This thesis investigates the socio-historical developments of Turkey in the light of current developments in the tradition of comparative-historical sociology by according a central place to the ‘concept of varieties of modernity’ in the analysis. The debate on varieties of modernity is a response and a contribution to new theoretical developments regarding modernity. And this thesis is set in the conceptual context of the current debate on varieties of modernity by aiming at understanding the Turkish experience as a particular model of modernity. The starting-point of the thesis is the possibility of the emergence of ‘multiple modernities’ with their specific interpretations of the ‘imaginary significations of modernity’. As a consequence, a critique of perspectives that reduce modernization of non-western societies to Westernization emerges immediately. Thus, the assumed equivalence between the West and modernity is problematized through the themes of the ‘plurality’ of civilizations, histories, modernizing agents and projects of modernity. The concept of ‘later modernities’ is suggested as a category for certain varieties of modernity, entirely different from the Western model. The term ‘later modernities’ refers in particular to non-western experiences that came about as distinct models of modernity, different from the West European experience, in the absence of colonization. In this context, the Turkish experience is a particular modernization an analysis of which is able to clarify the argument for varieties of modernity: the Turkish experience has been so far analysed only as a mere case of Westernization. By analysing both civilizational patterns and modernizing agents of Turkey, this thesis suggests that Turkish modernity cannot be read as a version of the Western model. This conclusion is reached through examining Turkish history in terms of a ‘singularization of culture’ against the view that sees Turkey as a border country between the West and Islam. It is argued that the division between West and East is, in fact, irrelevant in the case of Turkey. Therefore, the Turkish experience, as later modernity, does not express a Western model of modernity nor does it correspond to a ‘pure’ Islamic East. The distinctive traits of Turkish modernity are analysed on the basis of the following themes: the nationalizing process, the configuration of state, society and economy; Islam; the woman question. Finally, the lessons from the Turkish experience for a social theory of modernity are discussed in terms of conclusions.

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Building upon constitutive models of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, which appreciate the role of both organisations and stakeholders in constructing CSR, this thesis suggests that understanding of CSR is on-going and emergent through unfinalisable legitimation processes in social networking sites (SNSs). Constructed upon management research that has examined discursive legitimation processes, this thesis shifts away from CSR communications research into websites, CSR reports and press releases, to descriptively investigate discourse within interaction (dialogue) in the textually rich SNS context. The thesis contributes to the CSR literature by challenging conventional definitions of legitimacy, which suggest that objective, legitimacy ‘realities’ are espoused from ‘transmission’ (sender-orientated) models of communication, to offer interpretations of legitimation processes rooted within discursive and dialogical constructionism. In exploring how discursive legitimation occurs in contemporary networked societies across four UK-based retailers: the Co-operative, Lidl, Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury’s, findings capture the ‘centripetal’ (unifying) forces of normalisation, moralisation and mytholigisation at play in organisation-stakeholder dialogue across the SNSs, but also the ‘centrifugal’ (dividing) forces of authorisation, demythologisation and carnivalisation. These findings problematise the consensual tone of legitimacy as organisation-society ‘congruence’ and reveal the shifting and contradictory expectations that surround CSR. Within a Bakhtinian (1981, 1986) conception of dialogue, the findings most markedly reveal perpetuality (unfinalisability) in CSR communication and the impossibility of exhausting relations in polyphonic (multi-vocal) SNS environments, characterised by ‘dispersed authority.’ Furthermore, in conceptualising SNSs as interactive, agential and co-constructed organisational ‘texts’, findings also illuminate the performative (constructive) nature of SNSs in organising and (re)constituting CSR through organisation-stakeholder dialogue. This thesis provides a framework for understanding legitimation processes in SNSs, with implications for theory and practice.

This thesis examines the use of alcohol in pregnancy amongst women in Scotland, post the introduction of a recommendation for abstinence in 2007 from alcohol during pregnancy. There is an ongoing debate over this recommendation, with some researchers highlighting abstinence as the safest choice but others indicating that such advice may generate excess fear and stress to mothers and can also be a way of stigmatising and controlling women. I argue that an increase in women’s alcohol consumption has also initiated a marked increase in attention towards the role of alcohol in women’s lives and the risks of drinking alcohol during pregnancy. This growing emphasis of the concern towards women drinking during pregnancy has come from the extension of the medicalisation of motherhood and the perception that the maternal-foetal relationship is strained. Biographical narrative interviews with 22 women in Edinburgh and Inverness are used to explore women's alcohol consumption during pregnancy in Scotland. Primarily with the aim to further the understanding of the social and cultural context of women’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy by examining women’s attitudes towards drinking during pregnancy and their awareness of the risks of consuming alcohol during pregnancy. It is my contention that there are many complex themes involved in women’s choices around drinking during pregnancy and that the change to abstinence has further led to the messages women receive being inconsistent, which leaves women in a state of confusion. I maintain that it is important that we recognise that women have different attitudes towards alcohol. Women cannot associate themselves with generalised statements about harm and risk. I explore how women respond to health interventions and their attitudes towards existing public health campaigns and health interventions. Consequently, I contend that women in this study reveal mixed attitudes towards these interventions as they often feel they gloss over the individuality of these decisions and their complexity within women’s lives by using a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Women therefore challenged the notion of harm and the evidence base behind the guidance, leading to a lack of confidence in the medical profession and an increasing reliance on lay health beliefs. It also draws upon the often overlooked importance of pleasure in women’s choices around alcohol consumption. The study highlights the importance of women’s experience, and the necessity of talking to women to further understand what influences their decision making around alcohol consumption during pregnancy. I argue that an attempt to trigger concern in pregnant women is inappropriate because of the lack of evidence into the risks caused by even moderate alcohol consumption.

Academics, and the institutions which host them, are increasingly positioned as central components of national and regional innovation systems and as producers of skilled workers for the purported knowledge society. At the same time, globalising and internationalising discourses have constructed an image of highly skilled knowledge workers, including academics, as in demand and highly mobile. In academia, these trends have converged in the idea of a ‘war for talent’, in which institutions compete internationally to attract and retain the ‘best’ people. To some extent these notions extend already established understandings of academics as cosmopolitan and academic fields as transnational, yet their scale and instrumentalisation represents a distinct break from the past. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the empirical reality underlying these discourses through experiences and practices of non-UK citizen academics in the English higher education sector. Using original analysis of HESA data, it first describes recent trends and patterns in non-UK academic staffing in the English sector, and relates these trends to a qualitative analysis of the internationalisation policies of a broad sample of English institutions and other stakeholder organisations. Interviews with 23 non-UK citizen academics in two English higher education institutions explore the ways in which they understand, engage with and practice migration in their careers. It explores incentives and disincentives for migration, rationales for the directions and destinations of migratory flows, and the degree to which these non-UK citizen academics are represented in the imagined ‘mobile academic’ of policy and discourse. In addition, it explores the ways in which non-UK citizen academics in two universities contribute to the internationalisation of their institutions. The study provides a rich understanding of the character and role of non-UK academics in the internationalisation of English higher education, and the ways in which their practices and experiences reflect broader trends, policy agendas and discourses. Outcomes of the study build on and contribute to existing literature and theory, and are relevant to policy makers at institutional and other policy scales.

The 'Mechanism of Defence' project is an interdisciplinary study that examines the effect of sexuality on the perceived cohesion, morale and unit effectiveness of University Officer Training Corps (UOTC) battalions. The study privileges sociological theory and social policy using Emile Durkheim’s Division of Labour as its primary theoretical frame. The study evidences the influence of social structure as a central and abiding force in the establishment of community values and the integration of sexual minorities. It seeks to inform integrative measures in countries like the United States by examining and illustrating as a model the United Kingdom’s approach (post EU-ordered integration). The study has secured the full participation of the twelve largest (of 19 total) Territorial Army UOTC battalions in England and Wales. Five hundred and fifty-nine (559) British Army UOTC cadets were surveyed as to cohesion, morale, unit effectiveness and familiarity with minorities (including gays and lesbians) in their units in a comprehensive total sample of these battalions. 26 Cadets, commanding officers, adjutants and PSIs (Permanent Staff instructors, i.e. service veterans, some active service personnel) agreed to full length interviews (two to three hours each) regarding levels of cohesion, morale and unit effectiveness and the challenges they face as leaders in the post-integrative modern military system. The study devotes significant attention to the development, manifestation and impact of group, individual and community identity and the dynamics of organizational behaviour. This includes the extent of (individual and group) defence mechanisms triggered by gender and homophobia within the military environment. It also charts the development of anti-gay discrimination throughout history (from Ancient Greece and Feudal Japan to present day) with a brief but informative look at the effects of religion and politics.

The rise of digital media in Nigerian public life is evident in a variety of contexts – from how mainstream journalists gather news and information, to how young people express their dissatisfaction with the government on matters of concern, such as the case of the 276 kidnapped Chibok Girls (April 2014). This thesis is an investigation into the growing use of digital media in Nigeria, and identifies significant developments in Nigerian democracy through a growing ‘digital public sphere’. New communication skills of dialogue and deliberation are being cultivated through an improvised and often creative use of digital media, and ‘netizens’ [citizens active on the Internet] are purposively generating social, political and cultural consciousness. To explore this embryonic digital public sphere in Nigeria, field research was conducted in the form of historical, political and interview based research with active digital media users. The interviewees featured journalists, citizen journalists, bloggers, public officials, social activists, religious leaders, and cultural producers, and revolved around current uses of digital media technologies, online dialogue and key issues, and digital media as a tool for democracy in Nigeria’s future development. Largely on the basis of the interview data, this thesis argues that despite a discernible ‘culture’ of democracy cultivated through pervasive use of digital media, a digital public sphere can only be realised in a democratic-enabling political environment. This would necessitate public officials engaging in public dialogue; protections from harassment, insults and cyber-bullying; and the digital media infrastructure being developed, accessible and affordable. Furthermore, this thesis identifies how an effective digital public sphere will only function where the agencies of mass media are willing to take more active roles in collaborating with citizens online in order to cultivate transparency in public affairs, and also disseminate vital information, and work for widespread digital access.

This thesis investigates the relationship between personal change and social change, in order to theorise the former in a way amenable to better understanding the latter. It initially proceeds through a detailed critical engagement with the work of Antony Giddens on late modernity, arguing that in spite of its popularity and influence this account suffers from defects which only become apparent when the ideas offered are used to make sense of research data. Grounded in this critical analysis, the present project develops an account of ‘personal morphogenesis’: an analytical framework for studying processes of personal change in a sociological manner. This is developed and refined through a longitudinal case study which followed a varied cohort of undergraduate students through their first two years at university.

Tracing Autism is about neuroscientists’ on-going search for a brain-based biomarker for autism. While much recent sociological work has looked at the ‘cerebralization’ of such diverse diagnostic categories as depression, bipolar disorder, psychopathy, addiction, and even autism itself, surprisingly little light has yet been shed on the mundane ways that researchers in the new brain sciences actually think about, reason through, and hold together neurological accounts of complex and emerging diagnostic entities. Situating itself within a series of interviews with neuroscientists who work on the autism spectrum, one of the most enigmatic, recalcitrant and unresolved categories of contemporary neuroscience, Tracing Autism is an attempt to fill this gap. The key argument is that while this work might be seen as a process of gradual ‘neurobiologization’ or neuromedicalization,’ talking to autism neuroscientists reveals a practice much more complex, much more ambiguous, much less monolithic, and also much less certain, than the sociological literature yet fully realizes. The thesis shows how autism neuroscience works by tracing its way across some very different and ambiguous commitments – carefully negotiating the space between the biological and diagnostic definitions of autism, the hope and disappointment of neuroimaging technology, as well as the intellectual and visceral commitments of laboratory research. Locating itself within a recent turn to theorising the entanglement of cultural and biological phenomena within scientific spaces (Barad, 2007), and joining with a growing literature that wants to take neuroscience seriously (Wilson, 2004), Tracing Autism shows how the complex work of autism neuroscience picks its way across social deficits, neurobiological substrates, psychological theories, disappointing machines, and loving scientists. Tracing Autism is the story of an intellectual and affective complexity that has come to define autism neuroscience; but it is also the story of the care, seriousness and novelty with which neuroscientists talk about their work.

This thesis presents an analysis of lesbianism within a twofold perspective - the sociology of deviance (lesbianism as a 'counteridentity') and the sociology of female sexuality (lesbianism as it relates to the role of women in society). Throughout the text, I draw from both perspectives in order to present a contemporary view of lesbianism as a complex, social phenomenon. Traditionally, academics and others who were concerned with this area have advocated an individual or 'non-problematic' approach, or both. A major contention of this thesis is that prior theories have obscured important, it not necessary, social factors which are relevant to a full understanding of lesbianism. The methodology i. clearly outlined in terms of data collection (interviews, questionnaire. and participant observation), the purpose, goals and limitations of the research process. Three key sociological concepts are put forth and affect the direction of the analysis. They are: lesbian identity, lesbian role and lesbian social organisation. These concept. are drawn from a basic assumption of this thesis - Lesbianism, like sexuality, is a social construction. As the research process unfolds and the findings are revealed, we are continually confronted with lesbianism as a distinct, yet complex and changing social phenomenon which is directly related to objective social factors and subjective experience. A variety of relationships, organisational roles (of a political and non-political nature) and life-styles emerge from within the contemporary 'lesbian ghetto'. We observe how and why lesbians organise their social lives. It is hoped that a critical analysis of lesbianism will, not only challenge certain ideas about lesbianism and the lesbian role in society, but also, point out to the uninformed observer, academic and lay person alike, the complexities which are involved in the understanding of the contemporary lesbian experience, as well as the sociology of lesbianism.