This thesis investigates neo-colonial tensions and conflicts of identity of indigenous students attending international schools in Nigeria. Nigeria is not an exception to the countries with growing numbers of international schools. Their educational provisions are characteristically in the style of western systems of education and their agendas are different from those of local systems. The increasing growth in the numbers of international schools is seen to correspond with the spread of neo-liberal globalisation. Although the schools claim to provide education with an international global perspective, they are also argued to be closely aligned with the principles of globalisation as it relates to neo-colonialism. In the past, the children of globally mobile workers formed the majority of the student body but in recent times, the population has changed considerably to include more enrolment of indigenous students. As this trend is set to continue, it is important to consider issues associated with indigenous student experiences in the international school. Through the voices of students, teachers and parents and an exploration of the virtual context of international schools in Nigeria, this study examines this phenomenon with a view to understanding the issues existing in the context of the students’ experiences and how they make meaning of them to negotiate their identities. The findings suggest that the students are negotiating their identities within a set of contradictions and complexities which lead them to experience a conflict of identities. A model was developed from the emergent themes that maps the sources and nature of conflicts that indigenous students experience in the context of their schooling experiences. The model can be used as a heuristic device to understand the contexts within which indigenous students attending international schools negotiate their identities as TCIKS - Third Culture Indigenous Kids.

The current thesis aims to clarify some aspects of the relationship between biology and social bonds. The central task is to demonstrate that, despite clear problems of some past approaches claiming to represent biology, there is non-reductive compatibility between the perspective from cultural approaches documenting processes of social bonding in humans and the perspective from basic biological theory. In demonstrating this compatibility, the thesis also attempts to contribute to delineating the utility and limits of applying insights from biology to understanding aspects of human social behaviour, and to sociological study in general. The areas of social bonding and social relationships under focus are mainly at the level of individuals and primary social groups, rather than a structural-functional approach often employed in classical sociology of the family and comparative sociology. The thesis initially reviews recent cultural approaches to understanding social bonding, and notes the potential academic value of a clarification of the association between social kinship and physical ('related by blood') kinship. In reviewing biological theory on social bonding and social behaviour, it is argued that classic sociobiological interpretations of this biological theory are erroneous in some crucial respects, and a different interpretation is argued for. Evidence on processes mediating social bonding in social mammals and particularly in primates is reviewed. It is demonstrated that circumstantial, social and contextual 'cues' typically mediate the formation of primary social bonds in these species, not genealogical relationship per se, and that these findings are compatible with basic sociological theory. In the human case, it is demonstrated that the current interpretation of biological theory is also compatible with established disciplines closely associated with detailing mechanisms of social bonding (such as attachment theory). The consensus here is again that social bonds are mediated by various social and contextual cues rather than genealogical relationship per se. Contemporary cultural approaches to describing processes of social bonding are investigated and found to be also compatible with the present interpretation of biological theory. With this basic compatibility demonstrated, the possible implications for analyses of patterns of social bonding in human societies is discussed. Delineating the scope of the biological perspective underlines the importance of analysing sociological and cultural influences on patterns of social bonding, including historical, economic and political factors. This is illustrated with some examples.

Bullying is ubiquitous and a major cause of psychological distress and disease. While most bullying research investigating the predisposing, precipitating and perpetuating factors has focused on victims, important gaps remain regarding the theoretical drivers of bullying perpetration. Using sexual selection and intrasexual competition as a theoretical framework, researchers have argued that bullying is an evolved behaviour that enables bullies to obtain or maintain a strong position in the social hierarchy and have greater access to resources, including sexual and romantic experiences. Intrasexual competition comprises two key features: competitor derogation and self-promotion. Bullying could be considered as a type of repeated competitor derogation, but the extent to which bullies engage in self-promotion tactics is unknown. As body shape and size are of central importance to males and females in the context of intrasexual competition, the aims of this thesis were: to determine whether body weight or body image independently or jointly predict bullying role; and to examine the extent to which bullies, victims and bully-victims are preoccupied with self-promotion through body alteration, and whether this is related to psychological functioning. A large school-based study (The Bullying, Appearance, Social Information Processing and Emotions Study; The BASE study) of adolescents in the UK was conducted. Study 1 investigated whether body weight or body image (i.e., actual or perceived underweight or overweight) was independently associated with bullying role (bully, victim or bully-victim), and whether body weight and body image interacted to predict bullying role amongst adolescent boys and girls. Study 2 examined whether bullies, victims and bully-victims were at increased risk of weight loss preoccupation compared to adolescents uninvolved in bullying, whether psychological functioning mediated the relationship between bullying role and weight loss preoccupation, and whether sex was a key moderator. Study 3 examined whether bullies, victims and bully-victims had a higher desire for cosmetic surgery compared to adolescents uninvolved in bullying, whether the relationship between bullying role and desire for cosmetic surgery was direct or mediated by psychological functioning, and whether any effects were sex-specific. The findings offer several new contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it was revealed that body image, rather than actual body weight, is associated with being a victim and bully-victim. Bullies were of average weight and were more likely to be at an advanced pubertal status (girls only). Secondly, being a male or female bully was directly associated with increased desire for cosmetic surgery and weight loss preoccupation (boys only). The relationship between being victimised (as a victim or bully-victim) and cosmetic surgery desire and weight loss preoccupation was mostly mediated by reduced psychological functioning. Overall, victims had the highest desire for cosmetic surgery, whilst bully-victims had the highest weight loss preoccupation; there were no significant differences between male and female victims or bully-victims. In conclusion, the findings that male and female adolescent bullies are engaging in or cognizing about self-promotion strategies to improve physical appearance, which was unrelated to psychological functioning, are consistent with the theory of bullying as a form of intrasexual competition. Bullies are thus multi-strategic in their attempt to obtain or maintain social dominance. Bullied adolescents are similarly concerned about their appearance, but this is mostly because of reduced self-esteem, body-esteem and emotional problems as a result of being bullied. Thus, adolescents involved in bullying are at increased likelihood of attempting to alter their physical appearance, albeit via different pathways and with likely different outcomes. The research advances theoretical understanding about bullies and has practical implications for understanding the body concerns and self-promotion tactics of bullies, victims and bully-victims.

Prior research addressing children's antisocial and prosocial behaviours have predominantly used a predetermined set of criteria which have been devised by adults. This psychological approach has lead to the perception of children as an individual phenomenon, using a dichotomy of behaviours consistently regardless of their immediate social environment. Therefore an argument is made for the use of an inductive, sociological approach in order to gain understanding of the everyday social interactions which children engage in. Conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis (Sacks, 1992a, 1992b) were employed to transcribe audio and video footage taken of thirteen, four-year-old children in their primary school playground in mid-Wales. The detailed and iterative analysis found that children employ specific resources to organise the social order of their playground. These resources include the use of name calling; access tools; possessive pronouns and collective proterms; reference to gender; physical gestures and the use of playground huts. The resources were used in the interaction of excluding or affiliating with peers, and also in the disaffiliation of peers where no further interaction was produced. These actions worked to produce different outcomes but were often used simultaneously in the co-construction of context. The wider findings which emanated from the detailed analysis identified the issues of sequences in children's establishment of social order; the context free and context sensitive nature of affiliation, disaffiliation and exclusion; issues of power; verbal actions supported by physical gestures; children's use of their environment; exclusive dyads; and children's social competence. The thesis holds implications for practice where practitioners can acknowledge the complex, multidimensional aspects of children's social organisation processes in order to avoid stereotyping. This study extends research which uses conversation and membership categorization analysis in the area of childhood studies which is important as this methodology affords unique access into children's worlds.

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This thesis considers from a theoretical and historical standpoint the different political implications of experiencing togetherness as a source of pleasure and joy. The first part critically reflects upon the discourse of “sociability” developed from early modernity to the 19th century and examines the most significant institutional formations that characterised its practice, with a particular focus on the passage from aristocratic salons to the bourgeois world of cafes. The sociability of the upper classes is then compared and contrasted with the forms of collective joy of the plebs, critically accounting for the way in which subjectivity and the body are differently implicated in the discourses surrounding carnivals, collective dancing and ecstatic practices. The second part focuses on the 20th century arguing that from this point the conflict between high and low sociability diminishes its political relevance to give way to increasingly ambivalent forms of togetherness based on the consumption of experiences and situation. The paradigms of the scene, the brand and the game are discussed as the primary institutions of a new dominant form of sociability deeply embedded in economic cycles. Finally, in the last part the notion of “militant conviviality” is introduced as a concept-tool to describe an emerging body of practices that are raising the stakes of sociability as an important component of radical political action today.

This thesis investigates bullying and negative behaviour among chefs working in commercial kitchens. The idea for this study arose due to evidence from the hospitality industry and amongst chefs in particular which suggested that negative behaviour and bullying were widely accepted practices. However, much of this evidence has been either anecdotal from media reporting or based on small scale studies.The industry has also complained about high labour turnover and the need for a trained workforce. Therefore, this study examines the behaviours to which chefs are exposed and if negative behaviours cause them to leave the industry.This thesis has used a questionnaire to measure responses from chefs who were either in training in catering colleges or working in the industry. Questionnaires were distributed to first year student chefs (n = 202), final year student chefs (n = 153) and working chefs (n = 304). Working chefs and final year student chefs were given questionnaires that included a behavioural method of measuring bullying, known as the NAQ-R, a self labelling method of measuring bullying and items about kitchen specific behaviours. Working chefs and final year student chefs were also asked about positive aspects of work and job satisfaction. First year student chefs were also given a personality instrument as well as being asked their opinions of kitchen specific behaviours.The findings suggest chefs’ exposure to regular bullying was in line with another major UK study (Hoel, 2002). However, occasional bullying was much higher. An examination of industry specific behaviours revealed that chefs tolerate a range of behaviours from verbal abuse on the one hand to physical and sexual abuse on the other. There were also positive aspects about the freedom of work and job satisfaction but this study was unable to find any evidence as to what made chefs stay in the industry.The study found that as student chefs become socialised into their role they were more likely to tolerate negative work behaviours and could identify reasons for their use although, this did not mean that they necessarily agreed with them. In fact, as the working chef sample was very different in ethnicity, gender and nationality from the student sample it could mean that due to negative behaviours on graduation students may not work as chefs.

Study One: Study One aims to better understand the roles that adolescents take during cyberbullying situations exploring the influence of attitudes towards cyberbullying, social grouping (being alone or with others), age and gender. Methods: Focus groups were used to adapt the Participant Role Scales (Salmivalli, 1998) and the Pro Victim Scale (Rigby & Slee, 1991) to explore cyberbullying. These adapted measures were completed by 261 participants across four year groups (year 7 to 10) via self report questionnaires. Results: Across social groupings an average of 73% of adolescents took participant roles in cyberbullying situations. There were significant differences between assistant, defender, outsider and victim behaviour when alone or when physically with others. In addition attitude towards cyberbullying significantly influenced the role taken and females were more likely to be defenders than males. Age significantly influenced outsider behaviour when participants were alone and defender behaviour when participants were physically with others. Study Two: Study Two aims to better understand what promotes or inhibits bystander involvement in cyberbullying situations. Methods: The study adopted an explorative approach to understand the experiences of 28 adolescents in a South West Local Authority in England. Data was collected via a semi-structured interview schedule administered in focus groups. Findings were analysed using latent thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Results: The decision for adolescent bystanders to actively join a cyberbullying situation was found to be complex. CMC, social influence (prior relationship, being alone or with others) and popularity and status of those participating in cyberbullying contribute to bystanders’ assessment of the risk and reward of participation. If reward outweighs risk an active role is taken (assistant, reinforcer, defender). However if risks are perceived to be higher than rewards then an outsider role is adopted.

This thesis is an inquiry into the nature and structure of face-to-face conversation, with a special focus on group meetings in the workplace. I argue that conversations are composed of episodes, each of which corresponds to an identifiable communicative activity such as giving instructions or telling a story. These activities are important because they are part of participants’ commonsense understanding of what happens in a conversation. They appear in natural summaries of conversations such as meeting minutes, and participants talk about them within the conversation itself. Episodic communicative activities therefore represent an essential component of practical, commonsense descriptions of conversations. The thesis objective is to provide a deeper understanding of how such activities may be recognized and differentiated from one another, and to develop a computational method for doing so automatically. The experiments are thus intended as initial steps toward future applications that will require analysis of such activities, such as an automatic minute-taker for workplace meetings, a browser for broadcast news archives, or an automatic decision mapper for planning interactions. My main theoretical contribution is to propose a novel analytical framework called participant relational analysis. The proposal argues that communicative activities are principally indicated through participant-relational features, i.e., expressions of relationships between participants and the dialogue. Participant-relational features, such as subjective language, verbal reference to the participants, and the distribution of speech activity amongst the participants, are therefore argued to be a principal means for analyzing the nature and structure of communicative activities. I then apply the proposed framework to two computational problems: automatic discourse segmentation and automatic discourse segment labeling. The first set of experiments test whether participant-relational features can serve as a basis for automatically segmenting conversations into discourse segments, e.g., activity episodes. Results show that they are effective across different levels of segmentation and different corpora, and indeed sometimes more effective than the commonly-used method of using semantic links between content words, i.e., lexical cohesion. They also show that feature performance is highly dependent on segment type, suggesting that human-annotated “topic segments” are in fact a multi-dimensional, heterogeneous collection of topic and activity-oriented units. Analysis of commonly used evaluation measures, performed in conjunction with the segmentation experiments, reveals that they fail to penalize substantially defective results due to inherent biases in the measures. I therefore preface the experiments with a comprehensive analysis of these biases and a proposal for a novel evaluation measure. A reevaluation of state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms using the novel measure produces substantially different results from previous studies. This raises serious questions about the effectiveness of some state-of-the-art algorithms and helps to identify the most appropriate ones to employ in the subsequent experiments. I also preface the experiments with an investigation of participant reference, an important type of participant-relational feature. I propose an annotation scheme with novel distinctions for vagueness, discourse function, and addressing-based referent inclusion, each of which are assessed for inter-coder reliability. The produced dataset includes annotations of 11,000 occasions of person-referring. The second set of experiments concern the use of participant-relational features to automatically identify labels for discourse segments. In contrast to assigning semantic topic labels, such as topical headlines, the proposed algorithm automatically labels segments according to activity type, e.g., presentation, discussion, and evaluation. The method is unsupervised and does not learn from annotated ground truth labels. Rather, it induces the labels through correlations between discourse segment boundaries and the occurrence of bracketing meta-discourse, i.e., occasions when the participants talk explicitly about what has just occurred or what is about to occur. Results show that bracketing meta-discourse is an effective basis for identifying some labels automatically, but that its use is limited if global correlations to segment features are not employed. This thesis addresses important pre-requisites to the automatic summarization of conversation. What I provide is a novel activity-oriented perspective on how summarization should be approached, and a novel participant-relational approach to conversational analysis. The experimental results show that analysis of participant-relational features is a.

This thesis investigates some of the practices by which interactants engage in responding to an informing in Greek talk-in-interaction. Using the analytical methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), I investigate the ways in which responses to informings are typically constructed and how speakers recruit the assistance of their interlocutors in order to format their following action by examining the following particles: entaksi (mainly in the beginning of a turn), ne (=yes) with a questioning prosody, ela + name (sometimes incremented with the Greek particle re), bravo, etsi den ine (a form of tag question in Greek) and etsi in the final position of a turn. The analysis focuses on the sequential and social implications of these particles in interaction and suggests that there are certain resources interactants deploy in response to an informing, especially in turn-initial position, to indicate their stance towards the prior turn. Interlocutors deploy different practices in talk that serve the avoidance of conflicts, especially in the context of interactions between friends and intimates. The tokens under investigation are deployed by recipients of an informing to position themselves towards a prior turn but at the same time indicate the degree to which they accept the informing, absolute agreement or preliminary to a disagreement. As the first conversation analytic investigation of information receipts in Greek talk-in-interaction, this study attempts to illustrate the interactional significance of receipt tokens in the organization of talk and the accomplishment of actions in interaction.