This thesis provides the first extensive sociological analysis of the genetics and life assurance debate in the UK. It uses data from original qualitative interviews, as well as various policy documents and reports, to investigate the likely implications of genetic information for life assurance provision, reveal the narrative strategies used by key stakeholders as they account for their concerns on the issue, and evaluate the efficacy of the policy and regulatory framework. It also attempts to evaluate the suitability of the citizens’ jury model as an alternative to existing decision-making procedures. The thesis begins by revealing the most likely social, commercial, legal, and ethical implications of allowing insurers to access new kinds of genetic information. A history of insurance, risk and probability is used as a starting point to challenge many of the pervasive fears and anxieties. This part of the thesis critically analyses the social and philosophical basis of such contested notions as ’discrimination’, 'social exclusion’, 'genetic information', and ‘social justice’, and begins to reveal some of the key strategies of stakeholders in the debate. The thesis then analyses stakeholder accounts of their concerns, and begins to reveal the ways in which they draw on a broad narrative repertoire to give their beliefs a degree of moral legitimacy/coherency. The impact this may have on the quality of debate is also investigated. Following from the analysis of stakeholder accounts, the thesis proceeds to investigate the nature of the policymaking and regulatory framework. Through a sociological analysis of the work of various advisory committees, which led to the implementation of a moratorium on insurers' use of genetic information, the thesis investigates how fair and equitable the overall political process has been, particularly in terms of the treatment of stakeholder evidence. It also assesses the role of the public and media in shaping the political response to this issue. The thesis concludes by assessing the citizens’ jury as suitable procedures for resolving the conflicts around genetic information and life assurance. Both the potential advantages and persistent problems with the model are critically evaluated.

This research focuses on improving stock tweet sentiment classification accuracy with the addition of the linguistic features of stock tweets. Stock prediction based on social media data has been popular in recent years, but none of the previous studies have provided a comprehensive understanding of the linguistic features of stock tweets. Hence, applying a simple statistical model to classifying the sentiment of stock tweets has reached a bottleneck. Thus, after analysing the linguistic features of stock tweets, this research used these features to train four machine learning classifiers. Each of them showed an improvement, and the best one achieved a 9.7% improvement compared to the baseline model. The main contributions of this research are fivefold: (a) it provides an in-­depth linguistic analysis of stock tweets; (b) it gives a clear and comprehensive definition of stock tweets; (c) it provides a simple but effective way to automatically identify stock tweets; (d) it provides a simple but effective method of generating a localised sentiment keyword list; and (e) it demonstrates a significant improvement of stock tweet sentiment classification accuracy.

The financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent economic collapse has helped bring scholarly attention on a sociological dimension of financial markets (Mackenzie 2009, Stark 2009, Knorr Cetina and Preda 2012). Despite recent research advancements in this area, however, the understanding of how financial markets are organised and reproduced remains limited. In particular, there is very little about the individual actors in the markets, how they think and act, and how they make sense of social context or how their experience is within it. This thesis contributes to addressing these questions by focusing on how investment bankers construct their professional identities and in particular, how did this process look like during the financial crisis of 2008. Three main areas are investigated: (i) what resources investment bankers draw on to construct their professional identities, (ii) what motivates them to do so, and (iii) how the process has been demonstrated through bankers’ lived experiences of the crash. To this end, the research integrates literature from the field of sociology of financial markets and identity. I argue that looking at professional identity construction through the lens of Honneth’s (1995) theory of struggle for recognition allows for a better understanding of the political nature of the intersubjective relationships in markets, alongside some of the pathologies that may develop in the periods of enhanced uncertainty. Methodologically, I conceptualise identities as narratives, in particular drawing on Ricoeur’s ( 1988) work on narrative identity. The analysis rests on the investment bankers’ accounts of their experiences of the crisis. By exploring how they have constructed their subjective understandings of reality and how they incorporated these into their professional identity narratives, the thesis advances the understanding of markets as political arenas of values, emotions and power games. I explore a number of frames the bankers used in order to position their identities within the workplace; including smartness, sacrifice, ambivalent status of money and temporality. I demonstrate that identity construction is inherently political and based on a fragile structure of systemic trust and interpersonal trust relationships. Threatened by the crisis, the bankers responded by creating liminal spaces in an attempt to re-align the identity narratives. The findings bear theoretical implications. Firstly , I argue that trust is a missing component in the theory of recognition when it deals with social cooperation. Secondly, I argue that as recognition normatively regulates social interactions in markets, actors are first and foremost power maximisers. I show that influencing expectations becomes, therefore, a central task for actors in the markets, leading to the development of reified identities. As a result, the emergent liminal spaces are shown to be arenas of the inherent struggle for recognition.