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This interdisciplinary research examines the public sphere as a communicatively-constructed realm and challenges Habermas’s model of public sphere communication based on the “public use of reason”/communicative rationality. It questions the model’s counterfactual normativity and its emancipatory potential in revisiting core concepts such as reason, power and consensus, while also considering social complexity, the media and counterpublics. This research is theoretical but informed by the quest for empirical relevance. Using critical hermeneutic methods, the thesis critically reconstructs Habermas’s theories of the public sphere and of communicative rationality, as these were developed and revised throughout his works, in order to lay the foundations for second- and third-order critique. The main critics considered in revisiting Habermas’s public sphere model are: Niklas Luhmann (functionalism and social systems), Michel Foucault (historical materialism, theory of power and rejection of universal norms), Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib (critical feminism, identity politics), Thomas McCarthy (critique of rationalism and normativity), James Bohman (social complexity) and Colin Grant (post-systemic communication studies). Drawing on these, the thesis proposes a renewed public sphere model consisting of systems and emergent publics, while rethinking communicative reason and power in conditions of overcomplexity (Bohman). Lastly, it redefines normativity in an empirically plausible light, connected to emergent communication practices.

It is a recurring requirement in open systems, such as networks, distributed systems and socio-technical systems, that a group of agents must coordinate their behaviour for common good. In those systems – where agents are heterogeneous – unexpected behaviour can occur due to errors or malice. Agents whose practices free-ride the system can be accepted to a certain level; however, not only do they put the stability of the system at risk, but they also compromise the agents that behave according to the system’s rules. In social systems, it has been observed that social capital is an attribute of individuals that enhances their ability to solve collective action problems. Sociologists have studied collective action through human societies and observed that social capital plays an important role in maintaining communities though time as well as in simplifying the decision making in them. In this work, we explore the use of Electronic Social Capital for optimising self-organised collective action. We developed a context-independent Electronic Social Capital framework to test this hypothesis. The framework comprises a set of handlers that capture events from the system and update three different forms of social capital: trustworthiness, networks and institutions. Later, a set of indicators are generated by the forms of social capital and used for decision-making. The framework was tested in different scenarios such as 2-player games, n-player games and public goods games. The experimental results show that social capital optimises the outcomes (in terms of long-term satisfaction and utility), reduces the complexity of decision-making and scales with the size of the population. This work proposes an alternative solution using Electronic Social Capital to represent and reason with qualitative, instead of traditional quantitative, values. This solution could be embedded into socio-technical systems to incentivise collective action without commodifying the resources or actions in the system.

Social capital, from the collective social capital theory perspective, is constituted by trust, social network and participation. Social capital is agreed to be crucial for civil society and wellbeing, but there is no general consensus on how to define and measure it. Sense of belonging shares important meanings with social capital, but is more amenable to measurement. Social capital, primarily a metaphor, is elastic, implicative, and versatile, whereas belonging is a more concrete and tangible concept that is suitable for the measurement. This research explores how belonging is related to social capital, and examines whether belonging can be used as an indicator for social capital. A mixed methods, qualitative and quantitative research design was developed to collect data on students’ sense of belonging to Bangor University. A new instrument, the 10 Words Question, was developed to elicit participants’ own thoughts and feelings, while a survey questionnaire was used in parallel, with questions about belonging, social capital, and demographic information. The empirical analysis reveals that there are four main domains of belonging, academic and social engagement, surroundings, and personal spaces. This challenges previous research on the subject in the UK. The findings suggest that students’ sense of belonging is strongly associated with social capital. Further conceptual and statistical analysis shows that there is significant overlap with each of the main components of social capital. One implication of the study is that a one-dimensional approach to students’ sense of belonging to an institution may result in poorly targeted and ineffective policies. The research highlights the complex characteristics of belonging, so if students’ belonging is to be used to promote academic success and retention, more conceptually refined approaches and empirically detailed evidence will be required. This research also demonstrates that belonging data can be used as a simple alternative indicator for social capital.

This thesis explores the formation of a distinctive type of popular cultural memory I have chosen to call newsreel memory, through a close analysis of oral testimonies provided by older residents of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and its districts. Focusing on the 1940s, this study demonstrates that although newsreel memories are anchored within the autobiographical, the interpretation of individual recollections can only be fully realised within wider cultural frames of meaning, significantly the familial, the generational, and the national. This thesis makes it clear that newsreels produced a unique viewing experience and one in which the pleasures associated with the spectacle of ‘actuality and knowledge’ were paramount. In addition, the gathered recollections themselves illustrate that in an important imaginative sense newsreel viewing brought historic news events, particularly during the Second World War, into existence and newsreel audiences into an imagined communion. Given the clustering of individual newsreel memories around an ultra-familiar canon of historic events, this study reveals the formative relationship between the historic events recorded by the newsreels and the personal expression of a particular popular wartime memory. Further, this thesis argues that one of the unique features of newsreel memory is its ‘entangledness’, that is, the way in which newsreel memories have been re-imagined and re-framed by the subsequent use of newsreel material in other cultural contexts. Finally, this study shows that, although the newsreel image derives its cultural authority from its perceived iconic status, what is in fact evoked is an imaginary witnessing of the prediscursive news event. As a result, what is recalled in newsreel memory is an event that took place else-where and else-when. Thus, it is the role of newsreel viewing as an important form of secondary witnessing that is explored here: a complex process, which confirms newsreel memory as a unique expression of both popular cultural memory and history.

Contemporary social life is increasingly characterised by various practices involving mobile machines and humans that enact multiple forms of travel. Thus, there emerges a question as to whether such practices change the patterns of conducting social life. This thesis begins with identifying crucial aspects in social life that have gone through significant changes. By adopting the metaphor of passages, social life and various socio- technological processes of organising machines are examined to identify the crucial importance of enacting travel, time, places and sociality. To further explore these aspects, the research draws on the material obtained through crafting socially and technologically mediated methods, including various forms of interviews and observations conducted in Taiwan during July and December, 2006. Passages that enable the travel with digital cameras, Wi- Fi signals and satellite navigation systems are examined in this thesis to characterise crucial ways in which social life is performed. Interactions between humans and machines are reconsidered so as to demonstrate how co-construction, negotiation, improvisation and modification are crucial mechanisms in enacting different forms of travel. Through the research, diversified and complex ordering of social life is examined by exploring the dynamic interactions between innovative and omnipresent machines and heterogeneous assemblages of machines and social entities. By examining how various passages are enacted and how social life is reconfigured, this thesis argues that there emerges a crucial intensification of embodied interactions with mobile machines. With these interactions, a series of significant reshaping of the relationships between machines, bodies, places, temporalities and social connections is unfolding and thus the patterns of conducting social life are constantly being reconfigured through incorporating existing practices and developing new ones.

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The thesis combines genealogical investigation with an 'analytics of government' to diagnose present reforms of Australian Social Security. The Australian example poses a new diagram of knowledge/power relations linked to early nineteenth century debates on pauperism and poor policy. Characteristic of 'advanced' liberal government, social welfare is transformed from an income redistribution scheme to a behaviour modification regime. This raises serious implications for contemporary citizenship, subjectification and the apparent flexibility of wage-labour. By re-tracing modern welfare's conditions of possibility, the present is reconstructed to breach the naturalness and self-evidence with which we accept the current crisis of welfare as problems of 'community', 'dependency' and 'participation'. The case is made that present control strategies rapidly recycle clients into flexible wage-labour via human technologies that seek the ethical and moral reconstruction of the poor. But diagnosis is a limited enterprise if it fails to consult the experiences of those to which these reforms are applied. A discursive analysis of 12 interview participants deemed 'at risk' of welfare dependency explores themes of labour market activity, welfare regulation and practices of freedom to understand how welfare subjects manage and transform their lives. Interviews confirm the existence of discourses that reinscribe distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor, intensify stigma of welfare receipt, and increase ambivalence about labour market security. Furthermore, a psychological subject emerges as one of two positions: it reactivates the pathologies of abject sectors of the population, while shoring-up capacities for rational self- management. Arguably, psychology has become a key technology for the ethical reconstruction of conduct and the calculated management of risk. Discourses of poverty are now recast as problems of 'the excluded' as welfare rationalities monitor and prevent behaviours that lead to market passivity. Like early nineteenth century statements on poverty, citizenship is now conditional upon moral improvement. And while neo-classical solutions have succeeded in moving the welfare debate away from contradictions of political economy, welfare reform risks producing a sector of the population that is low paid, casualised, under-protected from risk, insecure and desocialised.

A limitation of much past research on facial expression of emotion is its focus on static facial images. The research reported in the present dissertation was designed to examine the role played by dynamic information in the interpretation of facial expressions, particularly with respect to their perceived authenticity. In a first set of studies, the dynamic properties (i.e., onset, apex, and offset durations) of smiles were manipulated in the context of two social settings. Using a simulated job interview situation, the studies reported in Chapter 2 show that temporal aspects of smiles significantly influenced judgements made about interviewees. Comparable effects were found for synthetic and human faces. In the studies reported in Chapter 3, the impact of dynamic aspects of smiles was investigated in the context of two trust games with financial stakes. Choice of counterpart and decisions to cooperate with another person in the game were influenced by the dynamic quality of counterparts' smiles. These effects of facial dynamics on cooperative behaviour were shown to be mediated by the perceived trustworthiness of the other player. Focusing on real smiles, the research in Chapter 4 explored the role of the Duchenne smile in the expression and perception of spontaneous and posed smiles. In comparison to dynamic aspects, the signal value of the Duchenne marker was found to be limited and significant only for ratings of the upper face and of static displays. The study reported in Chapter 5 examined the role of smiles with different temporal dynamics in moderating judgements of emotional utterances. Smiles significantly influenced perceptions of emotional state evoked by the utterances and led to different attributions depending on whether anger or disgust was conveyed verbally. In sum, the findings illustrate that dynamic properties convey important information that is detected accurately and decoded meaningfully by perceivers.

Memetics, which posits a cultural replicator similar to the gene in biology, has been proposed as a theory with which to study cultural phenomena such as organisations. However, much of the theory of memetics has been developed without empirical testing. Consequently, its application to organisations and its operationalisation in empirical studies tends to make assumptions about the nature of putative memes. The purpose of this project is to design a study to test the fundamental tenets of meme theory in an organisational setting. To do so the study poses research questions relating to the possibility of identifying units of culture and investigates whether such units can be seen to replicate. The questions posed require the development of an 'extra-memetic' method which avoids the pitfalls of previous studies by rejecting the operationalisation of memes as part of its design. By considering complexity theory a narrative approach, grounded in a realist philosophy, is selected as the basis of an extra-memetic method. To accommodate the various technical terms used in the literature a glossary is included. Subsequently, an analysis based on first, structural narrative units and second, narrative evaluation is developed in the context of a case study organisation. The narrative approach enables the generic use of the underlying rationale of the genetic theory which underpins the proposal of the meme but without resorting to genetic analogy. In particular, the concept of the optimon is adopted. By comparing competing perspectives at the case study organisation, the study finds that it is possible to identify 'optimon' units of culture similar to the optimon genes which are described in Mendelian heredity. However, the notion of replication in culture, similar to that of DNA, is not supported. The original contribution to knowledge is constituted by a critical evaluation of the extant memetic theory, an approach to identifying units of culture which might aid the application of genetic metaphor or discourse theory and a new methodological approach to investigating the meme. In particular, one unit of culture, the 'proof, is identified and through the use of a punnett square model its credibility as a replicator is critically evaluated. The limitations of a single case study are recognised and summarised. However, in addition to the contribution to meme theory, the project points towards possible avenues for further research which are related to critical realism, discourse analysis and action research in organisations.