This study explores the mechanisms underpinning policy efforts to build community in deprived urban neighbourhoods using a mixed-method comparative case study. Two neighbourhoods within the New East Manchester (NEM) urban regeneration area are examined, one of which hosted a New Deal for Communities (NDC) regeneration partnership from 1999-2010. In 2009 the NDC successor body established a community forum in each neighbourhood in an attempt to sustain and extend NDC’s participatory practices. The study compares the community infrastructure embodied by the residents’ groups eligible to participate in the forum in each neighbourhood. Social networks data, standard survey metrics and ethnographic material on 61 groups were collected. These elucidate the structure of groups’ relations, their collective action capacity and the extent to which NDC, and its successor, NEM, were implicated in the formation and development of these relations. NDC was the most prominent expression of the New Labour’s social capital-orientated “turn to community” (Duffy and Hutchinson, 1997). However, the final national evaluation of the scheme raised doubts about its impact, finding little effect on community relations at the neighbourhood level (CLG, 2010c). This gap between policy ambition and outcome is probed in this study using new tools and employing concepts from the social movements’ literature, rather than the social capital framework underpinning most existing research on NDC. It focusses specifically on social relations as a metric of community infrastructure, but resists the network analytic tendency to infer community from the mere presence of relations (Blokland, 2003). Instead it seeks evidence of the capacity for pairwise ties to be translated into communal mobilization through the interplay of relational, cognitive and contextual mechanisms, including specific facets of the political opportunity structures (POS) of NDC. The study contributes to debates on policy, theory and method relevant to: the practice of civic engagement and community development in regeneration; the sociology of community in deprived post-industrial neighbourhoods; and the measurement of community capacity and collective agency. Analysis of social networks considers three levels: the connection of individual residents to each group; relations between groups within the neighbourhood; and relations between groups and local service-providers. Results show very similar levels of network connectivity in the two neighbourhoods, but greater evidence of the growth of sustainable grassroots organising and leadership capacity in the non-NDC area. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of POS concludes that NDC was instrumental in generating a constrained, controllable form of community engagement to meet the delivery requirements of the scheme. This process stifled the development of a wider, independent self-organising capacity on the ground, sustainable beyond the life of NDC.

This thesis explores the value of manufactured items among the Sanema, a hunting and horticultural people of Southern Venezuela. By extending the ‘virtue ethics’ approach prevalent in the study of Amazonian societies, I suggest that artefacts are as much a component of Sanema virtuous conviviality as corporeal practices. Manufactured items are meaningful in a distinct way to the often-studied crafted artefacts, which are widely seen to embody the human subjectivities of the maker. Instead, the valuable prefabricated properties of industrial goods, which I refer to as ‘affordances’, can allow morality to be conceptualised and materialised. The focus on manufactured items reflects the recent influx of such goods into Sanema lives that feature centrally in their daily narratives of personhood, sociality and ethical practises. In drawing attention to these industrial goods that emerge from the wider national context, I contextualise Sanema experiences within the contemporary setting of political participation, the market economy and frequent encounters with nonindigenous people. In contexts that range from expressions of care, inter-ethnic dependence, acts of justice, manoeuvrability within state apparatus, and the moral actions of nonhuman beings within the cosmos, the ethnography demonstrates that morality is often articulated as being realised through or within ‘things’. As such, my approach attempts to transcend the human-artefact dichotomy by leaving open the possibility that morality emerges from manifold material forms.

A current theoretical model (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009) proposes that lonely people are hypervigilant (i.e. on high alert) to social threats in the social environment. This leads to attention, memory, and confirmatory biases, which undermine the opportunity to develop positive social relationships. This thesis outlines a series of six studies that systematically examine the hypervigilance to social threat hypothesis in loneliness using adult samples. The studies described in this thesis make an original contribution to the loneliness literature and uses different experimental paradigms to examine whether lonely adults are hypervigilant to social threats that are visually presented. Studies 1 and 5 bridge the gap in the current knowledge to examine the visual attention processing of lonely adults to social threat depicted as social rejection stimuli using eye-tracker methodology. Study 2 investigates whether loneliness is associated to eye-gaze and emotion processing utilising a cognitive paradigm. Studies 3 and 4 extend the literature on visual attention processing of lonely adults to investigate the processing of emotional information depicted as facial expressions using eye-tracker methodology. Specifically, study 3 uses a paradigm of four different emotional expressions (i.e. anger, afraid, happy and neutral), and study 4 utilises a face in a crowd paradigm for which different ratios of happy to angry faces were presented. Study 6 extends the work on hypervigilance to social threats depicted as social rejection stimuli to examine how these stimuli are processed by lonely adults in the brain using EEG methodology. Findings from study 1 and 5 suggest that lonely adults show visual attentional biases to social threat stimuli linked to social rejection. Specifically, study 1 findings indicate that lonely adults show a hypervigilance-avoidance pattern of processing towards social rejection stimuli, whilst study 5 findings indicate that lonely adults show disengagement difficulties when processing social rejection stimuli. Study 2 indicates that loneliness is not associated to eye-gaze and emotion processing. Study 3 and 4 provide support that lonely adults are more attentive to angry facial expressions presented as static images. Findings from study 6 indicate that lonely adults detect and process social threats quickly compared to non-social threats in the brain. As outlined in Cacioppo and Hawkley’s theoretical model, the findings of this thesis support the idea that loneliness is related to initial cognitive processes. Specifically, lonely adults are hypervigilant to social threats depicted as angry facial expressions and social rejection stimuli. Thus, the thesis examines an important process within the model. The findings of the thesis can be used to inform ideas for future academic and intervention work in the loneliness field.

Career paths in the field of cultural and creative production and the attainment of recognition have been associated with networking and point at the relevance of maintaining social relationships. Social capital has been discussed as one key element, given the fact that forming social relations with significant others potentially aids individuals striving for symbolic capital – the precursor to recognition. The emergence of online social networking platforms as a means to amplify opportunities to build social relationships raises questions in regards to its impact on building social capital. The key question that arises is: To what extent can digitally mediated social relationships support creative professionals in attaining recognition for their work by capitalising on digitally mediated social ties? To answer this, it was necessary to uncover the nature of digitally mediated social relatedness in order to understand how and why these relations may be eligible to produce social capital. Tracing this process through drawings of personal networks elicited a wealth of narratives around the influence of digitally mediated social interaction on symbolic capital. This thesis identified that accessing social capital resources via digitally mediated social interaction operates within the context of two prime factors: risk and trust. As such, digitally mediated social ties are useful for building social capital. However, this holds primarily in contexts where risk is relatively low and therefore the required level of trust is marginal. The relevance of digitally mediated social ties in building social capital is thus largely context driven, whereby the individual circumstances of creative professionals are crucial. My findings highlight the ambivalent nature of digitally mediated social ties in terms of their conceptualisation as a form of social relationship. Interestingly, while being highly volatile and fluctuating in nature, these liquid ties, as I have labelled them in my thesis, do afford access to resources such as trust that have hitherto been primarily associated with strong social ties. Essentially, this challenges the prime conceptualisation of social capital as an affordance of strong, established social relationships in the formation of symbolic capital. Therefore, I make a case for a more nuanced approach to (mediated) social capital, which conceptualises the relevance of the social tie in light of its affordance, rather than its formal quality.

This thesis aims to expand our understanding of inter-organisational collaborations by exploring how the process of collaboration emerges over time and how collaboration partners (re)form their identities in the developing collaboration space. For the exploration of these aims, a practice-based study of inter-organisational collaborations is followed. The study analyses the KEDDY Aitoloakarnanias collaboration in Greece. In order to examine how the KEDDY collaboration unfolds, a longitudinal ethnographic research was conducted, collecting 43 in-depth interviews, 48 documents, observations of 13 partners’ meetings and numerous field notes. The data was analysed qualitatively using thematic and narrative analysis. The results show how, as they engaged in everyday working practices, organisational members demarcated the boundaries of the collaboration by producing two types of psychosocial spaces. The ‘spaces of regulation’ provided a stable meaning framework where the partners found continuity, while the ‘learning spaces’ offered them opportunities for renewal and change. These working spaces helped partners engage with the collaborative process in a flexible way. However, they required the activation of different types of boundaries and the establishment of different types of identities through identification loops. In this way partners were able to make sense of the constant changes in the collaboration space and organise their actions accordingly. Therefore, although some of the KEDDY collaboration features were designed a priori and provided continuity through regulatory spaces, this research illustrates how the day to day collaboration unfolds as partners also explore new practices. This indicates that it is not possible to predict the outcome of the collaboration process. Notwithstanding the limitations due to the small-scale nature of this study, the results have useful implications for the understanding of the development and transformations of inter-organisational collaborations over time. This research contributes to the body of research in the area in that it strengthens the view of inter-organisational collaboration as a process and questions in which way it is currently understood in the context of contemporary inter-organisational collaboration studies.

This thesis explores the concept of reputation-making with the aim of explaining how the rise of user-generated content websites has influenced organizational reputationmaking practices in the travel sector. The findings are based upon a corpus of data including: a field study at the offices of the largest travel user-generated website operator, TripAdvisor and an adaptation of virtual ethnography called “netnography”. Rating and ranking of hotels on social media websites has not only disturbed the established reputation-making practices of professionals in the travel sector and contributed to a significant redirection of reservation revenue but has performative consequences for tourist encounters. In other words, it is argued that if key assumptions underpinning the rating and ranking of travel change, the enactment of travel itself is reconfiguring and this has important implications for how reputationmaking occurs. The reconfigurations documented in the study are theorized using the lens of Process Theory. Originally inspired by philosophers such as Bergson and Whitehead and adopted in the work of organizational theorists such as Tsoukas, Chia, Langley, and Nayak, the choice of Process Theory to inform the conduct of this study resonates with key streams of existing reputation research that view it as a dynamic phenomenon. Core concepts within Process Theory, such as “becoming” enable further investigation into the precise nature of this dynamism by focusing on relations as always fluid and on the move. The challenge, even for literature that acknowledges phenomena as dynamic, is how to temporarily pause the flow for the purpose of analysis and thereby approach becoming without disturbing its inherent nature. This is taken up in the first analysis chapter which uses the notion of place to illustrate and analyze reputation-making using the process of becoming. The chapter argues the importance of recognizing the temporary pauses produced by rating and ranking mechanisms as generative rather than merely reductive algorithmically produced representations. In this way, we get closer to understanding the performativity of phenomena such as TripAdvisor and produce fundamental insights informing organizational reputation-making. It is argued that the organizational devices through which travellers’ engage with the places they visit are not only “making” reputations but are also making formative differences to the practice of travelling. In the second analysis chapter, a key issue associated with these changes - the intensification in focus on service – is explored further and in-depth examination of the field data is used to highlight ways in which TripAdvisor amplifies attention given to the specific characteristics of practices when they are performed. This provides evidence to ground Tsoukas and Chia’s (2002) proposal that organizational change is achieved through ‘microscopic changes’ thus reinforcing the processual nature of change. In so doing, key insights are generated to inform organizational reputation-making. Returning to the tenet of becoming in the third analysis chapter, the “circle of (il)legitimacy” embraces processual principles - for the nature of the circle is to have no beginning or end – but acknowledges the cumulative outcome of configuring practices for hoteliers through a discussion of key issues emerging in the travel sector. The relationship between reputation-making and legitimation is highlighted with examples of the additional processes through which reputation can now be made vulnerable within multiple jurisdictional contexts. The thesis concludes with the assertion that if we aim to understand the phenomenon of reputation-making, we have to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated way to conceptualize its formativeness. It is suggested that this extends beyond snap shot assessments or post-hoc crisis management to on-going maintenance of its emergence and development as well as processual changes across time and space.

The original research carried out in a range of arts organisations in the UK included employees at every level within both commercial and subsidised performing arts organisations in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It demonstrates that bullying in UK performing arts organisations is common and increasing in frequency: it is damaging, oppressive and unacceptable. Clear evidence is presented of the failure of management satisfactorily to address bullying: some arts workers tolerate intimidating behaviour by powercut managers because they believe in, and are committed to, the Arts. Among managers, the notion of the arts as vocaffon persists. The widespread perception is that arts organisations work outside the rules and limitations of the ordinary milieu, choosing to work in theatres and arts centres rather than in offices, factories and shops, and that the arts are different and exempt from normal rules and regulations. The research found that many aspects of working in the performing arts are not peculiar to the profession, they occur in other employment sectors and are more likely to be characteristic of the times in which we live, than specific to the sector in which we work. In assessing workplace stressors, it is the response of the organisation, alongside the individual response, that determines negative stress levels. The apportionment of responsibility for successful resolution of negative behaviours within arts organisations is examined. The need to develop suitable policies for dealing with bullying is highlighted. The nature of the behaviour, its effects on individuals and organisations and the role of the perpetrator are outlined. The experience of, and steps taken by, other countries are examined, notably Australia, Canada, France, Sweden and the United States where the profile of bullying behaviour continues to be featured regularly in the press and media, although not yet in the performing arts.

This research exposed some of the factors that affected organisational culture and group behaviour in Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) from its inception in 2007 through to 2014, when it became a Bespoke Trading Entity. The factors that were examined included organisationally legitimised personal, social and geographic identity, and linguistic difference and group size. Metaphor was also used by group members to describe the relationship they had with their groups. Group size was another factor that affected group behaviour. Finally, the effects of socio-technical induction and socio-cultural integration were seen to be additional factors that allowed cultural drag to occur within DE&S. The research was an insider ethnographic study that used a qualitative, multi-factorial approach which encompassed 6 years of observations, 124 interviews, and included the analysis of appropriate DE&S policy documents. This thesis is considered to be unique because no research of this nature, or at this level, has been carried out in DE&S, the Defence Procurement Agency (DPA) and the Defence Logistics Organisation (DLO). In addition, no studies have investigated the organisational culture of DE&S, apart from Kirke (2007a unpublished), Kirke (2010), which was a published article that was informed by that pilot study. The factors that were identified combined to produce both an organisation that possessed multiple organisational cultures and one single ethos which was that of delivering equipment to troops and supporting the troops, described as ‘front-line-first’. There was also an organisational culture that was affected by both the socio-technical and socio-cultural interactions of its members and of unconscious behaviours. All of those factors acted together as a system of interactions, with different factors taking primacy depending on the organisational context, no single factor being consistently more important than any other. The ethos of “front-line-first” was embedded within the DE&S organisational culture as a value which may have been used as a metaphor for the primacy of the overarching organisational culture of supporting the front-line.

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Most research investigating impression formation during early stages of a relationship on social network sites adopts unrealistic, ecologically invalid social scenarios. This thesis used an ecologically valid social scenario to improve understanding of impression formation during the early stages of a relationship on social network sites. Three studies investigated how students get to know each other on social network sites in the weeks before starting university. A focus group study, a questionnaire study and an experiment demonstrated that incoming undergraduate students form impressions about groups of people (e.g. a group of housemates) and specific individuals (e.g. a housemate) during university transition. The studies highlighted that it is too simplistic to suggest that impression formation about a group of people is different from impression formation about a specific individual. Instead, the coherence of the social target, the nature of the affiliation with that social target, and the strategies used to get to know that social target on social network sites influence how confident students are in their impressions of each other during university transition. Explanations are proposed that, if substantiated, would require expansion of the Hamilton and Sherman’s and cues-filtered in theories of impression formation. The studies highlighted that impression formation and the influence of those three factors can partially explain the intensity of students’ worries about the academic and social aspects of their future university experience. The findings are practically applied as guidance for university and pastoral support services and further research is proposed to test the tentative explanations.