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This thesis examines longitudinally how young offenders cope with prison life, in particular the relationship between early coping styles and later levels of psychological health' and homesickness. The research was conducted in two parts. The first was a preliminary study to modify a homesickness questionnaire (Archer et al, 1998) for use within a prison population. The modified questionnaire (HQ-P) demonstrated good reliability. The second part consisted of the longitudinal study. This comprised three phases where individuals were assessed within two weeks of arriving into the prison system (phase one, N = 261), six weeks later (phase two, N = 133) and four to six months after phase one (phase three, N = 55). At each phase, individuals were asked to complete a coping styles questionnaire, psychological health and homesickness measures. A small number of the sample at phase one also took part in a semi-structured interview. This was to explore qualitatively their methods of coping, management of relationships and levels of support experienced within the first two weeks of arrival into the prison system. The results demonstrated that the use of emotional and avoidance coping within two weeks of arrival into prison was related to better levels of psychological health and lower levels of homesickness some six weeks and four to six months later. Individuals also demonstrated preferences for particular coping strategies that remained consistent across each phase. There are many implications of these findings. The first of these is the demonstration that levels of homesickness remain consistently high as time continues in prison. The study also reflects the importance of not labelling coping strategies as universally effective or ineffective, and allowing a more realistic exploration of their significance as a result. The effective early use of avoidance and emotional coping upon later levels of psychological health and homesickness would contrast against coping theory, that has previously regarded emotional and avoidance coping as hindering effective management of the stressor (Zeinder and Endler, 1996 and Menaghan, 1982). ___________________ 'Psychological health refers to symptoms expressed in the Middlesex Hospital Questionnaire (Crown and Crisp, 1966). These include depression, free-floating anxiety, obsessional and hysteric symptoms, also somatic symptoms which has a physical base. When discussing the findings throughout this thesis, references to psychological health are a combination of the above symptoms.

This thesis is concerned with the British neglect of education in Belize and the emergence of increased tensions between church and state, from the twin catalysts for social change of the 1931 hurricane and economic depression until independence in 1981. This conflict has revealed a contradictory web of power structures and their influence, through the medium of schools, on multi-cultural development. The fundamental argument is that despite a rhetoric- of-difference, a cohesive society was created in Belize rooted in the cultural values propagated through an often-contradictory church-state education system, and that Jesuit supremacy of Belizean education came too late to unsettle or exploit the grass-root forces of cultural synthesis. Racial conflict in Belize is more a matter of habitual rhetoric and superficial. The historiography of Belize falls broadly into two categories: Diplomatic and labour, nevertheless cultural and educational studies have developed most notably from Social Anthropology. An extensive literature review revealed that notwithstanding the emergence of a substantial historiography of education on the British Caribbean similar research has been neglected on Belize. Therefore, my own thesis fills a significant gap in the historiography of British Caribbean education. The PhD discusses the relationship between conflicting hierarchies within education and multi-cultural cohesion, not yet been fully attempted in any of the secondary literature. This is a proposition argued through substantial and original primary research, employing a mix of comparative empirical research and theoretical Sights influenced by historical sociologist Nigel Bolland to analyse the interactions of people at community level, the ubiquitous presence of the denominations, and political and hierarchical activities. The empirical data was initially collected from HMSO, and Colonial Office files at the Public Record Office. The principal methodological area of research for the PhD resulted from a visit to Belize to procure a quantity of oral testimony providing a 'history from below' as an extra dimension to the British Colonial perspective. The methodology for Part 3 (1964-1981) reveals shifts in the balance of power relying solely on oral evidence and archival/ecclesiastical records from Belize. Church historians have confirmed previous research into the latter to narratives. An important contributiog.to my area of study lies in the use of Belize as a central focus and the historical peculiarity of denominalisation, where, unlike the English system the church rather than the secular lobby won the contest for control in schools.

Family support services aim to support parents and carers with the task of bringing up children; these services consistently report problems, however, in attracting helpseekers. Despite recent developments within child-welfare towards the provision of family-friendly services, self-referral rates remain low constituting at best 30% of all referrals. Agencies also report that families are reluctant to take up services following third party (frequently professional) referral. Despite these consistent findings the extant literature on help-seeking offers few insights into how social actors, in the face of family problems, make choices between the available sources of help. Within the extant literature studies consistently report that families prefer 'informal' support but few insights are offered about how such decisions are made and how preference is organised in relation to diverse sources of support. In this thesis and focusing on talk about `help-seeking' in focus group and interview settings, analysis centres on exploring the accountable properties of situated decision-making. From analysis of situated talk, the study offers insights and raises questions for further research that may assist family support agencies to more appropriately tailor their services to meet the needs of service users. The present study is much inspired by the work of Harvey Sacks in particular his development of Membership Categorisation Analysis. In making use of Hester and Eglin's occasioned model of MCA (1997) it has been possible to explore practical reasoning in and through the local, sequential and categorical organisation of talk. Analysis of situated decision-making, in relation to the topic 'help-seeking', finds decision-making a highly organised practical activity such that any social actor canmake an 'educated' guess about who, another, would suggest as a first category for help. Research participants, in deciding who should hypothetically be approached first for help, constituted a socially sanctioned order to help-seeking characterised by first-position category pairs and last-position category pairs. Use of, or reference to, prior knowledge of help-seeking encounters was also identified as a key decision making resource. This thesis concludes with a policy discussion and raises a number of speculative comments arising from the study that are relevant for the development of child welfare services. A number of avenues are suggested for further research, in particular questions are asked about the continued practice and emphasis within child-welfare services on professional social diagnosis, with the attendant neglect of help-seeking as a socially organised activity. The study suggests that future research might centre on further analysis of how 'family support' is organised within the family and prior to professional intervention. It is also suggested that further research examine the possibilities of response to requests for help as a better starting point for service delivery, rather than professional detection of 'problems'.

The relationship between ethnic origin and inclusion in British personnel departments has never been fully explored or explained. This thesis draws upon an exploratory questionnaire survey of personnel practitioners of ethnic minority origin, and case studies of personnel departments in five organisations in Britain, to identify how and why people are included in British personnel departments and the role of ethnic origin in determining that inclusion. In order to do this the thesis draws upon a range of models of inequality, including both Marxist and Weberian. For various reasons, however - such as a failure to overcome the separation of action and structure, an inability to articulate change, and a failure to recognise that closure is an ongoing process - none of the existing models are found to be able to articulate or explain filly the processes and structures of inclusion identified by the research. The thesis therefore develops a new model, focusing upon the microlevel, which overcomes the limitations of those existing models. The research reveals that inclusion is afforded to those who are able to symbolise to those with power over inclusion the type of potential which the latter parties desire them to possess. The ethnic categorisation individuals are accorded, it is shown, can function as one such symbol. However, where ethnic categorisation would not symbolise the potential desired, individuals may win inclusion by ensuring that they are categorised according to other criteria. Differences in inclusion between different personnel departments are found to reflect the relative power of different parties in the organisations concerned to ensure that those included in personnel departments symbolise to them the type of potential which they desire of them. As a consequence, the relationship between ethnic minority categorisation and inclusion, and between other criteria and inclusion, can vary between different departments and different situations. The model thus permits explanation of who is included in a particular part of an organisation and how that inclusion has been achieved.

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In Sub-Saharan Africa, 15-19 year-olds account for a large segment for the growing population. The region has the world's highest rates of early child-bearing, with more than 50 percent giving birth before the age of 20. Adolescents who become pregnant must drop out of school. Health problems, lack of education and the responsibilities of parenthood combine to further restrict their life options. Sierra, Leone, being a Sub-Saharan country does not only perpetuate the same problems, but the situation is exacerbated by her adverse economy, political instability, endemic corruption, inequalities to access resources and the generally very low literacy rates to which females contribute the most. In this thesis, the author's argument is that despite the government's intention to improve female education in particular, administrative inequalities and financial constraints experienced all over the country will prove inhibitive, as girls will continue to be excluded from enrolment ratios as well as drop out from the school system. A field study was undertaken to investigate whether teenagers who drop out of the system because of pregnancy or related issues would welcome the continuation of formal education to achieve their desired goals. Questionnaires for In-school and Out-of-school Respondents were used to investigate perceptions and actualities. Problems encountered included limitations to the field study caused by the war which was current. Lack of proper and concise data in the country constituted a great obstacle to the researcher's work progress. The findings revealed that researches into education for young women who drop out of school needs to be given more attention by the government and academics, for the development of a structured approach which would be integrated into the education system. Education is central to social progress and national developmental and unless education is provided in its entirety, the country's development will continue to stagnate

In a professional and business-social context such as that of global hotel brands in the United Kingdom, intercultural communication, contacts and relationships are found at the heart of daily operations and of customer service. A large part of the clientele base of hotels in the United Kingdom is formed by individuals who belong to different cultural groups that travel in the country either for leisure or business. At the same time, the global workforce which is recruited in the hotel industry in the United Kingdom is a reality here to stay. Global travelling and labor work mobility are phenomena which have been generated by changes which occur on a socio-economic, cultural and political level due to the phenomenon of globalization. The hotel industry is therefore well acquainted with the essence of different cultures either to be accommodated within hotel premises, as in the case of external customers, or of diversity management where different cultures are recruited in the hotel industry, as in the case of internal customers. This thesis derives from research conducted on eight different global hotel brands in the United Kingdom in particular, with reference to three, four and five star categories. The research aimed to answer the question of how hotels are organized in order to address issues of intercultural communication during customer service and if intercultural barriers arise during the intercultural interaction of hotel staff and global customers. So as to understand how global hotel brands operate the research carried out focused in three main areas relating to each hotel: organizational culture, customer service–customer care and intercultural issues. The study utilized qualitative interviews with hotel management staff and non-management staff from different cultural backgrounds, public space observations between customers and staff during check-in and checkout in the reception area and during dining at the café-bar and restaurant. Thematic analysis was also applied to the official web page of each hotel and to job advertisements to enhance the findings from the interviews and the observations. For the process of analysis of the data interpretive (hermeneutic) phenomenology of Martin Heidegger has been applied. Generally, it was found that hotel staff quite often feel perplexed by how to deal with and how to overcome, for instance, language barriers and religious issues and how to interpret non verbal behaviors or matters on food culture relating to the intercultural aspect of customer service. In addition, it was interesting to find that attention to excellent customer service on the part of hotel staff is a top organizational value and customer care is a priority. Despite that, the participating hotel brands appear to have not yet, realized how intercultural barriers can affect the daily operation of the hotel, the job performance and the psychology of hotel staff. Employees indicated that they were keen to receive diversity training, provided by their organizations, so as to learn about different cultural needs and expand their intercultural skills. The notion of diversity training in global hotel brands is based on the sense that one of the multiple aims of diversity management as a practice and policy in the workplace of hotels is the better understanding of intercultural differences. Therefore global hotel brands can consider diversity training as a practice which will benefit their hotel staff and clientele base at the same time. This can have a distinctive organizational advantage for organizational affairs in the hotel industry, with potential to influence the effectiveness and performance of hotels.

Major sporting competitions, such as the Football World Cup and the Olympic Games have become global events. For the organisers of such events, they are much more than a short-term competition, they present the opportunity to ‘re-imagineer’ nations and cities. Scholars have discussed the commercialisation and financial opportunities of such sporting events, and their links to neoliberalism. But recent official claims about the social benefits and carbon neutrality have received much less attention. This thesis addresses this under-researched area. It documents and analyses the social and environmental claims made in the context of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, and explores how these played out in the rural state of Mato Grosso. This study is primarily based on documentary research and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Mato Grosso. It is informed by a critical management studies perspective and draws specifically on a neo-Gramscian approach to environmental governance. This enabled me to go behind the environmental discourse in Mato Grosso and understand the realities on the ground. The findings illustrate how regional elites co-opted environmental governance mechanisms and appropriated the socio-economic benefits of the FIFA World Cup. I focus particularly on a carbon offsetting project which was supposed to plant 1. 4 million trees along the Cuiabá River in order offset the CO emissions generated by the construction of the new Pantanal football Stadium. As I show, this project was organised by an NGO manufactured by Mato Grosso based agro-industrial elites, who used it as a vehicle to further their interests at the expense of local subsistence fishing communities and the environment.

This PhD thesis focuses on women’s lived, embodied experiences of working in the lap dancing industry. It has been established within the literature on this industry that dancers portray heightened depictions of femininity (Mavin & Grandy, 2013) and engage in work on their bodies and aesthetic labour (Colosi, 2008; Colosi, 2010; Mavin & Grandy, 2013; Sanders et al, 2013) as part of their role, however little attention has been paid to how and why specific modes of sexuality become valued in this working role and how the portrayal of sexuality in the lap dancing industry is experienced and negotiated as dancers age. This study aims to build on previous research by considering the context and space in which dancers perform, embody and negotiate the role of a lap dancer in order to enrich our understanding of their lived experiences. The research takes the form of a retrospective auto-ethnography and incorporates three phases of data collection: website analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews. These phases of data collection have been selected to focus, respectively, on understanding how the lap dancing industry is encoded, embedded and embodied. Ultimately, this aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the industry and how it is encoded and landscaped through its online presence, how it is embedded in its situated context and finally, how this is reflected in, understood, and embodied by, women working in the lap dancing industry. The findings suggest that the landscape of the lap dancing industry and material setting in which the work is performed both encourages an ambiguous exchange relationship between dancers and customers and compels dancers to perform and embody heteronormatively prescriptive images of youthful sexuality.