Many developing countries in the 1950s, and 1960s adopted a growth centred strategy which was a centralised approach to development with the main focus on efficiency. But this strategy failed to improve the socio-economic situation of the majority of their rural population because it ignored the needs of the urban and rural economy i.e. agriculture, especially in commodities-based export countries. From 1970s onwards, the emphasis has shifted towards more a decentralised approach to development with a rural development bias. But the experience of different countries shows that with such a strategy the objective of equity is attained at the cost of efficiency and national growth. In both the centralised and decentralised approaches, the small towns and intermediate cities remain neglected. The researchers and planners have argued that in countries with an unbalanced settlement hierarchy, especially in the case of urban primacy, equity and efficiency could be achieved by promoting the development of smaller settlements which would integrate the entire urban hierarchy. To get the context for the empirical study, a literature review is undertaken. This examines the theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of development and urbanisation in developing countries. Then, the urbanisation process in Iran is discussed in detail, with particular reference being placed upon the socio-economic transition in the pre and post-Revolutionary era. The present research investigates the impact of development policies on urbanisation in Iran in general and at the provincial level in particular. The centralised development policy of the pre-Revolutionary period created severe regional disparities despite the availability of great wealth (oil) and undermined the peasant economy of the mass rural population. The most conspicuous consequence of this policy was rural-urban migration and rapid growth of urbanisation. This study investigates the impact and effect of such policy in an area where the dependency on agriculture is very high. The post- Revolutionaiy development policies tend to be decentralised and shown a greater concern with agriculture. Thus the research aims to evaluate the effect of a new decentralised policy on rural and urban development at the regional level in Mazandaran province. By closer study of Amol city, the research investigates the impact of rural prosperity on an intermediate city and its hinterland. The research has shown that although the new sectoral development (agriculture) decreased the overall economic gap between rural and urban areas, it has failed to prevent migration and the rapid urban expansion of small cities such as Amol.

The aim of this study is to examine the idea and practice of human rights in the particular context of India, with reference to a diverse set of organizations that emerged as a response to rights abuse, perpetrated both by state agencies and by dominant sections of the society. This work examines thirteen such organizations: ten of which are indigenous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), two are governmental organizations, and one is an intentional NGO, namely Amnesty International. The development of the idea of human rights in India is examined with reference to the major religious traditions, and the contributions of some national leaders (Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar). It is argued that the demand for civil and political rights, first raised by the Western educated elite, grew as a response to changes in the political system during the British rule, and was incorporated in the nationalist ideology, championed by the Congress party. The first human rights organization, established in 1936, became a model for various organizations that were formed in the post-independent period. Political developments towards the end of the 1960s and early 1970s gave rise to a set of organizations with limited agendas. After the period of national Emergency (June 1975-March 1977), as the organizations reconstituted themselves, they also diversified and expanded their agendas. The successful role of Amnesty International in highlighting rights abuse in India is described. This is contrasted with its Indian section, which has been beset by organizational problems. The circumstances in which the Indian organizations were formed, the way they have developed and how they function is examined.

Utilising original empirical research as a mode of contributing to theoretical understanding in the sociology of youth, the thesis posits that young people anticipate transitions with a possible future adult self in mind and such orientation mediates their present decisions around anticipated transitions. Whilst there is a subjective emphasis by young people on individual negotiation and control in the construction of their possible adult selves, it is nonetheless demonstrated that traditional determinants of social reproduction such as class of origin, family background, place of residence and gender remain influential. The research thus finds utility in the concept of structured possible selves. Through identifying the silient issues young people in four rural areas face in becoming an adult it is demonstrated that whilst there is some evidence of a biographical approach to the life-course, with some rural young people actively negotiating their way in a positive manner, others are acting through a paucity of alternatives. Living in a rural area adds further complexity to transitional decision-making as well as engagement in youth cultural behaviours hence prognosis of a disembedding of place and a decline in community and family ties is premature. A distinct aspect to living in a rural area is that more often than not, young people cannot make a post-compulsory educational choice without making other choices mainly because of limited employment opportunities and the absence of post-secondary educational institutions in rural areas. Decisions of migration are accompanied by financial decisions and also the personal/social decision to leave a community and social network that they are familiar with and often dependent upon. The research suggests that there are not only some unique issues for rural young people as they become adults, but also that the findings point to rural differentiation in their experience.

Situated at the intersection of economic restructuring and crime control, this thesis explores the practices and policies of economic regeneration, community safety and policing in the city of Glasgow. In particular old-industrial cities and regions have felt the pressures to ‘revitalise’ and regenerate their failing economic base, as well as to change the modalities of governance, and subsequently embarked upon local economic development and attracting growth industries. Examining the interest in quality-of-life offences within such regeneration agendas, my thesis explores the importance of crime control, policing and community safety in a series of empirical ‘cuts’ through the subject, starting with wider issues of crime control, imagineering and city centre upgrading. Practices of regulating city spaces are carried out in distinctive fields of community safety policies, the policing of homeless people and street prostitutes, and also include the regulating of businesses in the wake of economic regeneration. Furthermore, a city centre warden project, the City Centre Representatives, is studied in detail in relation to their work remit, encompassing a tourist service as well as a range of ordering tasks in the newly regenerated spaces of the city centre. Explicitly framing these substantive debates in a theoretical context, the first part of the thesis engages in questions of social ontology, working towards a research perspective of a reworked critical Marxism. Such critical Marxism is arrived at by discussion of current approaches, both in policy and academy, of how to account for processes of economic restructuring and crime control in late-capitalist societies. While maintaining concepts of a(n), although fragmented, social totality, held together in dialectical processes, social praxis as mediation between social totality and agency becomes the central hinge for researching such ontology. As embodied, routine and partially reflected upon social practices that centre on people’s work practices, such social praxis is subsequently spatialised by drawing on Lefèbvre’s work on the production of social space and employed in a detailed empirical study. In so doing, this thesis puts forwards a proposal of how a reworked critical Marxism can fruitfully engage with current theoretical debates within geography and he social sciences more widely without neglecting the importance of in-depth empirical research to develop and strengthen any theoretical engagement.

The first part of this thesis is concerned with the exegesis of Bourdieu's theory and the second part with critical investigations of his cultural analysis. In the interpretative analysis, I shall show that it is only through an understanding of his work as a whole that it is possible to grasp his now famous work on cultural reception. In our societies, the certified knowledge of professors and the consecrated representations of Tate Gallery artists serve to underpin the world through convincing the dominated of the intellectual poverty of their challenges. Moreover, I shall show that there is a stimulating and rich tension in Bourdieu's sociology, particularly in his explorations of how economic interests are culturally legitimated. Bourdieu is a classic historical materialist, yet one who denies some of the abstractions of sate orthodoxies. This means that - in the interests of truth - his theory forces the squabbling protagonists of different traditions to live together. Bourdieu has an impressive reassessment of the logic of a minortty elite culture in which art is hijacked to fit purposes often remote from the internal meanings of the texts themselves. In the second part of the thesis, it is argued that Bourdieu's sociology of culture has not entirely extricated itself from these same ideological tentacles. Firstly, in the case of Impressionism he overemphasises its character as a rupture in techniques and has not been sufficiently attuned to its dependence on popular subjects and popular sources. Secondly in the case of middlebrow and popular literature, it is suggested that he has failed to describe adequately the nature of the popular cultural field and has also neglected the character of the cultural marginalisation of women. Finally, a study of literary consumption in Scotland challenges Bourdieu's conclusions at some points. By considering these specific substantive areas, I hope to stimulate a Bourdieusian approach.

This dissertation contributes to a Sociology of Happiness by examining the social context of subjective well-being. It follows in Emile Durkheim’s footsteps, whose study Le Suicide initially proposed that being connected is beneficial for human beings. The empirical evidence on the relationship between social capital and subjective well-being has indeed grown considerably over the last years. However, the academic literature has a major shortcoming, as studies usually assume the importance of social capital for subjective well-being to be exactly the same between individuals. Interestingly, though, sociological theory gives reasons to expect the association between the two concepts to vary between societal subgroups based on the idea that people have different roles and find themselves in different circumstances. Hence, this thesis responds to a need to examine a new level of complexity and fills a research gap by investigating how social capital is correlated in different ways with life satisfaction by gender, age, parental status, and marital status. OLS and ordered logit regression analyses are conducted in order to systematically examine slope heterogeneity, using data from the European Social Survey for the UK. It turns out that the social context of well-being varies considerably between the subgroups studied here. For example, while among childless women volunteering is positively and very strongly associated with subjective wellbeing, the relationship is slightly negative for mothers. Consequently, this dissertation adds significant value to the happiness literature by looking beyond population means when studying the relationship between certain explanatory variables and a well-being response variable. Moreover, the thesis contributes to a much-needed theory building in research on subjective well-being by resorting to sociological theories. Important implications for current policy issues around well-being arise from the study, and it paves the way for a new wave of research which goes beyond a unitary ‘happiness formula’.

This thesis examines the mobilisation practices of one of the largest social movement organisations to have emerged in post-apartheid South Africa, the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF). Making a contribution to the growing field of scholarship on the global justice movement, this thesis presents an analysis of the micro-levels of mobilisation in order to provide a deeper understanding of the everyday forms of resistance articulated and enacted by the APF and its affiliated community-based organisations. Locating itself within the political process paradigm as developed by Doug McAdam (1982, 1996), Sidney Tarrow (1988, 1994, 1998) and Charles Tilly (1978, 2008), the study of micro-processes of mobilisation is advanced through an analysis of the interaction between mobilising structures, political opportunities and framing, in order to tease out the internal political, strategic and organisational differences within the APF. I propose that the APF and its affiliates should be conceptualised as a ‘social movement community’, arguing that such a conceptualisation places a critical focus on the significance of political scale, the importance of space and place as well as a consideration of the political, social and cultural aspects of collective action. By combining perspectives from social movement theory with a Gramscian perspective on resistance and counter-hegemony, this thesis presents an empirically and theoretically grounded analysis of the conditions which both facilitate and constrain the emergence and practice of transformative collective action. With a close focus upon the internal practices of mobilisation, the analysis presented contributes to a flourishing field of scholarship which analyses social movements as alternative public spaces in which individuals contest dominant practices of citizenship and democracy and forge potentially counter-hegemonic relations. Utilising James Holston’s (1998, 2008, 2009) concept of ‘insurgent citizenship’ this thesis examines the paradoxes of the post-apartheid democratic settlement, where the constitutional rights which have been extended to all sections of the polity have been undermined by neoliberal policies which have resulted in the privatisation of basic services and reshaped relations between the citizen and the state. Furthermore, as I will demonstrate, the quality and experience of democracy post-apartheid has also been undermined by increasing violence and inefficiencies within the justice system. This thesis argues that social movements provide important spaces for the alternative practice of citizenship and democracy in which socio-economically marginalised groups seek not only to be accommodated within the polity but also challenge the economic, political and social foundations upon which the polity is built. However, while social movements may offer progressive challenges to hegemonic relations through the course of collective action it is also possible that some forms of inequalities will become further entrenched. Thus, the analysis which follows offers a critical account of the insurgent citizenship practices of the APF which considers how some forms of inequalities, particularly in relation to gender, may become entrenched through the processes of mobilisation.

The study at hand explores Greek problematic drug users’ perceptions of the progression of their drug using careers and family responses towards drug affected children in Greece. The methodology of the study entailed the use of semi-structured in depth-interviews. In total, 40 interviews with problematic drug users (PDUs) were conducted as well as 8 interviews with parents of PDUs. Participating drug users were asked to reflect on all stages of their problematic drug using careers, from initial contact with drugs to entering treatment facilities where they were contacted. Furthermore, they were asked to reflect on the role their families played in influencing the progression of those careers and on the impact they felt their drug use had on their families. Parents’ accounts were also collected to provide a fuller picture of the issues in question. The results of the study put forth the vital role of self perception, whether this derives from sense of self through practice or participation in social groups, in relation to drug use onset and escalation. It is suggested that drug use may resemble a learning curve where drug using peers are ascribed the role of ‘aids’. The perception of one’s use as problematic was for the most part related to heroin infringing upon all life domains. Entering treatment was found to be sometimes unrelated to the decision to quit drug use. When the two were synonymous, reported reasons behind such decisions centred on issues of self perception, sense of obligation towards the family and a desire to return to pre-drug use life styles and selves. Reported factors either promoting or hindering change are also discussed. The hugely influential role of the Greek family in the progression of problematic drug using careers is a further proposal made by the current study. The experience of living with addiction in the family home and the reported impact on families is also presented. The specific cultural context of Greece was also shown to be shaping family reactions as well as drug using participants’ choices of course of action and perception of self. The overall suggestion based on the findings of the study is that the experiences of both Greek problematic drug users and Greek families of drug affected relatives form a ‘variform universal’. The conveyed picture is similar to that portrayed in the global literature, albeit coloured by the specific cultural context within which these experiences were lived through.

We present a family of simulation models of agents with energy from social interactions. We take the concept of “energy” from social network analysts Cross & Parker, from Collins’s micro-sociology of interaction rituals, and from the social psychologists Ryan & Deci’s studies on intrinsic motivation. We use simulation models as “tools for thinking” about what energy is, and how it relates to the take up of ideas, the formation of cultural groups and the performance of work. Our models also provide insight into phenomena from studies of “communities of practice”, social capital and computer models of networks. Baker & Quinn have also developed simulations of agents with energy, and so we offer a critique of those. We develop our models as extensions of the Axelrod Cultural Model. Our family of energy models include those that ascribe “emotional energy” variously to individual agents, to agents’ individual attributes, and to agents’ memories of interactions rituals. Agents obtain energy payoffs from interactions based variously on their sense of autonomy, belongingness and competence. We compare the behaviour of each model and choice of payoff function through experiments to test claims derived from Cross & Parker: namely that “energisers” cause greater take up of their ideas, cause larger cultural groups to form around them, and raise the problem-solving performance of the agent population. We demonstrate this first claim for several model scenarios, but fail to find scenarios where the second two hold. We then conduct experiments to relate the capabilities of energisers to tasks of: disseminating ideas to otherwise homogeneous groups, and; spanning boundaries across cultural divides between groups. In all experiments we find two factors play critical roles in determining the diffusion and homogenisation of culture: the decay of energy charges on memories, and; the initial number of cultural traits in the population.

This study offers a definition, description, analytical theorisation and critical discussion concerning the relationship between internal and external conversation. 'Internal conversation' refers to the inner dialogues that individuals have with themselves· about themselves and the social environment, while 'external conversation' refers to those parts of internal conversation that the individual shares with others. The central question of this research, concerning the relationship between internal and external conversation, derives from a common observation which remains unanswered: why do people produce different external conversations or different actions or responses when they face similar social situations? In other words, why do people react in different ways to analogous stimuli or circumstances? The individual constantly interacts in a specific way with both her external environment and herself; this process links the inner and outer cosmos of each person. This relationship is formed according to specific phases and operations, and it constitutes an 'agential filter' comprised of certain stages that enable the individual to relate her internal and external conversations. The individual uses a specific process in order to decide which part of her internal conversation she will externalise. This process is defined as 'mediation' and operates differently for each individual. It does, however, have a common aim: the main objective of mediation is to achieve a subjectivelydefined degree of 'inner balance' between her inner and external world which is satisfactory to her.