Work-family research in Chinese societies often directly adopts the Western work-family model and rarely attempts to consider cultural differences in the importance of employees’ parents. Researchers infrequently address the role of parents in the work-family field. The aim of this thesis was to understand the influence of employees’ parents on work-family balance and its related outcomes in a Chinese society, Taiwan. A multi-method approach was employed consisting of three studies. First, the nature of the influence of employees’ parents in Taiwan was explored through interviews, followed by an online questionnaire survey with Taiwanese employees to examine the relationships between the influence of employees’ parents, work-family balance, organisational behaviour and wellbeing. Third, a secondary data analysis was used to provide triangulations for the findings of the questionnaire survey. The interview study explored the influence of employees’ parents as six types of demand and six types of support. It also found that parent demand had a negative effect on employees’ work-family balance, while parent support had a positive effect. In the questionnaire survey, parent demand and parent support measures were developed. Using these measures, the relationships between the influence of employees’ parents, work-family balance and outcomes were tested using regression analyses. The results showed that parent demand and parent support were significantly related to work-family balance. In addition, the structural models revealed mechanisms for predicting two types of outcome variables. For organisational behaviour, a full mediation model was identified, showing that the influence of parents had only indirect relationships (through the work-family balance variables) with job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and turnover intention. For wellbeing, a partial mediation model was identified, showing that the influence of parents had both indirect as well as direct relationships with life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression. Last, the analysis of secondary data also showed that parent demand and parent support had significant impacts on employees’ work-family balance, which supports the results of the questionnaire survey. The implications for work-family research were discussed.

This thesis examines the ancestor figure in African American women writers’ neoslave narratives. Drawing on black feminist, critical race and whiteness studies and trauma theory, the thesis closely reads neo-slave narratives by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Phyllis Alesia Perry. The thesis aims to reconsider the ancestor figure by extending the definition of the ancestor as predecessor to include additional figurative and literal means used to invoke the ancestral past of enslavement. The thesis argues that the diverse ancestral figures in these novels demonstrate the prevailing effects of slavery on contemporary subjects, attest to the difficulties of historicising past oppressions and challenge post-racial discourses. Chapter 1 analyses Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), identifying it as an important prerequisite for subsequent neo-slave narratives. The chapter aims to offer a new reading of the novel by situating it within a black feminist ideological framework. Taking into account the novel’s social and political context, the chapter suggests that the ancestral figures or elderly members of the slave community function as means of resistance, access to personal and collective history and contribute to the self-constitution of the protagonist. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Walker’s novel fulfils a politically engaged function of inscribing the black female subject into discussions on the legacy of slavery and drawing attention to the particularity of black women’s experiences. Chapter 2 examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1978), featuring a contemporary black woman’s return to the antebellum past and her discovery of a white slaveholding ancestor. The chapter introduces the term “displacement” to explore the transformative effects of shifting positionalities and destabilisation of contemporary frames of reference. The chapter suggests that the novel challenges idealised portrayals of a slave community and expresses scepticism regarding its own premise of fictionally reimagining slavery. With its inconclusive ending, Kindred ultimately illustrates how whiteness and dominant versions of history prevail in the seemingly progressive present. Chapter 3 discusses Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975) and its subversion of the matrilineal model of tradition by reading the maternal ancestor’s narrative as oppressive, limiting and psychologically burdening. The chapter introduces the term “ancestral subtext” in order to identify the ways in which ancestral narratives of enslavement serve as subtexts to the descendants’ lives and constrict their subjectivities. The chapter argues that the ancestral subtexts frame contemporary practices, inform the notion of selfhood and attest to the reproduction of past violence in the present. Chapter 4 deals with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998) exploring complex ancestral figures as survivors of the Middle Passage and their connection to Africa as an affective site of identity reclamation. The chapter identifies the role the quilt, the skill of quilting and their metaphorical potential as symbolic means of communicating ancestral trauma and conveying multivoiced “ancestral articulations”. The chapter suggests that the project of healing and recovering the self in relation to ancestral enslavement are premised on re-connecting with African cultural contexts and an intergenerational exchange of the culturally specific skill of quilting.

Objectives: This thesis includes two distinct pieces of work. The purpose of the systematic review was to address a gap in the literature by examining available evidence relating to the use of Emotional Regulation (ER) strategies (avoidance, problem solving, reappraisal, rumination, and suppression) on the wellbeing of older people. The empirical paper aimed to examine the role of ER strategies and ageism on adjustment and retirement satisfaction. It also sought to examine the impact of other contextual factors such as financial status, health, and social support on retirement wellbeing. Methods: A systematic review of cross-sectional studies examining a quantitative association between one aspect of ER (avoidance, problem-solving, reappraisal, rumination and /or suppression) and a self-reported quantitative well-being measure was completed via a comprehensive literature search of electronic databases. Studies were included if the participants were 60 years or older and without cognitive impairment. Wellbeing was explored in a broader way not only including measures of the absence of illness but positive constructs such as positive affect, positive social relations or autonomy. In the empirical study, participants completed a postal survey which included ER strategies, attitudes to ageing, adjustment and satisfaction with retirement and contextual factors such as financial status, health and social support. A series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the independent contributions of ER strategies and attitudes to aging to adjustment to, and satisfaction with, retirement. Results: Twenty studies met inclusion criteria for the systematic review. The relationship between life satisfaction, positive emotion and ER was explored by four studies while nineteen out of twenty studied the relationship between ER and anxiety and depression. Only a conclusion about ER and negative mood measures could be made given the scarcity of research examining the association between ER and positive psychological concepts. Rumination was found to be the ER strategy most strongly associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression in OP population, while mixed results were found for avoidance, problem solving, suppression and reappraisal. Findings from the empirical study indicated that traditional predictors of adjustment (wealth and health) accounted for 12% of the total variance in outcome. Problem-solving was the strongest variable in the model explaining 24% of the difference in adjustment. Interestingly, the retirees who reported not having used problem-solving as a mechanism to cope with retirement were the most adjusted. Regarding satisfaction, retirees tended to experience higher retirement satisfaction if they had a greater level of self-rated mental health and increased access to household income (explained 14% and 9% of the total variance respectively). However, retirees who reported high levels of rumination experienced lower retirement satisfaction (rumination accounted for 8% of the total variance). Ageism was not a predictor of retirement adjustment or satisfaction. Conclusions: According to the systematic review, rumination seems to be the ER strategy most strongly associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression in OP population. This finding was consistent despite the heterogeneity of the studied populations and a variety of outcome measures. Further research is needed to explore the impact of ER strategies on measures of physical health and wellbeing in OP. The results of the empirical paper support the role of traditional predictors (wealth and health) in satisfaction and adjustment with retirement. The retirees who adjusted better to retirement were those who did not use problem-solving as a strategy to confront retirement. Retirees who reported high levels of rumination experienced lower retirement satisfaction. Ageism did not predict retirement satisfaction or adjustment. These findings are discussed in the context of retirement planning and successful ageing.

This thesis explores how consumption impacts on people’s wellbeing in seven Peruvian communities. It draws on social science literature on consumption and incorporates the key factors highlighted by the research on wellbeing determinants. Generally, it is accepted that consumption increases wellbeing by lifting people out of poverty and that it has a negative impact if it fails to place them at a higher social position. Other aspects defining consumption such as the symbolic meaning of goods, its pleasurable dimension, the role of goods and services as basic needs satisfiers, etc. have not been systematically approached from the perspective of their effect on wellbeing. The thesis takes on this challenge by incorporating the most salient features of consumption studied by social scientists through the concepts of motives and satisfiers. It draws on psychologists’ claim that motives are important in understanding the linkages between wellbeing and people’s behaviour. It also integrates the work of human needs theorists stressing the importance of analysing the effectiveness of goods and services as basic needs satisfiers. The research follows a multi-methods approach that takes into account the local specificities of consumption, whilst aiming for a global understanding of the key factors mediating its relationship with human wellbeing; accounting for its objective and subjective dimensions. It uses regression analysis to study how consumption affects happiness through total expenditure and motives, and qualitative methods to explore the efficiency of satisfiers in meeting basic needs. The research finds, as expected, that in the Peruvian communities consumption enhances happiness when it improves basic needs levels and places people at a higher social position. People consuming because of hedonic reasons are also happier, but those consuming for social acceptance and higher status are not. Moreover, being motivated by basic needs is negatively associated with happiness. One of the reasons might be the type of satisfiers used. The exploratory study of needs satisfiers in a Peruvian slum points at their potential inefficiency, which might be contributing to people’s frustration through consumption.

In attending to consumption as a defining feature of life in Western societies, existing consumer research has tended to envisage, construct and reproduce ‘the consumer’ as either enthusiastically embracing the delights of the market, or as actively resisting or rebelling against its evils. The extant research has therefore tended to assume a high degree of reflexive conscious engagement in consumption as the norm. In this research, I argue that this might have inadvertently obscured the possibility of non-participation in various aspects of consumption through disinterest. This appears within the field as a theoretical space where people relate to consumption opportunities with rather less reflection or emotion and allows for the choice not to buy to be part of an accepted and unreflected-upon aspect of existence; a diverse shadow-realm of consumer inactivity in which feelings of indifference may be significant. Though a general lack of interest in various aspects of consumption may constitute an ontologically common experience, indifference has remained a largely unnoticed and under-theorised element of social reality in a consumer culture. In this study, I explore the possibilities of indifference in a consumer culture, not as a psychological construct or symptom of pathology but as a lived experience, understood in different ways and constituted through different discursive contexts. In this research, I draw on 29 phenomenological interviews to offer an empiricallygrounded interpretation of what it means to be indifferent to consumption. From the stories the informants shared with me, I articulate how the experience of indifference can appear as a genuine blindness towards a spectacular world of consumption, underpinned by other sociocultural narratives that construct the marketplace as a remote, unfamiliar or unappealing domain. In other stories, experiences of indifference appeared to be maintained by a constant and taken-for-granted adherence to a classification system that denotes consumerism as a powerful source of physical and spiritual pollution. Whilst in other narratives, a general lack of interest in various aspects of consumption revealed a paradoxical desire for a personal identity forged from a dismissal of consumption; a culturally-shaped performance of pseudoindifference that involved refusing ‘consumer activity’ in order to construct a defiantly nonconsumer self. In addressing the cultural narratives and contexts that seem to account for nonconsumption through indifference, this study contributes to wider debates on processes of disengagement and less material living, and invites consumer researchers to develop a greater sensitivity to indifference within sociological accounts of consumption.

Modern studies of Roman slave subownership have been heavily influenced by Erman’s seminal study on slave vicarii. Based on the etymology of the word vicarius, Erman argued that initially the main function of vicarii was to be substitutes of other slaves. Only in the late Republic did the word vicarius also start to denote a slave that was part of another slave’s peculium. This thesis challenges Erman’s dichotomist view of the historical evolution of the Roman vicariat by arguing that the semantics of the word vicarius was already fully developed in the earliest stages for which written records have survived, and that it remained unchanged during the whole central period of Roman history (212 BC-AD 235). There was always only one type of slave vicarius: a slave who was part of another slave’s peculium. The term used to denote this type of slave has little historical relevance, as their purpose was not to replace the slaves they were subordinated to in the service of the master. If they ever performed tasks in lieu of their superiors, it was a consequence of being subordinated to them as independently controlled property. Chapter One focuses on the semantics of the word vicarius in literary sources. It shows that the term had two different meanings depending on whether it was used in relation to free people or to slaves, and that the semantic and syntactic context made the two meanings always distinguishable. Chapter Two deals exclusively with legal sources. It argues that, in the writings of the jurists, a slave vicarius was always an asset of another slave’s peculium, regardless of the tasks they performed. Chapter Three focuses on epigraphic texts produced by slave vicarii themselves or by the people who were closely related to them. It shows how slaves used the title vicarius to mark their permanent personal relationship to another slave. It also discusses the criteria used by Erman and Weaver in their unsuccessful attempts to distinguish between different types of vicarii in the sources. Finally, a short postscript provides a concise description of the semantic change the word vicarius went through in the fourth century AD, and it assesses the possibility that slave subownership survived in late Antiquity even though no slave vicarii are attested sporting the title.

In this thesis, I analyse the impact of economic shocks on violence, and the mechanisms underlying them. I also investigate the long-term effects of violence on economic outcomes. In my first chapter, I introduce this thesis, and broadly outline its aims and contributions. In my second chapter, I examine lynchings of African Americans in the US South from 1882 to 1930, and show that cotton price shocks predict lynchings. Lynchings also predict more black out-migration from 1920 to 1930, and higher state-level wages. Using a simple model, I show that this is consistent with lynchings having labour market effects that benefitted whites: lynchings cause blacks to migrate away, lowering labour supply and increasing wages for white labourers. I then turn to the long-term effects of lynchings. I show that Mississippi counties with more violence during a 1964 Civil Rights campaign also had more lynchings during the earlier period. Finally, lynchings persist in labour market outcomes: present-day results show that lynchings predict higher black-white worker, family, and household income gaps. In my third chapter, I turn to FrenchWest Africa, a co-authored work with James Fenske. We show that rainfall, temperature, and commodity price shocks predict unrest in colonial French West Africa between 1906 and 1956. We use a simple model of taxation and anti-tax resistance to explain these results. In the colonial period, the response of unrest to economic shocks was strongest in more remote areas and those lacking a history of pre-colonial states. In modern data spanning 1997 to 2011, the effect of economic shocks on unrest is weaker. Past patterns of heterogeneity are no longer present. The response of unrest to economic shocks, then, differs across institutional contexts within a single location. In my fourth and last chapter, I find that favourable temperatures and favourable economic conditions predict more witchcraft trials in Early Modern Scotland (1563-1727), a largely agricultural economy. During this time, witchcraft was a secular crime, and it was incumbent on local elites to commit resources to trying witches. Consistent with this, I find that positive price shocks to export-heavy, taxable goods like herring and wool predict more witch trials, while price shocks to Scotland's main subsistence commodity, oats, do not.

Academic perspectives on the meanings of luxury often link luxury to status or conspicuous consumption, assuming that luxury derives its meaning primarily from a traditional viewpoint, in which it is narrowly associated with generic economic and social displays of superiority, as attained through the rhetoric of wealth (Vickers and Renand, 2003; Vigneron and Johnson, 2004). However, this traditional view of luxury fails to appreciate the cultural and emotional complexity of luxury consumption: this rather limited interpretation therefore risks rendering consumers as passive and primarily homogeneous entities. This thesis argues that the term ‘luxury’ has little meaning unless it is integrated within the current ‘practices’ of consumer culture. Thus, the study conceptualises luxury from a consumer perspective, wherein meanings are understood as resulting from luxury consumption practices adopted by diverse sets of consumers across cultures. Sixteen UK and Sixteen Thai undergraduate and postgraduate students were selected to participate in two stages of data collection, involving collage construction, in-depth interviews and further fieldwork. The findings extends the existing research on luxury by developing four practices of luxury consumption: caretaker, escapist, self-transformation, and status-based. Accordingly, the study proposes an alternation view of luxury as ‘everyday luxury’, a view in which consumers can transfer and incorporate self-defined luxuries into everyday contexts. The notion of everyday luxury fundamentally allows us to move beyond a purely materialistic understanding of luxury in order to reach a metaphysical account of luxury as a subjective, moral, ephemeral and immaterial concept present in our everyday living. Moreover, this idea considerably fulfils our understanding of contemporary luxury so that traditional luxury (Veblen, 1902) and everyday luxury can co-exist within the concept of luxury. Overall, the subjective truth of the meaning of luxury in a cross-cultural context is regarded as combining the construct and outcome of a reciprocal interaction between both traditional and everyday luxury, the understanding of the self and morality within different cultures and societies, and different reflections on individuals’ lived experiences.

This thesis analyses the central role of agricultural labour in the construction of personhood, landscape and work in an Andean ayllu. It is an ethnographic study based on fieldwork in a small subsistence farming village in the highlands of Bolivia. In employing a practice‐led approach and emphasising everyday labour, ambiguity and the realities of history and political power play, rather than the ayllu’s ‘core characteristics’ of complementarity and communality, the thesis moves away from the structuralist approaches which have dominated this field of study. In this setting, agricultural activity, llank’ay, (to transform the land), fills and shapes the days and seasons throughout the year. Llank’ay goes beyond economistic definitions of ‘work’ to include leisure, politics and everyday practice: it is bound up with myths of cosmogony, notions of value, the power of the land and a basic belief in what it is to be a human. The thesis examines the importance of llank’ay through several prisms: the tasks of the agricultural year and how these are crucial to the development of personhood; the mediating role of llank’ay in claims to land and inter‐village relationships of reciprocity; the effects of Protestant conversion and the role of llank’ay in sustaining an animate landscape; the intersection of llank’ay with other forms of work; migration and the outcomes of discontinuing llank’ay. I conclude that in this ayllu the practice of agricultural activity transforms people and land, creates belonging and communality and shapes the local concept of what labour is. It in turn creates the structures and limits within which people and land can be transformed.

This thesis explores the possibility of a modern consumption distinct from discussions of the ‘consumer,’ ‘consumption,’ ‘consumerism’ and the ‘consumer society’ and rejects the possibility of a universal or ‘human’ consumption-activity rooted in use that merely varies with space and time. This is done by exploring the roots of these terms in the philosophical anthropology of economic theory, specifically the concept of homo oeconomicus. The economic inheritance within contemporary accounts of the capitalist consumption-relation is then pursued through a review of the disciplinary approaches to the topic made by historical accounts of ‘consumer culture,’ the study of patterns of use across the social sciences, from psychology, through geography to marketing and anthropology. Finally, the contemporary sociological investigation of ‘consumption’ is critiqued and its broad reliance upon a utilitarian-derived cost/benefit model adapted to incorporate ‘sign-value’ and discussions of postmodernism are rejected. This prompts the proposal of a ‘postphenomenological’ approach to the study of modern consumption and the ‘terrain’ upon which it is available to experience. The bulk of the thesis, chapters three, four and five, are taken up with a review of the contemporary commodity-form using the phenomenological categories of space, time and causality, respectively. This allows a historical perspective to be employed in the analysis of the role of material factors in the constitution of subjective experience and its role within the emergence of modern consumption. The theory of modern consumption and the sociospatial terrain upon which it unfolds is developed through the concept of ‘affordance,’ adapted from environmental psychology and a re-definition of ‘possession’ that arises from the inter-relation of being and having. This allows the rejection of the orthodox models and theories of ‘consumption’ outlined in chapter two. The thesis concludes by advocating an engagement in a ‘playful’ modern consumption that engages with the commodity-form as the medium within which contemporary ‘experience’ is transmitted and, which, consequently, forms the of the phenomenal forms of subjective experience derived from the capitalist consumption-relation.