The works of historians such as Hargreaves, Tranter, Walvin, McCrone and Bailey suggest that women were, for a variety of reasons, gradually entering into the ‘world of sport’ from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Despite a lack of research it has been argued that this trend, of increased participation amongst women, continued into the twentieth century. Recent studies have tended to converged on the broad leisure choices of women, ignoring the place of sport within these experiences. This study therefore addresses an under researched topic: the development of women’s participation in sport in Scotland between 1920 and 1937. Many argue that during the interwar years there was a general distortion of the traditional boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ areas of life for women. However, it has also been acknowledged that notions of gender differences persisted in this period. This study contributes to a wider understanding of gender relations during the period. It probes how women’s involvement in physically demanding sports were influenced by existing discourses and enabled the emergence of new ones. This thesis does not aim to chart the chronological growth and development of specific sports but rather seeks to understand the ways in which sport was incorporated into women’s lives and the meanings which they attached to their experiences. Each section of the thesis deals with a different area of participation. It examines the development of physical education in schools, the establishment and growth of a selection of sports organizations, the growth and use of local council run sports facilities and the development of work-based sport for women. This research focuses on contemporary depictions and discussions of sportswomen during these years as well as drawing on the views of sportswomen themselves. It employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies in order to achieve a holistic and balanced interpretation of interwar sports participation and the attitudes that influenced it.

Despite its relatively small land mass (approximately 245 000 sq km), the UK is now home to close to 61 million people (Office of National Statistics, 2009). This high population density (243 per km2), aggregated in major cities, leaves the remaining land area, under great stress to produce food and housing and recreation opportunities for the country’s ever increasing population. The principle of ‘right of way’, allowing walkers to cross privately owned land on paths or tracks, totalling about 140,000 miles (225,000km) makes recreation in Britain unique. In the mosaic of the English countryside, linear features (such as field boundaries, woodland edges and streams) are often the natural route of public rights of way. The importance of field boundaries to wildlife within the agricultural landscape, has been recognised for several years. Disturbance by public access and recreation is another potential source of detriment to farmland wildlife, and one that is noticeably absent from current research. As managers consider how to limit impacts, they are faced with difficult decisions that affect countryside users, landowners and biodiversity. A call by authors for better integrated social and ecological research regarding recreation impacts has been heard in recent years. This study takes a holistic approach to this challenge utilizing a questionnaire survey of farmers/landowners, recreational groups and members of the public in the Midland counties of England to identify areas of conflict between recreational users and identify areas current management that could be improved. Disturbance to wildlife and damage to tracks from ‘trampling’ were two topics commonly identified as areas of concern to landowners, recreational groups and the general public. Study two attempts to account for the differences in diversity, abundance and spatial distribution of farmland birds along a disturbance gradient (footpath). No significant difference between bird abundance or species richness on transects following public rights of way and control transects was found in this study, suggesting that presence of public rights of way with ‘low’ recreational disturbance does not impact on the abundance of farmland birds in lowland England. Study three investigates an important consideration in management of recreation and access - the durability or vulnerability of a vegetation type to activity. Low resistance to four studied activities (All Terrain Vehicles, horse & rider, walker and mountain bike), was exhibited by MG7 grassland in this study; all four activity types showing a 50% cover loss at 40 passes or less. The low resistance of grassland to trampling could have implications for management since areas of disturbance become obvious with just a few passes – these areas will tend to attract more use, and therefore lead to trail formation. In the case of Rights of Way that follow an obvious route such as a field boundary are less likely to have issues with be a problem. ROW without an obvious route to follow (through pasture or grassland) or physical boundary (hedge or crop edge) to guide the trail user wandering from the intended trail and possible formation of secondary trails could occur. This potential problem argues for the use good signage to avoid trail users losing their way from the intended route. The results of the three studies were drawn together in the final chapter to formulate suggestions for management of public access and recreation in lowland farmland.

The argument in this thesis maintains that despite the official recognition of professional football players in England by the highest law-making body within the sport (the Football Association) in 1885, it can be seen with the benefit of a century of hindsight that this act of legislation was merely a step towards legal rights for footballers which are more generally recognised in other branches of industry. It is further argued that the history of the legal status of professional footballers cannot be adequately conceptualised by the frequently employed schema 'illegality - legality - freedom', representing a three stage teleological evolution of the professional player as outhw prior to 1885, then as legitimate and respectable between 1885 and 1963 and finally as free and bourgeois from 1963 onwards. The denial of such a fictitious history involves the detailed historical and sociological investigation of the various, often contradictory, legal and social statuses of the professional footballer since his initial constitution as a legal subject in the late nineteenth century. Such investigation involves the major theoretical question in the study of law, that is, what exactly it is that is involved in legal 'recognition': in other words in being, or not being, a legal subject or legal 'person'. It is hoped that this thesis sheds some light on this question from a general and specific viewpoint.

This qualitative study of Youth Training (YT) is centred specifically around the experiences of trainee professional footballers. Presenting a case-study analysis of one professional English Football League club, it utilizes those methods of sociological enquiry traditionally associated with ethnography (i.e. participant observation, unstructured interviews, and documentary analysis) in order to explore the day-to-day lives of the individuals concerned. The study depicts the way in which YT recruits are socialized into professional football club culture and how their career expectations and aspirations are subsequently shaped by the detailed complexities of institutional experience. In turn, it looks at how trainees learn to adapt to their chosen occupational position, and uncovers their attitudes towards such diverse topics as educational attendance, inter-personal relations and masculine construction. Set against the historical development of football apprenticeship within England, the work examines the impact of new vocational policy upon the football industry as a whole and portrays the role of the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) - and its subsidiary body The Footballers' Further Education and Vocational Training Society (FFE & VTS) - in relation to the implementation of YT provision. To this end, it attempts to determine the extent to which modern-day forms of football traineeship differ from those methods of indenture employed in previous years. At the same time, the study provides insight into the personal and social lives of the trainees in question. Notably issues of class, sexuality and gender are raised in terms of individual experience and interpretation. Furthermore, the influence of club officials is also considered in relation to the pressures, pitfalls and constraints of trainee development.

This study analyses the dynamics and impact of international tourism in the Western Cape province of South Africa. It investigate how the Western Cape tourism sector interrelates with the international sector, and what developmental outcomes this has in the province. In terms of tourism's impact the study shows that it is geographically concentrated, with tourist activities focuses in and around the Cape metropolitan area and along the south eastern coastline. The province's rural areas have a very small share in the tourism market. Overall, tourism is following long-established patterns, being centred on the promotion of a number of traditional attractions and tourist images. The nature and distribution of tourism is partly related to the role and actions of key producers. Tour operators, for example, have an important effect on travel flows. They, along with other producers and agents such as the media, significantly influence consumers' knowledge and perceptions, and consequently the image(s) of the Western Cape. This in turn has an important consequence on localities and destinations that are visited by tourists. Furthermore, investment trends show that there is limited infrastructural development and demand-stimulation by the government or other tourism producers in regions where tourism impact is lowest. The provincial government is pursing an objective of sustained tourism growth, and greater tourism equity and impact distribution. This objective is hampered by several factors. The Western Cape tourism economy has significantly grown over the past seven years, but a number of aspects may constrain continued growth. Firstly, political, economic and social factors in the larger exogenous environment play an important role in restricting tourist demand. This, coupled with seasonal fluctuations in demand has led to a sector characterised by overcapacity. The regime governing flight access and availability to the Western Cape furthermore has a limiting effect on tourism production and consumption. In practice, the goals of growth and equity are difficult to balance. The government primarily seeks to do this by coupling the development of new products that involve the historically disadvantaged population of the province with an innovative product offer that appears to both traditional and new market segments. There is however a generally low level of demand for new or alternative products such as township tourism in international source markets.

This volume comprises ninety-one contributions to the Sediment 2011 conference of the Central European section of the Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM-CES) and the Geologische Vereinigung (GV) at the University of Leipzig held in June 2011. The central theme of this meeting was “Sediments: Archives of the Earth System” in order to bring together young and established researchers from all fields of soft-rock geology and beyond to shape a stimulating interdisciplinary program on the role of sediments in understanding the System Earth and the evolution of paleoenvironments and climate through time.

This thesis presents an ethnographic study that aims at explicating the work of creating content in Minecraft. The existing literature paves the way in understanding Minecraft’s community by providing fragments of what players do. However, the game is studied mainly from a ludic perspective or is treated as a resource to explore distinct research agendas, instead of a field of study in itself. As such, particular phenomena that are situated inside Minecraft’s community are lost. The conducted fieldwork discovered the invisible digital economy that is part of this community. More specifically, the chapters to follow elaborate on the actors involved in this economy, covering their roles, responsibilities and goals. Furthermore, the lived work of content production is unpacked by presenting the various work practices members attend to in commissioning, creating, and delivering Minecraft content. It also becomes evident that there is a complex division of labour at play, which is based on a fragmented infrastructure as Minecraft itself does not support the wide range of activities that are necessary for carrying out the work. Essentially, actors bootstrap the market’s infrastructure by appropriating or even creating bespoke systems for conducting the various work practices that are entailed in this business. On top of that, these systems are utilised for articulation work, which is necessary for tracking progress between the geographically dispersed actors, accounting for conducted work and addressing contingent scenarios. The main contribution of this PhD project is the discovery of this digital economy, which evidently plays a significant role in Minecraft’s current form and development. Additionally, prevailing understandings of Minecraft’s ecosystem are re-visited, re-examined, and re-specified, based on the empirical evidence presented in this thesis. Finally, a number of design implications are raised with regard to addressing the game’s lack of CSCW support.

Leisure boatbuilding is an industry that has tight profit margins and growing competition due to the global nature of the industry. It is a growth market with the number of high-earning potential customers increasing worldwide. For British boatbuilding to retain and increase its high standing within these global markets investment is required to develop larger profits and market share. Concurrent engineering is a method of design that has given large benefits to a multitude of industries but is ill-defined within leisure boatbuilding. This thesis investigates the nature of British boatbuilding and develops concurrent engineering within this context. To develop faster design while increasing quality this thesis concentrates on automated communication. A number of tools are developed focusing on structures and production. These include a mass and cost multi-objective optimisation tool further developing first principles rules using a Genetic Algorithm, a reliability tool to increase the speed of iterative design and a design history tool focusing on data mining using neural networks within a grid computing structure. Furthermore, a concurrent engineering methodology specific to leisure boatbuilding has been developed leading to a design environment for use within this sector. The resulting work develops techniques that increase the knowledge available to engineers in an intuitive, quantitative, manner.

With the rapid development of Computer-based Sport Training (CBST), feedback plays an important role in both coaching and learning. A good CBST system includes not only good training strategies but also effective feedback design. Feedback in the motor skill domain via CBST may be synthetically designed to allow athletes to practice in a more effective way, and enhance their skill acquisition. Little research has been undertaken on the integration of pedagogic theory and instructional design with the design of feedback in CBST. To bridge this gap, this thesis‟s purpose was to explore the design of pedagogically-informed feedback in the motor skill domain via CBST, in order to support athletes‟ achievement of their intended training outcomes. This thesis presents a framework of pedagogical feedback in the motor skill domain. It draws a picture of how principles from learning transactions, competency, cybernetics, and behaviourism, can work together to build sound pedagogical feedback for the implementation of a CBST system. The key principle of the framework is to generate feedback based on the athletes‟ achievement of their intended training outcome. The training outcome is conceptualised as comprising two components: a statement of capability, and a statement of the subject matter to which the capability applies. The pedagogical feedback system measures athletes‟ performance and compares it against the intended training outcomes. The system then identifies any performance gap and generates feedback to reinforce better performance. Four counterbalanced experiments asked student rowers to explore the differences between the pedagogical feedback system and their current feedback system (Sean-Analysis). Pedagogical feedback was at least as good as Sean-Analysis with respect to the level of satisfaction of the athlete. In addition, pedagogical feedback seemed able to generate feedback that was consistent with the athlete‟s intended training outcome, support the athlete‟s positioning within their level of achieved performance, and support the athlete‟s self-assessment. Overall, it can be concluded that the pedagogical feedback based on the proposed framework appears to be a good model for generating feedback in CBST.

This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of group walking practices in the Hampshire countryside, investigating the embodied, affective and social practice of the shared walk and its relation to the individual pursuit of wellness. Responding to the growing literature in qualitative health geography using ‘therapeutic landscape’ as a conceptual framework, group walking practices are approached in this thesis from a perspective of more-than-representational theories of social practice that aims to address group dynamics and the role of social relations for the establishment of therapeutic spaces. While also drawing attention to the embodied and affective nature of experience, this thesis opens a discussion between health geography and cultural geographies on the issues of the body, mobility and collective experience. Further, the thesis aims to place the study findings within the wider cultural phenomena of ‘walking for health’ through an exploration of practices of assemblage. Deleuzian assemblage theory, both as a pragmatic analytical tool and an ontological position, offers a new approach to thinking health and place relationally, arguing for a distribution of agencies and providing a framework for tracing their emergent effects across complex networks. The thesis finds its empirical focus in ethnographic fieldwork with five walking groups as well as individual mobile interviews. The findings discussed in the thesis firstly pertain to the significance of social relations for well-being, exploring the kinds of socialities that are produced while walking together, and arguing that the shared walk has the potential to establish a place-specific social aesthetic that can be experienced as restorative. Secondly, the rural walkscape as a therapeutic landscape is analysed as a specific outcome of place-based rhythms, implicated in the performativity and mobility of the body in the creation of a restorative place/practice. It is found that the shared walk is characterised by specific rhythmic qualities and that walking as a health practice is subject to a range of norms, regulations and performative styles. The findings and conceptual development in this thesis contribute to an interrogation of the complex processes through which therapeutic landscapes are established, practiced and experienced. The thesis also contributes to more-than representational geographies of embodiment, affect and landscape, which are intimately tied up in the production and performance of both wellness and place.