After thirty years of neoliberal public sector reforms involving the increased use of the private sector and the import of private sector methods, in many respects, the public sector is barely recognisable from when Mrs Thatcher was elected. This study is about one specific part of the public services – the public library service – and is analysed in the context of the wider picture of change in the public services. In particular, the focus of the thesis is the attitude of library service workers to the public service ethos (PSE), whether and how it informs their attitude to their work and its potential for use by their union in mobilisation. The thesis addresses three research questions: • Has the public service ethos survived? And if it has, what does it mean for workers? • Is there a relationship between commitment to the public service ethos and union membership and activism? • Could the union utilise the ethos in its campaigning? And, if so, how? Starting from a theoretical discussion of the origins and meaning of the PSE and a discussion of the relevance of mobilisation theory, the study highlights three key areas. First, there is an examination of whether workers in the public library service believe that a PSE exists and, if so, what it means to them. It is demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative data, including a survey of union members in the library service that it is both alive and well and a significant influence on how they view their working life. Secondly, there is an analysis of whether there is a relationship between union activism and commitment and a belief in the PSE. Connected with that is a debate about the utility of the PSE as an aid to mobilisation at the workplace. Thirdly, there is a discussion of the relevance of the PSE to unions’ wider campaigning, given their expressed aim of drawing on external power resources through alliances with service user groups. The study shows that public service workers continue to believe in a PSE, offering their union the opportunity to associate itself with it, thereby distinguishing itself from the employer and strengthening the union both within and outside the workplace.

This thesis presents a cross-national, comparative study of legal recognition for lesbian and gay couples, focusing on civil partnerships in the UK and marriage in Canada and the US State of California. The study investigates the impact of same-sex marriage and civil partnership from the perspectives of lesbian and gay couples and, in particular, addresses the social implications of couples’ new legal status. The thesis investigates the impact of marriage or civil partnership within couples’ family and friendship networks and in a range of less intimate social contexts, including the workplace, the neighbourhood and commercial settings. The thesis also analyses the impact of legal recognition on couples’ sense of citizenship and assesses the effects of the Proposition 8 referendum, which repealed existing same-sex marriage rights in California in 2008. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from in-depth interviews with married or civil partner same-sex couples in the UK, Canada and California, the study analyses couples’ narratives around legal recognition to identify the meanings they attach to their new legal status. In the context of the wider policy objectives of legal recognition with regard to tackling discrimination and acknowledging same-sex couples within family and other social networks, the thesis applies Erving Goffman’s analysis of stigma to this evolving policy context. The study concludes that couples broadly welcomed the legal entitlements that flowed from marriage or civil partnership, and often saw legal recognition as providing opportunities to seek social recognition from within their personal networks. However, legal recognition did not in itself guarantee social recognition, and sometimes revealed the continuing marginalisation of lesbian and gay couples within family networks and in other social settings. This highlights a distinction between legal and social recognition, and points towards a significant gap between the policy ambitions attached to marriage and civil partnership and their micro-social impact.

This thesis examines the relationship between rights and duties in the field of fetal gene therapy and assesses if the current regulatory position within England and Wales is compatible with the intergenerational aspects of scientific progress within fetal gene therapy (FGT). Within the field of genomics, the fetal junction has become a site where gene therapists are developing a range of medical techniques, such as fetal gene therapy and in utero stem cell therapy. Utilising such techniques raises questions about the intergenerational aspects of scientific progress and how intergenerational rights can reshape regulation. The thesis focuses upon these key questions: Are the intergenerational issues of FGT taken into account by both direct and indirect stakeholders? Can intergenerational issues override the reproductive rights of the mother? Have intergenerational issues impacted upon the clinical applications implicit and manifest in this work? Addressing such questions is important because the conflict between the rights of the mother, fetus, clinical researchers and society have the potential to delay progress in FGT. In addressing these questions the thesis utilised thematic analysis of relevant regulatory institutional documents, from international declarations to regulatory guidelines; and semi structured interviews of identified FGT practitioners to identify areas of potential conflict. Following the data collection and analysis, the field data identified five key areas of potential conflict, which were then assessed using the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) as proposed by Alan Gewirth (1978) and later altered by Beyleveld and Brownsword (2001). The thesis will argue that the field data shows that established regulatory principles such as human dignity are of limited value in relation to FGT. In other areas such as informed choice, autonomy and intergenerational equity the PGC is applied to define and partially resolve the outstanding areas necessary for consistent ethical and regulatory guidance in FGT

This thesis examines how scientific communities which are heterogeneous among themselves communicate and collaborate to produce knowledge on climate change. Climate-change science is a relatively new field of investigation and it includes experts from virtually all areas of scientific enquiry. This field is not, however, a homogeneous transdisciplinary area of research so that the different scientific communities that compose it have to bridge the gaps among themselves to be able effectively to communicate and collaborate. I use Collins and Evans’ (2007) realist theory of expertise combined with other relevant Science and Technology Studies concepts, particularly the notions of trading zones (Galison 1997; Collins et al. 2007) and trust (Giddens 1990, Shackley and Wynne 1995b; Reyes-Galindo 2011) to explain how different groups of experts build bridges between their heterogeneous forms of life. As climate-change science is too broad to be covered in one PhD project, I focus on paleoceanography, a subfield of geology that reconstructs past oceans and their interactions with the climate system. I use the fractal model (Collins 2011) to move through different levels of analysis and examine the different bridge-building mechanisms between expert communities at work at each of them. The main contribution of the present work is to identify and explain how the various mechanisms that mediate communication between expert communities come into play at different levels of analysis.

Disability is a common phenomenon in the UK and year on year there are more disabled graduates graduating and entering the labour market. Despite the relevance of disability to contemporary society, research that focuses on disabled graduates is notability absent in the wider equality and diversity literature. In order to address this lacuna, the research focuses on how disabled graduates manage and navigate the UK labour market. Five key stages in the graduates’ journey into the labour market are addressed in the research, the process of job searching, how disabled graduates negotiate the workplace environment, which includes management relations, how reasonable adjustments are secured, and engagement with external bodies for advice and support and welfare. The wide range of topics covered in the thesis allowed the totality of the experience of disability to be addressed. The thesis used an inductive, qualitative methodology to uncover the lived experience of the disabled graduates. Several key themes emerged from the thesis, firstly disabled graduates were active agents in managing their situation. They often had plan ‘A’ along with various alternative plans to allow them to achieve their desired career path. In addition the graduates were excellent at executing coping strategies to deal with the negative situations in which they found themselves; they did not allow their suffering to negatively deter them. Thirdly, the data showed it was very important to consider issues around impairment because impairment impacted many of the disabled graduates’ experiences. If issues around impairment are ignored then only a partial understanding of disability is achieved. Finally, the data indicated that disabled graduates still experienced unfairness and discrimination in the workplace. This discrimination manifested itself in numerous ways from failure to be recruited to employers failing to make reasonable adjustments.

This is a study of news production by eight major news organisations in the UK and Canada. Through observation of daily routines and semi-structured interviews, 124 journalists were included in the final sample. The overall aim of this research was to explore the interrelationships between new technologies, the potential autonomy accessible by journalists and the structure of constraints under which they operate. The news marketplace has become congested while audiences have fragmented and public news-producing behaviours have soared, facilitated through the ubiquity of new media. These developments were crucial to the analysis of mainstream news production within a media environment that has left news organisations struggling to retain audiences and their own credibility. New technologies adopted by news organisations have altered routines both within newsrooms and out in the field. News values have shifted towards ‘live’ coverage while workflow has been improved and convergence become the norm. At the same time, new media available within the public realm – including the internet, online publishing tools and advanced mobile phone technologies – are also available to individual journalists. However, it is those journalists already familiar with technology who are more likely to incorporate them into their own daily routines, along with the wider range of sources now available within the information producing strata of society. Research findings relate to the specific locations in the news production process at which new technologies, journalistic autonomy and constraining factors have the most impact. For this purpose, a model was developed along with an autonomy-constraint ratio. Key findings are that the transmission phase of news production presents the least amount of autonomy for journalists while the newsgathering phase offers the greatest amount of autonomy. Due to the temporal and theoretical limits of previous research frameworks, an autonomy-centred approach is proposed as a means of complementing the existing constraints-based approaches that have tended to dominate news production studies.

The works of historians such as Hargreaves, Tranter, Walvin, McCrone and Bailey suggest that women were, for a variety of reasons, gradually entering into the ‘world of sport’ from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Despite a lack of research it has been argued that this trend, of increased participation amongst women, continued into the twentieth century. Recent studies have tended to converged on the broad leisure choices of women, ignoring the place of sport within these experiences. This study therefore addresses an under researched topic: the development of women’s participation in sport in Scotland between 1920 and 1937. Many argue that during the interwar years there was a general distortion of the traditional boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ areas of life for women. However, it has also been acknowledged that notions of gender differences persisted in this period. This study contributes to a wider understanding of gender relations during the period. It probes how women’s involvement in physically demanding sports were influenced by existing discourses and enabled the emergence of new ones. This thesis does not aim to chart the chronological growth and development of specific sports but rather seeks to understand the ways in which sport was incorporated into women’s lives and the meanings which they attached to their experiences. Each section of the thesis deals with a different area of participation. It examines the development of physical education in schools, the establishment and growth of a selection of sports organizations, the growth and use of local council run sports facilities and the development of work-based sport for women. This research focuses on contemporary depictions and discussions of sportswomen during these years as well as drawing on the views of sportswomen themselves. It employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies in order to achieve a holistic and balanced interpretation of interwar sports participation and the attitudes that influenced it.

This is a study of media production and coverage of Israeli-Palestinian relations. It investigates how media production and coverage have developed alongside developments on the ground, political necessities and shifting perceptions of peace in relation to this conflict since the beginning of the Oslo peace process in 1993. The study presents a comprehensive historical analysis of the negotiations that led to the Peace Accord between Israelis and Palestinians in 1993. It highlights the elements that made the Accord a diplomatic achievement but which reestablished the imbalance of power that had previously defined Israeli-Palestinian relations. It also presents the results of a content analysis of The New York Times’ representation of the first months of that process. It then discusses the perspectives of subjects who have been involved in activities promoting dialogue to challenge dominant explanations for this conflict since the early nineties, comparing these with the views of journalists who have covered this conflict and the peace process for different media. In describing the interplay between media and these other contexts, as well as the ways through which this has been linked to discursive explanations of peace and the return to visible conflict, this investigation reviews the factors that prevented the media from becoming agents of change.

This thesis considers the remaindered other in contemporary British society, and the representation of that other in British fiction since 1968. The liberal approach to otherness that has arguably been a defining characteristic of the British identity since the Second World War has, I argue, always been incomplete, leaving a remainder to whom equal representation and cultural acceptance have been denied. By examining a diverse range of texts which address an equally diverse range of identities, this thesis addresses the questions of what otherness means in contemporary society, how it manifests and manages itself, and how the fiction of the period addresses the social anomaly. In recent studies of controversial fiction, there has been a tendency to focus either on the aesthetics of excess (eg. Durand and Mandel, 2006), in which the transgression is primarily stylistic, or else on the marginality of the now-legitimised “other” (in particular the homosexual, the racial other, or the working class; eg. Nicola Allen, 2008). In contrast, this thesis examines novels that engage with those figures who have remained socially excluded, figures whose tabooed identity has persisted in spite of the broader move toward liberal inclusivity. The primary texts discussed are, largely, novels that have received little critical attention, despite their literary credibility, highlighting a reluctance to engage with those problematic identities that remain outside the realm of cultural legitimacy. The thesis positions the criminally transgressive (the paedophile, the incestuous family, the sociopath) alongside the culturally stigmatised (the disabled, the elderly and the dying) in an attempt to demonstrate a continuity of resistance to a diverse range of tabooed identities. Theoretically, the argument draws on aspects of cultural studies, structuralism, anthropology and disability studies in order to examine the representation of the tabooed voice and to consider its legitimacy in the contemporary literary field.

The problem of representing decision making behaviour in discrete event simulation was investigated. Of particular interest was modelling variety in the decisions, where different people might make different decisions even where the same circumstances hold. An initial investigation of existing and alternative approaches for representing decision making was carried out. This led to the suggestion of using a neural network to represent the decision making behaviour in the form of a multi-criteria probability distribution based on data of observed decision making. The feasibility of the stochastic neural network approach was investigated. Models were fitted using artificial data from discrete and continuous distributions that included the shape parameters as inputs, and tested against known results from the distributions. Also a bank simulation was used to collect data from volunteers who controlled the queuing decisions of customers inside the bank. Models of their behaviour were created and implemented in the bank simulation to automate the decision making of customers. The investigation established the feasibility of the approach, although it indicated the need for substantial amounts of data showing examples of decision making. A hybrid model that combined the stochastic neural network approach with a rule-based approach allowed the development of more general models of decision making behaviour.