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Disabled people are significantly disadvantaged in employment, with many more unemployed, in lower status occupations and on poorer salaries than their able-bodied counterparts. The increased use of flexible employment methods, including part-time working, temporary contracts and ‘flexitime’, has raised questions about how the experience of disabled people in employment has been affected. This thesis has this as its motivating issue, that is, have flexible employment practices provided more opportunities for disabled people in employment or further restricted their prospects? After outlining the main issues involved in the disability and employment debate, the thesis uses the period of the two World Wars to draw out the three central themes of disability, flexible employment and the ‘body’. These are explored in turn, in particular their changing understandings. The recent social theories of the body are of particular relevance. Rethinking the body as a social and cultural entity, the mind and the physical body of a person connected to, affected by and affecting, social and cultural processes, allows the development of the theory of ‘embodiment’. The thesis, using evidence from the main UK disability and employment organisations and three large UK service sector companies, argues that an embodied approach can provide a better understanding of the relationship between disability and flexible employment. An embodied approach forces a focus on the processes of employment and disability by looking at how work operates. It also puts attention on the materiality of employment for disabled people. The spatial practices of employment in the companies can be better understood through an embodied approach as the full range of the interaction between employees and their work - mental and physical - is involved. The whole nature of the meaning of ‘employment’ and ‘disability’ is also raised.

The focus of this dissertation is essentially theoretical, and to do with concepts, assumptions and dualisms relating to 'home'- and 'work'. These are seen as socially constructed concepts in a dialectical relationship with one another; to understand one it is necessary to understand the other. It is argued that the meaning of 'home', in particular, has been largely taken for granted and unquestioned. A method of interpretation, combining hermeneutics with a critical edge, was roughly followed; incorporated within this were the principles of grounded theory that would permit concepts to be developed from data. A theoretical sample that clearly crossed the boundary between home and work - self-employed independents who worked from home - was targeted, resulting in twenty in-depth interviews. The contrasts between (a) an apparent sense of autonomy but lack of legitimacy, and (b) a relatively good work situation but poor market situation were related to the distinction between being in one's own house -and being self-employed - but being seen as 'at home'. There was found to be a contradiction between what were believed to be the generally accepted meanings of 'home' and 'work' and those of the group; whereas the former were not compatible with using home as a place of work, being a contradiction of one another, the latter were. In this situation, strategies such as avoidance of the term 'at home' and a tendency to use 'professional' were evident. A postal survey provided verification and some clarification of these findings. The theoretical analysis draws on the way in which the separation of 'home' from 'work' resulted from a restricted and simplified model of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality. Whereas work was associated with rational liberal economic and scientific values which expressed the legitimate Modern paradigm, home remained associated with conservative values and nature - the non-rational.

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Resource exploitation by human communhies living in close proximity to protected areas has motivated the imposition of strict rules and regulations for biodiversity conservation and management. However, these rules have often been shown to exacerbat~ illegal ~esource extraction and resource use conflicts. While the role of the park-people conflict in the degradation of protected areas has been discussed, such a relationship has rarely been ~xplored empirically through a wider perspective of coupled human and natural systems and institutions. as a mediator betw~en them. Thus, this study investigates the role of institutions in providing social-ecological resilience in three villages near Nepal's Bardia National Park (BNP). A standardized household questionnaire, workshops, interviews, focus groups and v~getation surveys were conducted to generate data on the institutional arrangementS in BNP anct't\Yo key outcomes of the social-ecological systems, namely community livelihoods and the Slate of the park's vegetation. Narrative analysis, binomial regression, t-tests, non-parametric tests and descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data. The findings suggested that more than a third of the respondents met their livelihoo~ needs by illegally and regularly extracting resources from the park, which had significant impact on the vegetation diversity and structure. Wildlife interference and strict rules restricting resource use were the main causes of conflict .between communities'and park management. As uniform rules were applied for ali cases and all levels of social groups, incentives were found to be ineffective in meeting community needs. Lack of community' involvement in the design of incentive structures, low level of local participation in decision making processes, and non-consideration of local people's needs while making management' plans were responsible for these institutional failures. These findings suggest that 'site-specific management strategies, tog~ther with nested and overlapping institutions, are crucial for the design of robust institutions. A new paradigm that integrates adaptive co-learning and management techniques is essential for the co-existence of humans and wildlife at Bardia.