This thesis draws from a bi-national comparative study on the importance of ‘winning’ within university sport in England and the United States, in two institutions, University College Worcester (UCW) and the British University Sport Association (BUSA) in England and Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States. The thesis focuses on perceptions and attitudes related to the ‘amateur’ – ‘commercial’ ethos of winning, specifically of administrative personnel, coaches and athletes within these systems. In order to provide a contextual setting, the socio-historical development of sport culture generally and in universities in particular was examined in both countries. This context also provided an informed rationale for ‘participants’ perceptions and attitudes selected for this study. A multi-method approach for data collection was utilised comprising questionnaire and interview instruments supported by a comprehensive underpinning literature review including participant observation and analysis of primary and secondary documentation in a comparative dimension. The study’s findings suggest that the extent of the importance of winning within university sport in England and the United States is influenced by a range of shaping factors. BUSA’s central goal emanates from an ‘amateur’ approach that includes features such as ‘mass-participation’ and recreational enjoyment for the student-athletes participating. The NCAA is a business-run organisation that operates on financial budgets into the millions. Inter-collegiate sport serves as a major form of entertainment in American society, with ‘commercial’ pressures driving a ‘winning’ attitude on all levels. However, the empirical evidence and participant observations do suggest an emerging blurring of perceptions, especially amongst the athlete groups at both UCW and NNU. The evidence reveals features, which challenge accepted orthodoxy on the nature and extent of the ‘amateur’ – ‘commercial’ ethos continuum in both university systems.

This thesis provides an inside, in-depth look at how journalists at latimes.com and salon.com came together to create content for their websites over a six month period. It vividly unveils the process of newsmaking by journalists working for organisations whose output is the world wide web. It uses mixed method case studies of two US-based news websites, latimes.com and salon.com, to show how both parentage and net native sites construct a news story. The case studies include direct observation, in-depth interviews and content analysis to deconstruct the process of covering the 2008 Presidential election. The thesis works around Brian McNair‘s cultural chaos paradigm (2006) which explains the emergent nature of news online and the lack of control by any environmental factors that seek to affect its outcome. The thesis begins by outlining the four crucial changes which occur online that are redefining major tenets of journalism both practically and theoretically. It goes on to explain not only how online news has become a destination for many around the world but also why these two online news websites have found a niche for themselves on the Web. The findings of this research outline not only how the newsmaking process exists in these two environments but also how they are creating a new type of convotelling journalism. The 2008 US Presidential election is used as a story to show the unstructured and chaotic network that now exists in how news is gathered, produced, and disseminated online. It goes on to explain the multitude of changing relationships journalists are grappling with as this convotelling newsmaking process occurs. The contrast between the net native and parentage website is dissected to show just how the two sites vary even though their goal is similar. The research concludes making an argument for a hybrid model of journalism being done online that is distinctive in nature.

This thesis explores the identity formation of three Turkish speaking social groups – Cypriot Turkish, Kurdish and Turkish (CKT) – living in London in a transnational context. The thesis aims to explore how CKT youths negotiate their identity by looking at their everyday experiences. The everyday experiences of CKT youth are observed through their discourses and interpretations of different interactions. By analysing these interactions, this thesis aims to fill some of the gaps in the literature on transnationalism. The theoretical framework of this thesis is based mainly on Giddens’ theory of identity formation and Faist’s concept of transnational social space. By focusing on the concepts of identity and transnational social space, the thesis examines how the experiences, perceptions and social relations of CKT youth are formed by negotiation and dialogue with the country of origin, host culture and individual attachments. Giddens helps us to conceive identity in a dynamic way and as an outcome of the interaction between structural dimensions, social relations and the self. In this thesis, these structural, social and individual dimensions are operationalised through the analysis of CKT youth interaction with their family, community organisations, school contexts, neighbourhood environments and transnational medias. The concept of transnational social space is used to characterise the identity formation occurring across the borders of nation-states and brought into a single social space. The empirical data are based on 45 semi-structured interviews with CKT youth, 16 semi-structured interviews with first generation CKT migrants, one focus group and participatory observation at five community meetings, as well as several social events organised by CKT youth. The thesis concludes that the choices young people make in terms of their ways of life, the sorts of interactions they have, and their social and cultural preferences frame their positioning within society. Their experiences are diverse and transformative, formed through their interactions with various social and structural aspects surrounding them.

The present thesis aims to explore creativity as representation, action and cultural participation in the context of a traditional folk art. It develops a cultural psychological approach to the phenomenon, one that considers creativity situated between creators, creations, audiences, and a complex background of norms and beliefs. A tetradic framework is thus formulated trying to capture the dynamic between self and other, “new” and “old” in creative production and in particular their inter-relation through processes of integration, externalisation, internalisation and social interaction. This model guided the research design, starting from the three main questions of the thesis: how people attribute creative value to the craft, what makes the activity of decoration creative and how children’s engagement with this practice develops during ontogenesis. The folk art chosen for this study is Easter egg decoration in two socio-cultural milieus in Romania, the urban setting of Bucharest and the village of Ciocăneşti. This craft was selected for its rich symbolism and polyphony of practices that situate it at the intersection between folklore, religion, art and a growing market. In this context, the first research included in the thesis investigates patterns of creativity evaluation in the case of ethnographers, priests, art teachers and folk artists and highlights their relation to the practices and beliefs particular for each of these groups. The second study uses a pragmatist-inspired model to analyse creative action in the case of decorators from the urban and rural setting and outlines the general stages and micro-genetic aspects of creativity specific for both contexts. Finally, the last piece of research considers creativity development in the two settings above as shaped by different practices of socialisation and enculturation. In the end, reflections are offered on the general conception of egg decoration as mastery in ways that bring to the fore the interdependence between tradition and creativity and suggest the existence of habitual forms of creative expression.

This thesis sets out to examine how local environmental movements mobilize to engage a new intertwined national and global context in which capitalist globalization has intensified major problems, in particular social and economic inequalities and ecological degradation. In their struggles, local movements mobilize beyond their local and/or national borders, inserting themselves into transnational networks. A representative of such struggles, as I argue in the thesis, is the Bergama movement. The Bergama Movement, a local environmental movement struggling against a transnational gold-mining company in Western Turkey, is analyzed based on an extensive field research reflecting the geographical scope of and the diversity of actors involved in the movement. The research aims to understand the interrelated dimensions of a social movement such as initial mobilization, mobilizing structures, framing, identity construction, and political opportunities; embedding it in a new political and social context in which structures and practices at varying levels of politics become enmeshed. Thus, the thesis shows that making clear-cut distinctions between the local, the national and the global, is inadequate in understanding local movements which challenge actors of capitalist globalization. The contribution of this thesis lies in using the case of the Bergama movement to unpack the interrelated dynamics involved in enmeshed scales of doing politics. In that regard, I show that national and transnational actors align themselves, as in the case of the state in Turkey and transnational mining corporations, in a pro-mine network, while the Bergama activists have formed an extensive movement network by forging links with global civil society actors, external political parties, supranational and international organizations and the media who challenge capitalist globalization. Witnessing that their national political context is being restructured under capitalist globalization, they extensively utilize transnational political opportunities and define themselves as part of a general anti-capitalist globalization struggle.

This thesis stems from a questioning of the instability of the state's discourse in the cultural domain. In effect, since the appearance in the Western world of the first explicit cultural policies, arguments justifying the state intervention in this domain have ceaselessly changed over time, appealing sometimes to notions such as that of 'democratisation of culture', 'cultural democracy', or to notions of 'cultural development', 'cultural economy', or 'cultural diversity'. The inconsistencies that characterise the state's rationales in this domain notably reflect a continuous quest for legitimacy that is worth analysing. Like elsewhere, the consensus over the legitimacy and the purpose of a cultural policy was not easily reached in the Canadian French province, Quebec. Several policy statements have indeed been formulated before the adoption, in 1992, of Quebec's official cultural policy. To understand the evolution of the justifications for state intervention in this field, we analyse three policy statements that were key in the history of Quebec's cultural policy: Pour une politique (1959); La politique quebecoise du developpement cultureI (1979); and La politique culturelle du Quebec: Notre culture, notre avenir (1992). In a first phase, we examine the politico-historical context from which these policy statements emerge. Secondly, we recount the origins of the most important ideas that we find at the core of these statements and which were rooted in the work of intellectuals (such as Edmond de Nevers, Edouard Montpetit, Marcel Rioux, Fernand Dumont) as well as in governmental reports that predated their elaboration. We then analyse the argumentation of each cultural policy statement as well as the critiques they raised at the moment of their publication. These critiques were formulated as much by journalists as by politicians, artists and other professionals working in the field of culture. The analysis of the argumentation is carried out with a theoretical model that has been developed by French sociologist Luc Boltanski and economist Laurent Thevenot, the Economies of Worth. We explore more particularly the concept of 'compromise' such as it was designed in the model. This concept enables us to understand why cultural policies have difficulty achieving consensus. The application of this model to cultural policy has not been attempted before, so this is one of the original aspects of this thesis.

This thesis explores the performative enactment of identity and embodiment through an online ethnography of the online game Final Fantasy XIV. It is argued that online identity must be viewed as performative, that is, enacted through speech and action, and embodied via the avatar, which acts as a body project for the player. The avatar identity is also constrained by the notion of authentic identity, which denotes how a single body is expected to hold a single identity. The thesis makes contributions to three areas. Firstly, in substantive terms, the thesis contributes original sociological knowledge of online social interaction, drawn from an online game and its related spaces, which remain under-researched sociologically. Secondly, the thesis makes a theoretical contribution through a theoretical framing of how online, embodied identity is achieved in an online game in a performative fashion, which is centred on the body of the avatar, coupled with the speech and actions of the player. Finally, the thesis also offers a methodological contribution through its original use of photo elicitation in online interviews, and furthers the debates around (online) ethnography. An 11 month programme of fieldwork was undertaken, comprising 36 asynchronous, image elicitation interviews, extensive participant observation of the game over the 11 months, and observation of the official forum lasting nearly six months. The thesis concludes that online identity and embodiment in these spaces are heavily constrained by norms drawn from everyday life, such as heteronormativity, and racism. The game design is also influenced by the developers‟ norms and values, such as the avatar appearance. The possibilities for performative identity and embodiment are severely constrained by the community, who reify the game space as separate from “real” life and reject the inclusion of non-normative avatars.

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The research reported in this thesis is an investigation of identities of primary school leavers (10-13 years old) residing on the Caribbean territory, St. Kitts. Through two main phases and a pilot of an ethnography conducted intermittently between 2008 and 2011, I explored volunteer-participants' individual and collective identities. In particular, I explored their aspirations for the future and everyday living, the influences they perceive, and conceptualizations of and aspirations for the Caribbean. The aim was to gain insights into their understanding of Caribbean, thus, illuminating Caribbean-identity; two terms fuelling debates in the Social Science literature alleging a Caribbean-identity crisis. One of the main innovations of the design was my partnership with a group of primary school leavers who were trained to help as co-researchers to collaboratively generate and partially analyse data. The findings suggest participants have very positive perceptions of themselves as individuals; however, their identities seem more localized. They generally aspire to migrate, especially to America, to achieve success, and their conceptions of Caribbean vary greatly and seem uncertain while their overarching-aspiration for their island and region is for them to become "better" places socially, economically, politically, culturally, and environmentally. In part, this main finding conflicts with the idea of an identity-crisis on an individual-level, but supports ideas of a lack of a resolute sense of self on a regional-collective level for participants. Equally important, participants report many positive impacts resulting from their involvement. For some, the process contributed clarity about self and aspirations, and for others, it helped with not only a clearer-perspective, but also the development of life-skills.

The motivation for this research was to better understand how social class impacts on the reproduction of cultural taste on the basis that access to 'legitimate' culture is predetermined by class position. This was driven by my history as a woman with a working class cultural heritage operating as an artist in a school setting, a predominantly middle class position. The research asks, therefore, the question: what enables transgression from one class/culture to another? [...]