It has been well documented that young people’s social class, gender and ethnicity have significant bearing upon their participation in post-16 and higher education. Less research has considered how decisions regarding participation in post-16 education and HE are framed by the places and timeframe in which young people live. This comparative and qualitative study of young people aged 16-18 in the Rhondda Valleys and Newport considers how place and the contemporary economic context bears upon their aspirations and educational choices. The research shows that the contemporary economic climate and popular commentaries of ‘recession’ ‘cuts’ and ‘crisis’ persuade young people to remain in post-16 education and HE as a means of avoiding entry into this risky landscape and investing in human capital. The study revealed that place did appear to bear upon their decisions – albeit in subtle ways. Firstly, local opportunity structures informed the type of transitions young people made from compulsory to post-compulsory education. Drawing on Gambetta’s typology, where opportunities are limited but available, young people jumped into post-16 education but where opportunities are severely restricted, they were pushed into post-16 education. Local opportunity structures also informed young people’s plans to leave or stay within their locality, compelling them to leave places where opportunities are scarce. Place also matters to young people’s university choices and future aspirations through their emotional attachments to immediate and national localities. The research offers new insights into the importance of place in informing the processes by which educational decisions are made. It raises important questions regarding the extent to which differences in young people’s decision making processes have implications for their future experiences of education and life chances. It also has political implications regarding the geographical location of higher education opportunities and the role of universities in outward migration.

Despite the popularity and potential value of adventure activity (AA) programmes, support for the potential claims of these therapeutic interventions to change behaviour, improve social relationships and improve self-concept has been mixed. The present study is an ethnographic investigation into the effects of participation in AA with a particular emphasis upon self-concept that seeks to move beyond description into one of explanation concerning the processes by which changes may be elicited. The study sample consists of three intervention programmes for disadvantaged and at-risk populations. The first is a Pathways to Employment project for disadvantaged youth (n = 10); the second, a Youth Offending Team programme for at-risk youth (n = 9); and the third, a JobMatch programme for unemployed adults (n = 33). Findings indicate that the AA programmes made an important and meaningful contribution towards the positive development of self-concept and may also facilitate positive behaviour change among participants. A number of affective and cognitive components emerged strongly from the data that show improvements to self-esteem, mood and self-confidence (self-efficacy). These in turn appear to effect behavioural changes exhibited and reported by participants. Participants describe improvements in attitudes and behaviour expressed as being more ready to overcome anxiety in fearful situations, take on new challenges, act in a more agentic and self-determined manner and be more trusting of others. A number of elements such as the concept of ‘challenge by choice’, the application of constructive dissonance and the personal characteristics of instructors/ staff created an autonomy-supportive environment that facilitated participants to engage internal sources of motivation which appear to play a significant part in the adventure training process. Findings also suggest that the AA represented mastery-oriented situations engendering cogent perceptions of risk and danger allowing displays of competence described as ‘self-esteem moments’ that accounted for elevated levels of self-esteem and self-competence.

This thesis explores the politics of care and transnational mobility – through a multi-sited ethnography of the everyday lives of a variety of migrant populations. Utilising a mixed-methodology it investigates the interconnections between care, mobility, labour and control. The care labour process is examined, particularly that of care homes for older people. It is seen that mobility controls shape the working and living conditions, employment relations and forms of exploitability experienced by differentially included migrants. As well as such dynamics the thesis also explores the strategies that emerge from within the workplace itself that migrants utilise in order to negotiate such conditions. Care is also examined from the vantage point of the lives of asylum applicants and their experiences of the asylum support regime that has emerged in recent years. Welfare and support services are argued to have increasingly come to be utilised as regulatory mechanisms. The numerous ways this occurs and the effects this has on such migrants are examined as is the dual function that NGOs have come to play within such processes as both providers of support and sustainability and agents of control. A further aspect of care concerns the self-organised networks of care that migrants create amongst themselves. The concept of the ‘mobile commons’ is developed to argue that both the transnational and local networks of care that migrants craft, as well as the caring relations afforded through institutions such as churches are key in enabling migrants to become mobile, negotiate their caring commitments and sustain themselves while in transit or in a given location. By thinking the relationship between care and migration from these interrelated perspectives the thesis aims to contribute to a reappraisal of existing forms of social movement organising and political mobilisation around the issue of mobility.

In the context of shifting public expenditure and related cuts to public services, the Voluntary Sector (VS) has been given a prominent role in the organisation of social care. Government reform agendas in the UK try to thrive on public support for 'empowerment of local communities', more 'voice and choice' for service users, and a discourse of 'partnership' with the VS for implementing policies that imply an increasingly competitive commissioning of sensitive services. This research traces the neocommunitarian turn in neoliberal discourse and develops a critique of the imposed pseudo-marketisation of social care by examining everyday experiences of labour. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in London's VS. In relation to reports in the sector on the loss of funding for women-only projects and services, it examines the transformation of working conditions and the strategies applied in dealing with the outcomes of reform. The study draws on in-depth interviews with 31 women working for 19 different women's organisations. Additional interviews were conducted with union representatives and officers working for local infrastructure organisations and commissioning bodies in two inner London boroughs, in which the outcomes of commissioning practices for the workforce in the VS were further explored. It is argued that neocommunitarian neoliberalism results in insecure work environments and the institutionalisation of volunteering, which will exacerbate the ongoing crisis of care. While employment in the women's sector has always been precarious – as being short-term, insecure, poorly remunerated and supported by high amounts of volunteering – women reported on a loss of control over the quality and direction of work as well as the imposition of inadequate workloads. This makes it increasingly difficult to endure and resist precarity in social care. It creates harmful work environments and implies a loss of needs-adequate service provision, both traced to intensify existing inequalities along the lines of class, gender and race.

The involvement of citizens and communities in public service decision-making has been the focus of a great deal of policy initiatives and academic research over recent years. Much of this research, exploring the conduct, effectiveness, and problems of citizen engagement, has shown how the roles of the citizen-consumer and public service officials in co-governance are problematised and contested (Clarke et al 2007, Foot 2009). This has led to a call for empirical research to explore and better understand the local situated practice within implementations (Hughes 2007, Barnes 2009). My research addresses the gap in our knowledge of the bottom-up micro-level practice of co-governance by conducting ethnography of the lived experience of neighbourhood public meetings that were introduced as part of the Neighbourhood Policing programme within England and Wales. My methodology draws on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2005a) in understanding the importance of identities in collaboration and the way that power dynamics are enacted within collaborative interactions. By providing evidence of locality differences and of nuanced embodied and relational identities within collaboration it contributes empirical depth to our knowledge of the situated practice of professionals, residents and elected representatives within the context of power-sharing and vertical coproduction. This highlights the importance of procedural, distributive and outcome justice in police-community engagement (Bradford 2011). It also contributes to current policy and practice debates in a number of ways: by making the case for the empowerment of disadvantaged communities as predicated by radical communitarianism (Braithwaite 2000); by demonstrating the relevance and importance of collective identities within co-governance (Emejulu 2011); and by exploring the difficulties faced by the police and public service officials in dealing with both citizens and elected representatives within co-governance (Yang 2005, Sullivan 2009). Finally it highlights the importance of the relationship between horizontal and vertical partnerships and how access to key decision-makers is vital for community co-governance to achieve any form of justice.

This thesis presents a qualitative case study of support care, a supportive intervention for families in crisis and at risk of breakdown. The service involves families being matched with a support carer, who it is envisaged will engage with parents and provide regular short breaks for children and young people. The service aims to provide support that is responsive to families’ individual needs. Although flexible, the service is time-limited with typical intervention periods lasting between six and twelve months. Three Support Care schemes in operation in England and Wales participated in the research and ten individual placements were followed for their duration. Semi-structured interviews and participant observation constituted the principal research methods. The study included the participation of key support care stakeholders, including social workers, support carers, parents, children and young people. The thesis sought to understand how Support Care was delivered, how it was perceived and experienced, and how it attempted to alleviate family difficulty. In addition, the study provided a microcosm of how policy, practice and theory inherent in the relationship between the family and the State are enacted and experienced at the point of service delivery. The empirical chapters are concerned with the functions and features of time within the service, the relationships forged over the course of the intervention and attempts to support families towards ‘good enough’ levels of functioning. The findings of the research suggest Support Care is valued by stakeholders. The service can be applied to support families with a variety of difficulties and the practical and relational elements of the support are appreciated by service users. However, the time-limited nature of the service is sometimes experienced as challenging and difficulties are not necessarily considered resolved at service conclusion.

The overarching objective of this thesis is to explore the warehouse location decision problem by considering regional and specific site attributes in the unique context of humanitarian relief organisation. This is to fill the gaps the revealed in the current understanding of location decision problem, particularly the lack of studies attempting to investigate humanitarian pre-positioned location decision problem with qualitative attributes opposed to the many previous studies focused on computerised optimisation model absence of the human judgements. Specifically, this research develops into case studies of the international humanitarian organisations selecting the warehouse attributes and locating the alternative warehouse locations. International humanitarian relief organisation aiding the refugees participated in the case study of the regional location selection problem for pre-positioned warehouse with five major attributes and 25 sub-attributes. Six international humanitarian relief organisations based in Dubai, UAE participated for specific warehouse location selection problem with five major attributes and 30 sub-attributes. The overall research design adopted in this thesis is as follows. First, the coherent humanitarian warehouse location decision attributes were developed in the basis of a literature and semi-structured interviews with practitioners whose organisation practice pre-positioned warehouse operation system. Secondly, two case studies were conducted for constructing the hierarchy structure for warehouse evaluation for regional and specific site location. In the first case study, 11 managerial level officers participated to construct the regional warehouse location decision attributes and evaluated the warehouse location for the organisation. In the second case study, panel members were form by 11 decision-makers from six different organisations constructed the hierarchical structure of the specific site warehouse location attributes for the evaluation. Thirdly, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is executed to acquire criteria weights and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is employed to obtain the final ranking of the warehouse locations. Fuzzy set theory is adopted in the evaluation to deal with the fuzziness of decision-makers‟ preferences in decision making. In conclusion, this thesis extends the body of knowledge in pre-positioned warehouse location problem in the humanitarian relief logistics context by suggesting a MADM location method, AHP and TOPSIS, integrated with fuzzy set theory to understand the priority preference of regional (macro) and specific site (micro) warehouse location attributes and the selection of the optimal warehouse.

This thesis proposes that the range of institutional logics provided by both Friedland and Alford (1991) and Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury (2012) has overlooked the inclusion of an environmental societal logic. The concept of an environmental logic is therefore developed and applied in order to understand how a ‘green paradox’ surrounding nuclear power emerged over the past sixty years of the UK civil nuclear energy programme. The research employs a Critical Realist ontology (Bhaskar 1975) and constructs a qualitative and historical case study of the nuclear power industry via the analysis of newspaper articles and Government policy documents. The findings show that the green nuclear debate was informed by four ‘situated’ manifestations of an environmental societal logic which informed the environmental values and expectations of different actor groups engaged in the debate. In particular, the thesis shows how a situated target-based environmental logic emerged within the energy industry as a result of embedded institutional work and eventually informed the arguments promoting green nuclear. These arguments remained in contention with those of the environmental movement who maintained that nuclear power was definitively not environmentally friendly. Additionally, the Critical Realist ontology provides a framework with which to explore levels of meaning and structure and thus offers a means to explain this ‘situated’ nature of institutional logics. This thesis contributes to existing institutional theory in three key ways: Firstly it proposes and illustrates the theoretical and analytical utility of an environmental institutional logic. Secondly it develops the concept of a situated logic and, in doing so, builds an improved understanding of the ways in which agency, institutional logics and the institutional structure of industries interconnect. Thirdly it demonstrates and explains how one societal logic may become situated in multiple and possibly contradictory ways depending on the actor groups in which it manifests.

This thesis reports on a UK-based ethnography of prenatal screening for Down’s syndrome across two hospitals. By studying the mundane and routine practices of the clinic, I initially capture how Down’s syndrome screening is organised and how its sedimentation as a taken-for-granted aspect of pregnancy contributes to the procedure being ‘downgraded’. This downgrading accomplishes hierarchies of valued/valueless work and professional specialities and also, therefore, of certain professional identities. In what follows, I explore the conduct of care and how professionals detach from Down’s syndrome screening by assigning responsibility for decision-making to parents-to-be. Professionals’ devotion to the rhetoric of ‘informed choice’ and ‘non-directive care’ also naturalises screening as a ‘normal’ part of pregnancy, this routinisation being extended by parents-to-be (often with professionals) privileging the ‘social’ rather than ‘medical’ dimension of ultrasound scanning. I continue by analysing how Down’s syndrome itself is constituted both inside and outside screening encounters. During consultations, the condition is rarely discussed and is substituted with dominant discourses of ‘risk’, ‘problem’, and ‘abnormality’. The condition is subsequently constructed as a negative pregnancy outcome. This intersects with the production and reproduction of ideas around perfection in the social practices and cultural materials of the clinic and how, if a diagnosis is established, the unborn ‘baby’ is recast as a ‘foetus’. By making this move, the unborn baby is denied personhood and a termination of pregnancy is made possible. To conclude, I highlight how the routine practice of prenatal screening for Down’s syndrome has transformed antenatal medicine, invigorated parental expectations, shaped issues around reproductive politics, and cultivated certain body-society relations.

Over the past two decades sexuality and reproduction have proved potent and contested subjects. After the unexpected collapse of the state socialist systems, societies facing uncertainty and dislocation have turned both to the allure of ‘the west’ and to pre-socialist traditional values of family and gender. Along with this, aspirations of moving closer to Europe sits alongside a resurgent nationalist sentiment throughout the region, and it is sexuality and reproduction which has become a particularly contested battleground, as the female reproductive body has become a metaphor for the vitality and viability of the nation-state. Discourses of demographic crisis, calls to produce more (indigenous) children to increase the population and ensure the stability and viability of the state, and proscription of so-called ‘deviant’ (defined as non-heterosexual/non-reproductive) sexualities have all gained in currency as the nations of the region try to establish themselves as sustainable entities following the years of state-sponsored paternalism. At the same time, western nations and donor agencies offer support to redevelop and redesign out-of-date systems and bureaucracies and the opportunity to modernise and enjoy the benefits of capitalism and liberal democracy. A particular focus on developing civil society along with the reform of state institutions widens the social marketplace still further. It is against this backdrop that policy makers and service providers attempt to develop and provide health services. Public health is a useful barometer of what is happening in society, as it reflects the effects of wider socio-economic and political trends. Within this, the study of sexual and reproductive health is crucial as it also has the ability to illuminate the differential effects of societal change on different groups within society, such as women or those from minorities. It also powerfully illustrates the contestations going on in wider society around meanings of the moral and healthy, as sexuality and reproduction are issues pertinent to the continued reproduction of states and other ‘communities of power’. This thesis is a study of the experiences and perceptions of service providers in the field of sexual and reproductive health in Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Through interviews with service providers in both state and civil society sectors as well as regional and national authorities and international donor agencies, and an extensive media review of the portrayal of sexuality, reproduction and sexual and reproductive health, opportunities and barriers to providing accessible and responsive services within the contested arena of two postsocialist countries with much in common historically and culturally but following very different paths in the contemporary period are explored. The continuing importance of sexual and reproductive health as a category of study which can illuminate wider macro-level debates on national identity and vitality, as well as the importance of discursive battles over control of meanings, are amply illustrated in the thesis. In particular the relation between health and morality is extensively explored, and the relevance of an area studies approach to this wider topic is demonstrated. The thesis finds that it is vital to consider sexual and reproductive health services within their wider sociocultural context and that transnationally-funded initiatives do not take full account of the multiplicity of meanings and values underpinning the reactions of target populations to their services; indeed services are often framed as representing an unwelcome invasion of ‘alien’ morality. Ultimately providers and funders need to take the moral understandings of their target populations very seriously if they are to overcome the considerable opposition to their services.