This is a narrative inquiry in which I asked six master's level students at a University in the North of England to reflect on their experience of using social media as the learning platform for part of a taught module. I was motivated by the growing ubiquity of such approaches in higher education and by the need to develop rational, just and sustainable online pedagogies that are alert to both the opportunities and threats of this shift in medium. My research questions, framed from a Bourdieusian perspective were: - To what extent is symbolic violence evident within a social learning network for master's level students at a UK University? - What forms does such symbolic violence take and how are these forms affected by the medium? - What kinds of dispositions, abilities and assets constitute and confer capital in this setting? In answering these questions, I trace symbolic violence in the online exchanges between participants and in the consequences of those exchanges. I develop an index of digital capital to describe the dispositions, abilities and assets that they needed to profit from learning in this way, along with a notion of digital hiatus to describe what happened when they lacked such capital. At the same time, I acknowledge the positive impacts of this approach on some of the participants. I locate this research within the literature on social media use for education and more specifically within the subset of that literature that uses Bourdieu's ideas to explore digital inequality. I also locate it within the institutional context of a post-1992 UK university, the national policy context and the economic context for the growing use of technology in Education. I conclude by reviewing the benefits and limitations of the methodology and theoretical frameworks adopted and by considering the potential uses of my index of digital capital, identifying how this might be explored in future studies.

Mainstreaming gender within reconstruction is vital to enhance sustainable development in disaster affected regions. Promoting needs and concerns of women and men as well as their experience and knowledge in all process of reconstruction can fulfill sustainable post-disaster reconstruction. Studies have found that failure to address gender issues in post-disaster reconstruction will hinder the opportunities of reconstruction to achieve sustainable development. Yet, many cases of reconstruction activities across developing countries failed to promote gender mainstreaming. This research aims to provide policy-relevant findings regarding strategies for mainstreaming gender with the aim of achieving sustainability in post-earthquake reconstruction in Indonesia. The case of gender mainstreaming issues at post-disaster reconstruction at Bantul and Sleman Yogyakarta Indonesia were examined. Multiple case studies were applied to achieve the aim and objectives of the study. Accordingly, the sequential mixed-method approach was used with the primary data collection methods are semi-structure interviews and questionnaires. For analyzing the qualitative data, the study chooses content analysis technique along with descriptive and inferential statistics that be used for quantitative data analysis. This study confirms that women are not only more vulnerable but also have a larger number of vulnerabilities. Women face all dimensions of gender vulnerability during reconstruction. Among the most vulnerable groups are pregnant women, women with disabilities and older women. Despite their vulnerability, women can make a difference during reconstruction through their economic, social and environmental capacities. This study shows that women’s capacities in the economic, social and environmental dimensions not only substantially reduce their families’ and communities’ vulnerability but also enhance the sustainability of their families and communities following an earthquake. This study further shows that gender mainstreaming strategies within sustainable reconstruction should incorporate not only strategies for protecting against gender vulnerabilities but also strategies for promoting gender capacities. Both are fundamental to the achievement of sustainable reconstruction. Further, this study presents key enabling and constraining factors in the mainstreaming gender into sustainable post-disaster reconstruction. These stem from government, non-government organizations, and society. The key enabling factor on the part of government is strong women’s leadership, while the key enabling factor from society is support from active roles for women’s groups. This study shows that adequate technical and financial supports are the key factors from non-government organizations. The key constraining factor from the government is resistance from senior bureaucrats.

Stereotype, as a ubiquitous and persistent social phenomenon, has been a key issue in social psychology for some ninety or so years since Lippmann introduced it into social science in 1922. However, “Stereotypes wear the black hats in social science” (Schneider, 2004:1) and, to some extent, stereotypes themselves have been stereotyped, as the traditionally held view has focused on the negative values of stereotyping and viewed it as a static factor in social perception. In this view, stereotypes were considered to be overgeneralisations, inaccurate assumptions, and the cognitive roots of prejudice even discrimination, which are best avoided. Stereotypes have recently claimed an important place in the field of intergroup relations and intercultural communication, but reciprocal interaction between self- and other- perceptions across different ethnic groups in the cross-cultural context has gone largely un-discussed in cross-cultural pragmatic studies. This thesis is an attempt to fill the void by theoretically situating in cross-cultural pragmatics, and empirically investigating one cross-cultural pairing, i.e., British and Chinese overseas students. Moreover, this work will focus on the conventional but perennial issues in stereotype research, i.e., the accuracy, role and pragmatic functions of stereotyping as realised in an interactive context. A mixed methods research methodology has been employed as a procedure for collecting, analysing, and integrating both qualitative and quantitative data in two consecutive phases: (1) focus group interview; (2) questionnaire survey. The aim is to build a holistic perspective to illuminate the research questions. The objectives are to probe the cross-cultural practitioners’ first-hand stereotypical perceptions of self and others through their interactive practice, generate insights into the impact and pragmatic functions of stereotyping, and thereby shed light on stereotype research. This thesis serves to assess the evidence of ‘kernel of truth’ hypothesis and bridge the divergences between British stereotypes of Chinese people and Chinese stereotypes of themselves and vice-versa. Ultimately, therefore, the stereotyping is demonstrated as pragmatic device to assist interactants in achieving more harmonious and mutually beneficial interactions as what is perceived can help interactants predict, expect, and explain what is meant in specific cultural context.

Over the past decade, the UK has witnessed a considerable expansion in the provision and use of charitable food aid, particularly food banks. The phenomenon has become a prominent political issue, and a rapidly expanding field of academic study. However, there is limited data available as to the prevalence of food aid use or the factors associated with it. The growth in food aid has also prompted research and policy interest in the wider issue of food poverty: the extent to which people struggle to afford food; its drivers and impacts; and the role which charitable food aid has come to play in food poverty experiences. There is a recognised need for better understanding of both food poverty and food aid use as separate but connected phenomena. The recent rise of charitable food aid in the UK has been mirrored across other European welfare states, provoking significant questions about the changing roles of, and relationships between, statutory and voluntary sectors in providing a social safety net. There is a need for greater critical reflection on how food aid is challenging and changing welfare states, particularly in countries where it has only recently become widespread. The overall aim of this thesis is to gain new empirical and theoretical insights into the rise of food aid and its role in relation to the changing nature of the welfare state. In order to address this aim, a mixed methods study of food poverty and the rise of food aid within the welfare state was undertaken. Scotland was selected as the major case study for the research, with a particular focus on the city of Glasgow, while Finland provided the minor, comparative case. The quantitative part of the study involved cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of an existing household survey of 15 deprived neighbourhoods in Glasgow (the GoWell study). The objective was to examine the scale of both food poverty and food bank use. Binary logistic regression modelling was used to examine the relationship of these outcomes with socio-demographic, health, and financial variables. The qualitative fieldwork involved a total of 51 semi-structured interviews. These included interviews with a sample of the GoWell study participants (n=12); service providers in Glasgow (n=12); and policy actors across Scotland (n=9). Fieldwork in Finland involved interviews with policy actors and individuals working in statutory and voluntary services (n=18). This study provides quantitative analysis of a self-reported measure of food bank use, including empirical evidence of the scale and drivers of food poverty and food bank use in deprived neighbourhoods. While four per cent of respondents were found to have reported food bank use in 2015, 17 per cent reported difficulties affording food. The findings highlight the impact of financial factors, specifically of recent UK Government welfare reforms, on both food poverty and food bank use. The study found that survey respondents with mental and physical health problems were more likely to experience both food poverty and food bank use than those who reported good health. Worsening health was also found to increase the likelihood of entering food poverty over time. The qualitative findings provide evidence of how food banks are shaping experiences, perceptions, and delivery of the welfare state at a local level, and also consider how policy makers perceive the state-food aid relationship. Drawing on welfare state regime theory, analysis of interviews with policy actors in both Scotland and Finland inform an examination of the various roles and relationships of food aid and the welfare state across different regime types. Theoretical characterisations of the relationship between food aid and the welfare state, arising from analysis of interview data in both countries, are presented. These include understandings of food aid in relation to a welfare state which might be considered: contingent; shrunken; impersonal; or regressive. Comparing Scotland and Finland offers important insight into how and why food aid may play different roles in different welfare state contexts.

This thesis explores the phenomenon of a business exit by analysing its context using gender as a lens. It has employed critical realism as the research ontology, and realist phenomenology as the research methodology. By adopting the social embeddedness perspective as the primary focus, this study substantiates the complexity of structures involved in shaping a business journey and its exit. The entrepreneurial trajectory has been the mode of analysis rather than just the event of 'business exit‘, to provide a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of exit and its position in respondent‘s life. The study starts by reviewing the intersection of the 'gender in entrepreneurship‘ and 'business exits‘ literature. It indicates that the 'business exit‘ literature is still evolving, and only a limited number of studies have explored the topic qualitatively, within which the concept of 'gender‘ remains largely unexplored. Recently, some studies have sought to develop typologies of business exits; however, this stream of literature has yet to influence the on-going research explicitly as most of the emerging empirical studies exploring business exits still use 'failure‘ and 'closure‘ interchangeably. There is little acknowledgement of the critical distinctions between these concepts. It is particularly misleading when the topic of research is exploring gender around these parameters. The current feminist literature argues that "women businesses do not fail often but have a higher exit rate", so the process of investigation began with an aim to subjectively explore the context behind it. The first part of the thesis defines a 'business exit‘. A customised typology of business exit trajectories is developed from the research data. These trajectories are then analysed by looking at the intersectionality of multiple socially embedded contextual structures that influenced respondents‘ entrepreneurial journey and their subsequent exit. The study follows a discourse that includes both genders using a post-structural feminist stance. The aim of this gender multiplicity has not been to seek "how one gender is different from other" but rather to seek "how social conditioning of each gender has a direct impact on their entrepreneurial journey and subsequent exit". This approach has revealed gendered social conditioning of both genders which not only highlights the gendered processes across the business course but has also questioned the 'assumed differences‘ from previous studies, by identifying the similarities across the structures. e.g. children, family embeddedness and access to resources which predominantly have been associated with women entrepreneurs only. In-depth subjective assessment of the sample of 46 former and current entrepreneurs (26 women, 20 men) who exited a business venture they founded indicates a complex interplay of socio-economic, socio-cultural, psycho-social structures and mechanisms shaping up the phenomenon of business exit as experienced by the entrepreneur. Critical realist analysis of the phenomenon has identified underlying causal mechanisms that mediated the entrepreneur‘s exit agency. This research contributes to the business exit literature by developing a categorical schema based on exit motivations, which indicates that the suggested higher exit rates among women entrepreneurs is flawed. Most exited ventures are not an exit from entrepreneurship, as they follow a re-entry trajectory. The findings also contribute to the feminist entrepreneurship literature by identifying micro-social practices that constitute macro-social gendering which affects the entrepreneurial journey and its subsequent exit for both genders.

This thesis explores the nature of emotions in the context of a programme team involved in the planning phase of a local partnership initiative in the UK. Positioned in the social constructionist tradition, the study adopts a relational perspective, where primacy shifts from selves to relationships in founding social realities. Accordingly, the thesis frames emotions as intersubjective and dialectical experiences that emerge through dialogue and embodiment. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a fifteen-month period, this study unravels the ‘actuality’ of programme work at both collective and individual levels. At the collective level, the results from the thematic analysis of data highlight emotions during the ever-changing flux of events as the team ceaselessly engage in sense-making with the hope to establish a level of coherence and stability. At the individual level, the results from the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) reveal the innermost struggles of individuals in giving rise to emotions; individual emotions are found to rise strongly when matters of 1) identity, 2) justice and 3) meaningful work are questioned. By showing the salience of emotions in the actuality of programmes as a form of project-based work, the thesis develops two major contributions. First, it proposes relational leadership as a more pragmatic approach to leading programmes that are commonly characterised by ambiguity, turbulence, and change. Second, the thesis urges the need to cultivate situational (rather than standardised) ethics in teams, specifically suggesting the feminist ethics of care as the moral paradigm that remains sensitive to subtleties of situations and relationships.

Schools are pivotal sites for identifying and responding to child neglect due to their universal positioning within the community. This thesis presents an investigation into how schools respond to concerns of child neglect which is the most common reason a child is placed on the child protection register in Wales. Findings from the study contribute new understanding about the nature and level of support delivered by a range of staff in mainstream schools. The study employs an explanatory two-phase design comprising analysis of quantitative and qualitative methods across three local authorities in Wales. The study’s design sits across three levels of service intervention, from the early identification of neglect in schools as universal services, the implementation of preventative and voluntary multi-agency support, through to the school’s level of involvement in the statutory child protection process. The first phase of the study analyses quantitative data drawn from documents held on social work case files (n=119) in three authorities. The second phase employs thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews undertaken with a variety of staff in six schools from teaching and non-teaching roles (n=30), together with non-participant observation of school-based decision-making practice (n=5). Findings highlight the complexity which surrounds child neglect and draw attention to the difficulty of merging two multifaceted systems within one narrative. The first phase identifies the problematic nature of the case file data as a result of intricate social work processes, varying cultures of recording, and large amounts of missing data. In the second phase differences between the two fields of responsibility emerge emphasising the often-messy practice reality of inter-professional working. This thesis makes an original contribution to understanding the challenges which exist for schools when responding to child neglect. The findings have important implications for future policy and practice in the delivery of school-based service provision, and social work practice with schools when working with children who are living with neglect.

Understanding and responding to the complex causes and effects of children’s experience of neglect is a challenge for society and government. Judging its chronicity, severity and impact on children and delivering timely and proportionate services, are core functions of statutory social work. This thesis examines how assessments and decisions are made in neglect cases. Its findings draw on the narratives of social workers and team managers based in two Welsh local authorities. The practitioners are consistent in describing the organisational parameters and imperatives, and their experience of delivering their roles and responsibilities. They acknowledge the environmental pressures that influence how parents live and behave, and the histories and circumstances that contribute to their limitations as parents. They are much less clear about the effect on their practice of the partially resolved, inter-related practice-moral phenomena such as cause and effect and agency and responsibility. The practitioners recognise that critical decisions about children’s futures are founded on how they and the parents exercise their respective proxy and individual agency. The family-professional relationship is characterised as seeking a complementary approach to meeting common goals through co-agency. The location of the practitioners’ work with families lies somewhere between their designation of just good enough parenting and causing significant harm, focusing on the immediate presentation, and making judgements about the directions of the case and the allocation of limited resources. The impact of poverty and intergenerational/community deprivation on the parenting and the children is described, but not approached, as issues that social work can tackle beyond the immediate family. The practitioners generally accept the focus of their practice as located at the point of children’s greatest need and risk. Whether due to political and budgetary constraints, or organisational incapacity for change, the status quo for social work has settled on a high plateau of intervention.

Whilst, at the UK level, there has been some research into the integration experiences of refugees and asylum seekers (e.g. Phillimore et al. 2008; Kirkwood et al., 2015; Basedow and Doyle, 2016) there has been little research focusing on the devolved Welsh context. This thesis seeks to address this lacuna through applying Ager and Strang’s (2004) Indicators of Integration Framework to an analysis of qualitative interviews with refugees and asylum seekers living in Wales. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 19 refugees and asylum seekers from 13 different countries of origin. Interviews are analysed using a discursive psychological approach (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), and focused on the ways that participants’ talk functioned in the interaction. In addition, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of seven UK and devolved government refugee integration strategy documents was also undertaken. Analysis of these policy documents revealed that each drew on notions of the individual nation having a ‘proud tradition’ of protecting refugees which worked to construct refugees as being in need of protection only, obscuring any economic or civic aspirations that they may have. Analysis of the interviews, by contrast, revealed that participants constructed integration in a more multi-faceted way in which they had aspirations of contributing to both the economic and civic life of Wales. The research finds that these constructions point to a need for re-thinking the categories “refugee” and “asylum seeker” and that the term “forced migrant” better reflects the protection and aspirational needs that participants constructed. As such, it argues for a shift in focus from integration “processes” to situated “practices” of integration. A further ideological dilemma (Billig et al., 1988) is also discussed between the UK government’s ‘hostile environment’ approach to migrants which seeks to deter asylum seekers from entering the UK and the stated aims of both UK and devolved governments of ensuring refugee integration. Policy implications are suggested including the need for the Welsh Government to better reflect the economic and civic aspirations of refugees and asylum seekers within its refugee integration strategies and to call for devolved responsibility over asylum support so that it can achieve its aims of seeing Wales become a ‘Nation of Sanctuary’.

It has been well documented that the success of any public policy is closely linked to its development and implementation. Less research has considered how devolved nations tackle the complex and unstable nature of public policy making and address the challenges of implementing national policy. This thesis aims to provide an historical account of the development of one specific welsh education policy, created just after devolution. This thesis follows a single policy from its conception to worked reality. In particular, this thesis aims to uncover how one specific case created during this unique time period, post devolution, was developed and implemented, The Advanced Level Welsh Baccalaureate Qualification (WBQ). The WBQ education policy is of great significance to Wales’ reform agenda and has undergone radical revision, since devolution, making this research particularly timely. This thesis shows how the WBQ can be viewed as a flexible policy that can be adapted at the micro level, to create an education package best suited to the unique needs of the individuals and wider economic realities found across Wales. The WBQ aimed to tackle some of the most challenging educational issues, such as the academic vs. vocational education, specialisation vs. generalism and dealing with disaffection. The thesis draws on interviews with key stakeholders representing the macro, miso and micro, in 2012. The findings highlight the challenges of public policy making in devolved Wales and address how policy is made and who is actually developing policy. The findings of this thesis have suggested that key individuals at the macro level were crucial in shaping and developing the WBQ. The research offers new insights into the importance of considering implementation in the development of public policy. This thesis highlights how organisations and individuals involved in the implementation of public policy actually shape its finalised form in both subtle and more extensive ways during their translation and adaptation of policy. The degree of mutation that arises during translation impacts on the policies success in eventually becoming institutionalised. Variation itself is not unexpected given the flexibility but the findings demonstrate that this flexibility is causing a huge variation in quality and incomparable delivery and structure across institutions. The success of the policy is linked to its original aims and the issues within the Welsh education system it aims to tackle. The WBQ has been successful in achieving some of its original aims whilst others have remained unchanged.