This work puts into close relationship the approach of Analytical Sociology, characterised by a search for explanatory social mechanisms, and the tools of Complexity Science, particularly useful for studying social systems characterised by non-linearity and out of equilibrium dynamics. It starts by presenting arguments for analytical social research, touching on epistemological, theoretical and methodological issues. After having introduced and debated the analytical approach to social theory, it describes a kind of bounded rationality that seems to be consistent with both the methodological individualism implied by the approach and the need for final explanations of social phenomena. The focus then passes onto the choice of an appropriate tool for the analysis of social systems: Agent Based Simulations. In the second half of the work this framework is applied to a social dilemma, voluntary public good provision. The critical point about the provision of public good is connected to the general social dilemma of cooperation: individuals would improve their wealth by making a full contribution to the public good in the case of cooperation with others, but free riding can be widespread and have a strong impact on the system dynamics. Thus the work, having introduced some not very common tools, concentrates on attempts to analyse and simulate the behaviour of subjects in economic experiments about the voluntary provision of public goods, pointing out that the mechanism in such dilemma is mainly the result of conditional cooperation. A case study of a rural community in Italy helps to validate the results and to direct attention to some other key issues, such as the structure of the interactions between the community members. The work ends by presenting a mechanism-based theory of voluntary public good provision that helps in understanding the boundaries of validity of social explanation and in extending it.

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This thesis addresses itself to students of South Africa on the one hand, and to political scientists on the other. The South African polity, it argues, must be understood as a single, complex and powerful manifestation of the capitalist state. It is 'the ideologies and activities of capitalists therefore, that are of central importance to our understanding of what is unique and what not unique about the political nature of this society. At the same time, the study focusses on matters of more general concern to students of capitalism, asking how the understanding of ideologies, interests and dominance can advance our knowledge of power and its relationship to the class structure.

The research reported in this thesis applies the Theory of Reference Groups to the activity of purchasing a consumer durable. The interpretation and development of Reference Group Theory by T. Shibutani and E. Bott, is adopted, and the example of a consumer durable that is used is a washing machine. Reference Group Theory has many interpretations and has been used in different ways in research. Some of the more outstanding interpretations and uses are analysed an d compared in order to counter the criticisms that are made of this theory as a whole, to present an explanation of the interpretations used here and to justify its use to study the phenomenon of purchasing a consumer durable. This interpretation puts a strong emphasis on the need to maintain a somewhat precarious theoretical position between social determinism on the one hand and psychological determinism on the other. Several traditions of research and specific research studies in the field of buyer behaviour are discussed and a critique made of the ways in which they maintain or fail to maintain, this balanced, though elusive, theoretical position. In a number of ways the traditions can be seen to support each other's results, and when one tradition has taken up too deterministic a position, social or psychological, it can be counterbalanced by another tradition, which has taken up a similar deterministic,but opposite, position. Four, empirically testable propositions deduced for the premises of the Theory of Reference Groups are formally tested by the data collected from recent purchasers of washing machines living in the Manchester conurbation. Three of the propositions are supported by the data, and part of the fourth. In general, the patterns in the data offer a remarkable support for the theoretical perspectives used in the research.

Although much research has examined employees’ experience of the work-family interface, its conceptualization has been rather problematic, ranging from work and family as mutually constraining through to mutually enriching and, more recently, to work-family balance (WFB). Building on Greenhaus and Allen’s (2011) conceptualization of WFB as comprising satisfaction and effectiveness components, I proposed and tested a model of he antecedents and outcomes of WFB. Based on work-family border theory, I hypothesised that family-supportive supervisor behaviours (FSSB) facilitate WFB and hat the relationship is stronger when the organisation also offers formal support (availability of family-friendly practices (FFPs); enhancement effect). Furthermore, I integrated the leadership and work-family interface literatures by proposing authentic eadership as an antecedent of FSSB. Based on role accumulation theories, I proposed life satisfaction and health as outcomes of WFB satisfaction and WFB effectiveness and job performance as an outcome of only WFB effectiveness. I tested my hypotheses with individual-level data in Study 1 (two waves of data; employees from Germany and the UK) and nested data (individuals nested in teams; two waves of data; employee and supervisor ratings; Germany and the UK) in Study 2. The obtained findings largely supported the hypothesized model and showed that both authentic leadership (Study 1) and team authentic leadership (Study 2) predicted FSSB which, in turn, increased WFB satisfaction and WFB effectiveness. Contrary to my prediction, both studies revealed that FSSB and (team) availability of FFPs compensated for each other, only impacting WFB satisfaction/effectiveness if the other form of family support was not available. Furthermore, both components were positively related to life satisfaction and health, while WFB effectiveness was only related to self-rated performance (Study 1) and not supervisor-rated performance (Study 2). Lastly, the serial moderated mediation model hat tested the conditional indirect effect of (team) authentic leadership on the outcomes received mixed support.

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This thesis seeks to explore the cultural tendencies of contemporary anti-capitalism by relating such tendencies to the wider cultural context. It is argued that contemporary anti-capitalist movements such as the Occupy movement are marked by a self-emancipatory ethos that emerges as an inherent feature of a global society pervaded by Western­ bourgeois cultural tendencies. It is argued that the self-emancipatory ethos is constituted by an essential contradiction, simultaneously bringing out being-over desires (or desires for power over humanity and nature) and being-with desires, (or desires for horizontal connections or associations with humanity and nature). Employing a post-structuralist perspective and insisting on the improbability of cultural transcendence, the thesis suggests that contemporary anti-capitalist movements tend to radicalise, rather than absolutely oppose, Western-bourgeois cultural tendencies, and explores how radical groups feed radical undercurrents into the liberal-democratic mainstream to contribute to the development of Western society. In developing the concept of self-emancipatory contradiction, the thesis seeks to radicalise the philosophical perspective employed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. It traces these authors' philosophical perspective back to the philosophy of desire developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the late 1960s and early 1970s, linking this philosophy to the political and social upheavals that developed from the revolt of May 1968 in France. While insisting that Deleuze and Guattari helped usher in a postmodern break in the 1960s, the thesis seeks to place this break within the history of self-emancipatory struggle in the West, exploring how the break exacerbated the self-emancipatory contradiction to feed into the development of neoliberal culture from the late 1970s onwards. In placing the postmodern break in its cultural context, the thesis explores the origins and early development of the Western-bourgeois ethos of self-emancipation, focusing on early liberalist philosophy and key democratising political upheavals in Western history.