Within the social sciences, there is extensive literature on youth transitions as a key context for understanding how social changes and complex contemporary life have an impact on young people’s lives, focusing generally on the ‘global north’. However, far too little attention has been paid to exploring youth transitions in the ‘global south’. Even if it is acknowledged that youth research in the global south has grown in recent years, and has discovered different youth experiences from those in northern contexts, these studies have still been narrow and mostly based on theoretical rather than new empirical work. This research addresses the research gap by investigating young people’s transition from education to the labour market, and exploring the impact of social changes on their lives beyond the global north, in Kuwaiti society. It provides insight into how contemporary young people are constructing and negotiating their pathways to work within a complex reality in which traditional norms and cultural restrictions come into conflict with modernity. It highlights the role of certain variables that continue to mould their transition, including family, gender, religion, education, and government policies. It demonstrates that the rapid change and the compressed manner of modernity in Kuwait have made young people live in a state of tension and contradiction between modernity and tradition, agency and structure, and individual and collective ways of life. It shows how the unique nature of modernity and its consequences in Kuwaiti society have made the young people’s experience distinct from that described in other contexts. This study draws on data generated through questionnaires and interviews. It involves a sample of 1,120 secondary school students, and 24 young adults who had recently entered the labour market. The thesis, which reports the results, challenges existing models in the youth studies literature and critically assesses general sociological theories which tend to be northern-centric. In considering the ideas of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck on modernisation and individualisation, it is difficult to apply his western ideas to the Kuwaiti context. This thesis therefore calls for a cosmopolitan sociology, claiming the need to re-define the concepts within social sciences in such a way that can be easily and flexibly used in a variety of global contexts.

During the years from 2006-2009 and 2009-2013, both Iraq and then Afghanistan were under extreme duress, succumbing to the pressures from violent armed non-state groups. This occurred while both cases were already under US occupation. In order to resolve the growing instabilities posed by these non-state groups, the US escalated its initial military efforts first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. The escalation of military efforts was conceived as a “Surge” strategy. The Iraq Surge was implemented first, starting in 2006. By 2009, the situation in Iraq dramatically changed because there was a significant reduction in the direct violence experienced by Iraqis. Furthermore, the new Iraq government gained political momentum and for a short period, it was able to centralize the states political authority and gain more legitimacy amongst the Iraqi people. Much of the conventional wisdom amongst policy experts and some academics is that the Iraq Surge worked, and the premise for this is the reduction of violence and the growing strength of the Iraqi government from 2006-2009. In light of the success in the Iraq Surge, another Surge was employed in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan Surge started in late 2009 and carried on through 2012. The Afghanistan Surge was conceived using the same political plan, and the same military manuals and tactics deployed during the Iraq Surge. However, Afghanistan did not experience the same radical decline in direct violence that was seen in Iraq.

This thesis suggests how service operations that experience arrival time and process duration variability can configure resources and design processes so that a throughput time appropriate for customers is maintained. It does this by exploring four star hotel operations, an under-researched area and uses observation, an under-used research method, to identify causes and reasons for variable throughput time. Several theories are brought together in a unique way to categorise and analyse the findings. The conclusion is that four star hotels can focus on reducing variability arising from their actions but that customer variability generally needs to be accommodated. Customer variability is accommodated by using flexible capacity in the form of labour, space and equipment. Service encounters are shortened to allow employees to process customers more rapidly when demand is high. Physical space to contain customers is provided to allow them to exercise choice as to the length of time that they spend on activities. Labour is flexible and cross-trained; moving labour to satisfy demands of customers present is a key operational aim in hospitality. This is supported by ensuring that sufficient equipment and materials are provided to meet the needs of customers. Future research could be conducted to investigate approaches to influencing customer variability while maintaining perceived satisfaction with service. The findings reveal useful insights for operations that experience variable arrival and processing rates. People are the greatest source and least controllable source of variability. It also confirms the utility of some key operations and service management theories.

This thesis contributes to knowledge-based view literature by proposing a novel approach to the integration of two key perspectives in knowledge management: the objectivist and practice-based perspectives. This integration can provide the basis for the adoption and use of information and communication technology (ICT) tools for the sharing and integration of knowledge. This integrative approach is aligned with the knowledge-based view of the firm and can provide valuable opportunities for the transfer of knowledge. The objectivist perspective has thus met with limited success due to the inherent difficulty in codifying knowledge, particularly as it relates to strategies for the effective transfer of knowledge within organisations. On the other hand, the practice-based perspective continues to develop but has not yet reached a maturity level to justify its use on a large scale. Neither one of these two perspectives alone is able to deal with the challenges of transferring and integrating knowledge. The recent knowledge management literature has emphasised the importance of interactive knowledge management technologies, which have manifested themselves in the form of social networking tools in bringing the human side into the knowledge management equation. It is argued that such technologies have distinct features that encourage knowledge sharing, social interaction, and user participation. Yet, very little is known on the benefits, challenges and the factors leading to its successful implementation within organisations.

The ageing labour force has become an unavoidable issue in the Taiwanese labour market. However, labour participation rates for older Taiwanese, as well as public intervention, still remain at a fairly low level. Moreover, little attention has been paid to understanding why older Taiwanese are consistently less likely to retain work. By using mixed-methods, this thesis seeks to explore the reasons why there are low labour participation rates among older Taiwanese. Two distinct groups are identified here: Group 1: ‘low employment rates and low incomes’, and Group 2: ‘high employment rates and high unemployment rates’. Moreover, it is recognised that employment barriers in relation to human capital/working ability/employability are likely significant factors. Also, it finds that there exists a strong ‘not-to-work’ social attitude among the older Taiwanese. Thus, it is suggested that the Taiwanese government’s responsibility to address relevant human capital issues and ‘not-to-work’ social attitudes should been taken into policy consideration. In addition, by taking lessons from the Active Labour Market Policy (ALMPs) in advanced countries, the current Taiwanese public employment services need to be reformed in many aspects. However, policy must consider how to reflect on local contexts as well as the diverse public attitudes.

This thesis explores advertising as a ‘soft’ mode of governance understood in terms of a form of power which avoids instruments of coercion, involving instead certain practices of freedom and forms of pleasure. The main concern of the thesis is to analyse the mechanisms through which techniques of such ‘modest’ power interact with techniques of representation in order to define forms of femininity and shape self-fashioning practices of female consumers. The study is based on a comprehensive survey of a sample of television advertisements broadcast in Britain on three television channels with national coverage in May 2001 as well as on the analysis of a selected body of advertising trade literature. It draws on theoretical and methodological approaches from social anthropology and various strands of cultural studies. The thesis reveals that the way advertising attempts to influence consumers is in line with some aspects of neo-liberal style of governance. It argues that such a mode of governance seeks to regulate women’s ethical sensibilities by outlining the space of desire, power and pleasure, by stimulating the will for self-improvement and by providing advice about how women should think of and shape themselves.

The EU as an ideational actor has a significant impact on non-European countries. This thesis examines the growth of European ideas circulating throughout the field of Latin American Higher Education (HE), as part of the Bologna Process, which has manifested itself in a set of procedures, methods and tools that have contributed to the transformation of Chilean and Mexican HE. This phenomenon requires a rigorous analysis of European ideational factors present within Normative Power Europe (NPE), not only through a cluster of ideas, norms, principles and values but also through analysing language. The thesis examines such claims, focusing on Chile and Mexico, and argues that the impact of European influences upon received countries is mediated by domestic circumstances. The thesis makes a contribution to both existing understanding of the European Union’s influence over Latin America and Latin American HE, and also seeks to advance upon existing debates around the notion of Normative Power Europe in particular, by illustrating how the NPE literature would benefit from a deeper consideration of the use of language and considering translation processes of receiver countries.

Multinational teams (MNTs) have traditionally consisted of members from different nationalities, and such teams have attempted to capitalise on the diversity of the members to create innovative solutions. Currently, dynamic capabilities, by which is meant the ability to integrate, coordinate and upgrade capabilities to respond to environmental changes and dynamic demands, have been urged on multinational companies. However, very limited attention has been paid to how functional MNT leaders utilise team capabilities, including the diversity of the members, to enhance team effectiveness in organisational processes. To address that research gap, this study investigates functional MNT leadership skills aligned with dynamic capabilities and McGrath’s Input–Process–Output (IPO) model. First, it explores organisational processes and roles of functional MNT leaders from a perspective of dynamic capabilities. Second, it examines the mediation effect of functional MNT leadership skills by testing the proposed IPO model, and investigates similarities and differences between functional MNTs in two locations, Japan and Germany. The findings show that the right combination of functional MNT leadership skills – intra-team and extra-team relational skills, communication skills, setting clear goals, managing differences of national cultures, and technical competences – is required depending on the type of functional MNT and the location.

This thesis argues that transnational corporations (TNCs) bear primarily negative moral duties in relation to human rights, i.e. to avoid doing harm, and that they can be held responsible when they fail to discharge such duties. Thus, their duties are not primarily to protect human rights, as some commentators have argued. To defend the negative duties claim, I detail ways in which corporations inflict harm not only directly through their operations, but also by shaping and supporting a global institutional arrangement that foreseeably and avoidably produces human rights harms. Therefore, the negative duties of corporations should be understood to include refraining from engaging in harmful institutional practices, or participating overall in a harmful institutional order without providing adequate compensation to the victims of harm. If they fail to do so, TNCs can be held accountable for the negative outcomes engendered by the global order.

This thesis includes three empirical studies detecting the determinants of crime in England and Wales. We firstly apply time series analyses to look for cointegrating relationships between property crimes and unemployment as well as law enforcement instruments. We extend our study by employing panel data and corresponding techniques to control for area-specific fixed effects as well as the endogeneity of law enforcement variables. In our third study, we allow crime rate to have spatial spillover effect, in other words, the crime rate in one area is affected by, in addition to its local crime-influential factors, the crime rates and crime-related factors in its neighbouring areas. We demonstrate this result by constructing a theoretical model and testing it by applying spatial analysis regressions. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: First, property crimes are better explained by economic models of crime than violent crimes. Second, law enforcement instruments always have negative effects on both property and violent crimes, indicating their deterrence and incapacitation effects as predicted. Third, social-economic factors, such as unemployment and income level, have two effects on property crimes: opportunity and motivation. Their net effects on property crime rates depend on the type of crime as well as the time period being examined. And finally, there is indeed spillover effect existing in crime rate. For burglary, theft and handling, and robbery, the crime rate in one area is positively and significantly correlated with the crime rates from its neighbouring areas. Furthermore, the crime rate of sexual offences of one area is negatively related to such crime rates in neighbouring areas.