The starting point for this research is the importance of narrative in our life. Many scholars regard it as the organising principle by which people organise their experience in, knowledge about, and transaction in the social world. Indeed, authoring and co-authoring narratives have been cited as among the most important communicative actions in an organisation. This study adapts Fisher's (1987) narrative paradigm to explore how organisational members view their reality. Human beings in this view are seen as homo narrans --- both as storytellers and objects of storytelling. Narratives act as vehicles through which organisational members can offer definitions and explanations of their work life. They act as a metacode transmitting shared meaning. As a consequence, members establish definitional boundaries through which they judge and understand the situation at hand. Recognising the limitations of this paradigm, the analysis in this research study adds Pacanowsky's (1983) application of Geertz's (1973) cultural insights to organisational life. To Pacanowsky, organisational culture is the residue of employees' performances. To Geertz, such performances are an ensemble of texts. In summary, the following main perspectives informed this research: a) Human beings are storytellers b) Culture is the root metaphor of organisational life c) Organisational culture is a text d) A text must be read and interpreted in the meaning-making process. To reflect this theoretical perspective, hermeneutics was used as the method of inquiry. A series of in-depth interviews were conducted over time to gather data on the use and content of narratives within a Malaysian organisation, Palmyra. During a period of change, stories and narratives are often 'emotional' in nature. This is understandable as change brings a new arrangement of reality. At Palmyra, an organisation that deals primarily with language and literature, the narratives and stories revolved around what was called the 're-inventing programme'. Besides repositioning staff and offices, management aimed to 'bring religion back to the workplace' and this became an important agenda in the whole planned change. This approach to organisational change views change as a matter of body, mind and soul. The stability of nafs (the inner self) is regarded as important, and organisation is seen as a moral problem. This research shows how this approach can be understood in the light of the tawhidic paradigm. The implementation of the change programme brought many important undercurrents (shadows) to the fore, and these were reflected in the narratives, which emerged. Tribalism or parochialism was one of them. The organisation members who felt displaced responded through various means. Among others, they utilised the power of literature and hidden transcripts. Many ancient and classicaltexts were given new interpretations. Various forms of halus (refined and indirect) were identified as ways of communicating their unhappiness. While sharing many of the themes, which can be identified in European and American research on organisational change, these forms of resistance used methods and symbols, which were distinctively Malaysian. This research study makes a number of important contributions to organisational communication studies. In particular:1. It adds new knowledge to an understudied area in organisational communication, namely the analysis and significance of stories in the workplace.2. It also contributes to another underrepresented area of study, namely the religious aspects of organisational communication culture.3. It demonstrates the value of qualitative research methods in organisational communication studies in Malaysia, where previously quantitative methods have been dominant.

Intergenerational practice (IP) is an increasingly popular community development tool which brings younger and older people together to participate in mutually beneficial activities. It aims to reduce negative attitudes and promote community cohesion. Previous research has examined the benefits of IP though much of this has focused on its potential to increase positive attitudes (and other individual level outcomes). In doing so, previous research has neglected broader social issues, the social nature of social change and the broader community and societal context within which IP takes place. As a result little was known about how IP works and its capacity for micro, meso and macro level social change. Within a social constructionist frame, this thesis argued that to understand the relationship between IP and social change, the role of different social agents in its production needed to be explored more critically. Social representations theory and mixed qualitative methods were used to explore how different social representations were engaged with, circulated or resisted in text, talk and action. Three studies examined practice guidelines, community facilitators and an intergenerational initiative. The latter study adopted an action research framework and aimed to both promote positive social change as well as explore the nature of this change. Mixed traditional and creative qualitative data were collected and analysed through thematic analysis. Findings revealed two competing systems of knowledge underpinned by themata individualism/collectivism and us/them. On the one hand, IP was characterised as an intervention targeted at problem individuals. On the other hand, IP was understood as a tool for collective action towards wider social issues. Between the push and pull of these systems of knowledge, IP was actualised in a middle ground, as a community mobilisation tool with the potential to foster community cohesion through the empowerment of older and younger people.

Considering there is a void in the literature for the social effects of giving and receiving respect, this thesis presented important new evidence that the experience of respect can elevate mood and openness values. My findings support my argument that respect is a social commodity that has value. As societies endeavour to nudge their citizens in a more prosocial direction, a focus on respect could prove useful in schools, public services, and corporations and NGOs and civil society in general. In our current political climate, we see evidence of increased polarization of public views. To tackle environmental and social problems, we overlook the importance of respect in mood and values at our peril. My thesis embarks on a journey to develop the respect construct via a qualitative study, and thereafter to investigate the effects on self-esteem, mood, values and prosocial behaviour when respect is received, and given. Four quantitative studies measure the effects on the receiver, while one study measured the effects on participants administering respect to others. I conducted a meta-analysis on the similar studies to determine the results more conclusively. Still, there are other questions waiting to be addressed. For instance, how much respect must be received for the recipient to feel respected? Are there stages or levels of feeling respected? Is there a threshold at which accumulated respect creates the feeling of respect? Is that threshold static, or is it a moving target that requires progressively more stimuli in order to push the recipient into a feeling of being respected? How long do the feelings of respect and being respected last?

This research examined whether value similarity between a person and another individual elicits more positive attitudes towards the individual. Chapter 1 provides a review of the interpersonal similarity-liking effect, which has been studied primarily in research on attitudes and personality, and it raises some issues that might be particularly relevant to examining effects of value similarity. Chapter 2 tested the similarity-liking effect by manipulating actual similarity in reported values, and found that value similarity increased liking in both a between and within-subjects design (Studies 1 and 2). Chapter 3 described four experiments testing the similarity-liking effect using trait-like descriptions to manipulate the extent to which a target individual is perceived as possessing similar values to the participant. Results indicated that perceived similarity predicts liking in a positive direction, and that this relationship is mediated by the perception of the target individual’s warmth and competence. Finally, Chapter 4 reviews the contribution of this research, discussing findings and implications. Overall, data from the six experiments provides novel and robust evidence that value similarity increases liking, while providing provocative evidence about the mechanisms underpinning this effect.

This thesis is designed as a contribution to the economics of social interaction with a focus on human emotions and thinking processes. The first two chapters are empirical and the third chapter is theoretical. Chapter one examines the extent to which punishments are motivated by the emotion of anger or ‘fairness’ considerations. A laboratory experiment uses a multi-round game where the punisher could not be sure whether a selfish action of the punished may be ‘excused’ or not. The results show that subjects tend to inflict a harsher punishment as the proportion of observed selfish actions in previous rounds increases, after controlling for the current action. The data can further test competing hypotheses of two theories: norm compliance and spitefulness. One third of subjects punish an action that fails to comply with the norm, but none habitually punish a spiteful person regardless of the current action. Chapter two investigates whether the individual tendency to think intuitively or deliberately can lead to altruistic giving or punishment. An online experiment uses a 40-item self-report questionnaire to measure individual reliance on intuitive feelings (Faith in Intuition) and personal tendency to engage in deliberate thinking (Need for Cognition). The results show that people who tend to think more deliberately are less prone to punish. An increase in the cost of punishing reduces both punishment and giving. High reliance on intuition is associated with greater sensitivity of punishment to a cost increase than to a cost decrease, which might be explained by loss aversion. Chapter three develops a model of interdependent preferences in the presence of asymmetric information. The model explores the welfare consequences of permitting divorce. Suppose each player has a private value of the marriage and may or may not care about the partner’s value. When divorce is possible, any player can use the threat of divorce to make demands on the other player, but it might also reveal one’s own value of the marriage. A well-known theoretical result is that asymmetric information routinely leads to inefficient bargaining and divorce, but this model further shows that incorporating interdependent preferences can eliminate such inefficiencies. Thus, asymmetric information is not a sufficient condition for inefficient divorce; the lack of care about the partner is also necessary.

Being able to better understand and measure what is happening in the world is of great importance for a range of stakeholders, including policy makers. The recent explosion in the availability of data documenting our collective behaviour offers new opportunities to gain insights into our society. Here, we focus on a series of case studies to demonstrate how new forms of data may be used to help us better understand human behaviour. Data coming from financial transactions taking place in the stock market can help us better understand financial crises. We analyse a dataset comprising the stocks forming the Dow Jones Industrial Average at a second by second resolution. We investigate changes in stock market prices and how they arise at different time scales, showing a transition between power law and exponential decay in the tails of the distribution of logarithmic returns. Accurate and quick estimates of the size of a crowd are crucial for the avoidance of crowd disasters. However, existing approaches rely on human judgement and can be slow and costly. Our findings suggest that data from mobile phone networks and social media platforms may allow us to estimate the size of a crowd. Such data could potentially be accessed in real time, leading to shorter delays than those experienced with previous approaches to crowd size estimation. We also show how communities on a network constructed from our social interactions through smartphones capture the temporal evolution of our behaviour in everyday life. The complex datasets presented here also require complex methodologies to analyse them. Complexity science, and more specifically network science, has witnessed increasing attention within the scientific community in the last two decades. Here, we will present a new technique to analyse a common feature of many real world complex networks, namely community structure. We show how our methodology addresses many of the drawbacks of current techniques, and we also introduce an efficient algorithm which outperforms analogous methods on a set of standard benchmark networks. Our findings suggest that the analysis of large complex social datasets coupled with methodological advances can allow us to gain valuable measurements of human behaviour.

Although many anthropologists have studied transnational groups, few consider the way in which social organisation takes place in globalising environments. An examination of the use of symbols of Germanness and cosmopolitanism in the selfpresentation of German businesspeople in London suggests that, in doing so, they are not defining themselves as a solidary group so much as they are engaging in complex negotiations between global and local social entities. Combining Anthony Cohen's theory of the symbolic construction of groups (1985) with Erving Goffman's of strategic self-presentation (1956), I begin by examining Sklair' s (2001) hypothesis that transnational businesspeople form a detached, globalised, solidary "transnational capitalist class." I then consider the ways in which symbols are actually used in transnational business, through a case study focusing around the London branches of two German banks, the Head Office of one of them, and German-focused institutions in the UK. My analysis reveals that not only is transnational businesspeople' s use of symbols more complex than the construction of a single social group, they also use the multivalency of symbols to shift their selfpresentations and affiliations in response to the activities of other actors. I conclude by postulating a new way of looking at transnational social formations, incorporating Sklair's theory, Castells' "Network Society" ( 1996) and Appadurai's "Global Landscapes": the Transnational Capitalist Society model (TCS). This is a theoretical construct comprising all actors engaging in business activity across borders at any given time; it also includes the links between transnational social formations, and local entities inasmuch as they engage in transnational capitalism. An examination of the symbolic self-presentation of German transnational businesspeople thus suggests that, not only are they not a solidary, detached "class," but the complex, shifting nature of their interactions points to the need for a more diffuse, multiply engaged model for considering transnational social formations.

No description available.

Social capital, as conceptualised to date, has looked at the composition of social networks and the socio-economic outcomes they produce, with very little reference to context, space, place, agency, or power. This thesis contributes to our understanding of social capital by looking systemically at the socio-spatial context in which networks emerge, and how social capital is exercised through mediating relationships with the objective of understanding how these processes are enabled or constrained in practice. Jane Jacobs approach to observing real-world, city processes from the ground up is applied to a case-study of creative practitioners working in the Stoke-on-Trent area from 2007-2011. Research methods were designed to elicit narratives from participants using a mapping exercise as a way to enact the everyday practices of the participants. These enactments were filmed as participants performed/narrated the story of their network. The narratives collected show that when social capital is conceptualised as an effect of dynamic social networks, rather than a static fund of potential resources, the processes by which individuals and groups win, lose or maintain advantage are uncovered. Exercised social capital has its own spatialities and modalities which place us nearer to, or further away from our goals. This thesis contributes both a novel framework and methods for analysing the exercise of social capital in a real world context which furthers our understanding of the co-constitution of space and society.

No description available.