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The socio-economic landscapes of islands have, in the past, been reduced to facile binarisms like prison/paradise, sovereign/non-sovereign or vulnerable/resilient (Royle, 2001; Baldacchino, 2006a; Guillaumont, 2010). These binarisms often mask the complexities and, possibly more importantly, the mundanities of island life in considering island development. This thesis provides critical empirical evidence of the lived experience of islanders and what it means to study small islands 'on their own terms' (McCall, 1994). The methods and techniques used in this thesis were framed within a constructivist research paradigm where traditional boundaries between researcher and researched are renegotiated to being equal co-constructors of , knowledge. Qualitative interviews, along with participant observation and analysis of textual material were used to present complementary and contradictory perceptions of island development. Sixty-one interviews were conducted within the Western Isles of Scotland and a further seven were conducted in Cape Breton Island, Canada. This thesis found that the socio-spatial characteristics of small North Atlantic islands with limited sovereignty (NAILS) contribute to development being so locally embedded that they find it difficult to be 'glocally' confident. Unlike other small island economies that have been described as existing in a type of a steady-state equilibrium (Bertram 1999, 2006), NAILS can be described as continually transitional. They are in a 'constant state of becoming'; becoming something other than dependent on traditional resource-based economies. There is a legacy of 'malaise, dejection, and despair' (Baldacchino, 200Sa:39) from a history of exploitation, resource dependence and failed development projects and falling populations. However, innovation in the form of community ownership projects, an experiential tourism product and new governance arrangements offer green shoots of hope and optimism.

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The study of social evolution is concerned with fitness consequences of interactions between individuals. It has proven to be an excellent area for relating theoretical predictions to empirical observations. I develop social evolution theory in several ways. (1) I demonstrate that limited male fecundity and small mating groups can select for extreme fertility insurance, curbing female biased sex allocation under local mate competition, which explains puzzling sex ratios in protozoan blood parasites. (2) I examine the underlying causes of an observed statistical invariant in the relative size at sex change in animals, revealing that it does not imply as much conservation of biology across taxa as previously imagined. (3) I extend recent theory regarding how local competition impedes the evolution of altruism to show that it also promotes the evolution of spite. This allows me to re-interpret several behaviours in terms of spitefulness, and predict where spite will occur in nature. (4) I apply spite theory to the evolution of chemical (bacteriocin) warfare in bacteria, and derive novel predictions for the evolution of virulence caused by bacterial parasites. (5) I formalize a verbal model for the evolution of costly punishment as a mechanism of promoting cooperation, revealing a logical flaw and the true source of its (potential) selective benefit. (6) I develop a multi-locus methodology for arbitrary social interactions, and apply this to a dynamically-sufficient co-evolutionary analysis of cooperation and costly punishment, revealing when punishment is favoured by selection. (7) I apply this methodology to the evolution of mutation robustness for a simple two locus model with recombination and inbreeding.

This thesis explores emotions that are mediated via the mobile phone and how these emotions are managed and used in the presentation of self. It addresses the question `How does emotion occur in the everyday use of mobile phones? ' The topic is explored using data collected in interviews with UK mobile phone users aged over 40. These respondents' expressions about, comments on and descriptions of their emotional connection with and through their mobile phones are used to explicate how the emotions mediated via mobile phones impact on their everyday emotional lives. I Prior sociological research on the affective aspects of mobile phone use and on emotion in particular has been limited. Furthermore, most research on the social practices of mobile phone users has been published during the last nine years with studies typically investigating much younger respondents than those in this present study. Drawing on literature on the sociology of emotion and on the social practices of mobile phone users, this study uses the theories of Goffman on dramaturgy, Hochschild on emotion management and Silverstone and Hirsch on domestication to frame the research design and analysis. The main findings of this study are that within this group of respondents the mobile phone has become a key component in the emotion management of their everyday lives, and that the emotion engendered by mobile phone use appears to have an effect on their sense of self. They use mobile phones extensively to manage the presentation of the self, as well as the emotional highs and lows of relationships and family commitments. It is also a repository of the emotional memories with which respondents interact. The older age of the respondents and the length of time they have used a mobile phone would appear to have some bearing on these findings and future studies on these aspects would further contribute to the body of research about emotion in the everyday use of mobile phones.

The Tactics of the Trinket presents a material geography of the £1 commodity, following the trinket's journey from its beginning as raw material on a Chinese rubbish dump, to factories, international trade hubs, state-of-the-art distribution networks, over-flowing high street stores, and finally the homes of the consumer. This trajectory is used to uncover the places and operations of the typical £1 commodity and the ways in which it utilizes and creates a complicated array of tactics. Each of these tactics is explored in turn; from the embedding of a culture of immediacy, to the intrinsic necessity of disposability, to the creation of agglomerative logic, to the over-powering presence of abundance. Immediacy is explored in relation to the consumer and traditional notions of desire and mystification unpicked. Disposability is questioned in the context of the possibilities of entanglement with objects rather than possession of them. Agglomeration is analysed as a practice both contributing to, but in some ways hors de, capitalism, as well as a phenomenon carving out new types of spaces. Abundance is picked apart as one half of a double-edged relationship with scarcity and a way of understanding current rhetoric on fast capitalism. The trinket is considered as part of both micro situations (for example, the solidarity of manufacturers in China's 'commodity city' of Yiwu) and macro geo-political movements (the impact of China's growth on the relationship between China and the EU). Its tactics are considered in the light of current capitalism and some initial principles for a new material manifesto are discussed.

Within the United Kingdom, assessments of societal progress have traditionally been made according to objective measures such as Gross Domestic Product. However, measures of subjective human conditions, such as 'quality of life', 'happiness' or 'well-being' are now being used more widely. This is reflective of a concern about the limitations of economic measures and the growing desire for complementary subjective measures to inform policy making. This thesis is concerned with the level of enthusiasm and speed at which these alternative subjective measures have being embraced and the consequences this poses for objective measures of poverty based on low income and material deprivation. This is because reflective measures like life satisfaction and overall well -being have been shown to be vulnerable to the phenomenon of adaptation and social comparisons, where people rate their situation with that of similar others and relative to what they have come to expect. This study uses a mixed methods approach to investigate how poverty indicators are affected by such processes. It does so through the lens of Walter G. Runciman's (1966) concept of relative deprivation. Results reveal that people often make comparisons with similar others, either in a lateral or downward manner. As a result, expectations are lowered with aspirations and preferences being adapted to people's material and financial constraints. The study concludes that the 'enforced lack' (Mack and Lansley, 1985) measure is the most effective in identifying individuals at risk of material deprivation. Meanwhile, levels of overall life satisfaction are argued to be particularly vulnerable to adaptation processes. This is because people rate their satisfaction relative to the quality of their personal relationships, rather than using a more reflective view of life overall.

This thesis assesses development theory by investigating the role of collecting to rural Gambians. Theories of development are based on the implicit acceptance of models of evolutionary development of society. Such models assume that societal development is linear, societies 'developing' from hunting and gathering (collecting) to farming to urban industrial modes of production as they ascend the 'evolutionary ladder'. Each stage is assumed to be distinct and not to overlap with the preceding or following stage. This thesis disputes such a model by revealing the vital importance of collecting to a so-called agricultural community in The Gambia. Research in Africa has hitherto concentrated on the farming system and cultivated crops and there is a large research gap concerning work on the collecting system and wild indigenous plant and animal species. Collecting is significantly more important than hitherto realized, suggesting that evolutionary models, and therefore theories on which development are based, are not only inaccurate but also potentially damaging. Collecting is only one aspect of rural individuals' adaptive survival strategies, interacting through time and space with farming and domestic activities. The importance of collecting is shown in this thesis, not only in subsistence terms to overcome seasonal stress both within and between years, but also as a vital component to the income-formation strategy of rural individuals and cosmology of socio-cultural life. Through an interdisciplinary approach this work attempts to dispel artificial boundaries placed on previous research in Africa. Since women are involved in collecting this thesis also contributes to the debate on gender and, through a methodology based on the individual, shows the importance of obtaining a differentiated view of women at both inter- and intra-household levels.