The thesis is a study of religion and social change seen from the perspective of Brazil's Roman Catholic Church and urban Labour Movement. The relationship between Catholicism and urban trade union struggles is explored within the specific institutional setting of the metalworkers' unions and Roman Catholic dioceses of Greater Sao Paulo during the period 1970-1986. Although the value of the study derives partly from the quantitative significance of the institutions selected (Sao Paulo' archdiocese is the world's largest and the metalworkers' union of the region is the largest in Latin America), it is their qualitative make-up that is of most interest. On the one hand, this is marked by a church firmly committed to liberation theology perspectives; and on the other hand by a deeply divided labour movement which is split into radical and conservative factions. By exploring relations between these respective groupings, the thesis highlights the contradictions and dilemmas faced by a radical church seeking to reconcile traditional catholic themes of unity with its more recent acceptance of the class-divided nature of society and the so-called "preferential option for the poor". The study also discusses in detail the profound historical realignment of relations between radical sectors of the Church and the progressive Labour Movement during the 1970's and early 1980's. It examines the pivotal role of Catholic labour militancy in this process of rapprochement, together with the institutional as well as self-imposed limits to this process.

My aim, in this thesis, is to criticise what I see to be a theme in contemporary cosmopolitanism, and suggest a new direction for such theorizing to follow. That theme is the placement of empirical considerations at the very centre of cosmopolitan theorizing. It seems at times that many cosmopolitans look around them, see something they find deeply unsettling (i.e. global poverty and/or inequality), and this moves them to theorize cosmopolitan obligations into being. I will argue against this kind of approach. I believe this ‘pragmatic turn’ to be damaging to cosmopolitanism. The starting point of these cosmopolitanisms seems to affect those theories, and makes suspect the implied obligations. It would be better if premises and presuppositions that were neutral with respect to these cosmopolitan obligations could imply such obligations. Furthermore, I will argue that a modestly metaphysical Kantianism can give us such neutral starting points. My interpretation of Kant centres on his ideas concerning moral agency, and will be metaphysical: the relevant ideas may be said of all relevant agents at all times, cannot be experienced through empirical investigation, and cannot be proved by theoretical deduction. Nevertheless, I will argue that my Kantian interpretation gives forth a modest metaphysics, insofar as the warrant we have to assert metaphysical claims is not given to us by speculative or theoretical reason, but rather by our practical reason. In particular, I will argue that, from a cosmopolitan perspective, a metaphysical, but also modest, interpretation of imperfection and freedom may be very useful

The study of social memory has emerged as a rich field of research closely linked to cultural artefacts, communication media and institutions as carriers of a past that transcends the horizon of the individual’s lifetime. Within this domain of research, the dissertation focuses on memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums) and the shifts they are undergoing as the outcome of digitization and the diffusion of online media. Very little is currently known about the impact that digitality and computation may have on social memory institutions, specifically, and social memory, more generally – an area of study that would benefit from but, so far, has been mostly overlooked by information systems research. The dissertation finds its point of departure in the conceptualization of information as an event that occurs through the interaction between an observer and the observed – an event that cannot be stored as information but merely as data. In this context, memory is conceived as an operation that filters, thus forgets, the singular details of an information event by making it comparable to other events according to abstract classification criteria. Against this backdrop, memory institutions are institutions of forgetting as they select, order and preserve a canon of cultural heritage artefacts. Supported by evidence from a case study on the Europeana initiative (a digitization project of European libraries, archives and museums), the dissertation reveals a fundamental shift in the field of memory institutions. The case study demonstrates the disintegration of 1) the cultural heritage artefact, 2) its standard modes of description and 3) the catalogue as such into a steadily accruing assemblage of data and metadata. Dismembered into bits and bytes, cultural heritage needs to be re-membered through the emulation of recognizable cultural heritage artefacts and momentary renditions of order. In other words, memory institutions forget as binary-based data and remember through computational information.

This thesis considers the processes of policy making and implementation of tall building development, as well as the management of visual impacts on regionally protected views in particular, in central London between 2000 and 2008, from the initiation of the Greater London Authority to the end of Ken Livingstone's era as Mayor of London. During this eight year period, more than forty tall building projects were processed through the planning system. Regional and local planning authorities, private developers and heritage groups have diverse interests in tall building planning and hence conflicts result regarding policy and implementation processes. The case study of No.1 Blackfriars Road—part of an emerging cluster of tall buildings at Blackfriars Bridge, Southwark—provides a useful exemplar. It is not located in an area that was designated as appropriate for tall buildings and is situated close to central London's historic monuments and conservation areas. I will argue that while a high degree of design quality in tall buildings has been achieved, a severe lack of conflict resolution has led to an upward spiralling of antagonistic interactions, uncertainty and the prolongation of the planning process. Moreover, emerging regional and local policy has strengthened the position of tall building supporters while gradually marginalising opposing heritage groups. Nor has planning policy and assessment methods provided a clear enough basis for decision making. The resulting ambiguity has been exploited by opposing camps which arrive at divergent conclusions regarding tall building projects. Furthermore, the involvement of private sector experts in governmental processes has led to perceptions by heritage groups of conflicts of interest. The thesis concludes by summarising the key aspects identified with regard to the translation of the urban renaissance agenda into tall building policies, the effectiveness of implementing these policies, and the impacts of planning processes on visual impact assessments.

There is little research into the ‘lived’ experience of individuals exposed to war, genocide or humanitarian emergencies. Similarly, little is known about the positive and negative psychological processes following such complex psychosocial events for reconstructing lives. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), this thesis sought to offer subjective insights into the unique experiential world of aid personnel, military veterans and their wives from both a primary and vicarious perspective. IPA is a detailed examination of an individual’s lived experience of a particular event. It seeks the insider’s perspective through a process of iterative interpretative activity. Data from semi-structured interviews revealed both negative and positive interpretations. Negative aspects included trauma betrayal, shame, narcissistic self harm, rageful anger and moral doubt. The positive domains of empathy, love, humility and gratitude, aspects of posttraumatic growth that are not captured by existing standardised psychometric tools of growth, assisted meaning making for redefining lives over time. This thesis critiques: first, the predilection for positivist research paradigms rather than phenomenological understanding to inform psychological practice and research; second, the commodification of traumatic phenomena as emotional capital; and third, my personal experience using IPA. In summary, theories of growth to date posit social support as a necessary condition for growth following adversity. However, when social support is absent or even antagonistic I propose that a unique dispositional profile that incorporates a strong altruistic identity can stimulate meaning making and posttraumatic growth. A strong altruistic identity is committed to assisting those in need despite the risk of personal threat or cost. It also has the reciprocal benefit of developing personal and social wellbeing in the giver. For the participants of this thesis, the growthful domains of love, empathy, gratitude and humility, all aspects of an altruistic identity, appeared to generate renewed moral integrity and self reparation for psychological growth.

The primary concern of this thesis is to explore how creativity is managed in original television production at the BBC, and to that end, it seeks to make an original contribution to both organisational creativity management and television production discourses. The thesis offers an extensive literature review that connects cultural production, television production and creativity discourses. The thesis is consequently divided in two sections. In the first, it addresses the major theoretical frameworks of organisational creativity management and television production, and also includes a chapter on methodology. The second aims to explore BBC creativity from three viewpoints. These are, from a historical perspective, from how the BBC is affected by external factors, and from how it attempts to manage creativity of original television production from 2004 onwards. Findings suggest that despite the efficacy of numerous policies regarding how creativity is stimulated at the broadcaster, others are open to criticism. One such policy is the Window of Creative Competition (WoCC). The WoCC requires BBC’s in-house production units and the independent production sector to openly compete for approximately 250 million pounds of annual commissions for original television production. The thesis concedes that the WoCC will lead to a progressive decline in in-house television production and possibly to a decline in UK television creativity. The thesis draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources. It combines case study explanatory analysis with long-term historical perspectives on organisational changes at the BBC.

It is commonly recognised that commercial security, in its different forms, has become an important element in societies as a provider of private and public security. The reasons for this development are manifold but can be seen to well from the changes in individual societies and their governance structures. Because of the growth of the security industry, many regulatory regimes have considered some form of industry regulation to be necessary. Some private security research has been carried out during the last 40 years. Most of the published texts have handled the situation in individual countries. The published studies are in most cases theoretical and based on existing documentary sources. In this study local interviews in six regulatory regimes; Belgium, Estonia, New York, Queensland, South Africa and Sweden, as well as transnational sources are used to make comparisons of different regulation solutions. There is, however, a basic problem with definitions, vocabulary and statistics concerning private and commercial security. A common platform is missing, which means that in this study some basic elements have been defined in order to be able to make structured analyses. The existing situation and interview comments concerning private security regulation have been used to analyse the industry, its challenges and its future development. The thesis tries to answer the questions why, what/who and how to regulate in general and more specifically in the six chosen regulatory regimes. Many of the industry’s challenges and trends can be understood through an examination of existing systems of private security regulation: legal apparatus that reveals how commercial security is positioned in different societies. The findings of this thesis confirm that private as well as commercial security regulation is very much a ‘command and control’ and ‘top-down’ procedure, bound to the general situation in each individual regulatory regime, and reflecting the cultures of the societies. The regulation texts as such may look quite similar, but the actual reasons for and practical implementations of them are locally specific and related to individual states’ overall governance practices and administrative maturity.

The objective of this thesis is to investigate, identify, record and capture the formation of Communities of Practice and the associated processes of Communities of Practice facilitated learning, i.e. Situated Learning and Communities of Practice - facilitated innovation within the organizational context of Indian Administrative Services (henceforth referred to as IAS) officers. The organizational context of the IAS is a fascinating one with its rich legacy and tradition of being the successor to the erstwhile Indian Civil Services (henceforth referred to as ICS) of the British Raj; and its subsequent position as the administrative elite in the political scenario of post-independence India. This research context was selected driven by personal considerations of the researcher who enjoyed familiarity with the social world of IAS officers. Communities of Practice (henceforth referred to as CoPs) are a cutting-edge, modern, progressive business theory of knowledge management, knowledge creation and learning. The location of CoPs lies in the theory of Situated Learning as proposed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their work 'Situated learning'(1991) on contextualized learning. Situated Learning proposes that the learning process of an individual is much more than the cognitive process of acquisition of skills and knowledge but situated in a social context, and it is through participation in the social context that the learning process occurs. This theory of Situated Learning has been adopted in the current research as a key conceptual framework. The objective of this research investigation was to capture and record the learning processes of the IAS officers through formation of CoPs and their participation in them. CoP-facilitated innovation was studied by the researcher deploying the framework of an informal network of innovative champions, i.e. individuals with innovative ideas and practices who facilitate the diffusion of innovative practices through the organization. The research methodology adopted has been qualitative, ethnographic, interpretive and case-study based. Two discrete case-studies were conducted in two distinct regions of India, Karnataka and West Bengal with distinctly diverse administrative and political histories. There emerged a key surprise in this research which was the evidence of IAS officers forming an elite group, this phenomenon which was manifested while conducting the case-study on West Bengal cadre IAS officers. There were methodological issues which were emergent during the conducting of the case-study on West Bengal cadre IAS officers like access, process of data collection i.e. conducting interviews which clearly indicated an elite character of the group being researched. This necessitated revisiting and revising of relevant research literature on elites and methodology pertaining to elite research issues. The current research study did not intend to study IAS officers considering them as an elite group but more as professionals and hence the elite section in this research thesis was incorporated at later stage and separately. The research literature on CoPs has progressed since the researcher commenced this study and there have been several differing views. This particular research work has influenced the contemporary research literature on CoPs by demonstrating the boundaries of the existing theories, the limitations of their applications and has expanded the scope of the existing theories in terms of accounting for several extraneous factors like the organizational legacies and traditions. The research findings question the avant-garde nature proposed by theorists of CoPs and it is not necessarily a panacea for all challenges of knowledge transfer and creation. Codes of Conduct, a clear, definitive, unwritten guide to appropriate behaviour as an IAS officer, a kind of dos and donts for a good IAS officer emerged as an important building block for formation of CoPs. This well-defined behaviour guide, the Codes of Conduct were transmitted in a tacit form from one generation to another. In conclusion, the findings of the research study indicates the tremendous influence of legacies and traditions of the ICS on the formation and functioning of CoPs and the associated processes of CoP-facilitated learning, that is Situated Learning. The ICS legacy and tradition determined their status as an elite group to a large extent, since the IAS cadres belonging to the regions which were directly under ICS rule, the IAS officers attached to those cadres displayed traits of an elite civil services group which were not evident and present in the parts of India that were not directly ruled by ICS officers. The findings indicated fragmentation of Communities of Practice when the ambient conditions were missing which have been defined in this study as Codes of Conduct and is identified as one of the key building blocks of the formation of Communities of Practice.

This thesis explores the under-researched terrain of policy elite-newspaper engagements and in so doing makes a substantive contribution in formulating an original conceptual framework for understanding how the interactional dynamics of the political-media complex work. This framework is then applied to the GM food row in Britain by asking how contestation emerged, was sustained then subsided in the political-media complex. This reconstructs the processes by which the pro-GM government consensus was challenged by newspapers, conflict escalated to fever pitch, threatening policy elite agenda and was finally negotiated through key compromises. Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines participatory politics, the political-media complex and new risks, the thesis conceptualises interactional dynamics as ‘discursive intersections’. These are shifts in claims and counter-claims that emerge during engagement at the interface of different sets of knowledge, cultures and agenda in the political-media complex. However there is an element of unpredictability in discursive intersections that arises from the paradoxical interdependence-independence of the relationship in the political-media complex; the elective and episodic nature of engagement on particular issues; and the variable form this may take with potential for conflict, negotiation or consensus. Historical and wider argumentative contexts are crucial to how and what form engagement takes place but do not define it. Thus, the trajectory of discursive intersections needs to be explored empirically rather than predetermined theoretically. This is done using a hybrid methodology that draws attention to the dialogical, persuasive nature of discursive intersections. The substantive contribution of the research is the formulating of this alternative framework for the analysis of interactional dynamics and its application to the GM food row in Britain. It does this by exploring how – that is the process in which - engagement emerged, escalated into contestation, was negotiated and then subsided. What emerged were the following findings. (1) Parallel, sustained and conflictual systems of argumentation about risk were developed between media and political elites despite elite consensus, abstract debates and short news cycles. (2) Newspaper contestation was constructed around a deeply ambivalent suspended certainty based on claims that there was no evidence of risk or benefit, harm or safety and demands for elite responsiveness to acute public anxiety over this.

This thesis aims to expand our understanding of inter-organisational collaborations by exploring how the process of collaboration emerges over time and how collaboration partners (re)form their identities in the developing collaboration space. For the exploration of these aims, a practice-based study of inter-organisational collaborations is followed. The study analyses the KEDDY Aitoloakarnanias collaboration in Greece. In order to examine how the KEDDY collaboration unfolds, a longitudinal ethnographic research was conducted, collecting 43 in-depth interviews, 48 documents, observations of 13 partners’ meetings and numerous field notes. The data was analysed qualitatively using thematic and narrative analysis. The results show how, as they engaged in everyday working practices, organisational members demarcated the boundaries of the collaboration by producing two types of psychosocial spaces. The ‘spaces of regulation’ provided a stable meaning framework where the partners found continuity, while the ‘learning spaces’ offered them opportunities for renewal and change. These working spaces helped partners engage with the collaborative process in a flexible way. However, they required the activation of different types of boundaries and the establishment of different types of identities through identification loops. In this way partners were able to make sense of the constant changes in the collaboration space and organise their actions accordingly. Therefore, although some of the KEDDY collaboration features were designed a priori and provided continuity through regulatory spaces, this research illustrates how the day to day collaboration unfolds as partners also explore new practices. This indicates that it is not possible to predict the outcome of the collaboration process. Notwithstanding the limitations due to the small-scale nature of this study, the results have useful implications for the understanding of the development and transformations of inter-organisational collaborations over time. This research contributes to the body of research in the area in that it strengthens the view of inter-organisational collaboration as a process and questions in which way it is currently understood in the context of contemporary inter-organisational collaboration studies.