This thesis investigates the nature of work culture and industrial relations at the Linwood car plant during the period 1963-1981. In Part One, Chapter One provides an overview of the historical debate over the use of oral testimony as well as introducing the methodology employed within the oral history project encompassed within the thesis. Chapter Two provides an analysis of the nature of work at the Linwood car plant and the ways in which this impacted on behaviour and attitudes in the workplace. This is further developed in Chapter Three where the focus is on organisational mischief, and consideration is given to the nature, consequences and explanations for this behaviour. The analysis developed in Part One, focuses on the dominant explanations for problematic industrial relations based on the notion of a ‘clash of work cultures’ due to an absence of intrinsic rewards in automated assembly-line work. Within the thesis such dominant narratives are not entirely supported by the Linwood sample, as a wide variety of attitudes towards work are exhibited, leading the thesis to question the validity of the categories of intrinsic and extrinsic reward. In Part Two of the thesis there is a shift in focus as the analysis concentrates on structures of authority at Linwood and the impact on industrial relations. Chapter Four gives consideration to the influence of historical contingency on management decision-making. Part of the 1976 government rescue package was a Planning Agreement incorporating employee participation in management decision-making that articulated with the Labour government’s manifesto commitment to industrial democracy. Yet throughout the different phases of ownership, interactions between management and workers at the Linwood plant explored in this thesis reveal a dichotomy between the rhetoric and reality of industrial democracy and worker participation. The final chapter of the thesis offers an exploration of shop floor industrial politics, and causes of strikes, to highlight the narratives of tension underpinning interactions at Linwood. The thesis provides a nuanced approach, highlighting variety of experience and importantly a complex interplay of interests shaping work culture and the nature of industrial relations in the car plant.

This research aims to find out the factors as well as the mechanism of young people’s self-destructive behaviour in Taiwan. The research employed a mixed methodology- both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In the quantitative study, a self-reported questionnaire survey was carried out to investigate the individual and social factors that affected suicidality and self-harm among young people (N= 1043) aged 14-18. In the qualitative study, 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with professionals to find out the mechanism of self-destructive behaviour. The results show that females are more vulnerable to self-destructive behaviours than males, but male suicide attempt is increasing. Self-destructive behaviour is shaped by a range of social, cultural and individual factors. General mental health and beliefs about death are the two individual factors that are highly related to young people’s self-destructive behaviour. Better general health and positive belief about death indicate lower risk of self-destructive behaviour. Social factors such as family interaction, peer relationship, traditional value, economic optimism and social-political security are five important factors to affect young people’s self-destructive behaviour. Close and supportive family interactions help reduce the risk of self-destructive behaviour. However, closer peer relationship may increase the likelihood of self-destructive behaviour because of copycat behaviour, imitation or altruistic behaviour. Holding more traditional values, young people may result in bearing many pressures during the current economic recession period.

This thesis addresses a gap in research on collaborative creativity. Prior research has investigated how groups of professionals, young people and children work together to co-create work, but the distinctive contribution of this thesis is a socioculturally framed understanding of undergraduates’ interdisciplinary practices over an extended period. Guided by a socioculturally framed theory of creativity, this thesis observed 4 students creating a 10 minute performance piece, and presents a longitudinal analysis of the co-creation process which occurred through a total of 28 meetings recorded over the course of a twelve-week term (24 hours of recordings in total). Specific episodes were selected from the full set of recordings, constituting 2 hours of recordings for in-depth analysis. Sociocultural discourse analysis was used to examine how social and cultural contexts constituted an ecology of undergraduate practice in interdisciplinary creative collaboration. Offering a new methodology, this discursive approach for studying context (Arvaja, 2008) was combined with interaction analysis (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002; Scott, Mortimer & Aguiar, 2006) to analyse how moment-by-moment creative developments and contexts were resourced and constituted through dialogue, artifacts and physical settings. With implications for theory and practice, the analysis showed how the students’ collaborative contexts were constituted through dialogue, and how their emerging co- creative practice was mediated through multiple social and physical settings. It further evidenced how common knowledge was constructed through the process of collaboration, the value of peer feedback for fostering confidence, and students’ need for ‘silent witnessing’; for space to reflect and contribute to a long-term cumulative conversation. The thesis also discusses how resourceful the students were, in terms of negotiating unfamiliar and unpredictable co-creating activities. Evidence is provided for the collaborative value of creating and appropriating new tools to develop common knowledge, and for the significance of imagination as a psychological resource for building common knowledge about hypothetical future activities, showing how technology-mediated co-creating can be seen as a complex interactional accomplishment.

The thesis attempts to address Orthodox Church concerns about the Protestant nature and ethos of the ecumenical movement, as it is encountered in the World Council of Churches, by examining Orthodox theological contributions to ecclesiology. This preliminary work is undertaken, as a first step, to establish points of dialogue with the theology of liberation and wider critical theories, in the search for a liberating ecumenism. At the same time, and in a second step (to follow the epistemology of the theology of liberation), this Orthodox theology is placed in a critical dialogue with the theology of liberation in the search for liberating ecclesiological perspectives that can contribute to the movement in ecumenism. This uneasy dialogue helps to recover absent epistemologies from ongoing ecumenical dialogues by re-reading orthodoxies, both ecumenical and ecclesiological, from a liberationist paradigm, and sets ecclesiology within the wider framework of contributions from critical theory. This dialogue between Orthodox theology and the theology of liberation helps to construct an ecclesiology that liberates ecumenism by setting ecclesiology and the ecumenical movement in the wider context of social movements. This thesis calls the ecumenical movement to ‘another possible world’ influenced by people-centred ecclesiologies, which transgresses the canonical boundaries in the ecumenical movement. To be ecumenical implies an Orthodox content to ecclesiology, otherwise the ecumenical movement is open to charges of pan-Protestantism. It is by embracing Orthodoxy that the ecumenical movement can move beyond hegemonic colonial projects and find a liberating praxis. This thesis proposes a dialogue that reflects the structure of the Final Report of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the World Council of Churches. However, it engages with Orthodox ecclesiology and ecumenical histories from the perspective of the theology of liberation in the search for a liberating ecumenism and proposes a praxis that develops movement in the ecumenical and the ecclesiological through developing an ecclesiology from different peripheries of the Church.

Based on 10 months’ qualitative fieldwork and the filming of a documentary conducted on the islands of Lampedusa and Fuerteventura, this thesis examines ground-level Europeanisation, concentrating on two well-established Communitarian policy frames -- the Common Fishery Policy (CFP) and the management of the external border of the Schengen space of free movement of people – and two populations of artisanal fishers who were exposed to them. It analyses how governmental logics operated on the ground through individuals’ engagement with Communitarian policies, and it reconstructs the major transformations that the two islands’ fishing industries underwent in the duree of more than fifty years of European integration. While until less than thirty years ago the economy of the Italian island of Lampedusa was centred on bluefish fishing and canning industries, on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura most islanders lived from agriculture for centuries. Following the European integration of Italy and Spain, both islands turned into major tourist destinations and the centres of frequent European migration crises. By focusing on these two territories, this investigation explores how EU governance contributed to transforming the local sociocultural and economic fabric and the islanders’ everyday life. Following the overview of how both policies were played out on the ground, I analyse the effects that the CFP produced on the two islands, and those that the management of the European external border generated in Lampedusa. Giving centrality to the marine element, I push the study of Europeanisation towards the sea and reveal how European policies had reconfigured the islanders’ relation with the seawaters surrounding them. Concurrently, by exploring the ways in which individuals interacted with EU governmentalities, I also unearth the several unintended consequences of Communitarian governance – as conservation policies aiming at recovering overfished fish stocks actually generated the conditions for increasing and uncontrolled overexploitation, while border policies for the securitisation of the European space de facto de-securitized life in Lampedusa.

This dissertation examines the political prospects of rural subaltern groups in the era of neoliberal globalisation by engaging with the ‘death of the peasantry’ debates. To achieve this, it concentrates on rural resistance in the northern highlands of Peru, Cajamarca, against ‘new mineral extraction’ by multinational capital in the form of Minera Yanacocha S.A. (MYSA), with a theoretical framework of critical geography on transnational activism. In particular, the dissertation devotes attention to the massive mobilisations against MYSA’s Conga mining project between 2011 and 2013. The dispossession and disempowerment of the peasantry have been highlighted as the accumulation of global capital has intensified alongside the implementation of market-led development models around the globe. In the 1990s, the extraction and export of abundant natural resources was promoted as a ‘new development alternative’. In tandem with the unprecedented width and depth of resource extraction, the continent has become witness to increasing incidences of struggles led by local communities, particularly in the countryside. Recent Peruvian economic growth has been boosted by a ‘new mining boom’. Simultaneously, many Peruvians are protesting against mining activities, particularly due to their negative social and environmental impact. Cajamarca is one obvious example where neoliberal mineral extraction has generated a series of local struggles since the arrival of MYSA in 1993. The asymmetrical power of multinational capital vis-à-vis campesinos stands out in the context of the emphasis of the central government on ‘national development’ based on natural resource extraction. Against this backdrop, this dissertation examines the re-articulation of rural subjectivities and the political possibilities in their ‘networked form of resistance’, instead of focusing on the fragmentation, powerlessness and passivity of subaltern groups in the face of global capital power. Economic reductionism restricts our understanding of neoliberal globalisation to the exploitation of global capital vs. dispossession of local communities. Following Doreen Massey’s relational geographical approach, the dissertation maintains that it is relevant to understand the ‘relational content’ of global capital mobility and complex dynamics of resistance. In addition, the dualistic framework of geography and power which is based on an essentialist geographical understanding of the spatial (i.e. space/place; powerful global and powerless local) tends to regard local resistance as ‘reactionary’ place-based struggle. Instead, the dissertation focuses on the ‘interconnectedness’ of subaltern groups. It argues that diverse social groups shape what Featherstone terms ‘prefigurative solidarity’ around ‘maps of grievance’, via political resistance. In this process, a political identity is constructed in order to bring neoliberal globalisation into contestation.

Capturing Appalachia: Visualizing Coal, Culture and Ecology, draws on extensive ethnographic, archival, and ecographic research conducted across Appalachia between 2014-2016 to develop an empirically informed sociological image of the interactions between culture, geography, and industry. Of particular interest are the ways that extractive cultures in Appalachia are constructed and communicated, and so the project includes archival work researching historical images as well as fieldwork focused on the production of images. Drawing on the traditions of cultural and ‘green’ criminologies, geography, and critical ecotheory, concluding that the cultural, political, and ecological worlds of Appalachia exist in a dialectical relationship with one another, and that at the center of each is an intense cultural relationship with the region’s historic and contemporary capture (cultural, economic, and ecological) by resource extraction. These dialectical relationships are made clear in the visuality of Appalachia, with paradigms frequently challenged by the production of countervisual narratives in productions spanning photography, literature, cinema, and media. The project constitutes the first extensive empirical application of the suggestions of an emergent green-cultural criminology. This research contributes significantly to the existing theoretical literature on extractive cultures through the development and application of the concept of ‘capture’, which is employed in throughout and which constitutes a central concept the project. The concept of ‘regulatory capture’ informs much of the existing sociological literature on harmful industry. Expanding on the concept of ‘capture’, I consider the capture of Appalachian economies by a single industry (economic capture), the capture of cultural production by the dominant industry (cultural capture), the legal capture of material landscapes by industry (ecological capture), the visual-mechanical capture of images of ecology and culture (photographic capture), and finally, the capture of ecology and people by an emerging industry of incarceration (carceral capture).

Robert Putnam’s 2007 empirical study, E Pluribus Unum, has become the seminal study in a growing body of work which uses statistical methods to measure the effects of ethnic diversity on social capital, or other measures of social quality. Putnam’s study found that ethnic diversity negatively affects social capital in the United States, leading people to withdraw from social contact and ‘hunker down’ at home, alone, miserably watching TV. This study revisits Putnam’s findings and seeks to plug two major gaps across this field: firstly, the absence of any frame of reference for social capital or other measures of social quality, which has led to both a narrowing of the commonly used indicators of social quality and a possible over-stating of the relative importance to overall social quality of those indicators which are employed; and, secondly, the lack of any investigation into how relationships between ethnic diversity and social quality change over time. This study addresses two research questions: Do ethnic diversity and immigration have any effects on a range of indicators of social quality in local areas of England? Do any effects from ethnic diversity and immigration on social quality change over time? The study analyses data from the Citizenship Survey and other sources to investigate whether the rapid increase and spread of ethnic diversity throughout England in the twenty year period from 1991 to 2011 had any measurable effects on indicators of social quality in local authority areas over the period 2001 to 2011. The study finds that ethnic diversity and immigration do have the negative effect on local trust identified by Putnam but that they also have positive effects on some social quality measures, and no effects on others. Broadly, these effects become more positive over time for measures of social cohesion and more negative for measures of social capital. The study demonstrates that the negative, positive and null effects of ethnic diversity are linked to differences in the measure of social quality; when individual-level, attitudinal, proximate measures of social quality are used, like local trust, negative findings are far more likely. The study concludes that ethnic diversity and immigration are not useful explanations for variance in social quality; levels of deprivation and higher-education more strongly account for this. It would be worthwhile to further develop a robust framework for quantitative studies of social quality and to improve methodologies for measuring social quality relationships over time.

Applicants to Medical School must be academically successful to secure a place at university. Despite their success in secondary education and the stringent entry criteria, a significant number of students fail summative assessments at the end of their First Year. This gives rises to the following question: “Why do previously high achieving students fail in the university system?” Existing models seek to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary withdrawal from university and to explain academic withdrawal in the context of an individual’s academic and social integration into a new educational environment, their commitment to the institution and their commitment to Medicine as a career. However, much of the existing literature on failure in the early years at Medical School has focused on pre-university academic ability, as demonstrated by grade achievement at the end of secondary education, and/or faculty’s perspectives of student failure. This dissertation adopts a qualitative approach to understanding success and failure in the first year at Medical School from the perspective of medical students themselves. Their perspectives are explored within the model of withdrawal and persistence proposed by Tinto (1975) and interpreted in the context of existing literature on failure in the early years of higher education in general and in Medicine in particular. These findings are further reframed within an analysis based upon Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice. This analysis considers the students’ field of operation, the relative positions of agents within the field and the capitals which allow them to hold those positions, and the habitus of the agents and the institution itself. Through this analysis, factors that students believe may predispose to success and failure are identified and discussed. This in turn leads to a consideration of how my own understanding and professional practice have developed and might develop in the future.

This thesis explores the relationship between urban restructuring and working-class communities in the context of post-industrial neoliberalism. While working-class communities were the bedrock of classical sociological analysis in the industrial period, it is thought that class no longer provides a meaningful social identity and increasing individualisation is often said to signify that agency is set free from the confines of structure. In this thesis, I attempt to, first, confront these assertions by reasserting the relationship between urban restructuring working-class communities and, second, represent contemporary working-class lives, through an ethnographic case study of gentrification in working-class neighbourhood, Partick in Glasgow. Substantively, in this thesis I take gentrification as a key process of class restructuring which is spatially articulated and is the leading edge of urban policy both in the UK and globally. While gentrification intimates that urban restructuring and working-class communities are inextricably connected, this relationship is not always fully explicated within research; orthodox definitions separate economic and cultural fields and working-class experiences are underrepresented. Thus theoretically, in this thesis, I attempt to attend to these shortcomings by using hegemony as framework. Hegemony refers to a form of rule relevant to how transformations in social relations are managed whilst the capitalist system is maintained overall. This involves a mix of consent and coercion which combine structural and agential processes, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between material and the phenomenological levels. Within this, gentrification is conceived as a political strategy, which not only seeks to create space for the more affluent user; it seeks to, consensually, create the more affluent user which, in the context of neoliberalism, relates to a moral and financial economy. This new sociological perspective on gentrification combines cultural and material understandings, whilst making working-class communities and their everyday lives the centre point of analysis. This focus is imperative since working-class people and places are the principal targets of policy-led gentrification, yet current representations of and conceptual language used to describe working-class lives have waned within mainstream sociology. I examine how working-class residents receive, negotiate and resist gentrification processes to reveal the ‘hidden injuries’ as well as the ‘hidden rewards’ of urban restructuring. This study aims to do this by collecting ‘locational narratives’ of 49 residents of Partick. These accounts revealed that respondents’ rejection of traditional class identity did not signify the end of class, rather, it demonstrated that there was a material rationale underpinning individualisation and their disassociation with class, which relate to neoliberal ideologies that decontextualise class and promote self-determination. Residents’ place-based attachment is revealed to be a crucial class signifier – on both phenomenological and material levels. Elective fixity describes the choice and control residents’ have over their ability to stay fixed within their neighbourhood. Respondents are shown to have a paradoxical relationship with gentrification whereby they are invited to participate in processes as consumer citizens, through homeownership or consuming privatised neighbourhoods services, yet are not provided with the means to consume. Residents’ experiences of gentrification are characterised by tensions around control and choice and lack thereof. While gentrification brought new rewards whereby working-class respondents could, provided they had the means, act as gentrifiers, they were also confronted with novel forms of displacement, identified as new typologies which relate to the increased privatisation of social housing. Thus, an emergent negotiated culture of contemporary working-class communities is revealed which is set within the confines of structure within a post-industrial neoliberal context. Using a framework of hegemony to understand the political project of gentrification reveals the reciprocal relationship between urban restructuring and the remaking of the working-class subject.