This study aims to measure the degree of diplomatic and political concern expressed by Saudi journalists and writers concerning the September eleventh event. The Thesis will also examine the influence the newspaper reports had on changes in opinion. These changes will be analysed, and this analysis will identify any changes that may have taken place in attitudes towards the United States of America and American culture. This study spans the three-month period that followed 911. It examines relevant articles that appeared in Saudi newspapers. To explore and analyse the writers' viewpoints, eight newspapers were selected for content analysis and these yielded four hundred and thirty one relevant articles. The results reported indicate that the findings of this thesis show that many factors can be attributed to the literature of the Saudi Press. The thesis provides an indication of the importance that the September attacks had on Saudi newspapers, not only the influence on the newspapers themselves but also the journalists and writers of the selected newspapers. It is clear that when the events were published that the events had been reported in a consistent and objective manner, which had direct correlation to the gender and nationality of writers.

This thesis is a study of why and how social impact measurement (SIM) is being adopted within the social housing sector. Driven by the need to demonstrate accountability, it is seen as a problematic undertaking. An original contribution is made by extending components within the concept of institutional work whilst working with an original nested theoretical framework with agency and institutions at its core. The exploratory, interpretivist and reflexive way in which this research was undertaken allowed issues of importance to the interviewees to emerge inductively. This approach was wholly necessary due to the embryonic nature of the agenda and the underlying contested concept of social value. A question arose as to whether the SIM output was an appropriate mechanism to provide such accountability. The research revealed macro level support for SIM through the analysis of institutional logics. Below this, within the organisational field, lies weak and contested logics at the meso level and a lack of informing logics at the micro level. A more specific understanding of SIM as a concept and the methodological choices may increase utilisation of SIM outputs and aid in clarifying the concept of social value, its creation and measurement.

This thesis develops a story about Venezuela as an oil state and the way it deploys its policies to instrumentalise culture and urban space. It examines the way the Petrostate is imagined in speeches, how it manifests physically in space and how it is discursively constructed in adverts. By engaging with the work of Henri Lefebvre, Bob Jessop and George Yúdice this thesis sets out to challenge the disciplinary compartmentalisation of the analysis of the material and cultural effects of oil to demonstrate that within the extractive logic of the Petrostate and the oil industry, territory, oil, and culture become indivisible. Mainly, it explores how the material and immaterial flows of oil traverse space, bureaucratic power, and culture. This thesis is particularly concerned with investigating the discursive and institutional mechanisms that enabled the Venezuelan stateowned oil company PDVSA to expand its dominant space over Caracas to effectively reframe the city as an urban oil field. The thesis develops through four interconnected arguments. It examines the representations of space produced by Petrosocialism through the creation of the new policy instruments of the Socialist State Space. This process opened an institutional and legal breach that enabled PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, to enact the Oil Social District as a parallel State Space. Consequently, PDVSA’s definition of its corporate headquarters as a centre of oil extraction conceptualises Caracas as an oil field absorbed by the Oil Social District to enable PDVSA La Estancia (the cultural and social arm of PDVSA) to override municipal authority and embark on an ambitious program of public art restoration and urban regeneration. PDVSA La Estancia’s actions in the city are justified by its use of farming language that discursively melds oil and culture in a symbiotic and cyclical relationship to define their work as ‘oil that harvests culture’. Moreover, the advertising campaign ‘we transform oil into a renewable resource for you’ is used by PDVSA La Estancia to render oil and culture as equivalent, conceiving culture as ‘renewable oil’ as if culture could accumulate in the subsoil waiting to be extracted, exploited and processed like a mineral resource. An original contribution of this thesis is to build on Yúdice’s expediency of culture as a resource to propose the notion of culture-as-mineral deposit, in which culture is inextricable from land, akin to ‘renewable oil’ and tightly controlled by the Petrostate.

There has been widespread concern not just in the UK, but also across much of Europe about the disconnection and disengagement of young people from democratic processes, both formal and informal (O’Toole, 2003). Taking into account the series of transformations that have occurred over recent years in the UK and the resulting in changes to established patterns of employment, social reproduction, family life and life experiences, it is young people who find themselves ‘positioned at the leading edge of many aspects of contemporary social change, and experience acutely the risks and opportunities that new social conditions entail’ (Hall et al., 1999). The revival of citizenship, democratic renewal and the participation of communities (and individuals) have been at the core of New Labour’s approach to revitalising cities in the UK. In Scotland, there has been an increasing drive by government to include young people in ‘mainstream’ society in the form of policy initiatives to create and underpin new opportunities for young people to participate more fully within the community. The purpose of this study is twofold, firstly, it focuses on the experiences of young people living in a disadvantaged area and (re) considers their understandings of participation and citizenship. Secondly, the study aims to explore the extent of the role of membership in a ‘consumer’ citizenship within a market dominated postmodern society. Situated at the intersection of social in/exclusion, ‘active’ citizenship and participation debates surrounding young people, this thesis uses the lens of ‘belonging’ and ‘membership’ to explore the issues among young people living in the west of Scotland and aims to widen debates about citizenship. The findings demonstrate that young people’s interests often fail to be understood, largely as a result of the attitudes of those who represent them, many of whom conflate or substitute their own views for those of young people. The study demonstrates that citizenship and participation for young people is neither fixed nor static, but remains homogenous, fluid and deeply entangled with everyday life experiences.

This is a mixed methods research thesis on how the Western press covers Venezuela. It found a pronounced to overwhelming tendency for all newspapers to present the country, its economics and politics in an extremely negative light, presenting minority opinions on highly-contested and controversial issues as undisputed facts while rarely acknowledging opposing opinions existed and displaying an overwhelming aversion to the Venezuelan government and its project in the majority of articles, especially editorials. Drawing on Herman and Chomsky (1988) and Gramsci’s (1971) theories, it found the coverage shaped by the cultural milieu of journalists. News about Venezuela is written from New York or London by non-specialists or by those staying inside wealthy guarded citadel enclaves inside an intensely segregated Caracas. Journalists speak mainly to English-speaking elites and have little contact with the poor majority. Therefore, they reproduce ideas that are largely attuned to a Western, neoliberal understanding of Venezuela. Facing intense financial pressure, newspapers have outsourced their coverage to local journalists affiliated with the virulently partisan opposition, leading to a highly adversarial newsroom culture that sees itself as the “resistance” against chavismo. Journalists sympathetic to chavismo practice self-censorship and experts sharing differing opinions about Venezuela are commonly blacklisted from mainstream media.

This thesis examines how the internet is used by disabled people in China and focusses in particular on whether internet use can improve their lives and by extension advance China towards a more inclusive civil society. Framing this work are three key overriding issues. First is the rapidly changing and evolving Chinese society and economy, as the country moves from a highly centralised regime to ‘socialism with Chinese characters’. Second is the near absence of disability and disabled people from this process and third is the expanding internet use by Chinese people. There has been very little research on either disability or disabled people in post-reform China and one of the aims of this thesis was to start to explore and fill the gap. The study attempts to find a contextualised and practical pathway to research disability in China. There are two key elements to the research. First is a broad overview of the use of the internet and the emergence of disability digital communities, using quantitative data from a content analysis of two popular disability forums in China’s cyberspace. This was followed by a series of in-depth interviews with 34 disabled people from across China. The data presented in this qualitative element of the thesis explores the intersection between internet use and economic participation, political engagement and cultural representation of disabled people and disability. The core issues that emerged from the analysis include a discussion on: 1) The internet as a tool for empowerment; 2) The internet as a mechanism for inclusion; 3) The internet as not only a tool but also a sphere; 4) The possibility of establishing a ‘netizenship’, to help access to, improve, or replace the un-developed citizenship in China. Overall, the study concludes that whilst internet use has significantly improved the lives of disabled people, it cannot change their disadvantaged position or promote the social justice of the reforming, digital China. Throughout the research there were concerns on the tensions between western-dominated literature and the specialties of the Chinese context. The thesis critically engages with western theories and methodologies to develop its own specific, contextualised framework. This framework takes account of the multiple dimensions of the disabled experience, the agency of disabled people, and social changes in the context of China’s reform. Only through this, the thesis argues, can disability in China be fully and properly explored.

This thesis explores the impact of instrumentalism on the praxis of counselling and psychotherapy in Britain, and is based on an ethnographic study of responses to state and organisational authority in the form of the social actions of therapists within several therapy-based institutions. Following a brief social history of British psychotherapy, the thesis includes an autoethnographic account of my entry into a psychotherapy habitus and my emerging self-identified role as an involved observer. This is followed by a discussion of material (from the period 2006-2015) arising from an analysis of six case studies and forty-five in-depth interviews. During this time, therapy organisations acted partly to facilitate the expected statutory regulation of counselling and psychotherapy, and partly in anticipation of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapy scheme. These actions included the codification and componentisation of therapy praxis in compliance with NICE guidelines for the empirical evaluation and approval of psychological therapy, using outcome measures and randomised controlled trials. They took place against a backdrop of neoliberal imperatives, designed to reduce welfare payments, (including the use of therapy as workfare), and the recasting of therapy knowledge within an economistic perspective. My informants include: senior therapy managers and training course directors within counselling and psychotherapy organisations who were collectively engaged in the production of monistic representations of therapy, therapy trainers subjected to numericised emotion management, and students on training courses aligned to digitally-Taylorised representations of therapy praxis. The thesis concludes with an interpretation of these actions, using a range of sources, followed by a discussion of the acts of resistance (since the beginning of 2016) by factions of therapists.

This thesis explored launches in the UK magazine industry. The majority of the existing literature surrounding magazines concerned the message and ideology that magazines provided. However, this thesis was concerned with the interaction between the structural context and the agents who produce the launch of a magazine. The thesis interrogated Archer’s (1982,1995) morphogenetic approach using magazines as an example. Mixed methods were used in the study which were substantiated as congruent with a crucial realist framework, including interviews with participants in magazine launches, and secondary data covering that period from 1980-2008. The secondary data inferred that magazines have a natural lifecycle; therefore, launches rejuvenated the magazine market. The study further explored the causal mechanisms that influenced the events of the launch through the interrogation of Archer’s theory of morphogenesis. The application of Archer’s morphogenetic cycle stressed the importance of the interaction between structure, agency, and culture and demonstrated that magazine launches were more than the sum of one person. Consequently, challenging the myth of the star producer. Having used Archer’s morphogenetic approach to explain the magazine launch process, the thesis argued that further theorization was necessary. It offered a modification to Archer’s cultural morphogenetic cycle as a possible solution.

This thesis focuses attention on the initiative taken in China to balance the tremendous economic success of the past half-century with the social outcome of increased happiness for the population. Though counterintuitive, the evidence from various surveys suggests a generally declining trend in happiness in the country at a time when personal wealth has been increasing. The empirical analysis suggests that social comparison, hedonistic adaptation, and changes in other happiness determinants provide three potential explanations for the decline in self-reported happiness in China. In view of the profound policy implications of such findings, the second part of the thesis centers on the institutionalization of happiness reform, that is, how much the initiative of developing a happiness index in Guangdong has influenced policy and practice in public administration at local levels. Fieldwork undertaken in the province suggested a considerable gap between the rhetoric of commitment to such policy and the reality of public administrative practice. Theoretical insights from neo-institutionalism are explored and offered by way of accounting for the limited impact of this apparently ambitious public policy reform.

Chaplaincy provides a microcosm through which the public role of religion can be examined and interrogated. Only two studies have examined the question of minority faith involvement in chaplaincy, both conducted before the large-scale introduction of formalised substantive chaplaincy posts for minority faith groups. The rapid development of Muslim chaplaincy, from visiting ministers to lead chaplains, has begun to be explored. But it is clear that a study concerning all minority faith groups involved is necessary in order to fully understand how far the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion have shifted since the turn of the century. Practitioner literature barely accounts for these developments in chaplaincy, while contributions by minority faith groups are rare. This thesis develops this literature by exploring the status and integration of minority faith groups in acute healthcare chaplaincy. This is achieved through a multi-site ethnography of five case studies of chaplaincy teams across England. Minority faith involvement is largely, but not solely, characterised by mediation, negotiation, and stagnation. These findings are situated within a broader framework of participatory parity, which not only refers to distribution and recognition, but also the socialisation 'gap' that exists for many minority faith chaplains. These factors impact on their ability to speak the language of the institution and the chaplaincy profession. These findings and analyses are then compared with the chaplaincy literature to show the situatedness of the mainstream chaplaincy discourses around spirituality, marginality, professional identity, and collegiality. The findings and analysis have significant implications for an understanding of how the roles of religious professionals adapt and change in a diasporic context, but also for understanding how religion is mediated in the National Health Service.