Bob Dylan has had not only a far-reaching influence, through his music and art, on the music culture landscape since the 1960s, but he has also had a significant personal impact on millions of his fans and followers around the world. My research focuses on and engages with the strong emotional attachments and investments made by many Dylan fans to Dylan’s music, art and perceived persona, which is often further appropriated again by many of his fans into their own personal ways of thinking, values and feeling, at times, even related to making sense of place, identity and personal life events. My research highlights the distinctive, individual, lived-fan-experience, as described by Dylan fans through their self-reflexive perceptions and narrative descriptions of their own everyday, Dylan-fan-life experiences. Drawing from online Dylan fan narratives, oral-histories, personal interviews and interdisciplinary writings on Dylan, I adopt an ‘insider view’ of Dylan-fan-culture, showing in what ways these fans practise their fandom and how they make sense of, and even relate to the world around them through their appropriations of Dylan’s music, words and art forms. My research and methodological approach is one that focuses attention on the significance of the corporeal and subjective lived-fan-experience, elucidating the emotional and (sometimes) transcendent affects experienced by many fans and followers of Dylan through his music and often-cryptic song lyrics. The research also addresses a relevant and noticeable ‘gap’ in the current academic literature on Dylan fans and fandom. In order to access and understand the everyday life-experiences of the individual fans themselves, their subjective meanings, feelings, values and perspectives, I have employed apposite inter-disciplinary perspectives from sociology, music studies, narrative theory, ethnography and psychosocial studies to exemplify ‘frames’, or ‘perspectives’ of meaning, understanding and context, through which many Dylan fans ‘connect with’ Dylan, as well as with other Dylan fans. I am interested in the fan’s own, distinctive, ‘Dylan-influenced life-world’ and his or her personal practice and appropriations of Dylan fandom, not only as an explicit area of research, but also as a further exploration into the areas of inter-personal, human-lived-experience, meaning-making, and understanding. Methodologically, I have placed and emphasis on my Dylan fan research as a journey and discovery rather than a rigid undertaking of an applied fan theory, with the intention to illuminate the actual, lived-Dylan-fan-experience. My intention here is to open up discussion to the areas of the individual Dylan fan, as well as the related sensibilities of identity, affect, relationship, belonging, meaning, values and knowledge. I depict fandom in terms of what is important to the fans themselves — “illuminating the experiences of others in their own terms” (Jensen, 1992:26), presenting fans “not as problems, theories or data, but as real people trying to make sense of their lives in the late 20th century ... ” (Cavicchi, 1998:10). Through elaborating and giving recognition to the expressions of music and fandom and the lived-experiences of the Dylan fans themselves, which are, for them, the core, ‘real-life’ frameworks and ... positions through which their lived-realities can be spoken... (see McRobbie 1994:189), I am highlighting the subjectively lived-fan-experience of the Dylan fans and followers that have participated in my research. The Dylan fans and their fan narratives, particularly those that portray the everyday fan-life and include the oral- history of the particular fan, are, in my attempt to connect with the personal and core Dylan fan experience, indispensable and vital components of my research on fans and fandom as I believe they not only intimately display a clear and critical account of the ‘real-life’ experience of being a (Dylan) fan, but they also elucidate the emotional and ‘affective intensity’ (Grossberg, 1992:64) that lies at the heart of what it actually means to be a (Dylan) fan. I claim they are authentic descriptions of the lived-fan-experience by the fans themselves. My research examines and documents the role and affect that Dylan’s music plays in the meaning-making and identification processes that occur in the fan’s everyday-life, through the conduit of Dylan and his music; the thesis also focuses on the areas of Dylan fandom which illustrate the more personal and affective connections that are forged and maintained with ‘Bob’ by his dedicated fans and followers, and which, in my view, are particularly significant to the actual fan practices and ways these Dylan fans live out their lived-fan-experience. One research aim here is to gain more insight into the subjective and introspective areas of lived-experience and being such as, emotion, belief, sentiment and perception. Because of the very human context regarding the subject matter and personalised experience of Dylan fans and their fandom, I have felt compelled to underline that there is a necessary need to illuminate, retrieve and include the subjective, emotional, lived-fan-experience of the fans themselves. I have thus searched for and experimented with diverse, open-ended (academic and ‘non-academic’) approaches, methods and ways of writing that could and would fittingly apply, complement and assist in communicating and verbalising the Dylan-fan experiences. This has entailed a concentration and focus on the individual-fan-experience as well as experimenting with methodologies that would connect to the narratives and sensibilities of the Dylan fans who responded to my research enquiries – many of whom are active and participatory in their fandom – and many of these sharing their interests and fandom with the global Dylan fan community via the online networks and web pages dedicated to Dylan and his music. Explicitly, my research explores Bob Dylan fans who are a particular and current sample of a specific (wider and larger) group of music fans expressing their own, unique fan-life experiences through their own (fan) narratives. The Dylan fans in my research are describing, in their own words, the significance and meaning that Bob Dylan and his music have in their everyday lives, and, in narrative form, the fans are recounting the practices and appropriations of their fandom. For many Dylan fans, their fandom has been continuous for many, many years of their particular lifetime. A majority of the Dylan fans who have contributed to my research are also active and participatory ‘online’ fans. My research ‘data’ of the Dylan fan narrative texts, describing their own personal lived-fan-experiences, very much exemplify a plurality of voices – yet also demonstrate an individuality of experiences. One aim of my methodologies and writing is to attempt to disclose the richness and depth of the reflective, Dylan fan narratives (DFNs). My goal is to better understand, comprehend and more fully acknowledge the importance of the emotive and perceptive elements involved in Dylan fans’ fandom. My intentionality in the study of Dylan fans has not been to overly theorise, explain or try to account for the phenomenon of Dylan fandom, but rather to utilise and share the descriptive Dylan fan narratives of their accounts of the lived-Dylan-fan experiences, to gain a better understanding of the Dylan ‘lived-fan-experience’ — i.e., what it means to the Dylan fan to be a Dylan fan, (as well as what is it that the fans do to live out their fandom).

This thesis examines the provision of Scotland’s Water and Wastewater Services (WWS) and considers how regulation, governance and operations have changed since the turn of the century. The adoption and implementation of a policy framework which affords a key role to private sector participation in a formally public utility is a central focus of this thesis. The analysis developed below of the politics of water locates the Scottish case firmly within wider global processes: this involves studying the transmission of policy ideas from supra-national agencies to the Scottish national level, and the actors within these policy networks. Neoliberal globalisation provides some of the conceptual framing of this research, and the empirical substance of the thesis is drawn from fieldwork conducted at the United Nations (UN), European Union (EU), UK and Scottish levels. The research argues that the increasing corporatisation of WWS in Scotland observed over the span of this research is possible due to a specific configuration of structures and agents. EU directives, devolution and marketisation provide some of the structural conditions for water policy making. Epistemic water communities, comprising think tanks, policy entrepreneurs and regulators are key agents identified in this research promoting corporatisation. This thesis argues that corporatisation is steadily eroding the public nature of Scotland’s water system.

‘Home’ is widely used to describe a positive experience of a dwelling place (shelter). It is about a positive emotional connection to a dwelling place, feeling at ‘home’ in a dwelling place, where both physiological and psychological needs can be fulfilled. This portrayal of ‘home’, however, is not always how a dwelling place is experienced. A dwelling place can be a negative environment, i.e. ‘not-home’, or there may be no emotional attachment or investment in a dwelling place at all. Both circumstances receive little attention in the literature. This research explores the realities of ‘home’ by delving into the ‘home’ lives of seventeen individuals who had experienced a range of different housing situations, including recent homelessness, moving to a (resettlement) sole tenancy and then moving on from that tenancy. Participants were asked to recall their housing histories, from their first housing memory as a child up to the time of interviewing. For each housing episode, they were asked to describe the circumstances of their life at the time, for example relationships, employment and education. They were also asked to reflect on their housing experiences. Similarities and differences of experience are explored according to gender and type of housing situation. This research tells the story of lives characterised by housing and social instability, often triggered by a significant change in social context in childhood. As such, the fulfilment of both physiological and psychological needs was often constrained, and experiences of a dwelling place were more likely to be negative rather than positive, although ‘home’ could be found in the most challenging of circumstances, and often in the most unlikely of places. The participants’ constructions of ‘home’ and ‘not-home’ were largely focused on a singular feature, unlike the broader social constructions of ‘home’. ‘Not-home’ was characterised by physical insecurity, whereas ‘home’ was characterised by emotional security, with many characteristics mirroring human needs, of which ‘positive relationships’ was the most common feature. Many participants, however, had limited experience of, and/or struggled to forge and maintain, ‘positive relationships’, they lacked ‘social capital’, which meant having to navigate through a life of instability pretty much alone. As such, this research proposes a new narrative of ‘relationship poverty’, in which a lack of ‘positive relationships’ hinders the fulfilment of needs, and therefore the possibility of feeling at ‘home’ in any dwelling place.

Childhood liver disease is a rare chronic illness which up until a few decades ago had no known survivors. However, thanks to advances in medicine young people diagnosed with liver disease are now surviving into adulthood. To date, there has been very little research done in the United Kingdom exploring the impact of liver disease on young people’s lives and this thesis aimed to explore the impact of liver disease across different life transitions. In chapter 1, I provide an introduction to childhood liver disease. In chapter 2, I introduce liver disease within a historical context as having a stigmatising reputation due to the negative connotations associated with alcoholism. I explain Goffman’s (1963) Stigma theory and Bury’s (1982) concept of biographical disruption as useful tools for understanding experiences of health and illness. In chapter 3, I address the methodology used; a social-constructionist perspective, semi-structured interviews with twenty 14-17 year olds, twenty-one 18 – 26 year olds and twenty-one parents about their lives living with liver disease and the use of thematic analysis to analyse the data. In light of the transition from paediatric to adult services, Chapter 4 contributes towards the literature on health communication and stigma by demonstrating how young people can make the transition into a stigmatised space. Chapter 5 demonstrates the complex ways in which alcohol can be stigmatising for young people living with liver disease due to ambivalent societal attitudes and how experiences of some South Asian participants can differ. Chapter 6 contributes to the childhood literature on biographical disruption by demonstrating how liver disease disrupts various transitions young people make and how parents can experience vicarious biographical disruption. In the final chapter I reflect on the contributions my thesis has made to the literature on childhood liver disease.

Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (PM) highlights fundamental social inequalities deriving from unequal distribution of resources and power within democratic societies and challenges commonly held notions that media within the capitalist democracies are liberal and dedicated to the public interest. This research makes important contributions to scholarly literature available on the PM, unpacking reasons why the PM represents a critical sociological approach to understanding media and society, explores the model’s potential within the sociological field. The dissertation advances a contemporary discourse on the methodological techniques utilized in applying the model and proposes it be officially synthesized with Critical Discourse Analysis. The study then applies the PM to Canadian newspaper coverage of the near genocide in East Timor. Following this, the study demonstrates the ease with which traditional political-economic analysis may incorporate the PM by assessing ways in which the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (formerly the Worker’s Compensation Board) operates as a power structure within Canadian society and by utilizing the PM to advance a preliminary assessment of the ideological formation of the WCB/WSIB in the Canadian news media.

International student mobility had undergone considerable growth over the last thirty years (OECD, 2015). Students who travel to different countries to study can be seen as an important group of people who develop the internationalisation of higher education. One type of student mobility, credit mobility, has come to assume greater importance recently. The number of credit mobile students, that is students who undertake a period studying or working abroad during their degree, has increased (European Commission, 2016). However, whilst credit mobile students form only a small minority of the student population, there has been a lack of research with young people who choose to participate in these programmes. This PhD research is a qualitative project that explores the motivations, experiences and aspirations of UK students who have spent either a semester or year abroad. Firstly, this study explores the backgrounds and biographies of these students who choose to travel abroad for higher education. Secondly, the study analyses the experiences of these students during their stay overseas. And thirdly, careful attention is paid to the aspirations of these students after they have returned from their period abroad. In this research, I demonstrate how young people attach significant value to student mobility by discussing it as an acceptable form of ‘authentic’ travel. Discourses around acceptable forms of travel, I show, stem from the habitus (Bourdieu 1986) of these young people. Secondly, I provide the first in-depth analysis of the key experiences of these students whilst abroad. Drawing on John Urry’s (2002) concept of the tourist gaze, I outline how new experiences away from home create a sense of adventure and novelty. Lastly, this research makes an original contribution to knowledge by developing our understanding of the aspirations of students who have completed a period abroad. Using Bauman’s (1996, 1998) theory of ‘tourism’, I demonstrate how young people who have studied and/or worked abroad become seduced by imagined mobile futures. I show how, for these students, their experiences create desires to continue living mobile lifestyles.

Some part of this study was covered by Dr. S.O. Adeyeye. His work published in 1978 concentrated on a general overview of cooperative movement in Nigeria. Since his work, there has been remarkably little or no research into the development of Cocoa Marketing Cooperatives' policies. A review of this study shows that Adeyeye carried out a historical work which did not account for the emergence of cocoa marketing policies during the early years of self government in Nigeria and what effect these policies had on the cooperatives' ability to practice their principle of democratic control. Our study is an attempt to fill in this important part of Marketing Coperatives' history. The theoretical part reviewed the conceptual framework of cooperative ideals and principles which enabled us to examine the operational policies of Cocoa Marketing Cooperatives in Nigeria, against the cooperatives' principle of democratic control. Our finding is that the adoption of cooperatives' principle of democratic control was not encouraged by the Governments who took the responsibility of promoting cooperatives in Nigeria, There was no provision for basic training in democratic procedure which is essential for any cooperative to be an independent viable organisation. The absence of cooperative education culminated in corruption and inefficient administration of the cooperative which was widespread over the period under study. Finally, the study acknowledges the difficulties of applying the cooperative principles in a real world, but recommended that it is of the utmost importance that cooperative organisations as they try to survive in a real world, should find new ways of putting principles into practice because the principles enable any cooperative organisation to fulfil the basis of its formation, that is, the promotion of members interests. The principle of democratic control to some extent indicates who the members are and allows them the right to determine for themselves what is their common need and how the need would mutually be met. The idea of the cooperative was born out of ideally felt need of members. It is a means of self help through mutual help, hence members should participate actively in all activities of the organization. The methodology applied to this study includes descriptive analysis, field work, archival and documentary research, informal discussion and the author's personal observations.

This thesis offers an investigation into the social construction and social control of the asylum 'problem' in the UK. It explores how asylum came to be constructed as a key social problem, how this process of problematisation influenced the development of a range of social control strategies and how their imposition has shaped subsequent developments. Asylum has been associated with a range of contemporary social problems and has become an issue through which wider insecurities are articulated. This study is based upon qualitative research combining semi-structured interviews with a range of actors involved in various ways in the asylum debate, along with documentary analysis of materials integral to the construction of the issue. This involved the analysis of accounts and the types of discourses that have been used to promote particular knowledge claims regarding asylum seekers. The findings of this research show that the problematic status of asylum is not an inevitable consequence of large numbers of recorded applications for political asylum, as is often postulated. Rather, it is the result of a range of claims making activities and interventions from a diverse body of actors and institutions. Integral to these findings is that the social control responses implemented to provide solutions to the problem themselves further contribute to asylum being viewed problematically. As such, the findings of this research are situated within a wider body of academic literature, including social constructionism and social control. The analysis of this study builds upon such works to provide an insight into how it is that contemporary social problems are constructed and how this can be directly related to the specific conditions of late-modern societies.

Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a new model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other without a traditional hierarchical organisation to produce common and public goods, such as Wikipedia or GNU/Linux. There is a need to understand how these communities govern and organise themselves as they grow in size and complexity. Following an ethnographic approach, this thesis explores the emergence of and changes in the organisational structures and processes of Drupal: a large and global CBBP community which, over the past fifteen years, has coordinated the work of hundreds of thousands of participants to develop a technology which currently powers more than 2% of websites worldwide. Firstly, this thesis questions and studies the notion of contribution in CBPP communities, arguing that contribution should be understood as a set of meanings which are under constant negotiation between the participants according to their own internal logics of value. Following a constructivist approach, it shows the relevance played by less visible contribution activities such as the organisation of events. Secondly, this thesis explores the emergence and inner workings of the socio-technical systems which surround contributions related to the development of projects and the organisation of events. Two intertwined organisational dynamics were identified: formalisation in the organisational processes and decentralisation in decision-making. Finally, this thesis brings together the empirical data from this exploration of socio-technical systems with previous literature on self-organisation and organisation studies, to offer an account of how the organisational changes resulted in the emergence of a polycentric model of governance, in which different forms of organisation varying in their degree of organicity co-exist and influence each other.

This thesis explores young people’s perceptions and practices surrounding ‘youth sexting’, particularly regarding privacy and consent. Youth sexting – involving the production and exchange of sexual images or messages via mobile phones and other communication technologies – has attracted media attention, public concern, and research and policy focus for some time, particularly regarding the perceived harmful nature of the practice (Crofts et al., 2015). This thesis situates harmful practices in terms of breaches of privacy and consent. The research is used to advocate for progressive, harm-reduction approaches to responding to youth sexting that centralise ethics, justice and equality, and give rights to sexual and bodily expression and exploration, as well as freedom from harm. Group and one-to-one interviews with young people revealed narratives of individualism and responsibilisation regarding harmful sexting practices. Intertwined were moralising discourses about harm-avoidance, which underpinned a demarcation of deserving and undeserving victims, and promoted victim-blaming. Analyses revealed however, that risk and harm was not inherent to sexting and was shaped by norms and standards surrounding gender and sexuality, and local peer group dynamics and hierarchies. The designation of some forms of bodily and sexual expression as shameful and illegitimate shaped harmful practices and were incorporated into young people’s self-concepts in ways that both reproduced and resisted established systems of meaning. The findings suggest that rather than being caused by technology, youth sexting should be understood as a complex, negotiated practice situated within young people’s peer, digital, relational, and sexual cultures. The thesis explores young people’s perspectives on addressing youth sexting, and concludes by emphasising the need to disrupt and challenge the meanings underpinning shame and stigma, and the responsibilisation of individuals to deal with inequality and harm.