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The relationship between youth and society has been the subject of study by cultural theorists for decades. Research on youth identities conventionally considered how they were defined through families, education and labour market experiences. Recently, however, the focus has turned to the ways in which young people construct their identities, founded on spaces of leisure experience, consumption and lifestyle. These dimensions are brought together in the practice of „lifestyle‟ sports which highlight the importance of leisure as part of identity formation, performance and display, and have been linked with youth culture. In this thesis it is argued, however, that debates within youth leisure and lifestyles sports have understated the relationship between youth, sport participation and space drawing upon geographical research as part of the investigations into these claims.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between tourism and remembrance in a landscape of war, specifically the Normandy beaches of World War II where the D-Day Landings of June 6, 1944 took place. The anthropological investigation employs a theoretical framework that incorporates tourist performance, tourism worldmaking, landscape, cultural memories of war and remembrance. The thesis also examines the tourism-remembrance relationship by way of the various vectors that inform cultural memory, such as the legend of D-Day, national war mythologies and war films, and how these are interpreted and refashioned through tourism.

The establishment of regeneration programmes as part of urban policy has triggered an upsurge of interest in the study of tourism as a factor of urban change. The inner city and the urban waterfront in large post-industrial cities have become the common ground for research in tourism and regeneration but the recent regeneration of declining seaside towns in the UK has not received the same attention. This thesis presents a study conducted into the dynamics of change in a seaside town through the exploration of the formation of the discourse concerning the role of tourism in regeneration.

Sociology of Planned Migration, the subject of this thesis, is the product of a research into the movement of firms and workers from the inner areas of London to new towns. It is mainly a contribution to the sociology of planning, although its broader aims and objectives are: (a) To develop the concept of planned migration, based on the policy of dispersing and decentralising urban population and industries to new towns; and to use the concept as a framework to develop a distinctive area of knowledge known as Sociology of Planned Migration. (b) To provide a descriptive account of a typical planned migration process, as the background for studying attitudes to out-migration from the city, and for promoting understanding of the nature of change involved in planned migration to new towns. (c) To offer a theoretical explanation to planned migration decisions of city residents to new towns, and (d) To explore the wider theoretical issues in Sociology and the policy implications which planned migration raises The chosen locale for the research was one in which migrant firms provided their workers with the opportunity of choosing between moving out of the city to a new town or staying behind. The main issue was, therefore, one of determining how the workers exercised the vchoice between these alternatives, through their migration decisions. The problem was not only that of identifying the determinants of and the constraints on mobility, but also and more importantly, that of explaining their migration decisions and the frame of reference on which they were made. It was necessary to adopt a research design which would enable planned migration to be studied as a process of social change, so that conclusions may be drawn about the subjective interpretations and meanings that workers attached to out-migration, their attitudes to moving, the stages of transition and adaptative processes through which they had to pass to move to a new town, the decision-making process itself and the action frame of reference. The method of study was based on testing the hypothesis that the migration decisions of city residents tend to be motivated by the desire to satisfy non-work aspirations, by carrying out a secondary analysis of the data from the Survey of Migrant Fi ms. This survey, involving four firms that moved from London to new towns, was undertaken by the author as a member of the research team on the New Towns Project sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. The main findings of the present research can be summarised as follows: - 1. Migration decision-making, as a process, is an adaptive response to a change of environment. 2. Migration decisions of city residents were based on cost-benefit analysis of the relative advantages and disadvantages of moving or staying behind. 3. The drop-out rate was 59%. This means that the firms, on average, transferred only 41% of their staff to their new locations in new towns. 4. Up to 61% of the working class respondents moved, compared with only 39% that did not. 5. Contrary to existing evidence on selectivity in migration, more older workers moved compared with the younger ones; and the skilled manual workers, the professionals and the technicians, as well as respondents with higher qualifications and formal training, tended to stay behind in spite of attractive inducements from employers. 6. Of those who moved, 17% were motivated by the desire to keep their jobs and to maintain their career progression; while the remaining 83% were motivated by the desire to satisfy non-work aspirations which are dominated by environmental quality and housing. In addition to providing an opportunity for studying the migration process and attitudes to leaving the city for new towns, this research has both facilitated a better understanding of the nature of migration and decision-making, and contributed to the debate on environmental determinism, social mobility, non-work sociology, and the open system theory in industrial sociology. In all this, the aim has been to demonstrate the application of action frame of reference to the study of planned migration and industrial behaviour in a changing situation. In general, however, the findings have raised more questions than they would have answered For instance, is environmental quality increasingly becoming a social value and a new route to social mobility? In the near future, will the search for better environment increase the 'retreat into the suburbs' and hasten the death of the cities? How far does the finding about mobility of city residents to new towns by age, class and profession challenge current assumptions and knowledge from migration studies? These equations may teem rather provocative, but they indicate new directions in which planners may have to focus attention in order to improve their understanding of the relationship between the dynamics of urban population movement and future planning policies, with reference to new towns. In the current debate about the relevance of the policy of dispersal and decentralisation of population and industries to new towns, many have argued that the policy has encouraged the decline of our cities. However, evidence from this research shows that whether or not such policy continues to operate movements out of the cities are inevitable. At the same time, it is also evident that whilst the new towns hold a great deal of attraction for some city residents, many others still find the city a valuable habitat. The policy implication of this situation suggests that to continue new town development simultaneously with the renewal of the cities would provide two equally desirable communities for work and living. The choice as to which is better must remain with the individual. Today, it is a fact that dispersal and decentralisation of population and the new town development have both become established features of British planning. It seems, therefore, appropriate that a systematic study of the influence of this innovation on social evolution, social policy, economic and regional planning and settlement patterns should now be a subject of academic interest under the title of Sociology of Planned Migration.

This study is an attempt to examine the spatial distribution pattern of the Chinese population in the Malaysian region (i.e. Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei) in relation to their migrations, growth, economic activities and socio-political characteristics. Chinese contacts with South-east Asia go back to the pre-Christian era and progressed slowly during the pre- European periods. With the advent of European powers, the role of the Chinese in South-east Asia rapidly changed from that of elite traders to one in which coolie labour was predominant. There was also a marked change in the nature of Chinese settlement in South-east Asia, as the early pattern of seasonal migration gave place to one in which immigrant labourers stayed for long periods of their working life and in many cases permanently. The creation of the British sphere in the South China Sea initiated the great 19th and 20th century migration of southern Chinese to the Malaysian region, Singapore in particular becoming a centre from which dispersion later took place to adjacent areas. Subsequent Chinese settlement in Malaya has been conditioned by early commercial agriculture, tin-mining rubber cultivation, commerce and trade. The policy in Northern Borneo, especially in Sarawak, has been to discourage immigration. Chinese penetration in Northern Borneo has been largely confined to gold-mining and agriculture in Sarawak, agricultural plantation work in Sabah and the oil industry in Brunei. Since the entry restrictions of the 1930s and more especially since the Second World War, immigration has declined in importance and today the Chinese communities in the region are growing almost exclusively as the result of the considerable excess of births over deaths. Meanwhile the increased birth rate, the equalization of sex ratios and the increase in the proportion of infants and children in the population indicate the extent to which', the Chinese here are changing from immigrant to permanently settled communities. Changes have also taken place in occupational specialisation of the various dialect groups within the Chinese population and in their social and cultural habits in the region. The process of fusion among them has taken place, especially in the large urban centres. The occupational distinctions between them have been considerably modified. The social geographical pattern based on the new distribution of wealth is becoming more important than the pattern based on the cultural differences of the Chinese communities. Governmental policies of mutual adjustment of various ethnic groups into one people can succeed only if different ethnic groups are regarded as equal, for discrimination tends to emphasize if not indeed to promote awareness of racial origin and thus further to complicate the pattern of distribution and redistribution of the Chinese and other ethnic groups within the region.

The aim of this study is to illustrate the various aspects of social and ethnic differentiation in Kuwait. In order to understand these aspects, the study will investigate two main elements: (1) analysing the origin and the current aspects of differentiation through time, i.e. 1710-1980, and (2) tracing the spatial aspects of socio-ethnic differentiation over the inhabited area of the country. The study as a whole is a contribution to social and spatial studies of Kuwait society. In addition, it also contributes to other branches of geography like social, urban and electoral geography as it examines related aspects of group segregation and other socio-ethnic aspects. The study consists of 7 chapters each of which examines separate aspects but all with one common feature in relation to the theme of the study. The first chapter is primarily an introduction, concerned with three main elements, i.e. the importance of such studies to Kuwait, the objective and approach to the study, and the relation of such studies to the field of social geography. Chapter two is a socio-geographical perspective about the area under study. Chapter three examines the aspects of differentiation in Kuwait since its appearance on the map of the Peninsula until the discovery of oil, i.e. 1710-1946. Chapter four keeps on the same approach of chapter three but for the oil era i.e. from the year 1946 until 1980. Chapter five is about the segregation of the groups over the inhabited area of Kuwait. It also involved a field work study in relation to the spatial aspects of differentiation in the oil era. Chapter six, follows the year of National Assembly elections and other related aspects, i.e. early features of legislative participation, voting potential of each group and election returns for the election years 1963-67, 1967-71, 1971-75 and 1975-76. Finally chapter seven gives a summary of findings and the conclusion of the study.

Growing demand for and supply of adventure tourism activities, particularly packaged adventure holidays, means there is a need to understand adventure tourists. At the start of my research journey, the embryonic nature of adventure tourism research and the limited extant literature about adventure tourists provided the impetus to develop understanding of these tourists as a unique group of adventurers. Accordingly, the aim of this programme of research is to demonstrate the empirical and conceptual contributions that my published works make to the knowledge and understanding of adventure tourism participation and consumption. My research ethos reflects an interpretivist approach and my empirical publications predominantly report on qualitative data drawn from interviews and surveys with adventure tourists. The research contribution is achieved through two Focal Concepts. Firstly, adventure tourism participation, i.e.: the different elements which influence tourists to take adventure holidays in the first place. My work explores the distinctive characteristics of adventure tourists and how these influence their decision to participate in adventure tourism, their motivational decisions, risk perceptions, flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975) as a motivation for continued participation in adventure tourism, and their lifestyles. My publications are some of the first academic studies to develop new thinking relative to key influences which drive package tourists and independent tourists to participate in adventure tourism. Secondly, adventure tourism consumption, i.e.: tourists’ experiences of actually consuming adventure activities while on holiday. Adventure is often all-consuming and challenging and this means it can prompt diverse and conflicting emotions, ranging from feelings of fear and risk to deep satisfaction and elation. Consequently, my work investigates the emotional journeys which adventure tourists experience during activity consumption. Additionally, it examines the benefits which tourists gain from consuming adventure, and the influences on their adventure tourism experiences. My publications are some of the foremost studies to develop understanding of adventure tourism consumption.

This study examines responses to the development and governance of tourism on a small peripheral island. The Mediterranean island of Gozo, the second largest of the Maltese islands, is used as a case study. Responses are evaluated for three groups of respondents: the residents of Gozo, specific tourism-related actors in Gozo, and for specific tourism-related actors from the neighbouring main island of Malta. Malta is situated on the southern periphery of Europe and although a member of the European Union it remains on the socio-economic and political margins. Gozo is both geographically and economically peripheral to Malta. This puts Gozo on the periphery of the periphery, and thus it faces especially difficult core-periphery relations. Using interviews and other sources the study examines opinions about the processes of tourism development for the peripheral island of Gozo. Consideration is given to views about whether the processes of tourism development and tourism governance meet the needs of residents and specific tourism-related actors in Gozo. Attention is also paid to opinions about the most appropriate future development path for the island. Further, the differing perspectives between the residents and actors at the core and the periphery are evaluated. Core-periphery theory provides a geographical framework to understand disparities in power and development levels, and all these issues are evaluated in the context of core-periphery relations, and in the context of Gozo's internal and external networks of socio-economic and political relations, with some of these relations being largely local to the island and with others, by contrast, being with the main island of Malta and also further afield. Many dependency and core-periphery theorists have argued that peripheral islands will inevitably be dependent on their respective cores for economic and political support. This study revealed instances which both support and challenge some of these assumptions. In terms of formal political power, control over Gozo's tourism development clearly lies at the core, primarily with the government but also with the Malta Tourist Authority and Malta Environment and Planning Authority. However, analysis at the micro-level also reveals several instances where Gozitans have shown they have the potential to influence decisionsat the core, albeit through indirect and informal channels. These results challenge the dependency theorists' common portrayal of a subordinate island that is controlled and manipulated by its core, and instead highlight the potential power of local level actors in creating 'room for manoeuvre' in tourism development arenas.

Interpretation has been adopted at both natural and cultural sites as a soft visitor management tool where typically it might aim to develop an understanding and appreciation of the site as well as encouraging the appropriate on-site behaviour from the visitors. This study is primarily concerned with the on-site experience of the visitor through which interpretation in its many forms can play such a critical component. The study has explored the visitors’ choice of on-site activities as well as the overall range of on-site interpretive experiences available at two locations on the Jurassic Coast World Heritage site in Dorset and in so doing, has specifically explored the visitors’ interest in and attitude towards guided walks. A principle outcome of this study therefore has been the development of a framework for the potential design of guided walks which could be used to support the successful enhancement of the visitor experience on any natural site. The primary research undertaken in this study included a visitor survey which was conducted during 2007 and yielded a total of 600 groups of respondents. In undertaking the analysis of the data, three variables were identified as being worthy of greater exploration. Two of these ‘outcome’ variables had two states namely for; ‘residency’ (local resident or tourist) and ‘visitation’ (first or repeat visitor) whilst the third ‘outcome’ variable which was ‘social grouping’ had three potential states namely ‘alone’, ‘with partner’ and ‘with family / friends’. The analysis which included logistic regression modelling was applied to the data in order to explore the principle differences in the way in which the visitors within each of these three grouping variables responded to the questionnaire. Factor analysis techniques were also applied to identify whether any other associations existed within the overall data set. As a result of the analysis, the broad characteristics of the visitor population within each of the three grouping variables was revealed including their choice of on-site activities as well as their interest in on-site interpretive media and their attitudes towards guided walks.