This thesis concerns itself with optimal learning through experimentation by microeconomic agents. The first part presents a model of a search process for the best outcome of many multi-stage projects. The branching structure of the search environment is such that the pay-offs to various actions are correlated; nevertheless, it is shown that the optimal strategy is given by a simple reservation price rule. A simple model of R&D is provided as an example. These general results are then applied in a model of job search and occupational choice in which jobs are grouped into occupations in a natural way. Before getting a job, the agent must first become qualified in the chosen occupation, at which point his general aptitude for jobs in this occupation is revealed. The search environment is such that the returns of jobs are correlated within a given occupation, but the optimal strategy is given by the above reservation value rule. One implication of this is that young inexperienced workers prefer to try riskier jobs/occupations first. Issues of job turnover and expected returns are addressed. The second part studies optimal experimentation by a monopolist who faces an unknown demand curve subject to random changes, and who maximises profits over an infinite horizon in continuous time. Two qualitatively very different regimes emerge, determined by the discount rate and the intensities of demand curve switching, and the dependence of the optimal policy on these parameters is discontinuous. One regime is characterised by extreme experimentation and good tracking of the prevailing demand curve, the other by moderate experimentation and poor tracking. Moreover, in the latter regime the agent eventually becomes ‘trapped’ into taking actions in a strict subset of the feasible set.

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This thesis is an attempt to explain some of the factors impacting on e-mail adoption and use in undergraduates. It is an extended case study, and therefore real world based, spanning eight years from 1993 to 2001, the population under scrutiny being five cohorts of undergraduates studying Psychology at a Scottish University. In a time of rapid technological advance, where computer experience is rising, access to computers is widespread, and IT training is compulsory for students in the institution under investigation, e-mail use has changed too. However, an unexpected drop in e-mail use during the 1996/97 session seemed to be atypical and led the original focus of the thesis away from individual differences such as computer experience, computer related attitudes, gender and personality, towards social and situational factors. Careful observation of the 1993/94 and 1994/95 cohorts’ e-mail behaviour, using surveys, e-mail logs, and examination of e-mail messages, provided insight into the unique nature of the e-mail environment for these groups. The final conclusions of the thesis are that what appeared to be small features of the e-mail system, and the nature of the computer laboratories where access was restricted to the class, provided the requirements for an e-mail community to form. Some significant results were found for individual differences, and these had some effect on the adoption of mail by the earliest users (those who really instigated the network) but a minimal effect on eventual e-mail use with the class. A group of enthusiastic e-mail users, with very little training in the system, began to mail either groups of classmates, or individuals, making use of the system’s list of class e-mail addresses, and the list of users logged on to the system. These were speculative messages to unknown recipients but they were to individuals the senders knew they had some common interest with as they were in the same social group (the class). The mail was mainly of a social nature, often almost synchronous, and obviously enjoyable to those who adopted the novel technology. The e-mail messages revealed evidence of ‘playfulness’ in the exchanges ranging from the use of nicknames in headers, signatures, and distribution of poetry, song lyrics, jokes and graphics. The class was large and forming e-mail relationships was one way of ‘meeting’ others. This behaviour was missing in the 1996/97 sample, when e-mail was not available in the computer laboratories. E-mail was available throughout the campus but the computer laboratory became a place for work only, and not for communication with classmates. In the 1999/00 and 2001/02 cohorts there is still no evidence of an electronic community forming in the class, despite even more computers being available for e-mail. Changeover to a university-wide e-mail system for students has removed the features that were so important to the formation of the network in the 1993/94 and 1994/95 cohorts.

The purpose of this research was threefold: 1) to study peer interactions at the computer; 2) to study the interactions of the teachers with the children and analyse the impact of those interactions on the children’s social behaviour; 3) to explore teacher’s beliefs, views and knowledge about computers use in four Malaysian pre-schools.  Qualitative research was employed using a multiple case study approach based on constructivism.  Data were obtained primarily through non-participant observations, interviews with principals, teachers and children and documentations.  The results indicated that children exhibited a considerable amount of positive social interaction behaviour while playing with the computer.  For the purpose of the study the researcher only concentrated on a specific set of behaviour using the Children Social Interactions Behaviour checklist. This study indicates that computer activities with teacher facilitation helped promote social interaction between children.  Teachers who observe carefully are likely to see that children who may seem to be minimally and only superficially involved with their peers at the computer are actually learning by carefully observing their peers’ success navigating developmentally appropriate software.  Computer experts are valuable assets to the classroom.  Computer centres that encourage collaboration and cooperation make important contributions to the development of a community of learners and children growing cognitive, fine motor, and social competencies.  However, this will not necessarily happen just because the computer is present in the early childhood education setting.  Teachers must be conscious of the kinds of learning interactions they would like to occur in the context of computer use (including between adults and children, or between children), and adopt pedagogical strategies to support these situations. From the case studies, it is also clear that the role of adults is vital in the computer centre and two types of teacher behaviour occurred.  One was a passive role in which the teacher was only involved in computer use when she was asked by the children.  The other type of teacher behaviour was in an active role that included being a technical helper, a conflict mediator and a tutor. This study also carries several serious implications for teachers and parents.  First and most important, it highlights the rich social environment offered by computer usage.  Second, gender variation was seen in the frequency of computer use, with boys using the computer more than girls.  Third, given the right directions, children are capable of resolving their own conflicts. Teachers, therefore, need to be careful about when they intervene and how much help they offer.

This thesis is a case study of the relationship between gender and sexuality at the empirical sites of asexuality and sexual abstinence. Whilst this relationship has been theorised in a number of ways, there has been limited empirical research on how this relationship ‘works’ in practice, with extant studies focusing largely on transgender. I suggest that asexuality and abstinence represent an interesting site to explore this relationship since they represent, for want of a better term, a lack, absence, or negative sexuality (in that there is a lack of sexual attraction to others, or there is an abstention from sexual activity). The study is also warranted due to the insufficient sociological research on abstinence, as well as the limitations of the literature and research in the nascent interdisciplinary field of asexuality studies. Through conducting qualitative research (using interviews and notebooks) with 33 participants who identified as asexual or abstinent, I found that gender and sexuality were experienced as entangled in the lives of participants. With reference to the socio-structural context of hetero-patriarchy, I trace how ideas about sexual desire, sexual activity and sexual agency are (still) gendered, and how this impacts on both the construction of abstinence and asexuality as concepts, as well as in the experiences participants had as asexual people or as people who were practising abstinence. I also explore how sexuality was central to participants’ understandings of gender, and how this affected their gender identities, gendered appearances, and experiences of gendered embodiment. Ultimately, this thesis argues for the importance in theorising and researching gender and sexuality together, and in particular, for the importance of ‘gendering’ sexualities research.

The thesis explores the experience of pain for people who live with chronic pain and engage in BDSM1 (or ‘kinky’) pain play. It is situated within disability studies, taking the position that chronic pain is a disability, and in the use of crip theory to explore narratives of experience. The narratives, told through multiple, detailed interviews were explored in the contexts of crip theory, disability, and medical and social understandings of pain. The thesis addresses three core aims; firstly, to hear narratives of experiences of chronic pain and BDSM play. Secondly, to explore those narratives to reveal experiences and understandings of pain sought by those who live with chronic pain and also engage in BDSM. Finally, to challenge normative conceptions of pain through a critical crip reading of the narratives. The narratives revealed a range of complex experiences. I drew out these narratives in three broad themes: the role of crip time in living with chronic pain; the multiple uses of BDSM – including pleasure and control of the self – and the role of stigma and abjection. The thesis has made a number of original contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it revealed how pain is discursively constructed as needing control and containment, but how non-normative methods of control and bodily engagement are not necessarily understood as such. Secondly, the thesis exposes how pain is assumed to be wholly destructive to the self, but instead ways to integrate pain into the self are sought. Thirdly, it adds to crip theory by expanding the notion of crip time to reflect the experience of living with chronic pain. Finally, by demonstrating how the narratives challenge understandings of the ‘normal,’ as reflected in discourses of chronic pain. The thesis thus exposes how normative constructions of pain are a part of the performance and construction of able-bodyminded heterosexuality.

This thesis explores the ways in which memories of the communist era in Romania are transmitted to young people with no first-hand experience of those times. It looks at how youth actively contribute to the process of mnemonic socialization, where they are exposed to technologies of memory conveying both nostalgic and anticommunist, state-sponsored, discourses. It argues that in this context young people create their own emotionally imbued versions of the past, ‘second-hand memories’ (Keightley and Pickering, 2012) that result after lengthy and intricate processes of distillation. Another main argument of the thesis is that the past influences the present. Hence, young people live in societies where the effects of the communist era are still identifiable. Such traces can be found in the built environment, in the material culture, in the behaviour and practices of people or in the state of postsocialist Romanian society. Youth make use of second-hand memories in order to understand past, present and future. The fact that they inhabit milieux de mémoire (Nora, 1989) could be a reason for their interest in the communist era. By engaging with the recent past, young people also endeavour to explore their own identities, which have, in turn, been influenced by the times that preceded their birth. Literature on processes and politics of memory transmission and production focuses primarily on media of memory per se and on first-hand accounts of ‘eyewitnesses’. This thesis, whose findings are based on the thematic analysis of 59 in-depth interviews with Romanian young people born between 1986 and 1996, takes individuals as active producers of memories and unravels the ways in which social actors interact with vehicles of memory transmission and with discourses on the past. It thus represents an empirical exploration of how second-hand memories are created in a postsocialist context. By doing this, it contributes to the development of memory studies by extending the theoretical concepts of ‘second-hand memories’ and ‘mnemonic imagination’ (Keightley and Pickering, 2012), and by demonstrating the wider applicability of notions such as Pierre Nora’s (1989) ‘milieux de mémoire’, with its ensuing implications, or that of ‘embodied memory’.

This thesis explores the phenomenon of workforce modernisation through the reconfiguration of professional roles, which represents a policy priority in healthcare systems in the United Kingdom (UK) and globally. Heavily informed by conflict or power accounts of professionalism, the literature presents attempts to reconfigure professional roles as opportunities for the reallocation of professional knowledge and expertise and therefore power and status. Existing work emphasises the strategic, competitive activity of professionals to establish, extend and defend jurisdiction in the face of such change. Utilising an organisational neoinstitutional approach this thesis provides a novel theoretical interpretation of the opportunities and threats that the renegotiation of roles presents to the professional groups involved, adding complexity to the accounts that dominate the literature. The thesis draws upon work that describes the evolving nature and function of professionalism to demonstrate that in the contemporary organisational environment, focussed on accountability and risk management, attempts to reconfigure professional roles are understood not only in terms of the transfer of professional knowledge and expertise but the concurrent transfer of accountability for the management of risk. This represents a more complex commodity potentially associated with professional risk in the event of untoward incidents. Using the case of changes to the roles of consultant psychiatrists in the UK National Health Service (NHS) that propose the redistribution of clinical activity and responsibility from psychiatrists across the wider mental health workforce, the thesis demonstrates that rather than competing for jurisdiction associated with the management of significant risk, professionals carefully renegotiate their roles in a manner that ensures the protection, not just of their clients, but of the professionals involved. In this case, despite institutional work from professionals and managers to create change in established practice, concern with accountability for the management of risk drove adherence to traditional, readily accepted and organisationally sanctioned interprofessional boundaries, limiting the degree of change enacted. These findings have important practical implications for those involved in the management of change as well as theoretical implications for our understandings of professional role reconfiguration attempts and the nature of contemporary professionalism more broadly.

This study investigated the Mental Health and Social exclusion in People experiencing Homelessness and was completed in two phases; A large cross section study in which six screening assessments and a diagnostic test battery were completed with 529 individuals, followed by an exploratory secondary analysis investigating the association between social exclusion factors and mental health disorders. Analysis included the prevalence of the disorders found within this group, comparisons of the reported disorders with that of the general population and the utility of the screening test administered. A logistic analysis was completed for the 8 mental health disorders to understand the association between these and the 21 factors of social exclusion identified from the work of Percy- Smith and the Multiple Exclusion Project. Prevalence rates within the homeless study were found to be significantly higher than that of the general population with major depression and substance dependency being most prevalent. Psychosis yielded the biggest difference between the two populations. Only the AUDIT and DAST were found to be useful screening tools. Twelve indicators were found to be associated with mental health disorders with odds ratios ranging between 1.20 and 4.43. The study added evidence to the growing awareness of the multiply excluded nature of homelessness. Whether homelessness should be given such prominence in their support is debatable. This research supports the need for services that are multidisciplinary and cater for a broad range of needs. With the current reforms to the health and social care system what seems likely is that without more robust data and assessment, homeless individuals will not receive the services that they so clearly need. Further research is needed into the associated factors of social exclusion and their utility within needs assessments and how services should support those individuals with these complex needs.

Globally, the palm oil industry has been linked to practices that fit the most conventional definitions and perceptions of crime as well as the types of social and environmental harm that do not fit strictly legalistic definitions and understandings of crime. This thesis examines both the perceptions and realities of harm in the context of palm oil production in Colombia’s Pacific coast region, attending to the perspectives of corporate executives, public officials, industry representatives, small growers of oil palm, local palm oil critics, and NGOs with a critical stance towards agroindustrial palm oil production. The theoretical and analytical approach put forward to this end redirects the harm debate from a central concern with the academic contestation of harm within criminology, toward a focus on the on-the-ground contestedness of harm. The central research question that underpins the study is: “How are perceptions, practices, and realities of harm linked to palm oil production in the Colombian Pacific coast region contested, and what are the implications of this for debates on harm within green criminology?” Via a rich field-based account of the constructions, practices, and the lived and perceived realities of harm related to palm oil production, and the interrogation of the mechanisms and relations of power that thereby invest practices and discourses of harm, the study contributes empirically and theoretically to the green criminological analysis of the extractive industries, encouraging green criminology to engage with the notion of harm in more complex and nuanced ways. This approach enhances criminological understanding of the power dynamics that draw and keep in place the boundaries between legal harm, tolerated illegal harm, and non-tolerated illegal harm, and the hegemonic notions and practices of legality that thus operate to reproduce the status quo in ways that generate harm to human beings and the natural environment.