There is a desire in policy, to encourage young people to take part in Youth Participation Practice (YPP). More insight is needed in approaches to YPP that enable meaningful and positive experiences for young people and communities. This qualitative study investigates youth participation practice in North Ayrshire Council in Scotland. Theories and principles from Paulo Freire (1996; 2000) form the framework for analysis. The study examines what young people and youth workers define the purpose of YPP to be; investigates the approaches that are used; and analyses what participants define as the benefits and outcomes of YPP for young people and communities. Through two focus groups with young people, 22 semi-structured interviews with young people, youth workers and Ruth Maguire, an elected member in North Ayrshire, themes were identified. These include the notion of young people feeling ‘connected’, being ‘enabled’ and feeling ‘transformed’ through their involvement in YPP. Freire’s notion of armed love has been interpreted and redefined as the term ‘alfirmo’, which is the act of caring for, nourishing and supporting people, while asserting belief in their ability as agents of change. This study found that ‘alfirmo’ is embodied by youth workers and noticed by young people who have taken part in YPP in North Ayrshire Council. Through the embodiment of ‘alfirmo’, young people in this study feel connected to peers and youth workers and enabled to undertake many tasks such as presenting in front of peers and adults. Through their experiences in YPP, young people expressed that they have gone through a personal transformation, with a greater sense and feeling of confidence as a key example.

This thesis investigates the learning processes of internationalizing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that engage in inward internationalization (international sourcing), and outward internationalization (export). Although the notions of knowledge and learning are well addressed in the literature of internationalization, research on international sourcing from the perspectives of knowledge and learning, as well as research on the connections between international sourcing and export associated with knowledge and learning require serious attention. This research attempts to address this apparent theoretical and empirical deficiencies by providing a deeper understanding on the learning processes associated with international sourcing, export, and connections between international sourcing and export. Based on knowledge-based theories, organizational learning theories, and internationalization theories underpinned by the concept of cross-border buyer-supplier relationship, this research examines 1) the acquisition and exploitation of new knowledge from direct experience in international sourcing, and imitation of key foreign supplier, 2) the acquisition and exploitation of new knowledge from direct experience in export, and imitation of key foreign buyer, and 3) the acquisition, distribution, and exploitation of relevant knowledge by associating inward and outward internationalization. Thus, this research adopts a qualitative case study approach based on 10 case studies of the internationalizing SMEs in Malaysia. Semi-structured interviews with the Managing Director of case firms were conducted over a two-year period. Additionally, participant observations were conducted by attending the meetings related to import-export activities and documentations were gathered for data triangulation. The findings of this research contribute and extend the growing body of research on the importance of knowledge and learning on the internationalization of firm by developing conceptual framework of holistic view of internationalization which embrace inward and outward internationalization in terms of knowledge acquisition and exploitation, and the connections between inward and outward internationalization in terms of knowledge acquisition, distribution, and exploitation. Close relationship with key foreign suppliers empowered the imitation of key foreign suppliers of internationalization and technological knowledge. It also empowered firms to connect inward to outward internationalization through collaborative knowledge sharing. The distribution of knowledge through tacit-tacit and tacit-explicit knowledge sharing underpinned by formal planning was a perquisite for inward-outward internationalization connections to be established by those firms.

Food safety issues such as food hygiene, unsafe food and poisoned food have had a significant influence on consumers’ health and their daily lives for decades. The situation is deemed to be worse in China, which has a long history of using farm chemicals and frequent scandals involving food. However, the extant research on food safety issues has not been adequately examined, especially from the perspective of the consumer. Chronic food safety issues in China are believed to be a cause of psychological distress (Mathur et al., 2006). The wellbeing of consumers might be influenced by the issues in a more serious way, both psychologically and physically, over time. Hence, it is important to advance our understanding of consumers in terms of their psychological states and corresponding behaviours when faced with long-term and ongoing food safety issues. This thesis aims to conceptualise and empirically explore consumers’ long-term coping strategies and to achieve an in-depth understanding of the factors that may predict and influence consumer coping behaviours in the context of a long-term and ongoing food safety situation. In order to achieve the overall research aim, this research adopted a mixed-method approach comprising a qualitative study (consumer interview) and a quantitative study (questionnaire survey). Using semi-structured interview data from 20 consumers, the qualitative study identified specific psychological states and consumer coping actions when faced with food safety issues and informed and modified the conceptual framework. A total of 848 survey responses from the quantitative study were used to develop a new scale to measure and conceptualise consumer long-term coping strategies and tested the research hypotheses. Structural Equation Modelling in AMOS and regression with categorical variables in SPSS were used to test the hypotheses. The results suggest that the interplay of psychological states and cognitive appraisal and psychological states and personality traits, relate to different consumer long-term coping strategies. The extant literature has shed some light on long-term coping in general; however, there is no literature on long-term consumer coping. This research theoretically and empirically contributes to the consumer coping theory by offering a comprehensive conceptualisation and measurement in terms of the multi-dimensional model of consumer long-term coping. When faced with food safety issues, the specific emotions that consumers experience are under researched. Identifying specific emotions is important for two reasons: 1) the study of emotion and coping is inextricably linked. Different emotions involve distinct appraisals of the situation, which may lead to various forms of coping. This extends our knowledge of the emotion-coping relationship by linking the specific emotions to coping behaviours; 2) the behavioural tendencies of the specific emotions in chronic stressful situation can be articulated. Therefore, the current research contributes to the growing literature on consumer psychology by identifying and validating both negative and positive emotions simultaneously in a long-term and ongoing food safety situation. This is also the first study to identify the positive emotion of hope in the chronic food safety situation and consumer coping, advancing our understanding of consumers’ possible positive emotional appraisals when facing chronic food safety issues. Furthermore, the current research challenges the transactional theory of stress, which establishes a strong correlation between the individual’s experience of stress and the emergence of coping behaviours. The findings from this research show that consumers demonstrate various coping actions to deal with the problematic situation even when no stress was expressed. This provides a new angle for discussing stress and coping as previous research overlooks the conditions of eliminated stress. This corrective, thereby, optimise the theory’s explanatory power. Lastly, the antecedents of consumers’ decision to employ in particular ways of coping are not well articulated. Based on the results of this research, consumers’ situational cognitive appraisals and dispositional personality traits are identified as the influential moderating factors of the stress/emotion-coping relationships. This enriches extant understanding of the interactive patterns in consumers’ distinct coping responses.

This research focuses on the counter‐hegemonic spatial and cultural reproduction of film festivals. Specifically, it investigates the extent to which film festivals produce spaces of resistance to neoliberalism‐ the current formation of capitalism‐ while operating within the spatial, temporal and ideological boundaries of the contemporary neoliberal city. Using a critical framework that combines the public sphere and colonisation theories of Jürgen Habermas with David Harvey’s analysis of neoliberal urbanisation, this research examines three film festivals in different localities throughout the western hemisphere: the Workers Unite Film Festival, New York; the Liverpool Radical Film Festival, UK; and the Subversive Film Festival in Zagreb, Croatia. Emerging in the wake of the 2007/8 financial crash, these festivals comprise a diverse range of localised practices that have sought to bring attention to some of the social, spatial, political and cultural problems arising from neoliberalism as such. The practices they have developed are in many ways forged through a relation with an unsympathetic, if not totally oppositional, urban environment that is increasingly profit‐oriented and privatised. Thus the research investigates the possibility of film festivals as sites of resistance, and aims to map these spheres onto neoliberal modernity. The purpose is not simply to provide a critique of neoliberalism or the film festivals under analysis, but to offer some insight on these forms of local assembly‐ wherein neoliberalism and capitalism are not a given necessity‐ in the hope of contributing to a praxis that facilitates their transgression.

The thesis probes into the transitions of and within Jewish identity in the transitional state of Poland since 1945 until today amidst concentricity of anti-Semitism, discrimination of rights, forced emigration of Jews, religious dialogues, identity paradoxes, (re)conversion into Judaism, constitutional amendments and European aspirations. My research studies the increasing renewal of identitarian engagement of Polish-Jewishness and is an attempt to understand how a controversial minority identity is revived and renewed through a range of political, social and legal processes that enables people ‘to get in touch’ with their hidden pasts. I identify this change as an autonomous renewal of identity that is retributive, redistributive and cosmopolitical in nature opening new grounds for participatory citizenship; (inter) community practices and ethno-political dialogues. Based on interviews and observations in the field I narrate dimensions and shifts within the constructions of being Jewish and trace how Jewish identity affiliation are actively constructed through the state law, religious life-practices (as prescribed by Halakhah or Jewish Law), community awareness programmes, diasporic influences and cultural events. In the process, the thesis probes into the role of this ‘corrective measure’ for social change that allows such acts of self-renewal which surpass historical prejudices; reintegrates values, reinstates claims and re-objectifies transformation of cultural representation. This I argue lends itself to pluralist influences and outcomes than mere just appropriations. My research contextualises selfdefinitions of Jewishness obtained from the interviews within the legal templates of the 1997 Act in the Polish Constitution concerning relations with Jewish religious communes, the Halakhah, and the annual reports on Poland by the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and European Commission Against Racism and Tolerance (ECRI) to argue that such identity renewal incites important questions for the interpretation of Polish-Jewishness.

This thesis examines the impact of the social and economic policies of two aristocratic landowners on the development of Staffordshire towns. The integral role of land agents is demonstrated by comparing the earl of Bradford’s Walsall estate with the duke of Sutherland’s land near Longton, in the Potteries. While agents’ importance to the management of rural estates is recognised, and the contribution of aristocrats to the development of towns is similarly established, the role of agents on aristocratic urban estates is largely overlooked. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by readdressing this imbalance using considerable volumes of agent’s correspondence, many of which remained uncatalogued until 2013. These letters represent an invaluable, and underused, source for analysing the physical, social and political development of urban landscapes. Land agents, from diverse social and professional backgrounds, are demonstrated to play an instrumental role in the management and development of urban estates, to a far greater extent than the often-disinterested landowners. Yet the professionalisation of the agent’s role is shown to be a staccato affair with old systems of patronage often continuing. Three chronological chapters chart the physical growth of Longton and Walsall throughout the nineteenth century, demonstrating the influence and autonomy of agents over all aspects of urban developments. This analysis is supplemented by two thematic chapters exploring the estates’ impact on the social development of the towns. The provision or restriction of recreation spaces and attempts to shape political developments in the formative decades following the Great Reform Act, demonstrate sometimes unwelcomed attempts at continued social control in the new urban environment. Agents forged the link, or often the buffer, between the landowner and his tenants. They addressed their employees’ conflicting desires for the maintenance of paternalism, and for profit maximisation, and directed the transition from a rural to urban society.

Drawing on a small-scale qualitative study, this thesis examines family relations in post-colonial Seychelles. The Seychelles is considered a post-colonial society because it used to be a colony. The aim of this qualitative research, using an interpretive epistemology, is to explore family responsibilities, obligations, and commitment in the Seychelles, and how this varies for different generations and genders. Semi-structured interviews and vignettes were used to gather data from forty participants who consented to take part in the research. The analysis of the data revealed that there are different types of family structures and they are in flux. Post-colonial societies have certain common characteristics and the analysis of the data revealed that the racial, power and gender characteristics common to such societies can be found in the Seychellois Creole family. The analysis revealed that gender is more important than the other characteristics which post-colonial writers have written about and that several family practices are considered as gendered practices. This include the care of the elderly. The analysis also revealed that there are certain family responsibilities that are considered more important than others which include the care of children, the sick and the elderly, and helping each other. The findings showed that obligations within family relationships are not necessarily negotiated – there is more of an expectation. The findings also revealed that commitment is developed through the idea of reciprocity and commitment is then displayed through the support that exists between family members and through intergenerational solidarity – where care of the elderly is provided, usually by the adult daughter. This thesis contributes to discourses about family life, obligations, duties, commitment, generation, racism, gender, care, and post-colonialism. In its novelty, it brings new knowledge to family relationships on small post-colonial island states and acts as an impetus for future sociological research.

By introducing psychological theories into entrepreneurship research field, this thesis aims to investigate the relationship between self-employment and workplace wellbeing. The thesis consists of three empirical studies, which set out to answer the followingquestions: 1) What are the differences of workplace wellbeing between the self-employed and employees? 2) What factors contribute to workplace wellbeing in both direct and indirect ways? 3) What is the relationship between negative workplace wellbeing and positive wellbeing, 4) How does coping mechanism reduce negative workplace wellbeing and enhance positive wellbeing? Moreover, this thesis also examines the specific issues of self-employment, such as workplace wellbeing of the self-employed under the poverty line and the differences between the self-employed with hiring employees and the self-employed without hiring any employee. This quantitative and comparative thesis has employed the matching approach to overcome selection bias and combined with other statistical methods such as CFA, SEM and moderating hierarchy regression to test the conceptual models empirically. The data used for this research is sourced from the Understanding Society, the largest household panel data in the UK. This thesis found that the self-employed experience higher positive workplace wellbeing than employees. The self-employed with hiring employees experience a significantly higher level of negative workplace wellbeing than employees. However, the self-employed without hiring any employee experience significant lower negative workplace wellbeing. Moreover, this thesis found that job demand and job control contribute to negative workplace wellbeing directly, and the relationship can be partly moderated by social support. In addition, the thesis has tested the relationship between the positive workplace wellbeing and negative workplace wellbeing, which has been verified as negative correlations. Lastly, the results showed self-efficacy is an effective coping factor to reduce negative wellbeing and enhance positive wellbeing.

The proliferation of mobile technologies in the general population offers new opportunities for survey research, but also introduces new sources of error to the data collection process. This thesis studies two potential sources of error in mobile survey data collection: measurement error and nonresponse. Chapter 1 examines how the diagonal screen size of a mobile device affects measurement error. Using data from a non-mobile-optimised web survey, I compare data quality between screen size groups. Results suggest that data quality mainly differs between small smartphones with a screen size of below 4.0 inches and larger mobile devices. Respondents using small smartphones are more likely to break off during the survey, to provide shorter answers to open-ended questions, and to select fewer items in check-all-that-apply questions than respondents using devices with larger screens. Due to the portability of mobile devices, mobile web respondents are more likely to be in distracting environments where other people are present. Chapter 2 explores how distractions during web survey completion influence measurement error. I conducted a laboratory experiment where participants were randomly assigned to devices (PC or tablet) and to one of three distraction conditions (presence of other people who have a loud conversation, presence of music, or no distraction). Although respondents felt more distracted in the two distraction conditions, I did not find significant effects of distraction on data quality. Chapter 3 investigates correlates of nonresponse to data collection using mobile technologies. We asked members of a probability household panel about their willingness to participate in various data collection tasks on their mobile device. We find that willingness varies considerably by the type of activity involved, to some extent by device, and by respondent: those who report higher security concerns and who use their device less intensively are less willing to participate in mobile data collection.

This thesis investigates the sociomaterial practice of marketing at St Angela’s hospice in England and sets out how marketing practice plays a fundamental part in the influencing, organising and constructing End of Life Care (EOLC). Specifically, it examines how organisation-level marketing practices are informed by, and in turn inform, broader principles of marketisation. Drawing on the theoretical concept of performativity in relation to markets and marketing, this thesis advances an understanding of how the actions of a newly formed hospice marketing team frame and shape resulting in a particular form of care for the terminally ill. Key findings point to a constitutive role of marketing practice for processes of marketisation in an area of society where multiple issues and concerns exist. Revealing the consequences arising from the performative struggles to achieve and legitimise marketing practice this study shows the specific role of a marketing team in an organisation. Conceptualising the sociomaterial productive practice of marketing as ‘difficult’ but ‘purposeful’ through showing the effects and consequences of this practice, both in a hospice and in EOLC, this thesis makes an important contribution to the understanding of what marketing practice can accomplish. Undertaken as a three-month ethnography, exposing the challenges of carrying out research in an organisational setting to examine the ‘doing’ of marketing practice in which the central focus both of the organisation and the sector is, death and dying, this study addresses the paucity of studies carried out in the difficult context of a hospice. By revealing the consequences of the work of a non-clinical team this study broadens the consideration of who and what influences EOLC. Accordingly, this thesis contributes to both the study of marketing practice and Market Studies through detailing the productive workings of one functional area of a hospice. Giving important insight for hospice stakeholders through the focus within the thesis of who and what shapes EOLC this study is relevant for providers of EOLC and all concerned more widely with the care of the terminally ill because this thesis proposes how a form of care, which for most is inaccessible, as well as way for those at the end of their lives to behave, to ‘die well’, has come about.