Interactive System): an innovative, multi-method, multi stage, hypermedia process for public participation in S&T decision-making. The purpose of the thesis is twofold: 1. to conduct and describe an actual public participation process, and to present the results (the participants' decisions) of this process in an accessible format for a wide variety of audiences (including public and policy audiences) 2. To serve also as a piece of social science research, and to analyse the results (the participant's deliberation) of this research in a critical manner so as to contribute to academic debates (i.e. for predominately academic audiences). This thesis has been borne of two stimuli: an observation about the limits of the existing literature and a consideration about the philosophical nature of public participation and of social science in general. It has been noted from the literature that there has been, since the early flourish in the 1970s, relatively few examples of public participation process organised, not by government or 'official' bodies, but by university-based social scientists. This thesis is informed by the Pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey. Dewey's Pragmatism has much to offer the study of public participation in S&T decision-making. It places an epistemic emphasis on experimentation on understanding something through trying something out. As such, the rationale for this thesis is that by organising a public participation process for oneself - i.e. experimenting with it - is the best way to understand what constitutes a 'good' public participation process. The results of this thesis are trifurcate, split across the substantive, theoretical and methodological. The substantive findings are related to what the citizens thought of the issue, in this case 'mobile telephones, risk and health'. Participants, it was found, were on the whole 'not overly concerned' by this issue. The theoretical findings contribute to academic understanding on prominent Science and Technology Studies (STS) concepts such as 'precaution', 'risk'; and 'expertise'. They seek to add a new perspective to our understandings - one provided by an informed and reasoned deliberation among citizens in a designated institutional space. The methodological findings contribute to our understanding of what constitutes a 'good' participation process - and serves as an empirical evaluation of a social-science led public participation process.

This thesis takes a critical approach to dominant ways of understanding leadership. The context for the study is UK local government where leadership has been popularised as a key feature of the latest phase of public sector modernisation. By drawing on the linguistic turn inherent in poststructuralism, and in particular the work of Jacques Derrida, the thesis challenges the orthodox assumption that leadership is a neutral and stable pre-linguistic phenomenon. In contrast it suggests that any given 'truth' of leadership can be seen as an attempt to control a linguistic system that is inherently undecidable. It is an attempt to 'write' the world in a particular way, which is then forgotten. The thesis begins by considering orthodox approaches to the role of language in theorising organising in general, and also reviews a range of alternative perspectives that have gone some way towards engaging more fully with its epistemological, ontological and normative-ethical deficits. It then justifies the distinctive contribution to these debates made by the radicalised view of language found in poststructuralism in general, and the work of Jacques Derrida in particular. A review of the leadership literature suggests that it is dominated by an assumption that language is representational. Leadership is also depicted unquestioningly as an individualistic and impartial phenomenon. It is thus argued that the field is ripe for a more detailed focus on the politics of the language of leadership. The implications of Derrida's work for reading and writing texts, and the (im)possibility of a poststructuralist methodology, are discussed in some detail. In particular, I highlight the need to reflexively problematise the textuality of the truth of this thesis. This is addressed by means of a deconstruction of the assessment criteria for a PhD thesis, which is included in the Appendix. An analysis of the linguistic decisions I made in order to stage an exemplary chapter betrays the discipline exerted by the academy. The main empirical work is based on a variety of texts from the case study organisation, including interviews with putative leaders, and formal documentation, such as a statement of leadership competences. These are subject to close reading in the spirit of what has been termed 'deconstruction', focusing on how and with what consequences the popularised truth of leadership is organised through language. Each reading concentrates in turn on one aspect of the leadership truth being promoted in the case study organization, namely leadership that is 'visible', 'strong', 'understanding' and 'shared'. I suggest that 'leadership' is an unsuccessful attempt to stabilize the play of language around individualism, specific aspects of which serve to privilege the productive power of the person of the office holder as part of local government modernisation. The study concludes by suggesting that the very instability of the truth offers opportunities for rethinking both leadership and public sector reform, in ways that are more open to the other.

In this PhD thesis I construct a method for the analysis of video game media based upon the concepts of affect and the body of relations. I explore the interrelationship between play and story in the video game medium through an approach that emphasizes the connected and contingent ideas of embodiment and emplacement, as defined by the cultural studies critic Chris Rojek (2007). I suggest that game play needs to be understood as simultaneously processural and relational. I argue that the body of relations can be used as a means to understand a player's embodiment and emplacement in relation to video game media. The body of relations is constituted by the physiological, autobiographical, cultural, social, materialist, energetic, and economic aspects through which video games and video game players are constructed. Each element of the body of relations exists in a synergistic, dynamic relationship with the other aspects of the body of relations. In talking about embodiment I utilise the concept of `affect', the drives and motivations that characterise all human endeavour. The version of affect I employ was originally outlined by Baruch Spinoza and has more recently been re-conceptualised by the contemporary neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2003). I connect this definition of affect with the phenomenological approach as outlined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2007) and the idea of the 'extended mind' of Andy Clark and David Chalmers (2002). The resultant method suggests the necessity of conceiving `configuration' - the process by which a player interacts and interprets video game media - in affective as well as relational terms (Aarseth 1997; Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Eskelinen 2001; Giddings 2007; Moulthrop 2004; Murray 2005; Woolgar 1991).

This thesis examines contemporary discourses of forgetting, and in particular the notion of `cultural amnesia'. I take as the object of my research the mobilization of amnesia in the humanities and social sciences during the last two decades, arguing that this concept does not have a consistent relation to cultural phenomena but rather names a perceived loss, absence or deficiency, and sometimes excess or surfeit, in knowledge and the articulation of knowledge. I explore what is at stake in these rulings of cultural and social deficiency, the values and frameworks that are invoked to authorize them, and the specific fact of their being set out in terms of memory. My method of historicizing the emergence of the concept of amnesia as a preferred means of figuring cultural deficiency is to trace in contemporary discourses of forgetting certain legacies of Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. I submit that Theodor W. Adorno's thought is construed by theorists working on the subject of memory as a significant antecedent for contemporary debates; specifically, he is regarded as having anticipated late twentieth-century anxieties about amnesia. I attend to such characterizations both by offering a fresh consideration of the function of memory-related concepts in Critical Theory and by questioning what is at stake in contemporary claims of a relationship to - as well as in frequent disavowals of - aspects of this current of thought. The chapters that follow examine: the discursive functions of the concept of amnesia in cultural and social theory; the relationship between the concepts of reification and forgetting; the processes through which the postwar period became recognized as a period of amnesia for the Holocaust; the place of the concept of amnesia in Fredric Jameson's thesis on postmodernism and in today's recollection of his contribution; and the return of the notion of `the forgotten' in the turn to ethics in poststructuralist literary theory.

With the exception of work conducted by Parker (1996a) research concerning identity construction, surveillance practices and power relations within the context of a professional sports academy institution appears limited. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with staff and athletes at two Premiership academies (one rugby, one football), a Foucauldian framework is utilised to provide a sociological analysis of disciplinary power and its impact upon the experiences and development of elite athletes. Foucault’s (1979) concept of panopticism is employed to explore the impact of surveillance as a disciplinary tool within the academies. The concept of surveillance as a disciplinary mechanism is furthered with the application of Latour’s (2005) ‘oligopticon’ and Deleuze and Guttari’s (2003) ‘rhizomatic' notion of surveillance networks. Foucault’s (1979; 1994b) normalising judgment and the concept of self and ‘lateral’ surveillance are employed to understand how the athletes internalise the values, attitudes and behaviours witnessed within the academies. An analysis of the regulation of the social space and time is accompanied by an application of Weber’s (1978) ‘domination by authority’ to explore the authoritative role of the coaches and their relationships with the players. The Foucauldian approach is accompanied by the work of Erving Goffman (1959; 1961a; 1961b) to understand how the role of ‘elite athlete’, bound by the notion of ‘professionalism’, is constructed and managed by the players on a daily basis. By adopting both a Foucauldian and interactionist perspective the thesis explores how the structure of the academies impacts upon the development and socialisation of those housed within them, whilst also maintaining focus upon the construction and management of identity and the presentation of ‘self’ in an institutional setting.

A model of reality derived from critical realism and historical sociology provides a sufficient account of Christian sexual morality and shows that powerful human agents are responsible for the normative regulation of non-procreative forms of sexual activity in the West. If we are to understand the sui generis powers of human agents, sociology must engage with a model of reality which adequately conceptualises an entwining synchronic and diachronic realm. It is only here, in a connexion of the theoretical and empirical, that an essential grasp of social phenomena at depth can be reached and a true appreciation of hegemony and resistance can be rendered explicit for the purposes of emancipatory social science. ‘Emancipation through explanation; explanation through emergence’ (Bhaskar, 2009, p.103); this model of reality shows that Christian sexual codes are based on an untenable moral positioning which confuses biological sequence with a social construction. Human dignity is not derived from procreative sex; social scientific inquiry shows that these moral truths are based on unsound normative avowals. Through a history of ‘norm circles’ (Elder-Vass, 2010, p.115), it is reasoned that the historical preservation of (hetero)sexuality is tantamount to the protection of Christian ecclesiastical norms. Morality should not be rendered on a biological sequence of occurrences and it is irresponsible to base human sexual codes on testimony that can be retroduced as a product of irrational human collectivities. There is nothing divine about the persecution on the basis of difference; it is the emergent consequence of a hegemonic history of ideas. This project traces that history and those groups whose normative proclamations break with prejudice and intolerance. Therefore, the power of political action must not be misjudged. If nothing else, it is where the sui generis powers of human agency are most lucid: a causal force which yields, in its own way, the argument that all forms of sexuality are moral.