Des élus politiques, des membres des forces de l’ordre et des citoyens s’opposent sur la question du bien fondé de l’utilisation de la vidéosurveillance en milieu urbain lorsqu’on la met au service de la gestion de la sécurité. Si les uns voient dans l’installation de ces systèmes un danger pour les libertés fondamentales du citoyen, les autres considèrent que l’usage de la vidéosurveillance se justifie par la pression de l’insécurité. Il s’agit dans cette recherche de présenter les argumentaires des partisans et des détracteurs de la vidéosurveillance en distinguant les éléments divergents ou contradictoires du débat public sur ces dispositifs. Je me penche d’autre part sur la réception de ces systèmes par une population d’enquêtés strasbourgeois. L’analyse des discours recueillis permet à la fois de mettre en lumière des systèmes de représentations et de croyances concernant la surveillance vidéo de la ville dans laquelle ces vidéosurveillés vivent et agissent quotidiennement et de dégager les éléments qui entrent en considération lorsqu’un acteur formule une appréciation individuelle sur la légitimité de la vidéosurveillance. On verra que le type d’impression que provoque la caméra sur celui qui la perçoit n’est jamais constant mais qu’il varie selon la construction de la figure du vidéosurveillant, avec la nature du lieu dans lequel l’expérience de la vidéosurveillance est vécue mais aussi en fonction de la valeur attribuée à l’image du corps dans les différents espaces filmés. / Elected representatives, members of the police and citizens are at odds concerning the appropriateness of using video surveillance (closed-circuit television) in towns for security management purposes. Some see the implementation of these systems as a danger for the fundamental freedoms of citizens, while others consider that the use of video surveillance can be justified by the pressure of insecurity. The point of this research is to present the arguments of the supporters and critics of video surveillance by distinguishing the divergent and contradictory factors of the public debate on these devices. Furthermore, I focus on the reception of these systems by the people from Strasbourg, I have interviewed. Not only does the analysis of the gathered speeches highlight systems of representation and belief, relative to the video surveillance of the town in which the video-monitored people live and behave, on a daily basis, but it also reveals the factors to be taken into account when a person formulates an individual judgement on the legitimacy of video surveillance. We will see that the type of impression the camera provokes on the person who perceives it, is never constant, and varies according to the construction of the character/behaviour of the video surveillance operator, to the nature of the place in which the video surveillance experience is carried out, and also according to the value attributed to the image of the body, in the different filmed places.

Women all over the world are still having difficulties in occupying leadership positions. People perceive males as being highly qualified and likely to be considered as leaders. Females are less likely to be perceived as leaders and to be less effective in carrying it out. There are different leadership theories but the most studied and popular one nowadays is the transformational and transactional model. Female leaders are said to use a leadership behavior based on interpersonal relationships and sharing of power and information, the behavior which is usually associated with the style of leadership known as transformational. Male leaders have been found to influence performance by using rewards and punishment, the behavior mainly associated with the style of leaders known as transactional. The individuals, who work for leaders, are called followers. How followers view the magnitude of difference in power between themselves and their leaders is called a power distance orientation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate transformational and transactional leadership with a gendered and culturally appropriate lens, particularly, to extend the research on gender, leadership and culture area in an Arab Middle East context where little research has been done. This study was guided by two research questions; the first one examining the interaction effect of the participant’s power distance orientation and the leader’s gender on the participant’s perception of the transformational leader; the second one examining the interaction effect of the participant’s power distance orientation and the leader’s gender on the participant’s perception of the transactional leader. This research adopted the quantitative method; the use of vignettes and a questionnaire. 437 employees in an organization in Syria returned a complete and usable questionnaire. Data analyzed using ANOVA and hierarchical multiple regression revealed a significant interaction effect of the gender of the leader and the participant’s power distance orientation on evaluation of a transformational leader on three out of the five dimensions of transformational leadership. Also, results revealed no significant interaction effect of the gender of the leader and the participant’s power distance orientation on evaluation of a transactional leader on the three dimensions. This research makes an important contribution to theoretical understanding of gender by showing gender-role stereotyping may change over time and place. This study offers insight into the culture leadership research that means evaluation of performance for transformational leaders is influenced by the cultural value of a follower’s power distance orientation.

In recent decades the European Union has moved from a multilateral treaty to a distinctive social, political, and economic order among European states. During the same period political philosophers have increasingly turned their attention to questions of justice beyond the state. But their discussions have largely focused on global justice, and have paid relatively little attention to the distinctive moral and political questions raised by the emergence of a new type of order among European states. This thesis fills this lacuna, by developing a conception of ‘social democratic’ or ‘egalitarian’ social justice for the specific institutional arrangements of the EU. In Chapters one through three, I delineate a general conception of ‘pluralist egalitarianism’, the view that we have a variety of grounds for endorsing equality-inclined economic institutions domestically. Direct egalitarian arguments stress the internal requirements of institutional fairness to which basic economic institutions are subject. Indirect egalitarian arguments favour egalitarian economic outcomes based on concerns of social equality. I further differentiate between a transnationalist and an internationalist position. Direct transnationalist arguments stress the EU’s similarity to domestic institutions and derive egalitarian economic requirements for the EU as a whole. Indirect transnationalists argue that EU citizens stand in a distinctive kind of relationship such that the value of social equality has purchase amongst them, and social equality requires a limitation on economic inequalities at the EU level. By contrast, internationalists insist on the continuing importance of national self-determination. However, they endorse more substantive economic institutions at the EU level to protect existing social democratic welfare state arrangements. In chapter four to seven, I assess the extent to which each of these arguments can support a more egalitarian organisation of basic economic institutions at the EU level. Finally, I offer one practical proposal that would help the EU to realise the social democratic vision I have defended. This is the idea of an EU social minimum. I explain how such a social minimum would be conceived and implemented, and I demonstrate why transnationalists and internationalists should endorse such a policy.

Human culture is unique in its scope and complexity and is underpinned by the social transmission of information. Successful individuals will use both social and asocial information effectively. Evolutionary theory suggests that social learning should be guided by evolved learning rules that dictate when individuals rely on social information, a literature which I review across Chapters 1 and 2, with the emphasis of chapter 2 being on conformist transmission. In this thesis I present experimental investigations of the existence and adaptive value of several such strategies in both adults (Chapter 3) and young children (Chapter 4). In all cases I find strong evidence for the existence of such biases and show that they act to increase the accuracy of decisions. In particular I show individuals are highly sensitive to even small majorities within a group of demonstrators. The youngest children (age 3) however, show little sensitivity to social information and do not use it effectively. In Chapter 5 I present an investigation into the role of social learning in the evolution of hominin lithic technology. I conclude that even the earliest hominin flaking technology is poorly transmitted through observation alone and so the widespread and longstanding persistence of such tools implies some form of teaching. Furthermore, I conclude that the stable transmission of more complex technologies would likely require teaching, and potentially symbolic communication. I also postulate a co-evolution of stone tools and complex communication and teaching. In Chapter 6 I conclude that the cultural evolutionary approach, focussing on the evolutionary consequences of social information use and treating culture as a system of inheritance partially independent of genes, seems successful in increasing our understanding of the evolution of social learning.

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My aim in this thesis is to examine whether there are some mitigating factors, i.e. reasons to punish an offender less for his crime than an otherwise similar offender (other than that the offender suffered from mental disorder or disturbance or other forms of irrationality at the time of offence), that are more applicable to socially deprived offenders than to non-socially deprived offenders. I will answer the thesis question through a critical examination of twelve arguments for claiming that there is a mitigating factor that is more applicable to socially deprived offenders, each proposing a different mitigating factor. My conclusions are as follows: (1) Most of the arguments that I examine fail, i.e. they either fail to highlight a genuine mitigating factor, or we do not have much evidence that the mitigating factor highlighted by the argument has a greater applicability to socially deprived offenders than to non-socially deprived offenders. (2) However, one argument, which can be called the no violation of natural duties argument, is successful. (3) Moreover, the improvement of the worst off argument, an argument that is not often discussed in the literature, is particularly noteworthy. If my discussion about that argument is correct, then even if, as I will argue, the mitigating factor highlighted by that argument may not be more applicable to socially deprived offenders than to non-socially deprived offenders, the remaining parts of that argument would still have profound influence on punishment in our unjust societies.

There is something unique about human culture. Its complex technologies, customs, institutions, symbolisms and norms, which are shared and maintained and improved across countless generations, are what sets it apart from the ‘cultures' of other animals. The fundamental question that researchers are only just beginning to unravel is: How do we account for the gap between their ‘cultures' and ours? The answer lies in a deeper understanding of culture's complex constituent components: from the micro-level psychological mechanisms that guide and facilitate accurate social learning, to the macro-level cultural processes that unfold within large-scale cooperative groups. This thesis attempts to contribute to two broad themes that are of relevance to this question. The first theme involves the evolution of accurate and high-fidelity cultural transmission. In Chapter 2, a meta-analysis conducted across primate social learning studies finds support for the common assumption that imitative and/or emulative learning mechanisms are required for the high-fidelity transmission of complex instrumental cultural goals. Chapter 3, adopting an experimental study with young children, then questions the claim that mechanisms of high-fidelity copying have reached such heights in our own species that they will even lead us to blindly copy irrelevant, and potentially costly, information. The second theme involves investigations of the mutually reinforcing relationship predicted between cultural complexity and ultra-cooperativeness in humans, employing a series of laboratory-based experimental investigations with adults. Chapter 4 finds only limited support for a positive relationship between cooperative behaviour and behavioural imitation, which is believed to facilitate cultural group cohesion. Finally, Chapter 5 presents evidence suggesting that access to cultural information is positively associated with an individual's cooperative reputation, and argues that this dynamic might help to scaffold the evolution of increased cultural complexity and cooperation in a learning environment where cultural information carries high value.

Social learning is ubiquitous among animals and humans and is thought to be critical to the widespread success of humans and to the development and evolution of human culture. Evolutionary theory, however, suggests that social learning alone may not be adaptive but that individuals may need to be selective in who and how they copy others. One of the key findings of these evolutionary models (reviewed in Chapter 1) is that social information may be widely adaptive if individuals are able to combine social and asocial sources of information together strategically. However, up until this point the focus of theoretic models has been on the population level consequences of different social learning strategies, and not on how individuals combine social and asocial information on specific tasks. In Chapter 2 I carry out an analysis of how animal learners might incorporate social information into a reinforcement learning framework and find that even limited, low-fidelity copying of actions in an action sequence may combine with asocial learning to result in high fidelity transmission of entire action sequences. In Chapter 3 I describe a series of experiments that find that human learners flexibly use a conformity biased learning strategy to learn from multiple demonstrators depending on demonstrator accuracy, either indicated by environmental cues or past experience with these demonstrators. The chapter reveals close quantitative and qualitative matches between participant's performance and a Bayesian model of social learning. In both Chapters 2 and 3 I find, consistent with previous evolutionary findings, that by combining social and asocial sources of information together individuals are able to learn about the world effectively. Exploring how animals use social learning experimentally can be a substantially more difficult task than exploring human social learning. In Chapter 4, I develop and present a refined version of Network Based Diffusion analysis to provide a statistical framework for inferring social learning mechanisms from animal diffusion experiments. In Chapter 5 I move from examining the effects of social learning at an individual level to examining their population level outcomes and provide an analysis of how fine-grained population structure may alter the spread of novel behaviours through a population. I find that although a learner's social learning strategy and the learnability of a novel behaviour strongly impact how likely the behaviour is to spread through the population, fine grained population structure plays a much smaller role. In Chapter 6 I summarize the results of this thesis, and provide suggestions for future work to understand how individuals, humans and other animals alike, use social information.

The relevance of places to people has been questioned in recent times, as the world has become increasingly globalised and people more mobile. The aim of this research was to explore the relationship between sense of place and people’s behaviour in ‘ordinary’, everyday places. This contrasts with much prior research, which has focused on ‘special’ places, such as national parks and impressive landscapes in order to investigate the components of sense of place. Most people do not live in such places, but inhabit ordinary places in (sub) urban contexts. The research questions were: How does sense of place manifest in an ordinary, everyday landscape? In what ways can social learning impact upon the dynamics of sense of place? Can a more salient sense of place affect people’s attitudes towards and behaviour within their local area? Using an action research approach, pre- and post-interviews and three workshops to create a sustainable future vision at a neighbourhood level of scale, and the town as a whole, were held with fourteen residents of East Bolton, in the North West of England. The activities were designed to facilitate interaction between the participants, so that meanings attributed to places could be shared and discussed. This approach allowed participants to see familiar places in new ways and to share perspectives. The key themes that emerged from this research were: the importance of childhood places; the impact of mobility – both physical and social mobility; the interdependence of places at various scales; and also self-efficacy and people’s ability to influence their surroundings. A key finding was that sense of place can be made more salient for people in ‘ordinary’ landscapes, particularly if people are given direct experience of their places and opportunities to share and reflect on their perceptions relating to place. Social learning, however, takes time and requires resources to create opportunities to influence the salience of sense of place. The findings point to the value of promoting social learning through engagement activities. Planners, regeneration project officers and citizen groups could utilise sense of place as an organising principle to explore place meanings and as a catalyst for stimulating local action. Participants found it more difficult to discuss sense of place at the neighbourhood level of scale than the town level of scale, partly owing to their differing conception of boundaries and lack of awareness of the neighbourhood beyond the home. This has implications for implementing the localism agenda, suggesting that local action and visioning needs to be situated within activities nested at a range of scales in order to be most effective. The drive towards localism may lead to more self-organising and activism emerging from outside of the formal planning system and becoming a force for collective place shaping. Thus, the benefits of developing a more salient sense of place may also have impacts in less formal ways, such as greater interest and involvement in neighbourhood affairs and increased capacity-building, from which community action could potentially emerge.

The main thrust of this study argues that failure to account for the notion of power in considering learning in social contexts—like a working environment—inevitably presents an incomplete and unrealistic account of how learning actually is. Literature suggests that mainstream scholars and theorists have arguably pushed issues regarding the inter-connectedness of power and knowledge to the peripheral—resulting in both a paucity of theoretical coverage and empirical work on the subject. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this study takes inspiration from Foucault’s conceptualization of power—argued to provide a useful analytical framework for exploring power. Implications on how power impacts on learning in a contemporary workplace is viewed through the key ideas of ‘situated learning in communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger). This study proposes that Foucault’s conceptualizations of power—regarding power as being relational and interconnected to knowledge—allows for a useful analytical framework that can sensitize our efforts towards understanding the power effects of knowledge with regards to learning at, and through, work practices, ultimately enabling us to re-work the concepts of ‘communities of practice’. The context of this study represents a professional knowledge-intensive workplace—Private Wealth Management (also referred to as Private Banking). Such contemporary work contexts—suggested to represent rather different environments vis-à-vis craft-like professions, for example—are argued to represent a more complex, conflicted and competitively-induced platform for learning. The wider regulatory environment was found to have strong influences in shaping the learning environment, representing both opportunities and restrictions for the bankers. Assessment based, compliant-driven and structured-training efforts were key drivers of the learning environment. Social interpersonal skills and professional relationships were observed as being integral and found to involve elements of power inequality, both within and across boundaries to which participants mediated, negotiated and often times obfuscated to effect power shifts through their discursive practices. Skills and perspectives, with regards to learning, evolved as the banker’s career trajectory progressed. Power punctuated not only the social network of relationships, but was also noted at the organizational level, via both explicit and implicit controls. Participants described purposeful thoughts and actions: mediating learning and strategizing outcomes in the respective environments with conflicted identity that requires balancing self, belongingness and directed efforts towards meeting the expectations of organization, respective clients and self.