The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationships between health, place and inequality. The research focuses on area-based public health policy in a deprived neighbourhood - ‘Kingsland’ - in central England. Kingsland attracted a number of area-based initiatives (ABIs) with the overarching aim of reducing national inequality. Between 2000-2010, significant resources were invested in local projects to promote ‘healthy’ living: most notably through physical activity (PA). Kingsland became a relatively novel place: a deprived area with numerous PA facilities and services. A central research concern is how far these services, particularly a new local leisure centre, impact the lives of people of low-SES. Localities transformed in ways designed to promote ‘healthy’ living are conceptualised as ‘bio-spheres of risk-aversion’ and assessed for their potential to address health inequalities. This research took place two years after the ABIs were implemented. Data primarily come from sixteen months of ethnographic observation, but also includes interviews, a survey, and document analysis. Relationships between health, place and inequality are considered within the wider context of neoliberal dominance. The example of the global obesity ‘epidemic’ illustrates the ways in which neoliberal ideology promotes individual responsibility. The ‘oppressive’ and ‘emancipatory’ potentials of neoliberal health policy are explored in relation to the ‘choices’ and embodied experiences of people of low-SES. This research demonstrates that neoliberal policies not only have harmful individual consequences, they also exacerbate structural inequalities. Specifically, analysis indicates the potential for ABIs to exacerbate health inequalities. Findings reveal some direct, detrimental impacts on people of low-SES and highlight the importance of equitable health provision. This thesis makes an original contribution by revealing the paradoxical effects that health policy can have on relationships between health, place and inequality. It offers a set of novel theoretical concepts to better understand this paradox and to guard against it.

This thesis examines the experiences of young women participating in anarchist and environmental activism within the UK as a means of exploring the relationship between youth, gender, and political participation in a postfeminist, neoliberal context. Recent scholarship has identified young women as the ideal subjects of neoliberalism, where flexibility and reflexivity are prized and rewarded. Young women have been presented with new subject positions and forms of citizenship engagement but these are, for the most part, individualised and depoliticised. Concurrently theorists have warned of an impending crisis of democracy precipitated by youth political disengagement, while governments have condemned ‘incorrect’ or ‘disruptive’ forms of youth civic engagement. This thesis intervenes in these debates by exploring the significance of social movement participation for young women in contributing to their political agency and gendered subjectivity. The research utilised a qualitative feminist methodology, analysing data from 20 semi-structured interviews, three diaries completed by interview participants, and 200 hours of participant observation. The thesis finds little evidence that young activist women are individualised or disengaged. Instead, their participation in collective action and their identification as feminists contribute to my theorisation of them as ‘wilful women’, whose conscious, reflexive political engagement marks them apart from individualised neoliberal subjects. Through a relational, feminist political agency they are able to reframe femininity as active and compassionate rather than passive and compliant, and engage politically on this basis. The study also finds that the non-hierarchical organisational structures of activist organisations effectively contribute to the creation of anti-oppressive pedagogic strategies for confronting inequality within activist cultures. This thesis makes an original contribution by developing a set of theoretical concepts that enable an understanding of the means by which young activist women construct dissident, wilful gendered subjectivities that confront sexism and inequality both within their own activist communities and within society at large.

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This multi-method study is about small-scale illegal production of hashish in a mountainous village in north-eastern part of Kyrgyzstan. It demonstrates that drug production in Toolu is the result of a combination of factors: 1) economic transformations undertaken during the 1990s in most of the post-Soviet countries and the difficult conditions under which the agricultural mountainous economy operated as a result; 2) the legitimation of hashish making by drug producing community due to perceived injustice towards people who had to survive without any state support while the elite was corrupted and governance of drug control was inconsistent; and 3) the integration of illegal hashish production to the local economy and culture. My findings derive from extensive fieldwork based on a case study of Toolu village, located in the Tyup region of Issyk-Kul oblast. I spent nine months in Tyup, between 2009 and 2010 undertaking a mixed method study in which I collected sixty semi-structured interviews with farmers, two interviews with the representatives of law enforcement, made a participant observation of farmer’s livelihoods, and conducted a survey of 147 households. The study fills the gap in the drug market literature by presenting the case of hashish production that started as an economic necessity but was pushed into the sphere of traditional and cultural practices that helped the local population to legitimate this illegal activity. It further contributes to the debate on drug markets presenting the drug producers as farmers that deal with the economic, social and political issues as any other citizens of the country. Hashish production was not part of the agricultural activities of the local population of the region during Soviet times but became one of a number of strategies for survival and later one of the entrepreneurial diversifications of income generating strategies. Farmers had to become entrepreneurial and diversify their income to overcome the problems encountered with farm insolvency due to the neoliberalization of the economy. However, as farmers were not part of any organized groups they needed to legitimate their illegal activity. I argue that this was possible through claiming that they had a right to subsistence and right to protection from the state, which was denied to them follwoing the collapse of Soviet Union. My case study also demonstrates that cases of corruption among elites deepened the distrust of the state, and lack of governance of drug production by law enforcement contributed further to the legitimation of illegal hashish production. The moral economy of hashish production would not be possible without adopting some informal control mechanisms to drug producers. I also argue that due to local demands to be part of the community, hashish is also used as a source of support. My findings provide detailed discussion of the use of drug money in enriching and maintaining the social community. Overall, this ethnographic study of hashish production in one of the regions of Kyrgyzstan provides rich details of how illegal hashish economy contributes to the legal agricultural economy and culture in the post-Soviet region.

Malnourishment in children has been a cause of governmental concern for over a century. However, the nature of malnourishment has shifted during the 20th Century. Around the time of the Boer War there were concerns that children were not receiving sufficient nutrition which caused under-nourishment whereas today the concern is related to the opposite end of the malnourishment spectrum with increasing numbers of children suffering from over-nourishment. In the early 20th Century the government introduced legislation to allow Local Education Authorities to provide school meals to under-nourished children in order to prevent associated malaise and allow them to benefit from the education they were receiving. School meal legislation has been altered and amended over the course of a century to shape our children’s bodies and minds. This thesis analyses whether government policies for school meals have, since their introduction in 1906 in England, had a genuine impact (either positive or negative) on observed, longitudinal changes in childhood nutrition. The thesis assesses a series of cross-sectional data for children’s height and weight collected in the UK from 1908 to the present in order to estimate changes in malnutrition (including underweight, overweight, and obesity) for UK children. This quantitative analysis is contextualised with qualitative data on the development of legislation relating to school meals and interviews/focus groups with school cooks in an attempt to identify potential relationships. The thesis discusses observed fluctuations in the nutritional status of children in relation to the changes in government legislation on school meals and contextualises the findings with the wider literature. The findings suggest that fluctuations in child malnourishment are not easily attributed to changes in one category of government legislation. However, when placed into the context of wider sociological changes the increasing prevalence of childhood obesity seen from the mid-1980s appears to be strongly associated with changes in government welfare provision, of which the school meal forms a small part. Moreover, this thesis suggests that contemporary associations between low socio-economic status and overweight and obesity prevalence may not have manifested until after 1994. Children who received a free school meal between 1972 and 1994 had, on average, a lower body mass index (BMI) Z-score than children who had a paid school meal, had a packed lunch or went home. Additionally, there were strong relationships between low BMI Z-score and parent’s social class. Overweight and obesity in children rose sharply from the mid-1980s onwards during a period of legislative changes which, according to school cooks, significantly affected the quality of school meals. However, it was not possible to directly attribute these rises to the changes in school meal legislation. Although the school meal has been used as a tool for governing child malnourishment it is not possible to untangle rises in obesity and overweight from wider sociological phenomena which may have also influenced these increases. This thesis suggests that while legislation for school meals may be protective against under-nourishment in children it is currently unclear to what extent this affects childhood obesity.

This thesis is an ethnographic account of smoking practices in a former mining village in North East England which I call Sleetburn. My aim was to understand the link between poverty and smoking but my fieldwork led to wider issues of class and stigma as it became clear that smoking took place in the context of wider values. I start by contrasting prevailing values in the village with the middle-class privileging of social and geographical mobility, the denigration of close family ties as atavistic and the importance attached to ‘raising aspirations’ and discuss how local people negotiated these contradictions. Sleetburn had a long history of mobility but circular ‘there and back again’ mobilities were misrecognised as stasis. A close network of family and friends provided practical support, extending in space across neighbouring villages and across time in layers of memory which overlaid the visible space. Historically informed expectations of jobs were low; people had ordinary aspirations to happiness and security and reclaimed agency by carving out spaces of autonomy at work. Education provided little reward historically and was therefore ‘something to get through’. Imaginable futures depended on what was visible locally; social mobility through education led to geographical mobility and was easily obscured or coloured by emotional loss. In this wider context, smoking carried little stigma but was tied into emotional memories of parental smoking which made it difficult for continuing and indeed ex-smokers to distance themselves definitively from cigarettes, with relapses common even after many years cessation. The two main factors which facilitated smoking cessation were mobility, which created distance from parental memories, and urgent health threats to self or family which remade the once friendly and familiar cigarette as alien and dangerous. Those who continued to smoke were not so much ‘hardened smokers’ as discouraged quitters in a community where chronic ill-health (often linked to occupational exposures) was a commonplace for smokers and never-smokers alike.

This thesis emerges from a critical event; the Asian tsunami of 26th December 2004. It takes an analytical approach to narratives of everyday life events in two coastal communities in southern Sri Lanka. The villages of Po and Thomale, were both severely affected by the tsunami. They received varied and contrasting outside attention and aid in the aftermath of the disaster as a consequence of their different geographic and social characteristics. The thesis draws on my extended contact with these two communities over almost a decade, in the beginning as an aid worker, and later as a field-researcher. This extended contact has enabled me to explore the transformations in social and spatial organisation in the two communities, from the immediate aftermath of the tsunami up to the present day. Whilst Po benefited from numerous projects, aid, and development, as a result of its tourism and capital-generating potential, the fishing village of Thomale was largely side-lined. The characteristics of Po, and the changes that took place post-tsunami, promoted ‘outsider’ driven development and the appropriation of local land, by both foreign and Sinhalese entrepreneurs. The thesis answers two key questions: a) what strategies have locals developed to counteract this uninvited intrusion into their community? And b) how have the events and developments that have transpired as a result of the tsunami, affected locals’ ‘sense of place’ and their social relations? In tackling these questions, I explore local interpretations of kin and community, the role of kin-based factions, and the subsequent reconfiguration of a sense of place around novel kin-based social networks. Narratives of place are also explored, and in this context the thesis outlines how ritual is utilised to voice individual and communal concerns over the changing face and politics of place, as well as exploring violent conflicts that arise as a result of seemingly misplaced power relations, and identity. Ultimately, this thesis presents a segment of an on-going narrative of the relationship between people, politics and place in the aftermath of a disaster.

Companies surviving the 1980s world recession have needed regularly to manage change in order to compete effectively in turbulent and often global markets. Frequently, such change has challenged the existing organization and the system of industrial relations. Today, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the more successful companies operate with more contingent forms of organization. Such forms of organization have few layers, encourage empowerment, multiskilling and job enrichment and incorporate a wide range of Japanese manufacturing techniques and personnel systems. The impact of these changes on working practices, together with continuing high unemployment and a marked decline in union membership and influence, have influenced a move from industrial relations towards human resource management approaches. This transformation has been accelerated as businesses have both realised gains and experienced further recession in the early 1990s. This case study examines how a steel company managed a complex cultural and structural change programme. Change commenced in the 1980s recession when benchmarking activities suggested that more successful steel companies invested in both capital and people. Since then, the company has invested in people through numerous programmes including continuous training, vocational education qualifications, job flexibility and mobility, delayering, standard and target setting, appraisal, performance pay to recognise individual behaviour and contribution, and management training to improve leadership and the company's ability to manage change. By 1988, the company had adopted an HRM approach. In 1992, the senior management introduced a 'harder' form of HRM by establishing a fully single status company and derecognizing the four trade unions. The company has become an exemplar of HRM. This case study adds to the HRM debate by demonstrating through a wide range of measures that HRM has given the company scope for high performance.

Opponents of secondary re-organization have claimed that certain features of school organization associated with comprehensives have contributed toward declining standards of education. Teaching in such schools has been subjected to considerable criticism yet not received the research it would appear to warrant. The two schools chosen for study were representative of those involved in the controversy, and a phenomenological approach was adopted which attempted to examine the impact of comprehensive organization on teaching. Use of tape-recorded interviews as "accounts", complemented by classroom observation, provided the method for establishing the sense of social structure appropriate to competent teachers. Competence was regarded as a shared method for interpreting events, and competence as a teacher appeared to owe more to "control" in the class-room than the inculcation of knowledge per se. Competent teachers were expected to achieve this "control" without the aid of others and were considered responsible for the "control" of their own classrooms. Classroom teaching, however, rarely became observable to colleagues, and to assess the "control" of others teachers had to rely on publicly available indicators which transcended the isolation of the setting-principally noise. "Control", that is, was a socially organized phenomenon which was inferred rather than observed. Teaching competence, then, appeared to be based on "control" which was indicated by the maintenance of quiet orderliness in the classroom without recourse to outside help. This "control" reflected two fundamental aspects of the teaching: and the autonomy of classroom teaching. Threats to either posed practical problems for teachers because they jeopardized the appearance of "control". Although teachers felt that certain features of school organization associated with comprehensives posed added difficulties of "control", re-organization itself little affected the basic task structure of teaching which stemmed from the isolation and autonomy of the classroom situation.