This thesis is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the self-understanding of thirty sociologists in England and their relationship with the discipline. It investigates sociologists’ aspirations and how they unfold and are compromised in sociological practice. Based on the work of Alvin Gouldner, the thesis both examines the changing shape of sociology as a body of knowledge and institution as well as sociologists’ changing relationships with their theories and practices. At the core of this study is the recognition of a close intertwining of our ontological states, epistemological outlooks and actual practices as sociologists. The three-part analysis of the empirical research reflects a Gouldnerian understanding of sociology as the inextricable link between theory and practice. In ‘Part I: The Calling of Sociology – Sociologists’ Claims and Practices’ I analyse sociologists’ processes of sociological becoming and what they consider to be the key features of the discipline – synthesis, the social and critique. These key features and my respondents’ aspirations are the point of departure against which the realities of their sociological practice are measured in ‘Part II: Sociological Practice – Realities and Tensions’. Analysing social theory as a sociological practice, I illustrate how the social as an analytical key category in sociology becomes frequently compromised. Furthermore, Part II encompasses an analysis of the RAE in its overemphasis on research and publications at the expense of teaching, and shows how this fractures sociologists’ initial disciplinary aspirations. Thereafter I demonstrate sociologists’ dilemmas in practising sociology in a synthetic way, and how they face the disciplining nature of the discipline within the current political economies of research and publishing. This is followed by a discussion of how sociologists’ claims of contributing to critique and public discourse are practised and compromised. Against the background of the analysis in Part II, the question of what is left of sociologists’ aspirations and the discipline’s aims in being critical, analysing the social and being a synthetic discipline, is raised. Finally, in ‘Part III: Living Sociology’, I revisit my respondents’ initial aspirations in the light of their practices and analyse how they live and practise sociology’s key moments – critique, synthesis and the social. The last part of the analysis draws an outline of how sociology can be practised against current constraints, living the synthetic and critical character of the discipline in the 21st century.

This thesis argues that it is important to distinguish between two different phenomena in cyberpolitical spaces: First of all, between ethnic or religious groups fighting over in cyberspace, as they do in real life (Ethnoreligious cyberconflict) and second, between a social movement and its antagonistic institution (Sociopolitical cyberconflict). These different kinds of cyberconflict can be explained in the context of international conflict analysis for ethnoreligious cyberconflict and social movement theory for sociopolitical cyberconflict, while keeping in mind that this takes place in a media environment by using media theory. By combining elements of these approaches and justifying the link to cyberconflict, it is possible to use them as a theoretical light to look at the environment of Cyberconflict (CC) and analysis of incidents of CC. Consequently, this work looks at the leading groups using the internet either as weapon or a resource against governments, while also looking at networks, international organisations and new social movements. Searching for a satisfactory theoretical framework, I propose the following parameters to be looked at while analysing cyberconflicts: 1. Environment of Conflict and Conflict Mapping (real and virtual). The world system generates an arborescent apparatus, which is haunted by lines of flight, emerging through underground networks connected horizontally and lacking a hierarchic centre (Deleuze and Guattari). The structure of the internet is ideal for network groups, (a global network with no central authority) has offered another experience of governance (no governance), time and space (compression), ideology (freedom of information and access to it), identity (multiplicity) and fundamentally an opposition to surveillance and control, boundaries and apparatuses. 2. Sociopolitical Cyberconflicts: The impact of ICTs on: a. Mobilising structures (network style of movements using the internet, participation, recruitment, tactics, goals), b. Framing Processes (issues, strategy, identity, the effect of the internet on these processes), c. Political opportunity structure (the internet as a component of this structure), d. hacktivism. 3. Ethnoreligious Cyberconflicts: a. Ethnic/religious affiliation, chauvinism, national identity, b. Discourses of inclusion and exclusion, c. Information warfare, the use of the internet as a weapon, propaganda and mobilisational resource d. Conflict resolution depends on legal, organisational framework, number of parties issues, distribution of power, values and beliefs. 4. The internet as a medium: a. Analysing discourses (representations of the world, constructions of social identities and social relations), b. Control of information, level of censorship, alternative sources, c. Wolsfeld: Political contest model among antagonists: the ability to initiate and control events, dominate political discourse, mobilise supporters, d. Media effects on policy (strategic, tactical, and representational).

For many young people, social networks are an essential part of their student experience. Using a Foucauldian perspective, this qualitative study explores the networked experiences of disabled students to examine how dis/ability difference is ascribed and negotiated within social networks. Data comprises 34 internet-enabled interviews with 18 participants from three English universities. Accessible field methods recognise participant preferences and circumstances. Data is analysed using discourse analysis, with an attention to context framed by activity theory. Disabled students’ networked experiences are found to be complex and diverse. For a proportion, the network shifts the boundaries of disability, creating non-disabled subjectivities. For these students, the network represents the opportunity to mobilise new ways of being, building social capital and mitigating impairment. Other participants experience the network as punitive and disabling. Disability is socio-technically ascribed by the social networking site and the networked public. Each inducts norms that constitute disability as a visible, deviant and deficit identity. In the highly normative conditions of the network, where every action is open to scrutiny, impairment is subjected to an unequal gaze that produces disabled subjectivities. For some students with unseen impairments, a social experience of disability is inducted for the first time. As a result, students deploy diverse strategies to retain control and resist deviant status. Self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-advocacy are evoked, each involving numerous social, cognitive and technological tactics for self-determination, including disconnection. I conclude that networks function both as Technologies of the Self and as Technologies of Power. For some disabled students, the network supports ‘normal’ status. For others, it must be resisted as a form of social domination. Importantly, in each instance, the network propels students towards disciplinary techniques that mask diversity, rendering disability and the possibility of disability invisible. Consequently, disability is both produced and suppressed by the network.

Tourism like ‘nation’ is a ‘cultural’ concept. In many cases tourism has played a role in the expression of the ‘nation’ and helps solidify the common heritage, cultural kinship, a sense of common identity and belonging. In Scotland, the imagery formed by tourism has helped in the identification of the Scottish nation. This thesis is concerned with the interaction of tourism with the Scottish nation and examines how persistently the touristic heritage of Scotland represents its cultural identity, national image and distinctive characteristics. The main quest was to discover if tourism in Scotland is an expression of nationalism. This was investigated at tourism attractions at three levels - national, regional and personal - with particular reference to the central belt and the southwest region of Scotland. Qualitative research methodology was applied and data were collected through a variety of sources that included a questionnaire survey, interviews, participant observation, field observation and notes, and other unobtrusive and library-based sources. The evidence from this study shows that tourism plays a dominant and meaningful role in the manifestation of Scottish culture and national identity. The findings of this study suggested that the use of images and icons of Scottish cultural heritage in tourism strongly promotes and advances Scottish cultural distinctiveness and identity at all the three levels. At the national level, the presentation of Scottish cultural heritage to tourists in Edinburgh strongly resonates with the ideals of nationalists. At the regional level, the images of Robert the Bruce and Robert Burns in the southwest region in tourism are strong markers of Scottish nationhood. At the personal level, the Scottish heritage of ancestry for genealogical tourists is a strong means to reflect on their identity and cultural roots: for them, touring Scotland is one of the ways to express their ‘national’ feeling and a means to articulate their ‘homeland’ nationalism. These findings reiterated that the touristic heritage of Scotland has elements that closely correspond with the identity of the Scottish nation. Being dominated by heritage attractions, tourism in Scotland is a narrative of its past and the present, through which it mediates the nation, and advances its national sense through recreation, authentication and touristification of its cultural heritage. This study helps us gain a deeper insight into the coherency between the idea of tourism, history, heritage, authenticity, a sense of identity and cultural roots: that can be helpful in understanding the nation from the perspective of tourism. The knowledge from this study can be helpful to the agencies involved in the development and management of tourism and cultural heritage of Scotland.

This study examines the social conditions for the nature and development of theatrical dance as a historically constructed field. The first part consists of a sociologically informed narrative of the making of dance from its initiation as a courtly practice (court ballet) to its contemporary form (ballet and modern dance), with an emphasis on the social, political and aesthetic contexts in which it was shaped. This narrative outlines the logic of symbolic negotiation, focusing specifically on conflicts over the content, bodily forms and techniques of dance, which take place in different spaces and modes of production. These symbolic negotiations are conceived as reconfigurations of social and political struggles but they are of course expressed through the practices of specific individuals within the field. This historical analysis sets the scene for an examination of the particular logic or rules that govern dance production in contemporary Britain and Greece. Although ballet in Greece has been relatively dependent on the development of the from in Britain, the two countries are approached as separate cases. The experience of thirty working dancers and choreographers (twelve in Greece and eighteen in the UK) is charted within very divergent conditions, namely training and performing as institutionalized in each country. These dancers and choreographers shape their bodies and tailor their practices in relation to ideal types of performers. They form highly diverse dance styles, especially given their interest in differentiating their own practice from current dance forms. Such styles stand in competition to each other, resulting in conflicting definitions of dance – and of course – dancing experiences. These particular meanings of dancing and dance making are highlighted by artists’ various trajectories within the fields or subfields. The interviews reveal the interdependency of the British and Greek systems of dance production. As will be shown, the individual dancers’ and choreographers’ trajectories depend on their possession of capitals (economic, social, cultural). It is claimed that the “talented dancing body” in each society is shaped with reference to the particular aesthetic and technical components promoted by the different dance styles.

Since the early 1990s, political rhetoric concerning the victim’s role in the criminal justice process has shifted. The formation of Witness Care Units was the cornerstone of the government’s new strategy to provide additional support to victims and witnesses during their journey through the criminal justice system (CJS). From the outset, the Units were envisioned as being ‘multi-agency’: that is, representatives from the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) were obliged to become involved in victim work, and through such co-operation it was envisaged that victims and witnesses would be better informed, protected and supported. Such measures defined the Witness Care Units in a formal, procedural sense: at the same time, the Units would become arenas relating to the care of victims and witnesses. Therefore, a dispassionate description of a unit – the witness care officers, and their shared values that manifested themselves in the practices of the Witness Care Unit – might expose an attitude towards witness care that differed from that embodied within the national strategy. Through a detailed ethnographic study of the lived experiences of the practitioners of a Witness Care Unit, this thesis contributes to learning by using new data to examine some of the enduring challenges faced by them as they responded to the changing socio-political context. The study attempts to show that practitioners had differing role perceptions, and three ideal-types of witness care officer (humanitarian, performance-led and disaffected) were derived from the analysis which were a convenient way of making sense of this phenomenon. The competing demands of various organisational, personal, and societal factors was just one example of the contradiction between the ‘reality’ and the government’s declared vision for Witness Care Units. These findings corroborate the commonly held assumption amongst academics that the CJS is plagued by ambiguity (for example, Rock, 2004). Despite the use of the term ‘care’ in the implementation of government policy, the thesis highlights that the primary goal of Witness Care Units was to meet the government’s imperative to get more offenders brought to justice. Thus, government language purporting to put victims at the heart of the system was more likely to give victims the impression that they would have a more significant participatory role than they actually were being given.

This thesis seeks to explore the cultural tendencies of contemporary anti-capitalism by relating such tendencies to the wider cultural context. It is argued that contemporary anti-capitalist movements such as the Occupy movement are marked by a self-emancipatory ethos that emerges as an inherent feature of a global society pervaded by Western­ bourgeois cultural tendencies. It is argued that the self-emancipatory ethos is constituted by an essential contradiction, simultaneously bringing out being-over desires (or desires for power over humanity and nature) and being-with desires, (or desires for horizontal connections or associations with humanity and nature). Employing a post-structuralist perspective and insisting on the improbability of cultural transcendence, the thesis suggests that contemporary anti-capitalist movements tend to radicalise, rather than absolutely oppose, Western-bourgeois cultural tendencies, and explores how radical groups feed radical undercurrents into the liberal-democratic mainstream to contribute to the development of Western society. In developing the concept of self-emancipatory contradiction, the thesis seeks to radicalise the philosophical perspective employed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. It traces these authors' philosophical perspective back to the philosophy of desire developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the late 1960s and early 1970s, linking this philosophy to the political and social upheavals that developed from the revolt of May 1968 in France. While insisting that Deleuze and Guattari helped usher in a postmodern break in the 1960s, the thesis seeks to place this break within the history of self-emancipatory struggle in the West, exploring how the break exacerbated the self-emancipatory contradiction to feed into the development of neoliberal culture from the late 1970s onwards. In placing the postmodern break in its cultural context, the thesis explores the origins and early development of the Western-bourgeois ethos of self-emancipation, focusing on early liberalist philosophy and key democratising political upheavals in Western history.

The central contention of this thesis, and its original contribution to the subject area, is that the recent development of civilian intelligence analysis in Scottish policing presents a challenge to an otherwise hegemonic ‘cop culture’ in police intelligence work. In advancing this argument this thesis develops the existing literature by recognising that academic research to date on ‘police culture’ has focused almost exclusively on the cultures of sworn police officers, and particularly those ‘cops’ engaged in ‘frontline’ policing. Civilian police staff groups have been excluded from existing cultural accounts, despite their long-established position in many police forces, particularly those in Scotland. Drawing upon five years of qualitative sociological fieldwork, and taking inspiration from the theory and research of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis highlights how civilian intelligence analysts – as office-based, young, predominantly female and embodying a new ‘academic’ knowledge that is divorced from experience – have become increasingly essential to the effective functioning of intelligence-led policing. The integration of civilian intelligence analysis into police intelligence work in Scotland, however, is inhibited by the persistent hegemony of a cop culture that privileges masculinity, physicality, solidarity, cynicism and, above all, the experiential knowledge that the ‘crime-fighting’ cop has gained from policing ‘the streets’. The cultural challenge of civilian intelligence analysis, emerging from within wider processes of civilianisation and pluralisation, has provoked a patriarchal response from police officers. This response is characterised by masculine domination and the exertion of symbolic violence within the wider ideological construction of the ‘police family’. This patriarchal response has also contributed to the infantilisation of the intelligence analyst in Scottish policing, as a concomitant form of cultural control. The interplay of these processes of cultural challenge and control contributes to a phenomenon of cultural dissonance – a sense of difference, discord and disharmony – between police officers and intelligence analysts. This cultural dissonance is sustained in everyday practice through the perpetuation and persistence of a ‘them and us’ culture between these groups. This thesis concludes by exploring the future of intelligence analysis in the context of profound and on-going organisational reform, and in doing so identifies recent processes of de-civilianisation in Scottish policing. Although intelligence analysis has remained relatively insulated from de-civilianisation to date, fieldwork disclosed how there has emerged disquiet about the potential diversification of the intelligence analyst role and concern for the future position of the intelligence analyst in Scottish policing as it enters a new phase in its distinctive development.

Sociological analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is, as yet, limited. This thesis analyses how approaches to CSR are defined and mobilised in relation to the rights of workers in transnational contexts of production and exchange. Participation in emerging global discourses of CSR is becoming standard practice amongst transnational corporations, and the growth and professionalisation of CSR, even during global economic crisis, suggests there may be substantial incentives for those seeking to influence agendas. To misunderstand the significance of CSR is dangerous. It is necessary to go beyond questions of whether CSR is merely marketing, to understand how the terms of debate are being set regarding responsibility in the global economy. Drawing on critiques of globalising corporate practices and labour movements research, I examine how these debates are being mobilised not only by politicians and employers, but also by workers and their advocates. Employment relations is an important arena for practical and ideological struggles over CSR, as production networks and labour markets have been dramatically restructured by globalising processes. To investigate the role of contestation in CSR development, labour rights campaigns were investigated as moments when responsibilities to workers are in dispute. A preliminary textual analysis categorised competing CSR agendas in terms of corporate, professional, political and activist approaches. Research into three case studies then explored how these can be mobilised in practice: the factory-focused Keep Burberry British campaign to prevent work being outsourced overseas; the eventfocused PlayFair 2012 campaign for workers making Olympic merchandise; and product-focused campaigns for cut flower workers. The thesis contributes empirically and analytically to understanding the potential implications of emerging approaches to CSR for employment regulation, the relationship of states to corporations, and the response of labour movements. It is argued that activist framing of the employment relationship in terms of CSR is being used to pursue improved conditions of work and to influence debate over where responsibility lies.

The core of my thesis is to present a Marxist interpretation of the process of industrialisation in South Africa. I do so with the view that previous discussions on the process of industrialisation and its effects on the South African political economy have tended to obscure class relations in favour of race relations. The reason that this has occurred is that the dominant tradition in Marxist studies on South Africa has been located within a structuralist framework derived essentially from the French school of Marxism. The methodology of the structuralist Marxists has been such that it has led them to develop analytical tools that have focused on race rather than class as the predominant contradiction within South African society. An inadequate application and interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value has led Wolpe to develop his cheap labour thesis which has proven to be both problematic and inadequate as an aid to understanding the particular form of industrialisation in South Africa. Despite criticisms of this theory it has continued to be reproduced uncritically within South African acadentia leading to the development of further analytical tools such as racial capitalism and racial fordism that have proven to be inadequate in interpreting industrialisation. These concepts, moving even further away from Marx 's labour theory of value, tended to focus on the superficial aspects of racism rather than on class exploitation. The effect has been that an eclecticism has developed within the structuralist Marxist's analysis leading to an interpretation that seemed no different from the neoclassical and liberal schools of thought. A more serious implication of the structuralist Marxist's methodology has been the effect that it has had on the liberation movements and trade unions in South Africa. These theories played an important influential role in the strategic thinking of the liberation organisations leading them to direct working class struggles against a dominant racism rather than against a dominant racism and capitalism. These studies have implied that the post-apartheid state would be a reformist capitalist state rather than a revolutionary socialist state. While emanating from Marxism the structuralist Marxists have in actual fact been promoting a reformist capitalism. With these criticisms in mind I attempt to develop an interpretation of industrialisation that moves away from the structuralist methodology by anchoring my analysis within Marx's labour theory of value and class struggle. Furthermore, using the methodological approach of Geoffrey Kay I locate South Africa's process of industrialisation within the framework of colonialism and changing forms of imperialism. In order to understand South Africa's industrialisation (and that of many other former colonies) one has to develop an understanding of the changing forms of international capital and the effects that this had on development in various parts of the world. This interpretation essentially locates development and industrialisation within the process of capital accumulation and class struggle but also allows for an understanding often emergence of racism within this dynamic. The peculiarities of racism are located within this changing form of imperial dontination. While racism plays an important part in the dynamics of capital accumulation it is not tlle dontinant contradiction of South African society, which should be located within capitalist accumulation and changing forms of imperialism. Crises which emerge within this context are thus not crises of racism or crises in the economy but crises in the process of accumulation as a direct result of class struggle and affect both state and capital in a very serious way. The outcome of the crises can lead to reform or revolution. The post apartheid state has clearly adopted a reformist approach and for the structuralist Marxists tltis does not seem to be a problem, with many Marxists now seeing themselves as fonner Marxists.