My thesis examines the complex, fractured and diverse spaces of Asian cultural production in London, highlighting the immensely creative work in this area of popular music. The creation of these spaces presents new and different ideas about the self, and, furthermore, what it means to be young, Asian cultural producers in Britain and beyond. I conducted 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I collected interviews and engaged in participant observation in London’s various Asian music spaces - primarily at club nights, but also video shoots, album launches and music shows (large and small) throughout the city. Through ethnographic research, this thesis challenges and adds to the existing knowledge of Asian diasporic cultural production in the UK through the investigation of lived experience of diaspora. In stressing the knowledge that arrives out of everyday interactions this thesis seeks to go beyond the textual and theoretical in understanding diasporic music cultures. Furthermore the thesis explores how the everyday strategies produced within this Asian scene present a clear break from simplistic models of resistance that still forms the dominant reading of youth cultures. I argue that cultural production cannot be identified simply as a site for resistance or accommodation, nor are these Asian cultural producers following a strict binary model of authenticity or commodification. The findings suggest that these Asian music spaces are where young Asians actively engage in and create different and alternative ways of being that move away from ‘official’ constructions of Asians available in media and public debates. Moreover, Asian identities that are forged in these Asian music spaces are complex and contradictory, inclusive and exclusive. I argue that the cultural politics within the scene around representation, identity and production rely on both progressive, open, shifting and contingent definitions and boundaries of ethnic identity and forms of belonging while, at the same time, often impose or reinforce closed, exclusive, static and conservative notions of identity, nation, and gender.

This thesis assesses the potential of actor-network theory (ANT) for conceptualising social enterprise by applying the concepts of assemblage and translation to the production of social values through three fieldsites studied in Ghana. Social enterprises are companies that use market-based revenues to generate social value while maintaining financial viability. Social entrepreneurship involves using and combining resources, expertise and networks in an innovative way to achieve social value. Finally, social value makes it possible to explore well-being and common good in ways that cannot be reduced merely to individual needs and wants or to monetary quantities. The present study examines social enterprises and social entrepreneurship through three case-studies and draws lessons from nine months of fieldwork in Ghana in 2004-2005. Using actor-network theory allows us to trace and follow the three social enterprises and social entrepreneurs beyond the conventional understanding of an enterprise or an economy. Measuring and evaluating the qualities of interactions aimed at enhancing social value, social enterprises create new identified objects and realities by involving the stakeholders, users and customers in the process, not just experts, economists and accountants. These pluralistic socio-technical objects are considered in this study as assemblages. The production of social values is studied through the notion of ‘translation’ where values are gradually articulated through different stages. These propositions are studied by way of a ‘test’ in all three cases, in which various assemblages are identified according to three themes. The first theme discusses information assemblages, which is seen as a source of problematisations; the second relates to spatial assemblages and how they facilitate new associations to emerge; the third theme is credit and money; and how actors use them to enrol new resources. Finally, these resources are evaluated using either internal or external measuring tools developed for the social enterprise sector. Social values emerge through the cyclical process.

In this thesis the concept of social representations is made relevant to the study of the ‘public sphere’ according to scientists. This is elaborated by the re-examination of the notion of a ‘consensual’ and a ‘reified universe’ substantiating a more sociopsychological approach in the study of relevant phenomena. Two processes generate social representations of the public: anchoring and objectification. The empirical study investigates the scientists’ views of the public sphere, in relation to public perceptions, media coverage and the regulation of cloning technology. Elite media coverage of the stem cell debate and conversations with stem cell scientists are systematically analysed with multiple methods. Findings are based on 461 news articles that appeared in Nature and Science between 1997 and 2005 and on interviews with 18 U.K based stem cell researchers conducted between February and October 2005. The analysis compares the debate before and after the ‘stem cell war’ of 2002, and typifies a high tension in representing the public sphere, elaborated in metaphors and prevailing arguments. Central elements of the representation assume a strong disassociation of science from the public sphere; peripheral elements operate with a degree of blurring of those same boundaries, which recognises a common project. This representation, while being expressive of its context of production, constitutes a functional response to it.

Synthetic biology practitioners look through an engineer's lens at the incredibly complex, sensitive and seemingly endless resource of living reproductive material and contemplate turning biology into a substrate – composed of modular, wellcharacterised parts – that can be used to design and build new functional devices and systems. It is often explained that this vision for engineering biology may deliver future forms of efficient drug production, renewable sources of biofuel, methods to sense and remediate toxins and numerous other applications. Yet, synthetic biology remains a field in its infancy, facing a barrage of interconnected challenges across technical, social, ethical, legal and political realms. This multifaceted dynamic makes it a timely and important locus for sociophilosophical investigation. This thesis provides a highly empirical ethnographic account of two research groups as they were challenged to design and build a microbiological machine for the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) in 2009. The work examines forms of knowledge and material production in synthetic biology and, in focusing on iGEM, argues that this field is not only a feat of technical engineering, but also one of social engineering as it educates and indoctrinates a next generation of researchers through this unique contest. In this narrative, one discovers a microsocial sphere in which new ideas and biological entities at the intersection of natural and synthetic kingdoms of life are being constructed. Forms of teaching, tools, practices and processes that make imagining, designing and building new living systems possible are illustrated. The reader is also introduced to some international stakeholders and dynamics at play. With gathering media interest, attention from art and design perspectives, as well as publications across social, philosophical, political and legal studies of this ‘new’ biotechnology, there is a great need for the kind of detailed, insider view that this thesis provides – it contributes to an informed space through which constructive questions may be asked as the debate around engineering synthetic life continues to unfold. As such, this work helps to enable a reflection on the kinds of intervention possible in the process of dreaming up ideas of potential future living machines. Involved collaborators, as well as the resistance of life itself, will ultimately govern the limits of synthetic biology.

This project maps and compares how sociology as an institutionalised discipline of teaching and research has been introduced, developed and practiced in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. It sets out to interpret the observed trajectories in light of social-historical contexts. The three cases presented share some similarities in their colonial pasts, Chinese-populated demography, and development trajectories as "Asian tigers". However, they demonstrate a sharp contrast in post-war geopolitics, political context, and identity. Three levels of analytical categories are involved in the analysis: geopolitical, state-institutional, and (collective) practitioner-level. On the one hand, this project attempts to look beyond the national container to introduce various trans-border factors (e.g. scholarly migration, foreign funding and knowledge flow) into the analytical scope under the conceptual framework of a "world system of knowledge network." On the other hand, the explanation sought is to be grounded on a sympathetic understanding of the actors and their psychological perspective. The data analysed includes literature and archive material, bibliographic and demographic datasets, interviews with 56 sociologists stratified by bibliographical factors and a few informative talks, and some ethnographic observation in the field study. How sociology was introduced and institutionalized in three locations along the post-war geopolitical structure will be traced. The "domestic disciplinary identity" will be explored based on a systematic bibliographic review. A survey of the various modes of public engagement of sociologists is interpreted and the thesis relates some observed patterns to contextual factors. It further assesses the impact of recent higher education reform under managerialism and academic globalism on sociology.

This thesis is a study of the way in which contemporary social theorists conceptualise the divisions, disturbances, and failures of social life. It examines the special role that classical ideas of crisis and critique play in grasping the experience of rupture and finitude of the institutional frameworks that sustain human relations. The analysis developed in this thesis is designed to examine the inner relationship between these concepts and to demonstrate their mutual capacity to give meaning to moments of diremption of the social. It does so against customary claims in contemporary social theory that, at least since the 1960s and 1970s, have tended to regard crisis and critique as obsolete and inadequate analytical tools. The thesis examines and challenges the idea that social theory must do away with these concepts, for it obscures what is essential to these concepts: the potentiality of revealing what limits and exceeds our current ways of life. The thesis makes the case for the continuing importance of the concepts of crisis and critique as ‘social moments’ by way of rediscovering their mutual relationship in terms of ‘dialectical affinity’; that is to say, a non-causal relationship in which each term can actively register, bring about and turn into the other, and in which the unity of its elements is as important as their divorce. The core assumption is that social theory already provides us with essential tools for reconstructing different modes of encounter between the objective experience of crisis and the subjective practice of critique. To demonstrate this, the thesis draws upon the writings of Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism, Michel Foucault on governmentality, and Jürgen Habermas on communicative rationality. The sought-for contribution of the thesis is to find neither new foundations nor better definitions for each of these concepts but rather to rediscover the inner connectedness between them as a mode of sociologically grasping moments of diremption of social life.

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The thesis is focused on the possibilities that exist for crossing or even transcending the boundary between existence in the real and virtual worlds, and it presents the findings of a longitudinal study of an online community of cigar smokers, which was created for the needs of the study, tracing the interactions of its participants over a period of eighteen months. The internet enables the formation of online communities that provide unprecedented opportunities for communication across geographic, political and economic divides, and reach across barriers of distance, time and culture. Such communities provide a space for people to come together based on existing friendships, common interests, their work, and a variety of other factors. The study is aligned with the literature that views online communities as social networks, and such a way of thinking enables us to understand the relationship between structure and dynamics, and reveals the different roles of the participants, their relationships, as well as the structure of the social system that underpin the observed development of online communities. Network analysts suggest that offline relations affect the online interaction of participants; the ways in which that occurs, however, is still left unanswered. Although the literature suggests the need for more longitudinal studies on the role of online communities in creating novel interaction channels for both networks and individuals, there are very few to date. Moreover, the literature has mainly focused on the structural specifications of networks, and has paid scant attention to the content of the conversations that connected individuals are having. Hence, a longitudinal study with a focus on communicative processes is needed, to provide a focus on networks, people, and processes. To elucidate the understanding of offline interactions, the study explores an online community of cigar smokers, and traces such interactions identified in the content. The online community was created for the needs of the study, and populated through an online invitation system to track the initial relations among participants. The novel methodological approach of the study combines social network analysis with content analysis to generate a more nuanced account of the emergence of roles and relationships associated with recorded activities and observed structural features of the social networks, and explore the relationship between online and offline interactions. The study identified six distinctive technology-driven social trends that affect the emergence and evolution of networks among the participants. The distinctive patterns of interaction that persist over the course of the study are associated with a mix of behaviors that include play, trading and gifting, and entail the exchange or flow of informational and material objects. The findings of the study reveal that the participants of the online community used metaphors, puns, words from the everyday life repertoire, as well as the coining of new words, in order to communicate regarding such interactions. The diversity of activities across the community, and the flow of information, cigars, and money demonstrate the potential for complex, multi-faceted socioeconomic spaces that bridge the divide between virtual and embodied space, informational and material goods, and social and economic transactions. Moreover, the findings of the study shows that the offline interactions among the participants of the online community gave rise to a dense network of a homogenous population, with the properties of a scale free network, and of a small world with three degrees of separation. The interactions among the participants were highly reciprocated and reinforced, contributing to the growth of the network over time, and the tendency of participants to connect with friends of friends is equally spread in the network and not affected by prominence. There is a positive and statistically significant rich-club effect in the network, showing that the prominent participants do not compete with each other for status, rather they tend to interact with each other. The growth of the network can be divided into two periods: an initial accelerated growth, and an equilibrium period of homogenization of the population. During the initial accelerated phase, the backbone of the network is established, which contributes to the stability in shortest-path based metrics over time, and the overall density of the network. The findings suggest that we should treat with caution conclusions that relate differences in status to differences in network position. Although hubs in a network can control the diffusion of recourses across the entire community, the unstable nature of such positions suggests that the participants do not hold them indefinitely, and these positions offer only a temporary advantage to those who posses them. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent individuals can strategically manipulate their positions in a large network, even if that is their intention. The findings of the study illustrate the value of combining network analysis and content analysis to understand the evolving structure of online communities and their offline extensions. The study provides academics with new insights regarding the interactions of participants of online communities, and open new avenues for future research on the topic. Bridging work remains at the core of making sense of social experiences online, and the findings of the study contribute to the literature on online communities by responding to calls for more studies to make sense of the relationship between the online and offline activities. Moreover, this study contributes to the broader Information Systems literature, and more specifically to the field of Computer-Mediated Communication, by elucidating the evolving social interactions amongst participants of passion-centric online communities. When it comes to practitioners, the findings of the study here can provide the managers of online communities with novel insights on how to study and understand the communities they manage, identify opportunities or problems, and deliver policies and interventions in networked forms. Furthermore, the findings of this study can enable the managers of online communities to think of innovative ways to enable the participants to engage in offline interactions, without the fear that such interactions will negate the sustainability of the online community, while by enabling them to engage in such interactions, they can build more robust and successful online communities.

This study is designed to contribute to the understanding of the theory and practice of communication skills training. The participants are 48 trainee careers advisers following a Postgraduate Diploma in Careers Guidance. The purpose of the research is to investigate the effect of pre-training assessment and feedback on post-training performance. A secondary hypothesis relates to gender differences in communicative competence. The study uses a quasi-experimental, pre- and post-test design in which the independent variables are feedback and training. Dependent variables, applied at Time 1 and Time 2, include four self-report measures (Rotter I-E Scale, Social Situations Questionnaire, PONS Test and a repertory test) and behavioural ratings applied to videotaped interviews by two independent, trained raters. The findings suggest that while neither pre-treatment feedback alone nor training alone has an effect on performance at Time 2, the combination of feedback plus training produces a significant improvement in performance from Time 1 to Time 2. Significant differences between males and females in certain behavioural rating categories were found at Time 2. The results of this study lead the writer to propose that communication skills training could be enhanced by the inclusion of pre-training assessment and feedback, an inclusion which would result in CST being tailored more specifically to individuals even when the training is administered to groups. A second recommendation based on the findings is that there is scope for further investigation into gender differences in communicative behaviour and their implications for training.

This research investigated processes associated with greater and lesser likelihood of participation in higher education. The sample, of whom 89% were from underrepresented socio-economic groups, counted eight focus groups with a total of 78 participants and 26 individual interviews. The interaction of assumptions (drivers and barriers, constructions of students and of higher education and public discourses) and life history factors (initial education and familial influences) was examined to formulate a conceptual model of greater and lesser likelihood of participation in higher education. This conceptual model was derived from a literature-based, preliminary conceptual model that was adjusted to fit the key findings. The model is based on the idea of optimal cultural distance or the point at which higher education becomes for oneself rather than not for oneself. It takes into account the factors that lessen cultural distance and internalised barriers and hence increase the likelihood of reaching the point of optimal cultural distance. The model also takes into account the extent to which entering higher education is a decision or a non-decision and the extent to which decisions and non-decisions are made within practical or discursive consciousness. The conceptual model of greater and lesser likelihood of participation by potential entrants from under-represented socio-economic groups goes beyond contrasting polarised and social-class based educational trajectories. It offers important insights into personal constructions of higher education and will inform policy and practice in the current climate of higher education today.