This research studies undocumented policy practices within UK aid in general and the Department for International Development (DFID) in particular. It focuses on the policy practices or initiatives taken by various actors in influencing and shaping policy in the everyday life of aid bureaucracy. For this purpose, I have chosen as case study the evolution of DFID's Social exclusion (policy) framework within the timeframe of 1997-2010. The research findings identify undocumented initiatives taken by the policy entrepreneurs within aid bureaucracy. These efforts are directed not only towards benefitting the global poor but also at increasing institutional efficacy in delivering aid. Policy entrepreneurs execute these policy practices, also termed policy entrepreneurship, proactively on the political, administrative, and executive levels. Anthropological analysis and methods allow me to look beyond formal policy processes at the undocumented policy practices. Many development professionals, consultants, and office bearers while walking on the tight rope of internal policy and bearing the cross of the highly politicized organizational culture of the DFID, skilfully conveyed advice based on empirical insights to those high up. They transfer their disciplinary knowledge and empirical understandings to the policy makers and political actors in the larger interest of the development industry as well as the poor from recipient countries. On the one hand, from an anthropological perspective, this study broadens our understanding of the classical rational model of decision making within the bureaucracy. On the other hand, in the context of contemporary DFID bureaucracy, it highlights how civil servants resolve the moral-political conflict between their obligations towards the institutions they work with and their solidarity towards issues of human rights and social justice through their activism and policy entrepreneurial spirit.

Drawing upon intergroup contact theory (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew 1998) and the emerging literature on intergroup climate (e.g., Christ et al., 2013, 2014), I utilised various antipathetic intergroup relationships (e.g., Black people vs. White people; non-Muslims vs. Muslims), and various models of contact (e.g., Pettigrew, 1998; Koschate & van Dick, 2011) to test whether the effect of higher quality contact on less prejudice was facilitated by perceptions of a more positive intergroup climate. Results supported Allport’s (1954) classic model of four contact conditions independently predicting prejudice, although the conditions of ‘equal status’, ‘goal interdependence’, and ‘cooperation’ loaded strongly onto a separate factor than did ‘authority support’. Intergroup climate was successfully modelled as perceptions of intergroup norms, ingroup norms, and sociohistoric norms; further, there was some indication that beliefs regarding authority – traditionally considered a contact condition – might also impact intergroup climate in the form of macro authority norms. Results further supported the position that individuals are sensitive to intergroup climate, perceptions of which exhibited a separate – and stronger – effect on outgroup attitudes than did quality of personal contact. Regarding the proposed moderating effect of intergroup climate on contact effects, results were equivocal across studies. Some results supported the prediction of a facilitating effect of warmer ingroup norms on stronger contact effects. However, analyses of cross-sectional data revealed some evidence for an inhibitory effect, such that more negative (vs. positive) perceptions of intergroup climate were associated with a stronger relation between higher quality contact and warmer outgroup attitudes. Therefore, some aspects of intergroup contact might be most effective in negative intergroup climates. Theoretical and practical implications for contact researchers, prejudice researchers, and practitioners, are discussed.

This research is about the Social Networks and Social Capital of British-Bangladeshi Young Women in relation to their identity, cultural context and social aspects. It is a qualitative study based on the lives of a small sample of Bangladeshi young women, who are second or third generation British-born Bangladeshis between the ages of 16 and 29, living in London. They are British citizens and were born or grew up in Britain. The main area that the research takes place in is the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Methods encompass in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. This research investigation has found that the social networks and social capital of Bangladeshi young women were impacted by their identity, ethnicity, social and cultural contexts, such as religious and gender identity, patriarchal practice within households and racism. Accordingly, for many women the construction of social networks was enabling; but for others, there were constraints in relation to their identity. On the other hand, the social networks through various places, especially places of study and work, significantly enabled the women to acquire their identity with regard to their social position, which has been helpful for agency and negotiation power. Consequently, their social networks were shaped based on their subjective experience, cultural expectations and social aspects. However, the women were active in order to create and maintain their social life, as well as to negotiate and develop their own ‘strategies to manage’ techniques to cope with the constraints. In this study, my main argument aims to emphasise how social networks are formed and maintained by the Bangladeshi young women in relation to their identity, cultural context and social aspects. I contend that these women actively negotiate a multitude of personal, familial and structural concerns in developing their social networks. I also argue that agency and negotiation power positively contribute to mitigate cultural constraints and inequalities with regard to the social networks of these young women; however social structures and inequalities create significant boundary conditions for these women to acquire negotiation power.

This thesis focuses on examining users’ perceptions of privacy leakage in Facebook – the world’s largest and most popular social network site (SNS). The global popularity of this SNS offers a hugely tempting resource for organisations engaged in online business. The personal data willingly shared between online friends’ networks intuitively appears to be a natural extension of current advertising strategies such as word-of-mouth and viral marketing. Therefore organisations are increasingly adopting innovative ways to exploit the detail-rich personal data of SNS users for business marketing. However, commercial use of such personal information has provoked outrage amongst Facebook users and has radically highlighted the issue of privacy leakage. To date, little is known about how SNS users perceive such leakage of privacy. So a greater understanding of the form and nature of SNS users’ concerns about privacy leakage would contribute to the current literature as well as help to formulate best practice guidelines for organisations. Given the fluid, context-dependent and temporal nature of privacy, a longitudinal case study representing the launch of Facebook’s social Ads programme was conducted to investigate the phenomenon of privacy leakage within its real-life setting. A qualitative user blogs commentary was collected between November 2007 and December 2010 during the two-stage launch of the social Ads programme. Grounded theory data analysis procedures were used to analyse users’ blog postings. The resulting taxonomy shows that business integrity, user control, transparency, data protection breaches, automatic information broadcast and information leak are the core privacy leakage concerns of Facebook users. Privacy leakage concerns suggest three limits, or levels: organisational, user and legal, which provide the basis to understanding the nature and scope of the exploitation of SNS users’ data for commercial purposes. The case study reported herein is novel, as existing empirical research has not identified and analysed privacy leakage concerns of Facebook users.

Crowdsourcing is an approach to replace the work traditionally done by a single person with the collective action of a group of people via the Internet. It has established itself in the mainstream of research methodology in recent years using a variety of approaches to engage humans in solving problems that computers, as yet, cannot solve. Several common approaches to crowdsourcing have been successful, including peer production (in which the participants are inherently interested in contributing), microworking (in which participants are paid small amounts of money per task) and games or gamification (in which the participants are entertained as they complete the tasks). An alternative approach to crowdsourcing using social networks is proposed here. Social networks offer access to large user communities through integrated software applications and, as they mature, are utilised in different ways, with decentralised and unevenly-distributed organisation of content. This research investigates whether collective intelligence systems are facilitated better on social networks and how the contributed human effort can be optimised. These questions are investigated using two case studies of problem solving: anaphoric coreference in text documents and classifying images in the marine biology domain. Social networks themselves can be considered inherent, self-organised problem solving systems, an approach defined here as ‘groupsourcing’, sharing common features with other crowdsourcing approaches; however, the benefits are tempered with the many challenges this approach presents. In comparison to other methods of crowdsourcing, harnessing collective intelligence on social networks offers a high-accuracy, data-driven and low-cost approach.

The 21st century has seen a dramatic rise in Internet access and connectivity across the world. To date, only a small amount of research has been published on the subject of culture and Internet usage. This thesis investigates whether, and how, individuals from two different cultures (Saudi Arabia and the UK) engage with online social networks (OSNs) differently, and what might be the underlying psychological factors explaining such differences. A first qualitative study used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) to investigate motivations for using OSNs among Saudi and British participants. Both groups reported that they used OSNs to present a positive self-image, while desiring to maintain a sense of their ‘genuine' self in online interactions. For Saudi participants, OSNs also provided opportunities for selfexpression that were otherwise unavailable. British participants reported using OSNs for relationship maintenance. A second qualitative study also looked at motivations, but narrowed the focus to identity motives, applying motivated identity construction theory (Vignoles, 2011) to a thematic analysis of tweets written by citizens of Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. Motives for meaning, belonging, distinctiveness, continuity, efficacy, and self-esteem were all detectable in the tweets of both Saudi and British users. The manner in which these motives were pursued varied according to the cultural context of users within the affordances of the online context in which they were communicating. The research project then aimed to establish a way of measuring differences in online self-presentation strategies, by developing the online self-presentation strategies scale (OSPSS). Items were selected using exploratory structural equation modelling (ESEM). The scale was incorporated in a large-scale (N = 694) quantitative study of Saudi and British OSN users that measured self-presentation strategies, motivations of OSNs use and target audience. Mediation analyses were conducted to find out whether cultural differences in these dimensions were explained by two forms of cultural variation: relational mobility and Schwartz' theory of basic values. Self-enhancement vs. self-transcendence values and relational mobility, more than openness to change vs. conservation values, accounted for mean differences between the groups in motives, targeted audiences and self-presentation strategies. Together the studies reveal observable differences in the ways in which people from Saudi Arabia and the UK engage with OSNs. These are partially explained by the affordances that social media provide, which compensate for the unavailability of certain modes of expression and communication within offline cultural contexts, and by cultural differences in value priorities.

This thesis draws on a Bourdieusian perspective to explore the organisational mechanisms and dynamics in Palestinian politically motivated social movement. The consequent body of literature often lacks an integrated comprehension of Bourdieusian theory, and his three main concepts: field, habitus, and capital. Little has been understood about Bourdieu’s concepts in social movement context to understand the activists’ behaviours, practices, and practical reasoning in structuring their choices and practices. Being inspired by Bourdieu, the researcher relationally analyses and bridges between different subjectivist and objectivist perspectives on social structures and agents’ practices through employing the relational tool-kit of Bourdieu. To further understand the dynamics, mechanisms, and interorganisational and intraorganisational relations in social movements, an interpretive approach was used to gather context-rich data from ordinary activists, core activists and organisers. Findings showed that fields of practices, both external and internal, have specific doxa and species of capital, which shape the rules of the game inside this field, and its relationship with other fields. Data collected found that the ‘state field’ enjoys the most dominant doxa in the Palestinian context, which is deployed to legitimise the oppression of the politically-motivated youth movements that were studied. The external and internal fields’ doxa have a crucial influence on agents’ early socialisation, forms of capital, and field’s positioning. This variation and difference between the activists’ habitus caused multiple modes of domination and conflictual dynamics inside the movement itself in relation to features such as political credibility, recruiting parochialism, ideological conflicts, and repertoires of contention. This study contributes to a more dynamic understanding of the habitus as an open mediating concept and a reflexive space which transforms the activists’ behaviours and actions in some incidents. The findings have implications for social movement practitioners, and other relevant stakeholders such as activism groups and bodies, pressure groups, unions, and human rights and civil society associations. It is suggested that future research examining politically-motivated social movements should consider ethnographic methods to capture multiple observational data and contextual findings. In addition, it is suggested further examine habitus mechanisms in reproduction, change and transformation times.

Studies which examine conflict have identified coping strategies as potent variables for the social competencies of children. To extend these ideas to more specific indicators of social adjustment this study examined emotional impairments and coping strategies of victims and bullies. Inventories measuring emotional impairment: depression, anger, anxiety and self-concept were completed by 103 primary school children aged 9-11. A questionnaire measured five coping strategies: problem solving, social support seeking, distancing, externalising and internalising. Bully and victim nominations identified almost 5 times as many male bullies compared to girls therefore findings which specifically relate to bullying refer to boys only. Emotional impairments were identified as predictory variables for bullying and victimisation particularly for boys where anger was identified as moderating the relationship between externalising and bullying behaviour while anxiety was identified as a mediating variable between problem solving and victimisation. Findings here also suggest that all children learn how to cope with negative emotions through their experiences with adults. For bullies internalisation as a result of poor experiences during problem solving with adults makes problem solving with peers less likely.

Despite repeated demonstrations of the dysfunctional effects of social defences in organisations, social defence theory's (SDT) problem of organisational change (Long, 2006) remains. Why? Can this be avoided? The research centres on a four-year coaching and consulting project within a multinational manufacturing company. Social defences appeared but a careful Tavistock action-research intervention failed. Despite Menzies’ (1960) 'sociological innovation' that social defences are more than psychic phenomena and get built into organisations, she did not explain how this happens or what to do. A review of the literatures and case study revealed problems with the theory and intervention. Clues from Trist, Emery and Jaques suggested that both sociological and psychological theories are needed, implying that social defences be re-examined as both causes and symptoms. The change literature proposes that organisational change is qualitatively different from individual and team change (the focus of SDT). We develop realist explanations of the causes of social defences along with forecasting of their consequences, while retaining Tavistock interpretive methods. The cultural theory (CT) of anthropologist, Mary Douglas, emerged as the preferred sociological resource. We reconceptualise social defences as 'informal institutions' carrying implicit rules, norms and 'ways of thinking' that generate consequences (feedback). CT posits that contending 'thought-styles' derive from Strong/Weak Social Regulation and Strong/Weak Social Integration (solidarity). Anxiety and social defences may be understood as directed against a prevailing thought-style and the practices it inspires: leading to either task-undermining or anxiety-circumventing behaviour in service of task. Together, SDT and CT improve our capacity for diagnosing and facilitating change. SDT recognises that social defences are forewarnings of unspecified troubles ahead, but does not explain or forecast what these might be. CT improves our forecasting of the effects of social defences. SDT assists CT in seeing anxiety and defences as significant evidence of cultural shifts and realigning of the organising logic of institutions. This thesis should appeal to leaders who prioritise 'financial' rationality; and to change agents concerned with reading 'emotional' warning-signs and enhancing an organisation's capacity to do things differently.

This thesis examines the cultures of shame in the latter half of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. It offers a critical response to two oversimplified accounts of shame in the current non-historical literature: the traditional view, which identifies shame as a socially-constructed and morally-problematic emotion, and the recent revisionist view, which claims that shame is virtuous and entirely autonomous. By identifying shame as an emotion, a sense of honour, a moral sanction, a commodity, and a disciplinary weapon, and scrutinising it through the lens of religion, politeness, print, and law, this thesis explores how contemporaries experienced, interpreted, represented, and utilised shame for spiritual, moral, commercial, and judicial purposes over time. It demonstrates that shame, within different historical contexts, could be social as well as personal, morally virtuous as well as morally irrelevant or even bad. Shame was an essential religious emotion. Religious shame was a self-imposed and morally-virtuous emotion; it was desired and embraced by early modern Protestants, who saw it as a sign of piety and a means to come nearer to God. While religious shame was an emotion primarily concerning personal salvation, shame in a secular context was a socially-constructed concept dealing with a person’s public honour. Early modern people regarded shame as something of great moral and disciplinary value, which functioned as an inward restraint keeping people away from sin, and a form of community and judicial punishments. However, the moral and disciplinary characteristics of shame were not immutable; in the eighteenth century, shame faced the danger of being abused and reduced to a superficial and detrimental concept.