Over the past decade, the UK has witnessed a considerable expansion in the provision and use of charitable food aid, particularly food banks. The phenomenon has become a prominent political issue, and a rapidly expanding field of academic study. However, there is limited data available as to the prevalence of food aid use or the factors associated with it. The growth in food aid has also prompted research and policy interest in the wider issue of food poverty: the extent to which people struggle to afford food; its drivers and impacts; and the role which charitable food aid has come to play in food poverty experiences. There is a recognised need for better understanding of both food poverty and food aid use as separate but connected phenomena. The recent rise of charitable food aid in the UK has been mirrored across other European welfare states, provoking significant questions about the changing roles of, and relationships between, statutory and voluntary sectors in providing a social safety net. There is a need for greater critical reflection on how food aid is challenging and changing welfare states, particularly in countries where it has only recently become widespread. The overall aim of this thesis is to gain new empirical and theoretical insights into the rise of food aid and its role in relation to the changing nature of the welfare state. In order to address this aim, a mixed methods study of food poverty and the rise of food aid within the welfare state was undertaken. Scotland was selected as the major case study for the research, with a particular focus on the city of Glasgow, while Finland provided the minor, comparative case. The quantitative part of the study involved cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of an existing household survey of 15 deprived neighbourhoods in Glasgow (the GoWell study). The objective was to examine the scale of both food poverty and food bank use. Binary logistic regression modelling was used to examine the relationship of these outcomes with socio-demographic, health, and financial variables. The qualitative fieldwork involved a total of 51 semi-structured interviews. These included interviews with a sample of the GoWell study participants (n=12); service providers in Glasgow (n=12); and policy actors across Scotland (n=9). Fieldwork in Finland involved interviews with policy actors and individuals working in statutory and voluntary services (n=18). This study provides quantitative analysis of a self-reported measure of food bank use, including empirical evidence of the scale and drivers of food poverty and food bank use in deprived neighbourhoods. While four per cent of respondents were found to have reported food bank use in 2015, 17 per cent reported difficulties affording food. The findings highlight the impact of financial factors, specifically of recent UK Government welfare reforms, on both food poverty and food bank use. The study found that survey respondents with mental and physical health problems were more likely to experience both food poverty and food bank use than those who reported good health. Worsening health was also found to increase the likelihood of entering food poverty over time. The qualitative findings provide evidence of how food banks are shaping experiences, perceptions, and delivery of the welfare state at a local level, and also consider how policy makers perceive the state-food aid relationship. Drawing on welfare state regime theory, analysis of interviews with policy actors in both Scotland and Finland inform an examination of the various roles and relationships of food aid and the welfare state across different regime types. Theoretical characterisations of the relationship between food aid and the welfare state, arising from analysis of interview data in both countries, are presented. These include understandings of food aid in relation to a welfare state which might be considered: contingent; shrunken; impersonal; or regressive. Comparing Scotland and Finland offers important insight into how and why food aid may play different roles in different welfare state contexts.

This thesis explores the phenomenon of a business exit by analysing its context using gender as a lens. It has employed critical realism as the research ontology, and realist phenomenology as the research methodology. By adopting the social embeddedness perspective as the primary focus, this study substantiates the complexity of structures involved in shaping a business journey and its exit. The entrepreneurial trajectory has been the mode of analysis rather than just the event of 'business exit‘, to provide a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of exit and its position in respondent‘s life. The study starts by reviewing the intersection of the 'gender in entrepreneurship‘ and 'business exits‘ literature. It indicates that the 'business exit‘ literature is still evolving, and only a limited number of studies have explored the topic qualitatively, within which the concept of 'gender‘ remains largely unexplored. Recently, some studies have sought to develop typologies of business exits; however, this stream of literature has yet to influence the on-going research explicitly as most of the emerging empirical studies exploring business exits still use 'failure‘ and 'closure‘ interchangeably. There is little acknowledgement of the critical distinctions between these concepts. It is particularly misleading when the topic of research is exploring gender around these parameters. The current feminist literature argues that "women businesses do not fail often but have a higher exit rate", so the process of investigation began with an aim to subjectively explore the context behind it. The first part of the thesis defines a 'business exit‘. A customised typology of business exit trajectories is developed from the research data. These trajectories are then analysed by looking at the intersectionality of multiple socially embedded contextual structures that influenced respondents‘ entrepreneurial journey and their subsequent exit. The study follows a discourse that includes both genders using a post-structural feminist stance. The aim of this gender multiplicity has not been to seek "how one gender is different from other" but rather to seek "how social conditioning of each gender has a direct impact on their entrepreneurial journey and subsequent exit". This approach has revealed gendered social conditioning of both genders which not only highlights the gendered processes across the business course but has also questioned the 'assumed differences‘ from previous studies, by identifying the similarities across the structures. e.g. children, family embeddedness and access to resources which predominantly have been associated with women entrepreneurs only. In-depth subjective assessment of the sample of 46 former and current entrepreneurs (26 women, 20 men) who exited a business venture they founded indicates a complex interplay of socio-economic, socio-cultural, psycho-social structures and mechanisms shaping up the phenomenon of business exit as experienced by the entrepreneur. Critical realist analysis of the phenomenon has identified underlying causal mechanisms that mediated the entrepreneur‘s exit agency. This research contributes to the business exit literature by developing a categorical schema based on exit motivations, which indicates that the suggested higher exit rates among women entrepreneurs is flawed. Most exited ventures are not an exit from entrepreneurship, as they follow a re-entry trajectory. The findings also contribute to the feminist entrepreneurship literature by identifying micro-social practices that constitute macro-social gendering which affects the entrepreneurial journey and its subsequent exit for both genders.

This thesis explores the nature of emotions in the context of a programme team involved in the planning phase of a local partnership initiative in the UK. Positioned in the social constructionist tradition, the study adopts a relational perspective, where primacy shifts from selves to relationships in founding social realities. Accordingly, the thesis frames emotions as intersubjective and dialectical experiences that emerge through dialogue and embodiment. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a fifteen-month period, this study unravels the ‘actuality’ of programme work at both collective and individual levels. At the collective level, the results from the thematic analysis of data highlight emotions during the ever-changing flux of events as the team ceaselessly engage in sense-making with the hope to establish a level of coherence and stability. At the individual level, the results from the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) reveal the innermost struggles of individuals in giving rise to emotions; individual emotions are found to rise strongly when matters of 1) identity, 2) justice and 3) meaningful work are questioned. By showing the salience of emotions in the actuality of programmes as a form of project-based work, the thesis develops two major contributions. First, it proposes relational leadership as a more pragmatic approach to leading programmes that are commonly characterised by ambiguity, turbulence, and change. Second, the thesis urges the need to cultivate situational (rather than standardised) ethics in teams, specifically suggesting the feminist ethics of care as the moral paradigm that remains sensitive to subtleties of situations and relationships.

Schools are pivotal sites for identifying and responding to child neglect due to their universal positioning within the community. This thesis presents an investigation into how schools respond to concerns of child neglect which is the most common reason a child is placed on the child protection register in Wales. Findings from the study contribute new understanding about the nature and level of support delivered by a range of staff in mainstream schools. The study employs an explanatory two-phase design comprising analysis of quantitative and qualitative methods across three local authorities in Wales. The study’s design sits across three levels of service intervention, from the early identification of neglect in schools as universal services, the implementation of preventative and voluntary multi-agency support, through to the school’s level of involvement in the statutory child protection process. The first phase of the study analyses quantitative data drawn from documents held on social work case files (n=119) in three authorities. The second phase employs thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews undertaken with a variety of staff in six schools from teaching and non-teaching roles (n=30), together with non-participant observation of school-based decision-making practice (n=5). Findings highlight the complexity which surrounds child neglect and draw attention to the difficulty of merging two multifaceted systems within one narrative. The first phase identifies the problematic nature of the case file data as a result of intricate social work processes, varying cultures of recording, and large amounts of missing data. In the second phase differences between the two fields of responsibility emerge emphasising the often-messy practice reality of inter-professional working. This thesis makes an original contribution to understanding the challenges which exist for schools when responding to child neglect. The findings have important implications for future policy and practice in the delivery of school-based service provision, and social work practice with schools when working with children who are living with neglect.

Understanding and responding to the complex causes and effects of children’s experience of neglect is a challenge for society and government. Judging its chronicity, severity and impact on children and delivering timely and proportionate services, are core functions of statutory social work. This thesis examines how assessments and decisions are made in neglect cases. Its findings draw on the narratives of social workers and team managers based in two Welsh local authorities. The practitioners are consistent in describing the organisational parameters and imperatives, and their experience of delivering their roles and responsibilities. They acknowledge the environmental pressures that influence how parents live and behave, and the histories and circumstances that contribute to their limitations as parents. They are much less clear about the effect on their practice of the partially resolved, inter-related practice-moral phenomena such as cause and effect and agency and responsibility. The practitioners recognise that critical decisions about children’s futures are founded on how they and the parents exercise their respective proxy and individual agency. The family-professional relationship is characterised as seeking a complementary approach to meeting common goals through co-agency. The location of the practitioners’ work with families lies somewhere between their designation of just good enough parenting and causing significant harm, focusing on the immediate presentation, and making judgements about the directions of the case and the allocation of limited resources. The impact of poverty and intergenerational/community deprivation on the parenting and the children is described, but not approached, as issues that social work can tackle beyond the immediate family. The practitioners generally accept the focus of their practice as located at the point of children’s greatest need and risk. Whether due to political and budgetary constraints, or organisational incapacity for change, the status quo for social work has settled on a high plateau of intervention.

Whilst, at the UK level, there has been some research into the integration experiences of refugees and asylum seekers (e.g. Phillimore et al. 2008; Kirkwood et al., 2015; Basedow and Doyle, 2016) there has been little research focusing on the devolved Welsh context. This thesis seeks to address this lacuna through applying Ager and Strang’s (2004) Indicators of Integration Framework to an analysis of qualitative interviews with refugees and asylum seekers living in Wales. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 19 refugees and asylum seekers from 13 different countries of origin. Interviews are analysed using a discursive psychological approach (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), and focused on the ways that participants’ talk functioned in the interaction. In addition, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of seven UK and devolved government refugee integration strategy documents was also undertaken. Analysis of these policy documents revealed that each drew on notions of the individual nation having a ‘proud tradition’ of protecting refugees which worked to construct refugees as being in need of protection only, obscuring any economic or civic aspirations that they may have. Analysis of the interviews, by contrast, revealed that participants constructed integration in a more multi-faceted way in which they had aspirations of contributing to both the economic and civic life of Wales. The research finds that these constructions point to a need for re-thinking the categories “refugee” and “asylum seeker” and that the term “forced migrant” better reflects the protection and aspirational needs that participants constructed. As such, it argues for a shift in focus from integration “processes” to situated “practices” of integration. A further ideological dilemma (Billig et al., 1988) is also discussed between the UK government’s ‘hostile environment’ approach to migrants which seeks to deter asylum seekers from entering the UK and the stated aims of both UK and devolved governments of ensuring refugee integration. Policy implications are suggested including the need for the Welsh Government to better reflect the economic and civic aspirations of refugees and asylum seekers within its refugee integration strategies and to call for devolved responsibility over asylum support so that it can achieve its aims of seeing Wales become a ‘Nation of Sanctuary’.

It has been well documented that the success of any public policy is closely linked to its development and implementation. Less research has considered how devolved nations tackle the complex and unstable nature of public policy making and address the challenges of implementing national policy. This thesis aims to provide an historical account of the development of one specific welsh education policy, created just after devolution. This thesis follows a single policy from its conception to worked reality. In particular, this thesis aims to uncover how one specific case created during this unique time period, post devolution, was developed and implemented, The Advanced Level Welsh Baccalaureate Qualification (WBQ). The WBQ education policy is of great significance to Wales’ reform agenda and has undergone radical revision, since devolution, making this research particularly timely. This thesis shows how the WBQ can be viewed as a flexible policy that can be adapted at the micro level, to create an education package best suited to the unique needs of the individuals and wider economic realities found across Wales. The WBQ aimed to tackle some of the most challenging educational issues, such as the academic vs. vocational education, specialisation vs. generalism and dealing with disaffection. The thesis draws on interviews with key stakeholders representing the macro, miso and micro, in 2012. The findings highlight the challenges of public policy making in devolved Wales and address how policy is made and who is actually developing policy. The findings of this thesis have suggested that key individuals at the macro level were crucial in shaping and developing the WBQ. The research offers new insights into the importance of considering implementation in the development of public policy. This thesis highlights how organisations and individuals involved in the implementation of public policy actually shape its finalised form in both subtle and more extensive ways during their translation and adaptation of policy. The degree of mutation that arises during translation impacts on the policies success in eventually becoming institutionalised. Variation itself is not unexpected given the flexibility but the findings demonstrate that this flexibility is causing a huge variation in quality and incomparable delivery and structure across institutions. The success of the policy is linked to its original aims and the issues within the Welsh education system it aims to tackle. The WBQ has been successful in achieving some of its original aims whilst others have remained unchanged.

Following the Munro Review of Child Protection in England in 2011, the appointment of a Principal Child and Family Social Worker was recommended to provide practice leadership across child protection social work with children and families. Since this time, the experience of local authorities has varied greatly in the interpretation and implementation of the role. Using a multi-method qualitative approach, this study considered the views and perspectives of Senior Managers in the conception and implementation, and the experience of PCFSWs in undertaking the role, to interrogate the following research questions: - How has the role of PCFSW been implemented? - What does the implementation tell about management, leadership and professional status? - What does the implementation reveal about boundary spanning, organisational change, and complexity? - What are the implications for future policy development? The wider context of continuing changes in legislation, policy, regulation, and DfE lead reform was considered. Building on the systems approach advocated by Munro, this research was conceptualised with reference to boundary spanning and complexity theory. The findings suggest that current policy and practice in child protection social work has evolved in a closed system, where compliance and the features of managerialism prevail. In contrast, frontline practitioners more readily operate in a complex system. Tensions between the two perspectives continue such that the aspirations for reform instigated by Munro and articulated by the participants in this study have not been fully achieved. Such aspirations may not be achievable when one part of the wider system needs to be open and adaptive, while the authority in the system seeks to be controllable, and hence closed. These tensions are reflected in current DfE policy initiatives. Given this, it is unlikely that one role, the PCFSW, can singularly effect such change within the organisation or the wider system.

Psychiatric diagnosis has become a pervasive aspect of modern culture, exerting an increasing influence on forms of personhood, identity practices, and modes of self-governing. Debates surrounding the classification of psychiatric disorders are also prevalent, with particular disputes surrounding the relative merits of ‘biomedical’ vs ‘psychosocial’ understandings of mental health difficulties. There is arguably a need for further empirical exploration into the social and cultural implications of psychiatric classification and categorising practices within mental health service interactions. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted within several UK mental health settings, this thesis considers the role of diagnosis in constituting patient identities and in shaping professional categorisation practices, with a particular focus on bipolar disorder. Observations were conducted within sites where diagnostic identities are particularly salient: Psychiatric diagnostic and screening assessments, and a psychoeducation programme for bipolar disorder. Focusing on the formal and informal categorisation practices of service users and professionals, this study highlights the way in which psychiatric classifications can be negotiated, ascribed, and withheld in order to legitimate and contest particular kinds of suffering; in particular, it explores the way in which diagnostic categories – in particular bipolar disorder - can be used to interpret and medicalise morally problematic forms of experience and behaviour. Whilst diagnosis itself can function to medicalise aspects of moral life, its ability to perform this function is also shown to depend upon its conceptualisation as a biomedical disease entity. Findings suggest that bipolar disorder gives rise to particularly somatic concepts of personhood; its conceptualisation as an essentialised and reified illness category, with its cause located within the brain, enables a legitimisation of psychiatric ‘symptoms’ for both patients and professionals. In seeking access to more specialised mental health services with limited resources, potential patients can face trivialisation and deligitimisation of their problems by professionals, which at times manifests in the withholding of diagnosis. This is particularly the case within a mental health policy context which has increasingly moved towards the prioritisation of those with ‘severe mental illness’. As such, the study shows how the legitimising function of diagnoses such as bipolar disorder, can lead to a tendency for it to be both sought after by patients, but contested by professionals and amongst patients. In light of the apparent advantages conferred by this diagnosis, the moral and personal consequences of diagnostic membership, exclusion, and uncertainty are considered; in particular, the potential for this essentialised category to create divides between those considered to ‘have’ the disorder and those who are not, is contemplated.

The 2008 financial crisis has meant for the West a much wider social, political and economic questioning of its underpinnings. This delicate contingency combines with an increasingly evident ecologic crisis, indissolubly related to the capitalist, post-industrial, consumer economy that cracked in 2008. As the latter is proving unsustainable on all these levels, there is space for challenging this economic system and its underpinnings: development, industrialism and infinite growth (via consumption). Governments are putting in place measures that aim at environmental change mitigation, but with too little effect. With my study, I investigate the potentiality of the everyday as a site of ecological resistance, difference and creation. As a way of pursuing this, I designed a multimodal and multimedia participant observation study, focusing on energy use in everyday life. The locale is a town in the North-East of Italy, Vittorio Veneto, an interesting example of a formerly affluent area strongly hit by the recession. As a contribution to existent literature in this field, I draw and expand upon recent reflections that seek to go beyond the limitations of constructionism as the guiding approach to critical qualitative social sciences investigations. This “post-qualitative” literature calls for more attention to the ways in which language and discourses are co-emerging with, and co-constitutive of, the material, affective and non-representational qualities of experience. In line with this, I give special attention to the desiring and unconscious dimensions of energy use and everyday life more generally. Nonetheless, these are not conceptualised as subjective, interior or personal – but rather as trans-human flows that traverse and shape the social world. In this sense, focussing on desire is also a way to address the political and power-ridden aspects of energy use, little addressed in current research. Inspired above all by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (also with Félix Guattari), I look at the ways in which (collective) desire shapes the energy “assemblages” that we live through in ordinary life. If the dominant (libidinal) economy gears towards hyper-consumption and intensive energy practices, are molecular desires being mobilised that evade such hegemony? To what extent are they capable of a radical creation of more ecologically sensitive, life affirmative, assemblages? By making treasure of the different affordances of multi-media representation of the field, in my thesis I map contemporary everyday energy assemblages as they are territorialised and deterritorialised along lines of (ecological) becoming. I bring attention not only to the chances, but also to the risks and contradictions of emerging “lines of flight” from our unsustainable economy. This critical reflection is also applied to the theory informing my own study and its potential pitfalls. Finally, I reflect on the politics and ethics of social sciences in participating to draw lines of transitions towards sustainability.