This critical analysis focuses on my investigations over the past almost 24 years into what I term the ‘Satanic ritual abuse myth’ – or ‘Satanic panic’ – the controversy over recovered versus false memories, and, more recently, the validity of the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder (MPD), now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID). This reflective analysis, written for the PhD by prior publication, explores how my journalism has made an original and significant contribution to knowledge in my own field, investigative journalism, and how it relates to – and has contributed to - the literature in several academic disciplines – the psychology of false memories, the anomalistic psychology of weird beliefs, and the sociology of moral panics. I was one of the first researchers internationally to conclude there was no physical, forensic evidence that Satanic abuse existed. My ‘Making of a Satanic Myth’ feature, published in the Independent on Sunday in 1990, has been cited in the literature, along with key investigations since. I describe the methodology and conduct of research during my continuing investigations into the origins and spread of the ‘Satanic panic’ and related controversies of false memories and multiple personalities. The dissertation itself adds significantly to academic theories and historical accounts of these events from the 1980s until today. Through a wide reading of the literature I have pieced together a forensic chronology which provides a unique overview of a particular era of striking and peculiar phenomena. On reflection, I conclude that my investigations provide evidence for the concept of moral panics created through an ‘explosive amplification’ of anecdote, social and official concern about issues such as child abuse, spread by ‘claims-makers’ and a globalised mass media. Although sporadic claims of Satanic abuse continue I conclude there is still no corroborating evidence.

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This thesis investigates the origin and development of EC cultural policy through four case studies of policy formation. The four cases selected occurred in the pre-Maastricht period, 1955-1988. The first two policy experiences correspond to a pre-history of the EC´s cultural policy, the latter two resulted in authoritative policy decisions by EC institutions. The research objectives include historical understanding of this policy experience and an examination of the process of European policy formation. It draws upon archive material from the Historical Archives of the European Union. This material is organised and analytically narrated around the events that make up each episode. The approach is theoretically oriented case research – each experience studied corresponds to a policy episode. These policy episodes are analysed through a combined theoretical framework based on Kingdon´s multiple streams model (1995), which explains the pre-decisional and decision-making stages of the policy-making process, and on institutional processualism which seeks to attain a causal understanding of these processes that is sensitive to institutional context. This thesis represents one of the first applications of this model in the field of cultural policy. The comparative approach deployed identifies similarities and differences among the four episodes studied and compares the dynamics of the policy process between them with a view to generating theoretical generalisations about the formation of cultural policy in the EC in the period of interest. The application of Kingdon’s model to European public-policy to an extent tested the model, though ultimately it demonstrates its flexibility and relevance to a variety of agenda situations and analysis. The model was less successful in explaining policy formulation, in this instance, which is explained by the pervading institutional reach of the EC Treaties. A specific interest of Kingdon´s is policy entrepreneurship and how it affects the policy process and this is also a main interest of this research. The model worked well here but proved limited in that it generated only a partial explanation for the agency of cultural policy entrepreneurs whose motivations, we found, are intrinsic and specific to cultural policy.

The objective of the thesis is to use econometric analysis to assess the impact of power sector reforms in Africa during the period 1988-2005, using panel data analysis. The study uses fixed effects model, where all the reform variables are assumed to be strictly exogenous, but goes a step further, to endogenise the variables using 1-step Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimation. To ensure the robustness of the results, the study makes use of both static and dynamic models and other econometric methods to reduce as far as practicable, the likelihood of spurious correlation. The main conclusion from the generation sector study is that, the establishment of a regulatory agency is generally associated with favourable generation outcomes. These are likely to be achieved after a minimum period of 2 years for installed plant capacity, 3 years for plant energy output, and 7 years for plant utilization. Passage of energy sector law seems likely to enhance both installed generation capacity and actual plant energy output. On the impact of private sector participation (PSP) in the generation sector, management and lease contracts, as well as greenfield projects seem likely to enhance installed capacity and actual plant output. On plant utilization, the favourable outcome is associated with concessions and greenfield projects. For the network sector, the result seems to indicate that the co-existence of energy sector law and regulatory agency can reduce transmission network loss levels. The result on the distribution system however show that though energy sector law and regulation are necessary, they are not likely to be sufficient to reduce the system loss level. Effective loss reduction in the distribution sector is likely to be achieved if management and lease contract is present as a PSP option. The long lags associated with the existence of regulation, underline the notion that institutional changes alone are unlikely to be sufficient, if the workforce is not competent and well trained. This implies that regulatory agencies in Africa are still fragile, and it will take quite sometime to build the capacity of key professional staff to operate whatever institutional and regulatory frameworks are chosen.

The research aim of this research is to identify and examine key resources, a conceptual framework drawing on the application of stochastic frontier models in obtaining measures of efficiency that enable a comparison of performance across industries and countries, explaining why, in the same country, some industries achieve superior efficiency performance. The important task is to relate efficiency to a number of factors that are likely to be determinants, and measure the extent to which they contribute to the presence of inefficiency. More specifically, the first step of this thesis is to review the literature concerned with techniques of efficiency estimation. This will facilitate an understanding of both the theoretical and application part of the research. The second step of this thesis is to highlight the pitfalls of the different relevant models and methodologies. The third and most important goal and contribution of this thesis is to suggest a concrete method to estimate industrial efficiency, avoiding the inherent problems. This thesis considers a European Union perspective efficiency analysis to increase the information base and derive broader conclusions about European Union productive performance within selected countries. This issue is of particular research relevance because empirical evidence shows that even though European Union industries are widely analyzed with respect to performance, yet little attention has been paid to the estimation of technical efficiency. Within this sample, it is of great importance to examine which determinants are significant, however, it is also important, to examine whether the interactions between technical progress, ICT investment, ICT investment share, R&D stock and economy openness, namely the process of the integration into the world economy, has any implications for technical efficiency. Special emphasis is given to the review of two of the main heterogeneity determining factors, namely innovation investments (as a proxy of knowledge creation) and economy openness (as a proxy of knowledge dissemination). In particular, this thesis explores whether the interactions between these factors have any implications for efficiency growth, and whether there are any complementarities between them and fostering technical efficiency growth. More specifically, this thesis aims to distinguish between the two main factors which affect total factor productivity, namely technical progress and technical efficiency, as well as what determines the production frontier itself and what determines the inefficiency term (both theoretically and empirically).

This project focused upon exploring elements of hegemonic masculinity which participants have consumed (or otherwise) in a context of Facebook profiles in order to create their social self-expression. At the same time this study recognised the consumption of ideological aspects that underpin participants’ personal understandings of manhood. The first phase of the research focused upon content analysis of eighty-nine Facebook profiles (Chapters 7-9). The aim was to capture masculine traits that participants symbolically consume and conceptualise in their social environment on a daily bases. The second phase of the research used an analysis of thirty-one open-ended questionnaires (Chapter 10). It explored the consumption of personal experiences of being a man which were also compared with participants’ social self-presentation. Both parts of the research aimed to obtain a complex view on contemporary masculinities in order to understand why some aspects of hegemonic masculinity are consumed and valued on a daily bases while others are discarded by participants. In short, gender identity was a main focus of this research. Masculine identities were shown to be underpinned by social, cultural and media messages as well as individual reflexivity. This thesis argues that looking at the concept of masculinity through the new lens of symbolic consumption allows both the identification of people’s self-expression in a social context and the hearing of individual voices and the experiences of men. This approach captures the multiplicity of masculinities and contributes to challenging the hegemonic facets of gender.

It can be argued that we live in a ‘work-centred’ society, since not only has society witnessed a massive quantitative expansion of paid-work, but many also accept that, at this present historical moment, the tasks, relationships and time-structures of work occupy a central place in people’s sense of well-being. Critical social theorists have advanced an alternative perspective and undertaken a critique of work, responding to the interlinked social problems of mass unemployment, inequality, environmental degradation, and low well-being, by promoting an anti-productivist politics which calls for a decentralisation of work in everyday life. Theorists such as André Gorz have suggested that such proposals resonate with a cultural disenchantment with work, as well as growing desire for non-material goods such as autonomy, free-time, good-health and conviviality. Such claims, however, have rarely been explored on an empirical level. One of the central questions that remain unanswered is whether and how it is actually possible for people to live with significantly lower levels of work. In response to this gap in the literature, the present study undertakes a qualitative investigation into the lives of a diverse sample of people, each of whom has chosen to work less or to give up working altogether. In-depth interviews explore the work experiences and moral priorities that informed the participant’s lifestyle changes. Also explores are the trials of working less, including how participants coped with less money, and how they coped with the stigmas attached to working less, in the midst of a society that continues to attach moral significance to having a job. Are the participants deviants, malingerers, and failures, or might society learn something positive and inspiring from their actions and choices?

In recent years the police service has undergone a number of changes with the introduction of neighbourhood policing (NP) being one of the most significant. NP represents the latest in a long line of government endorsed attempts to introduce a more community orientated and customer focussed approach to policing. NP encourages police constables (PCs) and, the recently introduced, police community support officers (PCSOs) to spend more time engaging with the public, supporting vulnerable members of community and working in partnership with other agencies. This style of policing represents a significant departure from established understandings of policing which have become synonymous with ‗response policing‘ with its focus on maintaining public order and arresting criminals. A great deal of research over the last 30 years has referred to the highly gendered culture of policing which has also been the subject of a great deal of criticism. This research focuses on the identity performances of NP officers and the different ways that NP is enacted within different contexts and situated interactions. My conceptual framework draws on both ethnomethodological and poststructural approaches in understanding how officers in different contexts constructed, reconstructed and resisted discourses in the performances of particular identities. This framework is therefore sensitive to how power and resistance works through discursive constructions within particular contexts. To further improve our appreciation of context, emphasis is given to the importance of cultural meanings as an important source of discursive constraint. However, the research clearly shows that while some discourses may be dominant in influencing identity performances, these are always contested and it is though the clash of competing discourses that the agency of NP officers is revealed (Holmer-Nadesan 1996). The study adopts an ethnographic methodology, using participant observation and semi-structured interviews to examine four broad NP contexts. These are the PCSO training course and the three neighbourhood teams, all of which are located in a different policing environment. Drawing on ethnomethodology, my approach focused on the front and back stage contexts of neighbourhood policing, examining the relationships between discourses and performances within these contexts. The findings reveal the strength of dominant policing discourses linked to gender, police professionalism, ‗real‘ policing and community and also shows the ways that these discourses are also infused and subverted by different sets of meanings and ways of being. The PCs and PCSOs involved in the study were seen to manoeuvre and navigate these contested discourses in the ways they enacted NP in different contexts. The research also reveals the contested and fragmented nature of policing cultures and how these cultures may be best understood as a coexistence of multiple constructions of discourse (Mumby, 2011). The concluding discussion of the thesis presents a number of contributions in relation to the discursive construction of identities, the influence of gendered cultures as well as the challenge of introducing NP into British policing.

Contributing empirically, methodologically and conceptually to the body of work that remains unconvinced of the ‘death of class’ (Pahl 1989), this thesis explores the resonance of class culture in contemporary ‘alternative’ food practice. Indeed, arising from disenchantment with conventional industrial food production and supply chains, ‘alternative’ food networks aim to provide a means to reconnect consumers, producers and food (Kneafsey et al. 2008). By taking seriously the act of shopping for food as culturally meaningful and not merely a practice of routinely provisioning the home (Lunt and Livingstone 1992) this thesis then argues that ‘alternative’ food practice provides a platform for the performance of class identities. That is, both structurally and culturally, class is thought to matter to people (Sayer 2011), and is elucidated and reproduced through food practice. By means of mixed methods data collection; participant observation, survey, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, this study provides support for a Bourdieusian approach to class analysis. In particular, the thesis makes use of Bourdieu’s toolkit of concepts by conceiving of class as a relative ‘position’. This is understood to be achieved via the moral derision of the ‘other’, where participants draw moral boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods and the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ who partake in its consumption. In this way, the field of ‘alternative’ food practice seems not only ground from which to observe class. Rather, ‘alternative’ food is understood to be appropriated as a resource of ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984) that is then figured in the very maintenance and reproduction of class culture. This interface between class, food and culture may prove consequential for those seeking substantive alternatives to conventional foodways. Crucially, it is argued that by imagining less socially and culturally uniform strategies to promote ‘alternative’ food practice, we may unlock their potential to provide an equitable and sustainable food future. To this end, by elucidating the moral significance of class in the field of ‘alternative’ food practice, this thesis has wider implications in carving a role for sociological enquiry in the emerging field of ‘sustainability science’ (Marsden 2011).

There is a prevailing view that the seafarer labour market provides an exemplar of a global labour market (GLM). The broader literatures suggest that labour markets when examined in detail are characteristically segmented in various ways. There is some evidence to indicate that the maritime industry may be somewhat similar. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which the maritime labour market is striated and thus, the extent to which it may be considered truly global. Using the lens of perceived shortage of quality officers within the industry, this study examines whether the seafaring GLM can be understood to be a homogeneous space in which seafarers are freely employed on a global basis. A qualitative research methodology was utilised consisting of interviews with representatives from maritime associations and organisations, executives from shipping companies and seafarers. The study also analysed over 200 articles from the electronic archives of ‘Lloyd’s List’, a maritime newspaper. The analysis of the data revealed that jobs and seafarers are divided into market segments that can function relatively independently. Segments occur because seafarers and jobs do not fit smoothly via a common market mechanism, instead demand and supply processes separate jobs and workers into divisions. The segmentation of the labour market is marked by quality, trade sector, geography, and international regulations and industry requirements, and market striation occurs along both horizontal and vertical dimensions.