This thesis has three aims. First, I propose that researchers should focus more on similarities between groups of people, because they are arguably at least as interesting and important as differences. I demonstrate that even effects that are usually labelled as large often still display more similarities than differences between groups. In Study 1, I modified and extended prior procedures for describing similarities and demonstrate the importance of this exercise by examining similarities between groups on 22 social variables (e.g., types of human values, trust, moral attitudes) within six commonly used social categories: gender, age, education, income, nation of residence, and religious denomination (N = 86,272). On average, the amount of similarity between two groups (e.g., high vs. low educated) was greater than 90%. Study 2 (N = 54,082) replicated these findings. Study 3 demonstrated the importance of presenting information about similarity, by showing that a research report led to more accurate perceptions when similarities were presented alongside differences. Secondly, I explored whether differences might emerge in relatively concrete variables. In particular, human values (e.g., freedom, creativity) measured in Studies 1 and 2 were very abstract, and people instantiate (that is to say, exemplify) human values differently. I directly examined these instantiations in Brazil, India, and the UK (Study 4). Although some meaningful differences in value instantiation emerged, within- country variability outweighed between-country differences. Studies 5-7 provided further support for this conclusion. Finally, I tested the implications of one provocative difference in value instantiation, namely a tendency to associate the value of creativity with art and not with science, particularly in the UK and not in Brazil (Study 8). Results indicated that the detection of this difference may depend on the ways in which art and science are iv presented to participants, and this finding has implications for attempts to engage more interest in science. To conclude, the final chapter of the thesis summarises the findings and discusses some limitations across the chapters. It then outlines a range of broad implications, including the benefits of a stronger focus on similarities, such as increased transparency in the reporting of scientific results.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore implications of a necessary presupposition of a theory of the person in the aims of Personal and Social Education (PSE), with the aim of furnishing a conception of the person which retains a significant concept of personal agency in light of constraints on action. From the position that the concept of the person as agent is central to the aims of PSE, it is argued that given the tension between the conception of the person as autonomous and recognition of the plasticity of persons, the justification of the unity of persons suggests itself as a relevant and useful approach. This is held to provide a means of approaching issues of personhood which are central to the concerns of PSE and which also provides important insights into the some issues of agency. It is argued in the second chapter that the relation between a theory of personal identity and the aims of PSE which presuppose such a theory is best understood as one of interdependence. From this position, it is argued that the conception of the person as potentially autonomous does not necessitate acceptance of a strict identity or non-reductionist theory of personal identity. It is argued, on the grounds of internal coherence and the ideals evident in discussions of PSE, that the alternative, a continuity theory is preferable. In the fourth chapter the issue of constraints on the concept of the person and their effect on the acceptability of theories of personal identity is addressed. It is argued that certain constraints lead to the rejection of reductionism with respect to persons but do not affect the acceptability of a continuity theory or its importance. The argument supports the view that the concept of personal identity and the concept of the person are indeterminate and allow a qualified form of social ascriptivism. Implications of the conception of the person which has been argued for, are illustrated and explored in the fmal two chapters, where the discussion focuses on the use of students' autobiographical writing in PSE. The argument is made that the conception of the person argued for in the previous chapters has advantages over that contained in the traditional understanding of autobiography. Consideration of narrative and its role in making sense of experience leads to supplementation and refinement of the conceptualisation of the person advocated.

"Just as the problem of action at a distance created conceptual difficulties in philosophical analyses of causation, action delayed over time remains with us to create conceptual difficulties. . . In other modalities, such as vision, the question of whether behavior mediates simple discriminations such as the discrimination of intensity does not arise. It is not felt that such sensory processes must have the same dimensions as behavior. In temporal discriminations, however, the temporal gap is there to be bridged, and the analysis of mediating or timing behavior may be regarded as a kind of search for the temporal receptor". (Catania, 1970, p.36). The research reported in this thesis arose from a review of the literature on timing behaviours in organisms. This revealed that while many experimenters have described behaviour, produced by both animals and humans, where responses have been spaced accurately in time, the empirical results are open to equivocal explanations. One aspect of timing behaviour which has received little experimental attention is the function, if any, of the stereotyped behaviours which often occur collaterally with accurately spaced responding in time. These stereotyped collateral behaviours have sometimes been termed mediating behaviours because several researchers claim that they mediate accurately spaced responding in time (Kramer and Rilling, 1970, p.234 ff.). A detailed functional analysis of these "mediating'' behaviours has not appeared in the literature. This is possibly because the initial appearance of such behaviours is outwith the experimenter's control and, furthermore, these behaviours are normally peculiar to the individual and therefore difficult to measure quantitatively. The present investigation used a technique which made it likely that a certain behaviour would occur as the stereotyped collateral behaviour, and allowed a degree of quantitative measurement of this behaviour. It was hoped that investigation of stereotyped collateral behaviours would throw some light on the wider question of how organsisms space responses accurately in time.

This thesis examines the censorship of translated literature in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and the 1960s. Reconsidering traditional understandings of censorship, I employ a theoretical approach influenced by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu in order to understand censorship as a set of inter-related practices enacted by multiple agents, occupying points on a continuum of censorship that ranges from external authoritarian intervention to internalised, unconscious norms. An analysis of literary texts translated from English into Russian in the literary journals Internatsional’naia literatura and Inostrannaia literatura is supplemented by examination of archival material from these journals and the censorship agency, Glavlit; I aim to reconstruct the various layers of censorship carried out by translator, editor or external agents. My analysis begins with a study of the publications patterns of the journals, examining the inclusion and exclusion of texts as an attempt to impose a canon of foreign literature. Employing internal reviews and records of editorial meetings, I demonstrate that ideological control of foreign literature was not completely repressive, and that a number of texts not conforming to Soviet standards found their way onto the pages of the journal. The next chapters study censorship on the textual level. A chapter on puritanical censorship discusses how sexual and vulgar language was removed from the texts, noting the relative easing of censorship in the post-Stalin era. Puritanical censorship was often incomplete, inviting the reader to reconstruct the original meaning. The chapter on political censorship shows how taboo topics were removed or entirely misrepresented in the Stalin era, but modified less drastically in the post-Stalin texts. The following study of the censorship of ideologically marked language examines how censorship aimed to erase unorthodox uses of certain terms, imposing an authoritative meaning on these texts, and ensuring the continued circulation of canonical symbols in a limited discursive framework. Ideological censorship also created intertextuality between the English texts and the Soviet context, attempting to make those texts a part of Soviet discourse. Through an examination of these intersecting censorship practices I problematise the phenomenon, highlighting ways in which the regulation of foreign texts could be incomplete, and ways in which censorial agents often sought to undermine censorship, even as they acted as censors.

The practice of making international dedications (of days, weeks or years) proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century with the rise of international institutions like the United Nations. The practice contrasts alternative dealings with time i.e. sacred time or dedication as commemoration. International dedications celebrate a concept of social or environmental importance, with a particular emphasis on awareness raising and inculcating change on a practical level. 1995 was the ‘United Nations International Year for Tolerance’. To the study of tolerance, the ‘Year’ marks the apex of tolerance as an object of modern international concern. This thesis is divided into two halves. The former undertakes a close analysis of the build-up to the UN ‘Year of Tolerance’ (Chapter One), the ‘Year’ itself and the subsequent follow-up (Chapter Two). It likewise provides a more general account of the rise and practice of international dedication making. The second half of this thesis addresses the broader theoretical debate on tolerance, 1945-2010. This thesis understands the UN ‘Year of Tolerance’ as a particular institutionalised expression of a specific theoretical mode of tolerance, taken from the theoretical debate on tolerance, and masked by the veneer of cultural universality. It uses 1995 as an artificial marker to gauge continuity and change in the debate on tolerance and to demarcate between Chapter Three-Chapter Four (pre-1995) and Chapter Five-Chapter Six (post-1995). The conclusion summarises the principal points of continuity and discontinuity and finally contextualises the UN ‘Year of Tolerance’ in the theoretical debate on tolerance i.e. as the institutional embodiment of a particular liberal-‘political’ mode of tolerance and an international attempt at final foreclosure of the controversy around tolerance. In seeking to critically account for the UN ‘Year of Tolerance’, and likewise to provide a general overview of continuity and change in the modern theoretical debate of tolerance, this thesis seeks to redress ‘a gap’ in current academic research.

Partnership is a dominant theme of public policy and service provision in England and in other western countries. It is also a concept that remains relatively under-researched and under-theorised, especially with respect to conceptualising underlying relational processes that can shape conflict and consensus within partnerships. This thesis draws on a richly textured ethnographic study, using an in-depth casestudy of a voluntarily-founded, network-like, cross-sectoral partnership, which aimed to develop and implement a community learning centre in the village parish of Broadley, located in the English Midlands. The research sees fieldwork conducted over twenty-four months, using multiple methods of qualitative data-generation including the observation of partnership meetings and activities, semi-structured interviews and the collection of partnership artefacts (meeting minutes, funding bid document, emails). It presents an ethnographic view of the inner workings of one partnership and follows its entire lifecycle. This partnership was not sustained and did not realise the vision to which it aspired. A central concern of this thesis is to investigate the development of conflict and consensus within partnership practice. The contribution of the thesis is to tease out how these elements are understood. This study challenges naive texts that prescribe simplistic, recipe-based formulas for achieving partnership success. Instead, it illustrates what can happen when partners do not develop sufficiently strong and balanced sets of social ties between one another. Consequently, this thesis sets up a new research agenda focusing more specifically on issues of community overlaps, identities and social ties. This thesis has value in terms of providing a deeply relational account of challenges facing the development of one cross-sectoral, network-like partnership. It draws together insights from partnership literature, community literature and fieldwork,and provides a strong basis from which further research can be developed.

This thesis introduces and explores a novel construct for studying human beliefs in social science: doxastic spaces. These flexible analytical devices are demonstrated as capturing three key properties of beliefs which are difficult to depict through other formats: the relational, relative, and reflexive properties of beliefs. The doxastic-space paradigm developed by this thesis is likewise shown to enable new and insightful theories about belief formation and change. Two such theories cultivated herein are quantized evidence theory (QET) and entropy-based social learning (EBSL). These theories prioritise not only the evidential bases of beliefs, but also the cognitive limitations on memory and attention that people face in constructing and updating beliefs about their worlds. Such bases and limitations underscore not only the role that context has to play in sculpting beliefs, but also the reciprocal function of beliefs in helping to determine and demarcate context. Part of that context is discussed as being other people relevant in social judgment and learning situations. And interplay between beliefs and context is used to aid explanation for unstable tendencies in neglectful cognition. The work mixes theoretical and empirical investigation of the doxastic-space framework, and suggests that it may serve social science by working to not only forge deeper comprehension of belief dynamics but also to operate as a platform for interdisciplinary exchange.

This thesis presents an investigation of sensemaking within emergency response command and control (C2) systems. Sensemaking is considered from a novel perspective – that of sensemaking as distributed cognition – which proposes that sensemaking is a technologically mediated and socially distributed cognitive activity. This qualitative study adopted a multi-method approach and used two case studies to examine sensemaking in response to ‘routine emergencies’ and multi-agency major incidents. During routine emergencies, agents within the C2 network appear to function as a distributed Community of Practice, making use of rapid, highly compact, formalised communications – mediated by formal (designed) and informal (adapted) artefacts – in order to frame the problem. In contrast, whilst multi-agency major incidents display many of the features of Exploration Networks, the responding agencies were initially found to maintain their individual Communities of Practice, with inter-agency collaboration apparently hampered by the lack of shared artefacts to represent the ‘problem space’. In addition to presenting a comprehensive description of emergency response C2, the thesis supports the assertion that – in this domain at least – sensemaking is a systems-level activity that is supported by artefacts and collaborative processes. The thesis also suggests future directions for sensemaking, distributed cognition and C2 research.

Third Culture Kids are the children of people working outside their passport countries, and who are employed by international organisations as development experts, diplomats, missionaries, journalists, international NGO and humanitarian aid workers, or UN representatives. The “third culture” they possess is the temporary, nomadic multicultural space they inhabited as children, within an expatriate community and, in some cases, international school. This culture is distinct from their parents’ homeland culture (the first culture) and from that of the country in which they spend their formative years but of which they are not native members (the second culture). The “third culture” inhabited by Third Culture Kids does not unite the first and second cultures, but rather comprises a space for their unstable integration (Knörr, 2005). This thesis explores the following question: In what ways does being a Third Culture Kid affect notions of belonging, identity and place? Through analysis of both fieldwork in an international school, and exploratory life story interviews with adult TCKs from myriad backgrounds, this work contributes to a better understanding of the experience of growing up abroad, and tracks the long term effects of this experience on the ways in which TCKs orient themselves towards belonging, identity and place. Throughout the course of this research, findings coalesce to orient TCKs as cosmopolitans, rooted in the expatriate communities of their childhoods, continuing in mobility and self-conscious “otherness” into adulthood, and moving through place as “elite vagrants”.

1. The aim of the thesis is threefold: i) to present a fully dynamic analysis of leadership among the Baluch in the Persian Province of Baluchistan, ii) to illustrate the sociological distinction (or lack of it) between sacré and profane on different planes in the society, iii) to make some advance in the theoretical treatment of personality as a sociological factor in leadership. 2. The Baluch in general form a linguistic and sub-cultural unit within the broader cultural context of Eastern or Iranian Islam. The Persian Province of Baluchistan, which is roughly coterminous with the area of Persia where the Baluch form the majority of the population, is an isolated area which presents great extremes of altitude, climate and fertility. Natural conditions break the society down into small communities (whether settled or nomadic), and force it into dependence on a combination of agriculture and pastoralism in varying proportions. In almost every aspect of the material culture utter simplicity and dependence on the environment is evident. However, complex patterns of movement and other sociological factors keep all communities and classes constantly in touch with each other, and counteract the fragmenting effect of the the environment. Baluch society within the Province consists of: i) Balush - who are predominantly nomadic, ii) shahri - who are generally peasants, iii) ghulāms - who until recently were slaves, and iv) a superstructure of dynastic families, for which however there is no native term. From the point of view of leadership, there are also four role-statuses: i) kamāsh - who may be secular or religious, ii) maulawi - who is religious, iii) darwish - who is also religious, and iv) "chief" - who is secular, and for which there is no really equivalent native term. Political aspirations invariably function through one or other of these role-statuses, which however cannot be said to form a structure. A chief must be a member of a dynastic family, and is a leader by definition. Holders of the other three role-statuses are only potentially leaders: they may or may not lead in fact. The chief is generally but not necessarily more powerful than holders of the other role-statuses. Every man inherits a tribal name agnatically, and the word for tribe (zāt) is best translated as "birth status". However, the zāt of a man's mother is also an important factor in determining his status. He may only improve his status within limits by his own achievements. There are also institutionalised forms of behaviour for particular occasions and situations, and there is a "formal" religion - Islam. Beyond these factors there is no institutionalisation in the society, and so there is practically no specifically political institutionalisation at all. Furthermore, the terms for the three role-statuses which are named in the society are all of alien origin. 3. This situation makes it impossible to understand and analyse realistically the present framework of political conceptions in the society without taking cognisance both of the history of these conceptions and of comparative material from neighbouring societies, for all of these conceptions have at least archaistic aspects, and in some respects contact with the semantic origin of the term still conditions its use within the society. In general, a zāt represents a group of immigrants to the Province. The people who brought the name "Baluch" and the Baluchi language into the Province appear to have arrived there in the 11th century. There is evidence that agriculture flourished in the Province before the Baluch came, but we know nothing of any pastoral life there before them. The names of the main agricultural settlements were the same before the Baluch came as they are now. There are no other pre-Baluch names in the Province. On the basis of the historical and comparative data available a theoretical model is constructed to demonstrate the synchronic and diachronic contexts of the present situation. This model is particularly relevant to the study of: i) relationships between settled and nomadic and the mixture of various ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups; ii) the ways in which social stratification may result from such mixtures; iii) how certain political relationships - particularly the feudal relationship - may develop in these circumstances, and, iv) how the constellation and importance of kin and affinal relationships may be affected. 4. The kinship terminology is simple and cognatic. There are strong ties between brother and sister, and between cousins. Brothers and sisters generally inherit equal shares of land, except that the eldest son may be given an extra share. Livestock is gnerally inherited by sons only. Landownership is only of secondary importance to leadership. Marriage preference (for first or only wives) is for "cousins", and the bride-price is high and not affected by the choice of a father's brother's daughter. Some communities and classes are generally monogamous, others generally polygymous, and it is possible to discern a difference in the function and conception of marriage in the two cases. Matri- and patri-locality is better interpreted in terms of the fact that solidary political groupings (formed by marriage or allegiance) are generally more important sociologically than geographical and seological groupings. Among the nomadic Baluch a corollary of the orientation towards kinship, tribal affiliation, etc., is the instability of the individual camp. Marriage and inheritance practices reinforce "class" identity - particularly in the dynastic families where this identity is most important. Similarly, because of these practices, members of dynastic families acquire ownership interests in widely scattered pieces of land, and are therefore encouraged to move about continually. 5. The dynastic families form a superstructure. The chief is generally the paramount leader in a certain area, and has a certain vaguely defined "people". There are communities and areas without chiefs. Holders of the other role-statuses may also function as paramount leaders. Any leader automatically qualifies for one or other of the traditional role-statuses. This essay is concerned primarily with the chief who is seen (by the Baluch) as the most typical form of paramount leader but for whom nevertheless there is no native term. The main functions of the leader are to provide social control and initiative, but he also personifies the prestige of the community. A chief (or other leader) rules generally through kenash, who form the basic political denominators of the society. Neither is directly chosen or elected by the other. The extent of a leader's power depends basically on two factors: i) his "ecological" situation, i.e. parentage, alliance, etc. ii) his "personality", of which the first is little use without the latter, but the latter is to a large extent confirmed by the former. A certain quality attaches to this personality of the leader - particularly in the case of the chief - who has affinities with Weber's "charisma". In the Baluch Period (before 1928), where possible a chief operated from a fort in an agricultural centre, and generally either owed (informal) allegiances to a senior chief, or was owed allegiances by another chief or chiefs. He was traditionally entitled to a tithe on the produce of the land he controlled (apart from his major share of the produce from the land he owned), and service from the pastoralists. In addition to this in many cases he also collected a tax (in origin nourped from the Persian Government) from all sections of the population.