This thesis explores changes in the division of paid and domestic work when British couples become parents. It investigates whether the increase in gender inequality that often occurs may be an obstacle to childbearing and relationship quality. Previous research concentrated on mothers' labour market interruptions and connections between female employment and low fertility or high family instability. Considering the division of domestic labour, however, is central to understanding how economic inequalities between men and women are interdependent with women's greater involvement in unpaid work. This thesis also provides the first UK evidence on how domestic work matters to childbearing and relationship quality of new parents in the context of trends towards more egalitarian gender role identities but lagging practice. The theoretical framework combines a rational choice approach to family behaviour with explanations based on gender role identity. The empirical investigation uses event-history analysis and regression models based on fourteen waves (1992-2005) of the British Household Panel Survey. In contrast to neo-classical economic predictions, the change in the division of labour after couples become parents does not depend on women's relative earnings. Instead both partners' gender role identities are more significant. The association between the domestic labour division and childbearing or relationship quality, however, does not vary by women's gender role identities. Men's housework contributions are associated with a higher probability of having a second child for dual-earner couples, although traditional male-breadwinner families are still more likely to have a first and second child. Gender equality in housework and childcare after couples have a child is associated with lower satisfaction with the partner for most mothers but greater relationship stability. Despite emergence of some egalitarian trends, relatively traditional practice and expectations therefore seem to persist among new parents. The gendered UK policy context also favours more traditional arrangements around parenthood.

The research project attempts to advance evaluations that look toward the major impacts educational and industrial developments within Britain over recent decades have had on working class school leavers’. The thesis aims to contribute uniquely to these fields of study by concentrating the qualitative research that underpins the project within a distinctive geographical area within south west Birmingham, an area where the employment sphere was dominated for many decades by a large car manufacturer until its closure. The research focuses on the very unique experiences of school leavers in the area across two generations that it is suggested were subject to the influences of differing educational and industrial policies. Underpinning the exploration of people from this part of Birmingham’s experiences of school and post school transition is the thesis’ contribution to the new wave of class analysis that has emerged within academia within recent years. In particular the study adheres in part to contemporary evaluations of class as being individualised and subject to variations according to cultural and social as well as economic influences through a person’s life course. However, the thesis also suggests the use of a theoretical model of class that incorporates fluid, often changing, but sometime shared class experiences. Included within this exploration is a critique of the ideological construction of working class educational and occupational underachievement as being due to individualised social and cultural deficiency. Instead the thesis suggests the interrelationship of the growth of the educational market within the UK alongside rapid deindustrialisation has influenced distinctive and at times shared working class experiences.

This thesis examines slave women's work in the American South in order to ascertain the presence, extent, and nature of gendered divisions of labour, It argues that divisions of labour in field work were not as prevalent as previously thought, and that they depended on a number of factors including plantation size, crop type and season. The thesis also examines house work and argues that although gendered divisions of labour were far more apparent in this environment the important division between field slaves and house slaves was based on status rather than gender. This study interprets reproduction as a form of labour, and discusses the issue of production versus reproduction, and also slave women's resistance to reproduction, in particular through the use of birth control. Chapters on the work slaves performed for themselves, and the work they performed after freedom suggest that slave men and women subscribed to a clear gender ideology, and that it influenced gendered divisions of labour. However, they were pragmatic about its application, discarding divisions of labour whenever economic pressures dictated. The overarching theme of this thesis is that slave men and women more frequently worked together than apart and, as a consequence were able to form supportive relationships, rather than relying exclusively on their own sex for emotional and practical succour.

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Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has not spread rapidly in the UK, and in the north east of England its growth has been particularly slow. The purpose of this study was to develop an action research programme into CSA in this location to discover if it could be animated using a community-based participatory action research approach and to find out what benefits would accrue to participants of such a scheme. Participatory action research (PAR) with local collaborators took place between 2006 and 2009. Some data collection relating to the global CSA movement continued through to 2011. The thesis documents how two research groups adapted to restraints and opportunities to achieve their aims through the iterative cycle of planning, acting, observing and reflecting. The benefits to participants are understood and analysed in terms of community development and care theory. The thesis also includes an in-depth examination of action research and a comprehensive account of the history and development of CSA. The distinctive contribution to knowledge is in two regards. First, the use of PAR in facilitating stakeholder collaboration to develop CSA schemes enables an analysis of the role of PAR in animating rural development initiatives. Second, the specific socio-economic characteristics of Weardale mean that this research provides a highly original and distinctive contribution by examining how PAR might animate local food initiatives in a deprived area. The analysis demonstrates how the structure, form and practice of CSA reflect an ethic of care. PAR also stems from motivations of care and concern and is a search for knowledge and action that can contribute towards addressing situations that are deemed to be socially, economically or environmentally unsatisfactory. It is claimed that, although individual CSAs may focus their attention on achieving their immediate goals and tasks, nevertheless, CSA contains within it the potential to effect wider transformational change.

The retirement experience is examined in this thesis via interviews with four groups - residents in an inner city area miners, car workers and architects The purpose behind these interviews is to explore the everyday experience of retirement relating this experience both to the immediate structures surrounding the individual and to broader economic and political forces. As well as giving detailed descriptions of the retirement experience, this thesis is also concerned with theoretical issues in the field of social gerontology. Here, I have reviewed the main sociological theories and have indicated the outline of an alternative approach. As a final aim of the thesis, I have tried to integrate some of the arguments advanced, with a discussion about the components of a retirement social policy, relating the necessity for such a policy both to the ending of life-time employment and the movement towards an ageing of the population. Further, I have attempted to illustrate the effect of these changes via the interviews conducted for this study, building the elements of a social policy for retirement both on the latter, and on extrapolations about future social changes.

This thesis contributes to the literature that seeks to understand institutions. In particular the aim of this thesis is to shed light on how certain institutions arise in society as a result of collective choice, how in turn they shape behaviour of agents, and finally what their welfare properties are. These questions are tackled using the methodology of microeconomic theory where agent preferences, the state of technology, and the informational environment are taken as exogenous. In particular it is argued that the existence of different constraints on the informational environment can give rise to a rich theory of institutions that can explain why inefficient and seemingly inefficient institutions arise in a second best world. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with the incidence of costly dispute resolution in society. The question of why agents fail to revolve disputes costlessly is tackled. This contributes to the positive theory of individual behaviour given the existence of certain institutions. The second chapter of this thesis tackles the question of why the judiciary is characterised by certain inherently costly attributes. This contributes to the normative theory of institutional choice. The last chapter deals with the positive question of how institutions are chosen. A model is presented where the political alignments in a society are endogenously generated and the effect of varying the informational environment on these alignments is analysed. These three chapters collectively contribute to the incipient theory of institutions that comprises of two elements; first where the existence of institutional structure arises as an equilibrium interplay between individual choices and technological and informational constraints, and second where conversely, individual games are shaped by the structure of existing institutions.

The issue of unemployment started to be considered as a major problem in the most developed countries during the 1930s when these countries faced a major economic recession. At that time researchers in different academic disciplines such as economics, sociology and psychology focused their research on the impact of unemployment on individuals, families and societies. In addition, studies concerning the impact of unemployment investigated topics such as the relationship between unemployment and suicide and juvenile crime. Researchers also focused on the relationship between unemployment and family life including family communication and general family functioning, and individual outcomes such as self-esteem and life satisfaction where mixed results were reported. In recent years most developing countries have started to focus on the issue of unemployment as a growing crisis. The government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has recognised and responded to the problem of unemployment during the last two decades. The Saudi government now plan to address the problem of unemployment from different aspects such as economically, educationally and socially. This research focuses on the relationship between unemployment and family relationships and individual outcomes. Since the literature revealed few previous studies focused on the Saudi environment, it is hoped that the present study will contribute to the existing literature and provide important new evidence of the case of unemployment in the Saudi context. The literature helped in refining and developing the research variables and research questions. For data collection purposes, the study adopted a triangulation approach. In the first stage, a survey questionnaire was employed with a research sample comprising unemployed individuals (N= 550), and for comparison purposes a sample of employed individuals was selected (N=600). In the second stage, to obtain a clearer view and contribute to the comprehensiveness of the research findings, semi structured interviews were conducted with selected subjects who participated in the first stage and agreed to continue in the second stage. The results showed various relationships between unemployment and the examined factors. For family relationships, the results did not show a significant relationship between family communication (p = .697) and general family functioning (p = .242). For individual outcomes, the results indicated significant relationships between the two examined factors; self-esteem (p < .001) and life satisfaction (p < .001). In addition, the results showed that religion was the most frequently adopted strategy by participants that could help in reducing the impact of unemployment. However, the participants believed that family was the most reliable source of support. The results also reveal that the impact of unemployment can be influenced by factors such as wider support and work involvement. The interview findings showed similar themes where participants did not indicate that there was a negative relationship between unemployment and family relationships while evidence of the negative associations between unemployment and personal outcomes (self-esteem and life satisfaction) was reported. The findings helped the identification of different implications that can be of benefit for relevant organisations while contributing to academic knowledge about unemployment.

Owners tend to overvalue possessions relative to non-owners: a phenomenon known as the endowment effect. Over the years, many theories have been put forward in order to account for this robust disparity between owners' willingness to accept (WT A) and non-owners' willingness to pay (WTP). One possible explanation of the endowment effect is that owners develop feelings of ownership towards their possession, growing emotionally attached to what they own. A potential unifying theoretical framework that can explain this relation is the self-extension model of psychological ownership formulated by Russell Belk (1988). Accordingly, objects are incorporated into one's self-definition in order to fulfill the basic psychological needs of having a coherent and continuous sense of identity, sense of belonging as well as feelings of efficacy and effectance. The processes by which objects are incorporated into our self include: object appropriation (touch and use), getting to know one's possession (familiarity and knowledge) and active investment of the self in the object (creation). All of these premises were tested experimentally across 9 studies, presented in Manuscripts 1, 2 and 3. Overall, modest evidence was accumulated in favor of the proposition that feelings of ownership develop in order to satisfy psychological needs outlined by the self-extension model. Also moderate support was found to suggest that touch, use and knowledge influence subjective valuations of owners and non-owners. Only the implications of object creation were in line with the predictions of the self-extension framework. In manuscript 4, two different explanations for the endowment effects for risky assets were investigated: misperception of probability and value-uncertainty. Results were inconsistent with the former but supported the latter, showing that even if the representation of an asset is the same between owners and non-owners, higher uncertainty about its value increases the magnitude of the endowment effect.