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.

The PhD is driven by a need to analyse what Scottish planning has come to represent in practice. It does this through a focus on how Scottish planning reform (Planning etc. Scotland Act, 2006) has been used to respond to the key public policy issues of achieving ‘sustainable growth’ and particularly planning for housing in growth- pressured city-regions. In England, Allmendinger’s (2016) recent critical consideration of the current state of planning despondently sees ‘neoliberal spatial governance’ where planning is focussed on ‘facilitating growth,’ through ‘post political’ process and driven by ‘narrow sectional interests’. This thesis analyses the extent to which such critique is a relevant way of understanding Scottish planning and how planning has come to be criticised from some perspectives as a tool for rolling out growth, while for others planning is still perceived as a drag on growth. It does this by analysing planning practice in two city regions – Aberdeen and Edinburgh - which have faced pressures for growth, particularly housing growth. Both have used the reformed Scottish planning system to deal with these pressures. In Aberdeen, it reveals why an ambitious growth agenda easily emerged, where planning actors utilised the reformed Scottish planning system to advocate an ‘ambitious strategy’. In Edinburgh, it reveals why, despite utilising the same planning system, a more complex and conflictual relationship around planning and housing growth has remained in place, as the city-region struggled to realise a spatial strategy that adapts to existing local political tensions. In each case the role of global and local structuring economic conditions are foregrounded. This qualitative comparative case study analyses the operation of Scottish planning in the period (2007-2016) in two growth-pressured Scottish city-regions. It involves 48 interviews conducted in the period 2013-2015 with public sector officers, councillors, developer interests and community and special interest groups and the analysis of documents associated with planning strategies. It has been conducted by a planner who has worked ‘in the field’ in the public and private sectors in both cases. It applies a broadly Gramscian analysis, utilising a Strategic Relational Approach, where planning actors pursue differing agendas and attempt to address wider and competing public policy concerns while operating within evolving structural conditions. It demonstrates the ways in which planning is a means by which particular interests can formalise their ambitions for growth but can equally be used to constrain and defer decisions around growth. However, both cases reveal planning as a form of ‘neoliberal spatial governance’ where the contradictions of current state-market relations mean Scottish planning is unlikely to meet its complex objective of delivering ‘sustainable economic growth’.

This work explores the commissioning arrangements in the NHS after the adoption of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). The thesis aims to explore how these new commissioning arrangements have affected the decision making process and why commissioners select the providers that they do. This data is then used to see whether or not the service is being subjected to privatisation as was feared with the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act (2012). This work will begin by exploring definitions of privatisation and marketisation before embarking on a description of the shape of the private sector in the NHS. This is followed by the development of an internal/external pressure conceptual framework, adapted from the work of Pettigrew et al. (1992) to understand the pressures that commissioners may face in the selection of providers. The research was underpinned by symbolic interactionism and studied the work of two CCGs, using example services to explore their decision making processes. The thesis explores the themes that emerged from the data by using the internal/external pressure conceptual framework and then discusses to what extent privatisation has occurred in the NHS using the earlier definitions. The research concludes that the ability of the commissioners to freely select providers is severely limited and that as such, the selection of private providers is clustered in specific services.

This study concerns the lived experience of participants in 50+ exercise groups (mainly women) that are taught by the researcher who is herself 50+. Activities comprise Exercise to Music, Pilates and Tai Chi for Arthritis and most classes are run under the auspices of an Adult Learning scheme. The research explores the meanings which people attach to the processes of ageing and how these relate to their engagements with exercise. The work was stimulated by a desire to understand the factors that encourage the participants to engage in and adhere to exercise and, in so doing, to make useful recommendations for health promotion and service provision with the intention that others might avoid the dangers of sedentary behaviour. This ethnographic case study spans approximately four years beginning in the spring of 2013. It draws on data collected in five semi-structured interviews and ten focus groups that were recorded and transcribed and five shorter telephone interviews which were noted at the time. Also included are data from numerous short vox pops and interviews 'on the move'. Altogether 56 individuals contributed verbal comment that has been recorded in some way. The data are reinforced by participant observation and access to enrolment documents. All of this is supported by a field journal which creates an audit trail and traces the evolution of the study. The originality of the study lies in the ability of the researcher to open up the 'black box' of the exercise class to reveal what matters most to older adults when they engage in exercise and how the contents of the box are socially constructed. Drawing on her own life experience as an exerciser and as an educator, the researcher is in a unique position to relate to the participants both as a peer and as a professional. The study situates perceptions of ageing in the context of identity formation. It explores elements across the life course which have shaped those perceptions and how such perceptions intersect with values and beliefs about exercise and, furthermore, how they continue to do so. Through unpacking the 'black box' of the exercise class, findings demonstrate the existence of a 'package' of elements that individuals require in their iv exercise: some essential, others desirable and yet others totally unacceptable. Factors which are considered essential vary with the choice of exercise but there remains an overwhelming sense of agreement that whatever is chosen should be pleasurable and co-constructed in partnership with other people. How this occurs forms the major contribution to knowledge which may be valuable in its application to provision, instructor recruitment and training for older adult exercise classes. Though the knowledge arises specifically from the participants of this case study it has relevance in informing exercise provision for similar groups of people.

This thesis details a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the implications of a minimum wage increase in the Mexican labour market, estimating the impact on real wages, the distribution of earnings, employment, and informal employment. It uses, as a natural experiment the 2012 partial harmonization of Mexico's regional minimum wages, in which one out of the three minimum wage zones experienced an unexpected minimum wage rise. Using Difference in Differences regressions, we fmd no evidence of adverse employment effects in the labour market. Instead, the estimates suggest positive effects on real hourly wages, employment, and occupation in the formal sector. These results can be taken as evidence for the existence of monopsonistic labour markets in Mexico. Synthetic Control Method procedures demonstrate that the employment findings are robust to the choice of estimation method and to the level of aggregation in the data, corroborating non-negative effects on employment. In addition, Unconditional Quantile Regressions for the distributional wage effects suggest a small improvement in wages for the targeted lowest income workers, although, due to positive spillover effects, the relative increase in wages for the upper percentiles is even greater. This has the net effect of actually widening dispersion of wages.

This thesis examines the American official propaganda campaign on the Vietnam war, and its impact on both the British Government, America's main non-combatant ally, and British public opinion, from the time of the escalation of the war, in February 1965, to mid-1966. Concentrating on Administration statements, the study assesses the Administration's knowledge of events in South Vietnam and its secret planning on the war, compares this knowledge and planning with its propaganda, and evaluates the truth and accuracy of Administration propaganda. An assessment is also made of U.S. propaganda techniques and the utility of American official propaganda themes. The thesis then examines the information on the war that was available to the British public on a daily basis in the British press. The role of the press during the war is assessed both as an information medium, and as an audience for American official propaganda - an audience which then disseminated its own analyses of the war and U.S. propaganda. The British Labour Government's reaction and opinion on the war is traced in relation to its own policy of support for its U.S. ally, and the domestic political difficulties that this policy caused. British public opinion on the war during this period is evaluated through public opinion polls, and press accounts of opposition to the war, including accounts of demonstrations. The theme of this thesis is that when the war began escalating in February 1965, the British Government, the public, and much of the press, supported 135. involvement in Vietnam. But by mid-1966, the British Government had dissociated from the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam's oil storage depots, henceforth offering qualified support to its ally; the British public no longer supported U.S. action in Vietnam; and sections of the British press opposed U.S. involvement. The British Government's dissociation was a blow to the U.S. Administration, and thus the American official propaganda campaign had failed to retain the desired degree of support from its British ally.

The overriding concern of a multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious Malaysia has always been with inter-ethnic conflict and resolution. It is therefore little wonder that the Malaysian education system is seen arxl utilised by the State as an important social institution where certain ideas, values and symbols can be transmitted to students, the country's future generations, with the primary objective of fostering ethnic harmony in schools in particular and in the country in general. nd it is against this backdrop that this study seeks to examine what kinds of images, ideas, values and symbols that are being selected and promoted (and at the same time, excluding other items, images, ideas) in the reading materials of school students, which collectively are deemed as constructing Malaysia's 'national identity'. The textual analysis shows that the majority of these school texts tend to give heavy emphasis on Malay culture and interests, thus indicating that the construction of the 'national identity' is largely informed arid influenced by the State's policies such as the Malay-biased national culture policy and the New Economic Policy. In addition, the study also examines other related institutions such as the Ministry of Education (i.e. its Textbook Bureau) and the book publishing industry as a whole to see how they relate to the formation in the school texts of the kind of 'national identity' that is largely defined and sanctioned by the State. A group of 150 students were interviewed to ascertain their social and political consciousness. Their responses on the whole tend to suggest that the school texts are capable of creating, if not reinforcing, sub-national loyalties or ethnic sentiments among the students, the kind of consciousness that could seriously compete with arid challenge the nationalist project of creating a 'national identity'. In other words, national unity could be threatened.

This research addresses to some of the fundamental problems in systems science. The aim of this study is to: (1) provide a general conceptual framework for systems evolution; (2) develop a formal model for evolving systems based on dynamical systems theory; (3) analyse the evolving behaviour of various systems by using the formal model so far developed. First of all, it is argued that a system which can be recognized by an observer as a system, is characterised by some emergent properties at a certain level of discourse. These properties are the results of the interactions between the system as components but not reducible to the individual or summative properties of those components. Any system is such an emergent and organized whole, and this whole can be defined and described as an emergent attractor. To maintain the wholeness in a changing environment, an open system may undergo radical changes both in its structure and function. The process of change is what is called of systems evolution. On reviewing the existing theories of self-organization, such as "Theory of Dissipative Structure", "Synergetics", "Hypercycle", "Cellular Automata", "Random Boolean Network" et al., a general conceptual framework for systems evolution has been outlined and it is based on the concept of emergent attractor for open systems. The emphasis is placed on the structural aspect of the process of change. Modem mathematical dynamical systems theory, with the study of nonlinear dynamics as its core, can provide (a) the concept of "attractor" to describe a system as an organized whole; (b) simple geometrical models of complex behaviour, (c) a complete taxonomy of attractors and bifurcation patterns; (d) a mathematical rationale for the explanations of evolutionary processes. Based on this belief, a formal model of evolving systems has been developed by using the language of mathematical dynamical systems theory (DST). Attractors and emergent attractors are formally defined. It is argued that the state of any systems can be described by one of the four fundamental types of attractors ( i. e. point attractor, periodic attractor, quasiperiodic attractor, chaotic attractor) at a certain level. The evolving behaviour of open systems can be analyzed by looking at the loss of structural stability in the systems. For a full analysis of systems evolution, the emphasis is put on the nonlinear inner dynamics which governs evolving systems. In trying to apply this conceptual framework and formal model, the evolving behaviour of various systems at different levels have been discussed. Among them are Benard cells in hydrodynamics, Brusselator in chemical systems, replicator systems in biology (hypercycle), predator-prey-food systems in ecology, and artificial neural networks. The complex dynamical behaviour of these systems, like the existence of various types of attractors and the occurrences of bifurcation when the environment changes, have been discussed. In most of the examples, the results in previous studies are cited directly and they are only re-interpreted by using the conceptual framework and the formal model developed in this research. In the study of artificial neural networks, a simple cellular automata network with only three neurons has been constructed and the activation dynamics has been analysed according to the formal model. Different attractors representing different dynamical behaviour of this network have been identified (point, periodic, quasiperiodic, and chaotic attractor). Similar discussions have been applied to a coupled Wilson-Cowan net. It is believed that the study of systems evolution is one of those attempts to bring systems science out of its primitive stage in which it ought not to be.

There has been a significant increase in interest in the area of organisational change over the past thirty years. A multitude of approaches and methodologies have been proposed, developed and applied by organisational and management theorists, as well as systems and social scientists. Business practitioners and consultants have also not been hesitant in devising their own approaches to organisational change - undoubtedly attracted by the lucrative commercial gains they are capable of generating. It is the author's belief that much of this work focuses upon issues of change management: how to initiate, control and implement effective change within organisations. Yet the proliferation of such approaches in recent years belies an acute lack of any clear understanding of the very nature and essence of change itself. This thesis seeks to explore the concept of change, as it is manifested and described across the sciences. Firstly, it surveys the organisational change literature, highlighting the dearth of research devoted to analysing change from a conceptual and theoretical perspective. A cross discipline approach based upon General Systems Theory is proposed, as a means of further investigating the phenomenon and concept of change. The basic premise being that a deeper understanding of what change is, will better inform and guide our attempts to manage it. In applying the approach, a number of views, definitions, paradigms and phenomena of change are examined from across the natural, physical and social sciences. The recurring themes, principles and unifying ideas from this review are used to construct an initial change framework. This framework is not meant to be prescriptive, but rather is proposed as a qualitative analytical and descriptive tool with which to study change within organisations. To this end, two organisational case studies are documented, during which the framework is applied in an attempt to assess its analytical utility. The thesis concludes with some suggestions for further research, including ways in which the framework can be developed conceptually, and further applied practically within an organisational context.

Despite advances in project management techniques and greatly improved levels of experience in managing major projects, a significant number of these projects still experience serious problems during implementation resulting in unacceptable loss of functionality with related cost and schedule growth, and sometimes outright cancellation. Research has shown that major contributors to these problems are systematic and can be associated with project size, complexity, technical uncertainty, schedule duration and urgency, physical and social environment, and government and politics. Several authors advocate that the application of systems problem solving methods and techniques during project definition could resolve these systematic problems and should be used to augment traditional project management approaches. This research is concerned with bringing together two important models, one concerned with traditional project definition (the Morris Model) and the other concerned with systems engineering (the M'Pherson Model), and harmonising the result with other systems methods and techniques to form a comprehensive model (to be called the MM Model) for defining major projects for successful implementation. The Morris Model is introduced in Chapter 2 as part of a study into the nature of major projects and what makes them successful or problematic. As part of the study, a compendium of project success criteria is compiled for later testing of the MM Model. Chapter 3 concentrates on discovering how systems methods and techniques, including those that can be categorised under the soft systems banner, could be used in project problem solving. The M'Pherson Model is introduced during the path through the Chapter. An important step in the early life of a project is the approval stage. If decisions regarding a project's viability are to be meaningful, appropriate information for gooddecision making must be generated during the project definition. Project approval is the subject of Chapter 4. The MM Model for project definition is formulated in Chapter 5 and tested firstly against the compiled compendium of project success criteria and, secondly, against three careful selected case studies; British Rail's Advanced Passenger Train, Thames Water's London Water Ring Main, and the Rolls Royce RB 211 Aero-engine. The first case study represents a cancelled project, the second a highly successful project, and the third a project that experienced extreme problems but resulted in a highly successful product. Finally, in Chapter 9 the author provides a reader's guide to the formulation of the MM Model, discusses the extent to which the objectives have been achieved, the contribution to knowledge and possible areas for further work.