This thesis explored aspects of the urban-rural interface within a densely populated, deprived housing scheme located on a remote, rural island lying off the north west coast of Scotland. The thesis had two aims, the first related to health, health inequality and aspects of neighbourhood and from this exploration a second aim emerged that focused in detail on the effects of rurality and religion as significant cultural influences that determined the nature of health and social environment. The Cearns housing area of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis is reminiscent of a mainland urban scheme in terms of housing design and layout with units spaced around a series of pedestrianised courts with little green space. Significantly, most tenants, both well-established and recent, have their origins in rural Lewis, bringing with them a number of rural beliefs and behaviours. An in-depth qualitative study was carried out through individual interviews (N=55) and Cattell's social network typology was applied to inform interpretation of the nature of the social infrastructure. The main findings demonstrated the existence of 'traditional', 'socially excluded' and 'solidaristic' networks from which a strong sense of island identity, described as 'hebridean', emerged. In marked contrast to many urban areas, crime and vandalism levels were low, the housing stock was well maintained and the area was described by residents as friendly and close-knit. Hebridean communities are rural in nature, the Cearns being an anomaly, yet it shared with neighbouring villages close familial and other connections as most residents either know, or know of, their neighbours. Rurality and remoteness reinforced a 'can-do' self help culture where friendliness and co-operation is expected and this can be related to Freudenberg's notion of the 'density of acquaintanceship'. This study demonstrated that residents, irrespective of age or gender, have this view of the world, either from personal experience or through the rural upbringing of their parents and that either way a particular range of attitudes and behaviours has come with them to the Cearns. In addition to themes associated with rurality, findings from this thesis demonstrated the effect of religion at the level of the individual in terms of social support, as well as at community level in relation to social cohesion, identity and social control. Communities on the Isle of Lewis are distinctive and possibly unique within the UK in their continued adherence to the biblically strict Presbyterian religion, apparent through high levels of church attendance and strict Sabbath observance. Use of Social Identity Theory with its understanding of in-groups and out-groups provided a framework for an analysis of the interface of religion with social cohesion. The study concluded that these remote, close-knit, Gaelic-speaking, religious communities are amongst the most distinctive in the UK and that the methodology and findings of this study would have relevance in studies of similar communities elsewhere, notably within the hitherto under-researched rural communities of the Western Isles.

The introduction of the Social Inclusion Partnership (SIP) programme in Scotland in 1999 emerged as part of policy commitment to achieving social inclusion. The significance of this policy context to the SIP programming came through the move within urban policy programmes from focusing solely on tackling urban deprivation to also target resources towards rural and coalfield areas and socially excluded groups. With this change in approach came an explicit commitment to tackling the social exclusion experienced by young people at both the neighbourhood and local authority levels. Within this policy context, this study set out to compare the approach adopted by one thematic SIP (the Big Step) and one area-based SIP (Drumchapel SIP) to promoting social inclusion for young people. Using a care study methodology, data was collected using a combination of interviews with SIP stakeholders, young people and a range of external ‘experts’, supported by analysis of SIP documents and observation of SIP meetings and other formal events. Three key themes frame the focus of this study. First, an investigation of the theoretical and policy influences steering the approach taken within the case study SIPs to achieve social inclusion for young people illustrates a clear theoretical and policy framework driving the work of the SIPs influenced by concerns to achieve social inclusion by promoting a mixture of rights and responsibilities for excluded groups. The result is an explicit programme of work to promote social integration through active participation in society and the economy. Alongside this, however, emerges an implicit concern with managing the individual and social costs of young people’s exclusion from labour market and other socially acceptable activities in order to reduce the problems associated with young people. Second, the practice of the case study SIPs was compared across three key areas: the working practices of the SIPs in responding to the agenda on ‘strategic working’; the views of respondents on the relative value of working in partnership; and the involvement of young people within the decision-making structures of the SIPs. Clear distinctions in the practices of the case study SIPs were identified. This provided an opportunity to reflect on the relative contribution made by area-based and thematic SIPs to the promotion of social inclusion for young people, and from this to review the wider applicability of the findings from the case study SIPs as the third theme of the study. Extrapolating trends emerging from the case study SIPs, the study concludes that both types of SIP contribute towards promoting the social inclusion of young people, with area-based SIPs addressing the social exclusion of young people within the wider community context and thematic SIPs foregrounding the interests of young people.

The importance of a critical understanding of space in contemporary social scientific enquiry is increasingly recognised as fundamental for the analysis of the development, enlargement and experience of modern capitalism. In particular, the concentration of forces and relations of production, circulation and consumption, of people, commodities and services, is progressively appreciated as achieved through the creation and exploitation of urban space. The thesis presents a critical examination of a variety of theories of space and spatial theories as a foundation for the analysis of urban modernity. These include the works of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Georg Simmel. The syncretic adaptation of these formative theoretical analyses provides a conceptual framework for the subsequent substantive analysis of a case study of specific forms of modern urban social space. That is, an exploration of the processes by which the origins and development of what came to be integral features of the landscape of the modern city were produced, namely, the creation of the social spaces of public parks. The growth and increasing importance of the city in the 19th century had important social as well as economic and political consequences for the development and administration of the infrastructure and experience of the urban environment. The physical and mental, medical as well as moral consequences of city development led to campaigns to improve the condition of the urban population that provoked a response by the local state. One prominent aspect of this municipal commitment was the development of urban public parks as an ameliorative response. Glasgow’s experience of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the 19th century and the particular conditions that arose led to a specific form of municipal government that produced a network of public parks that was unrivalled by any other city. The investigation and analysis of the production of municipal public parks in the city of Glasgow in the period from the early 1850s to the late 1970s gives detailed consideration to a large number and variety of empirical sources to deliver an historical, sociological and geographic account of the complexity involved in the analysis of such commonplace everyday spaces as public parks. As such, the investigation of parks as social spaces constructed, depicted and used for leisure and recreation contributes to the understanding of the development and experience of urban modernity, as well as to contemporary socio-spatial analysis.

The provision of state pensions in the advanced countries faces two significant and reinforcing challenges. Demographic change and global economic pressure impact the provision of public pensions by increasing social spending and depending on the method of financing, the base of government’s revenues from which these programmes are funded. Countries belonging to the liberal welfare model, such as the UK and Canada, hold a common view on the primacy of the market and actively adapt measures that keep social benefits modest. Yet the reforms adopted by the UK and Canadian government reveal divergence. This presents a puzzle as the welfare state literature predicts convergence. Canada with its small domestic market and open economy has greater exposure to risks of globalisation than the UK, but it is the UK and not Canada that adopted the more radical reforms. To explain this puzzle, this thesis examines four cases: two different pensions’ schemes in each of the two countries – Canada and the UK. The thesis argues that the concentration of political authority is central to explaining the variation, although not the sole factor.

My thesis is that femininity is constructed as abstinent, in particular, as abstinent from public, productive labour and from the active expression of desire/pleasure. Further, that the enforcement of women's abstinence through psychiatric, psychological and sociological discourses on femininity ensures the means of patriarchal expression. Women's inabstinence, therefore, poses a threat to patriarchal expression, and insofar as patriarchy is realised through patriarchal expression, to the stability of patriarchal society. Women's drunken inabstinence, however, provides only a temporary, individualised and often self-destructive omen of the threat. My fieldwork focuses on the processes and experiences through which women come to be administered as `alcoholic'/`problem drinkers'. My meetings and discussions with alcohol and drug agency workers and with women administratively defined as `alcoholic'/`problem drinkers' explicated the processes of the social control of all women in terms of the containment and privatisation of their active collective pursuit of pleasure. Drunken women's struggle against the strictures of femininity expresses the beginnings of a threat to patriarchy; however, insofar as the characteristics of femininity itself are `drunken' in their demands for dependency, patriarchal accessibility and a dislocation from public/productive activity, drunkenness as a critique of patriarchy is self-defeating. The challenge to patriarchy comes only in women's sober, collective refusal to abstain from passion.

This study is original in that it draws upon postmodern theories on the perception and representation of reality to investigate the relationship between the perception of quality of life and counterurbanisation in rural Scotland. Repertory grid analysis and a postal questionnaire were used in the research to determine the perceived importance of factors in the quality of life of various social and migrational groups in eight rural study areas. The research revealed that counterurbanisation in all its forms is widespread in the areas investigated, and that a significnt component in this process is migration to seek a perceived rural idyll, a form of migration which is unconnected to any economic component, or any changes in the location of industry. Postmodern theories regarding the perception of reality in rural and urban areas were used to explain people's perceptions of what was important in their choice of where to live. The study area of the respondents, their migrational histories, socio-occupational class, housing tenure, and most significantly their age group, were all predictive in determining how important many quality of life factors were perceived as being. However, the main conclusion from the study was the similarity that existed between the perceptions of all groups. Factors reflecting stereotyped images of the rural idyll and those of the problems of urban life, conditioned into the collective consciousness by the way in which these environments are portrayed on television, in the mass media, in literature, and in advertising, dominated in respondents' perceptions, along with other topical environmental concerns over factors which reflected more 'traditional' problems and concerns of rural life.

Patterns of food use and of social support and alliance are significant for the constitution of boundaries between religious and ethnic groups and the status hierarchies within them. Food and social support are also significant for health. In the case of British Asian communities, control of food intake has been identified as the key to overcoming their current epidemic of heart disease. Level of stress and social support have also been thought important for understanding levels of psychological distress among British Asians. The present study focuses on young British Asian women with ancestry in the Indian subcontinent, their patterns of food use and social support and how their choice of cultural strategies affects the likelihood of change to these patterns. The rationale for concentrating upon young women is twofold. First, middle aged women appear to suffer from a number of health disadvantages, including aspects of coronary risk and psychological distress. By focusing on a younger generation of women, factors involved in the biographical development of these problems might be ascertainable. Second, in terms of the sociology of ethnic boundaries, young women are in a pivotal position with regard of the continuation of the culture, occupying a role as daughters of migrants on the one hand, and as the first generation of British role models for British Asian children on the other. Comparison with the majority ethnic group is treated as a question about how respondents view with similarities and differences between themselves and the general population. The study addresses a range of research questions from health-related issues at one extreme to issues about the social construction of ethnic groups at the other. The first group of questions concerns the role that health plays in food choice: how health is conceptualised, how far folk ideas (possibly) deriving from biomedical, Unani and Ayurvedic conceptualisations are integrated with one another, and in what social contexts health concerns are overridden by the symbolism of ethnic identity.

The object of this study is to examine the rural settlement forms of the later 18th and early 19th century in the Scottish Highlands by means of documentary evidence and field remains. The main manuscript and documentary sources are described in Chapter 1 and the forms of field remains, -their recording and analysis, are explained. A brief review of research into Scottish rural settlement over the past 100 years, particularly Highland settlement and the changing approaches and interpretations is covered in Chapter 2. The developments of the period 1750-1850 had some of their origins in the 17th century, and the main historical events in the Highlands which had a bearing on agriculture, population and settlement from the late 17th to the early 19th century are reviewed in Chapter 3. The major part of the thesis is a comparative study Of Lochtayside and Assynt based on land surveys of the period 1769-1774 and this is dealt with in Chapters 4 to 10. Chapter 4 introduces Lochtayside in its physical setting and its historical development prior to 1769 is covered by references to early maps (particularly Pont and the Military Survey)and the history of the Campbells of Glenorchy/ Breadalbane. The rural landscape of Lochtayside in 1769 is discussed in Chapter 5, with reference to population, agriculture, forms of tenancy, rents and occupations. Chapter 6 examines and discusses the field remains of the earlier settlement pattern - the townships, settlement clusters, shielings, mills, etc. The physical landscape of Assynt and its pre-1774 landowners are examined in Chapter 7 and the evidence of early maps is discussed. The picture of the Assynt rural landscape as interpreted from John Home's-Survey of 1774 is presented in Chapter 8 with a discussion of, land divisions, tenants and nontenants. The surviving remains of the settlements and the special role of the 'sheelings' in the late 18th century Assynt-agrarian economy are discussed in Chapter A direct comparison of Lochtayside and Assynt in 1769- 1774 is made in Chapter 10, looking at differences. or similarities in physical geography, history, population density, landholding systems, settlement forms and survival of remains. Some extra evidence-from other sites in Perthshire and Sutherland, including two excavated sites, is examined in Chapter 11 and compared with Lochtayside and Assynt. Conclusions on settlement groupings, forms of houses and buildings in the areas studied are made in Chapter 12, and 10 generalisations, which in themselves are a summary of the thesis in terms of settlement development, variation and survival, are presented.

`Low Cost Home Ownership' represents a package of policy measures which are part of government housing policy to extend home ownership. The package was outlined by the Department of the Environment in a publicity brochure entitled `A First Home' (1981) aimed at local authorities and housing associations. The different Low Cost Home Ownership measures have been pioneered and implemented at a local level as part of the government's wider strategy of privatising housing provision and consumption. This thesis is directly concerned with exploring the structure, substance and impact of Low Cost Home Ownership policy, in the context of Glasgow. The thesis is based on three levels of analysis, linked through a focus on policy and the role of the state at national and local levels. First, a preliminary level of analysis evaluates the success of Low Cost Home Owernship policy in its own terms. It is suggested, for example, that the term `low cost' home ownership is a misnomer in many cases. At a second level of analysis, the thesis examines the structure of policy, including the division between central and local levels of government, and the categorisation of policy as, for instance, housing or planning. A third level of analysis incorporates the substance of Low Cost Home Ownership policy. The underlying assumptions of the policy are analysed, particularly the tenure bias of Low Cost Home Ownership. Urban policy encompasses Low Cost Home Ownership policy measures in several cities, including Glasgow, and the thesis examines the functionalist objectives of population and socio economic stability in the city. In addition, Low Cost Home Ownership policy in Glasgow is aimed at widening tenure choice and meeting housing needs. An analysis of these policy objectives requires the conceptualisation of `choice' and `need' in housing policy and housing studies.

This thesis is an ethnography of how individuals experience urban change and difference on a south London street. My research focuses on the contemporary increase in cultural and ethnic diversity in London, and I explore what this means for social life and shared space on the Walworth Road. The purpose is to observe and interpret the forms of contact and distance people develop in living with difference in their everyday lives. I use a mixture of official, archival and ethnographic data to contrast how individuals transgress or re-inscribe social and spatial boundaries, and how systems of power authorise boundaries between people and places. I also combine ethnographic and visual methods to analyse and illustrate the layers of place, time and experience that are invoked by narratives of change on the Walworth Road. Although my thesis connects the global and local impacts of change, I select the small independent shops along the Walworth Road as the base of my exploration. Within a selection of shop interiors, I explore forms of social contact that are locally constituted through regular, face-to-face interaction, and through shared spaces and practices that engage people across diverse spectrums. I analyse the relationships between proprietors and customers: between workspaces and work skills and social spaces and social skills. Through this empirical process, I emphasise the social and political significance of ordinary spaces and informal memberships that emerge out of everyday contact in neither overtly public, nor overtly private space. This thesis has been edited into a book form to be released by Routledge in May 2012, the title of which is ‘City, Street and Citizen: The measure of the ordinary’.