This thesis examines values-based and interests-based arguments around potentially disputed developments in genomics and the relevant policy and regulatory responses. Developments in genomics may result in disputes about the prospects and problems around them, with different stakeholders bringing a range of values and interests to bear on the many actions and decisions concerning this subject. This thesis contends that the relationship between values-based and interests-based arguments and the technical and social contexts reveal unique alignments or textures to different applications of genomics, an understanding of which will contribute to development of appropriate policy responses. Three case studies are examined: genetically modified and cloned animals, population biobanks and stem cell research. For each, a detailed examination is made of the values-based and interests-based arguments advanced and the relevant policy and regulatory responses. From these analyses, it is argued that the superficially simple categorisation into values-based and interests-based arguments conceals a great deal of complexity but also reveals important features about each case studied. The dynamics of each case varies with predominantly interests-based arguments in biobanks, values-based arguments in stem cell research and values-based arguments conflicting with interests-based arguments in the case of cloned animals. These data imply that each application of genomics should be examined in its specific context. This thesis contributes to a theoretical understanding of disputes by applying a values-interests approach to a range of different contexts, demonstrating that the approach has merit in terms of conceptualising the main features of potentially contested situations. This thesis provides evidence that further examination of arguments identifies three different categories of values-based arguments and three aspects of interests-based arguments. This conclusion points to an increased role for careful examination of arguments with a view to clarifying assumptions about the nature of the issues at stake to enable more discriminating policy responses.

With their significant impact upon economic, social and political spheres, videogames are a crucial site of sociological research. The spaces in which videogames are played are often referred to by generic terms which does not adequately incorporate or convey the experiences of those who use technologies as a means of communication, work and play. Placing Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1991/1974) as its cornerstone, this thesis examines how Lefebvre's conceptual typology of space can be used as a tool of analysis, arguing that the experiences of postindustrial society are concurrent to experiences of space transient and in flux.

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This thesis is a sociological examination of racist humour that uses a) linguistic models of humour to highlight how the mechanisms of humour work rhetorically, and b) the sociological theories of Zygmunt Bauman on the characteristics of order-building discourse in modernity and postmodernity. These ideas are applied to four specific modes or case studies of racist humour to show how it impacts on modem and postmodern discourse. In my first case study, embodied racist humour, a derivative of biological racism, is identified as a racism primarily aimed at black people in the US context, by expressing racist dichotomies and images of the removal of the black `other'. Second, culturally racist humour is shown to have a similar impact on racism aimed at British Asians. Third, the humour of black and Asian comics is examined as a key site of resistance to embodied and cultural racism, but one that is fraught with problems associated with the rearticulation of racism. Lastly, in the postmodern period, liquid racism is highlighted as an increasingly confused and diluted type. Throughout the thesis, racist humour is shown to have a series of interconnected roles in supporting the meaning systems of racism. Overall, the thesis provides a means of analysing racist humour, and in so doing moves sociological humour studies beyond accounts that fail to negotiate the particular semantic frame and functions of racist humour.

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In its broadest ambition, sociology aims to better understand the human predicament. Despite this, modem social theory is grounded in a decidedly Western disciplinary rationality-modernist, developmentalist, naturalistic, and secular. Yet, the fact is that human beings exist in multiple diverse traditions, including transcendental, authentic/liberative, and religious. A paradigm of comparative social theory, then, would enlarge our craft's theoretical apparatus: A 'hermeneutic cultural positivity' model that has both intercivilisational and existentialistic aspects will put at sociology's disposal a vast array of comparative and analytical concepts to address contemporary global issues in an intercivilisational dialogue. Specifically, social theory which considers major problems in relation to existential questions reveals commonalities among Western and Muslim intellectual traditions. The major elements of 'social' theory-human nature, community, religion, the sacred, the secular, and authenticity-are here deconstructed from both perspectives, as understood by two representative theorists from each tradition, who all agree that modernity poses both a possibility for and a danger to human existence. Goffman's sociology is based on symbolic and discursive social theory, while Giddens defends social democracy and the 'Third Way.' Despite these theorists' absence of transcendental consciousness both focus strongly on ex~stential concerns (as�?· distinguished from religious concerns). By the same token, in the Muslim tradition of liberation theology, existential concerns are equally crucial social issues in Iqbal's modern traditionalism and Shariati's post-colonial Islamist modernisation. Considering these four thinkers within this comparative model can create a new vision for tackling world problems by demonstrating their respective theories' inherent strengths and weaknesses-Le., their potential contributions. Without understanding both intellectual traditions in these seemingly different civilizations, we are not able to reach the constructive understanding at the basis of meaningful co-existence. On the modem global stage, reinventing the sociological tradition on an intercivilisational basis can bring fundamental change to intellectual engagements. Rather than incommensurable agents imprisoned by our mental and social structures, we can choose between disagreement, clash, confrontation, and dialogue.

A growing body of empirical research reveals that implicit biases manifest in many of our actions. It has been suggested that there is a fundamental distinction between (i) our implicit biases and the actions which they influence; and (ii) attitudes such as beliefs that we attribute to persons and think of as agential, and the actions that they guide. Call these the ‘substantial distinction’ (SD) views. According to SD arguments, implicit biases are distinguishable from beliefs and other agential attitudes, on the basis of one or more of the following features: • We lack awareness of our implicit biases. • Implicit biases are associative, and so they lack the appropriate structure to enter into logical inference relations with mental states that have propositional content. • We lack control over the formation of our implicit biases, and over the execution of our implicitly biased actions. Some SD theorists have further argued that because implicit biases and implicitly biased actions lack one or more of the above features, they are not appropriate candidates for normative evaluation, and we are therefore not morally responsible for our implicitly biased actions. I reject the central claim of the SD view, namely, that there is a fundamental distinction between implicit biases and agential attitudes such as beliefs, and the actions guided by each. I argue that at least some of our implicit biases are propositional in structure, and that we have the same kind of awareness and control of at least some of them, and the actions that they guide, as we do of at least some of our beliefs, and belief-guided actions. As a result, there is no principled way in which to maintain the required substantial distinction. Having shown that the SD view fails, I develop a ‘continuum thesis’ on which implicit biases and beliefs are not fundamentally discontinuous, and at least some of the former share all of their characteristics with at least some of the latter. I argue that this account is best able to accommodate the findings on implicit bias. According to the continuum thesis, we have a sufficient level of awareness and control such that at least some implicit biases are agential, and at least sometimes, agents are morally responsible for implicitly biased actions.

This thesis addresses the sociology of the body and of governance by presenting empirical material, in the form of both textual and interview data, drawn from a case study of cervical screening. This material is used to examine women's experiences and their sense of embodiment in the context of cervical screening participation. The thesis argues that cervical screening, as a form of prevention, represents a new type of social regulation in late modernity. This argument challenges current understandings of the relationship between the body, gender and health. First, the thesis poses a distinction between the body and the concept of embodiment and argues that conflation of these two concepts obscures social processes and experiences. Second, the thesis addresses tensions between notion of citizenship and surveillance in the literature which focuses on bodily regulation and issues of health. Third, the thesis reveals previously obscured aspects of this experience, such as risk, obligation, trust and entitlement.

By highlighting the embedded forms of social life contemporary debates in Social Sciences have made it necessary to newly explore two major binary oppositions, that of nature and society and structure and individual. In the current atmosphere of tension between constructivist and materialistic positions, it is fundamental to offer detailed analysis and definition of these core issues. The aim of this thesis is to explore new understandings of social constructionist accounts by focusing on sex/gender identity and critically comparing two constructionist views: Bourdieu’s <i>Theory of Practice </i>and its core notion of <i>habitus, </i>and <i>The Performative Theory of Social Institutions, </i>the social theory of the <i>Strong Programme, </i>(a sociology of scientific knowledge developed by Barnes, Bloor). <i>The Performance Theory </i>claims that the realm of the ‘social’ is the result of the constitutive nature of <i>self-referential performing practices </i>(verbal or otherwise). Its basic tenet that social life is a <i>collective achievement, </i>that is, the result of the continuing realignment among individuals which occurs in the interactive, and its emphasis on the performative nature of the individuals’ self-referential inductive inferences, stands in stark contrast with that of Bourdieu’s notion of the stability of the habitus as the internalization of pre-existing macro-structures. I argue that whereas Bourdieu’s novelty is that he locates social effects at the level of the body, his theory, by envisaging this socialization as a Parsonian model of early internalization resulting in permanent fixidity, suffers from a macro-structuralist bais of ‘externality’. <i>The Performance Theory, </i>although not specifically concerned with the body, provides an analytical framework which resolves Bourdieu’s tacit reification of the ‘social’. By introducing Kusch’s notion of Artificial Kinds, closely connected with the main tenets of the performative theory of social institution, I develop a definition of an embodied habitus as a ‘social institution’, that is, as the result of the constitutive power of the dispositions, as <i>a self-referential collective achievement, </i>and to achieve a more accomplished synthesis of the dualisms individual/structure and nature/society.