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The study focuses on foreign women who have been living in Liverpool from the year 2001. The investigation mainly analyzes the subjective perception of integration and the objective outcome. Literature has neglected, in general, the role of women in migration and in particular the importance of the integration of women, in the host society, for the well being of the whole family. It is often assumed that if the local Authorities adopt policies that respect diversity the immigrants will automatically feel integrated and become a vital part of the wider society. The responses obtained from 100 English women were compared to the ones received from 100 foreigners and 23 respondents who were born in the United Kingdom. The women from the UK: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, were considered as foreigners because people who are born in any of the countries that form part of a Nation State feel strongly about their ethnicity. This research tries to discover whether the perception of the women contacted reflects the objective outcome of the survey that has been conducted with the help of a questionnaire and evaluated by using a purposely created tool. The tool enabled the construction of a table to show the discovered differences. They show that there is a marked difference between the subjective perception and the objective outcome of integration. It is therefore acceptable to speculate that foreign women in Liverpool are integrated in their "diaspora space" but not within the wider society of the city. If the mothers are not integrated is unlikely that their children will be. This condition can, as a first consequence, cause confusion in the children and perhaps lead to their rejection of the local culture and, secondly, prevent any sort of integration that in turn should avert the formation of a cohesive society. Integration in the wider society can only be achieved if the subjects speak the local language. However the learning of English in the country of origin will not encourage the absorption of the culture of the country where the language has originated. Therefore fluency in the host language could be another aspect encouraging the creation of self-segregated communities.

Rangers and Celtic Football Clubs, together known as the ?Old Firm?, have received the lion?s share of attention given to Scottish association football in both scholarly and popular literature. During Scottish football?s formative years, however, the ascendancy of the OldFirm was far from set in stone. The exhaustive study of these two extraordinary organisations, therefore, greatly distorts our understanding of Scottish football?s Victorianorigins. Both clubs were part of a far greater scene which included not only fellow ?senior?,well-established clubs, but also any number of ?junior?, ?juvenile? and non-classified football clubs, as well as fledgling associations which oversaw the regulation of the younggame. This thesis will examine the birth and growth of football in the west of Scotland,during a period stretching from the mid-1860s to the Ibrox disaster of April 1902.Clubs were formed at any number of locations, from schools and churches, to factories and coal pits, as well as the many spaces in between. Clubs? respective connections in their own communities not only dictated how and why the game was played, but also determined the local support and patronage that each club received from local establishment figures. Victorian football organisations were as much social clubs as they were organisations dedicated to the playing and winning of the sport, and the sociability and conviviality of clubs determined their place in a complex social hierarchy, often leading to hedonistic excess. What pulled football away from this social scene, however, was its undisputed status as a gate money bonanza, one which saw not only the formation of a partisan supporter culture, but also the creation of a niche press dedicated to the ins and outs of the nascent game, both of which continued to fuel participation in the young sport. When the game itself became the main attraction, and when victory became more important than camaraderie, professionalism was not far behind. Play-for-pay irrevocably changed the relationship between players, supporters, the press and football clubs? local communities. This thesis will examine the interrelationships between the players, the supporters, sport clubs? patrons and the press, as well as the local and national connotations present in the building and advancement of the newly-popular association game.

This research project was conducted in response to several calls by marketing scholars and practitioners for a better understanding of the concept of consumer engagement in general and social media based brand communities in particular. The term ‘consumer engagement’ has grown in importance in recent years to describe consumers’ interactive experiences with brands. The popularity of that term was boosted by the rapid penetration of social networking sites which facilitated engagement of consumers through online brand communities embedded in it. This thesis investigates consumer engagement in Facebook brand pages. These pages are considered a form of online brand communities that are created by many companies for marketing purposes. Fast food brand pages in Egypt were used as a context for conducting this research study, where they are extensively used for targeting young consumers. With the purpose of identifying the factors that enhance consumer engagement in these online communities, this study examined consumers’ relationships with brands that initiated these communities as well as consumers’ perceptions inside these communities. Also, it studied the role of these brand pages in fostering consumers’ brand love as well as brand equity dimensions and outcomes. Brand love is an important marketing concept that has been appearing in academic publications recently to describe consumers’ emotional connections with brands. It is becoming widely accepted that consumers’ emotions towards brands, are a key determinant for their consumption behaviour. A mixed method research design incorporating focus groups and online surveys was used to collect data in the current study. The data collection was conducted by drawing a sample from young consumers whose ages are between 18 and 29, and who are active members of official fast food brand pages on Facebook in Egypt. The first phase of this study adopted a series of qualitative focus group discussions with the aim of exploring the nature and dimensionality of consumer engagement from the perspective of young Egyptian consumers. Also, it was useful in exploring the benefits these consumers seek by their engagement in online communities. The second phase was conducted through an online survey that was posted on Facebook brand pages of the fast food chains in Egypt. The aim of the quantitative phase was to test a conceptual framework for the antecedents and outcomes of consumer engagement in social media based brand communities. This framework was developed from an extensive literature review as well as the qualitative discussions. The findings indicated that consumer engagement is a multidimensional concept that consists of emotional, cognitive and behavioural dimensions, as well as several sub-dimensions. Also, three factors related to consumers’ relationships with brands (brand identification, satisfaction and trust) and four factors related to consumers’ perceptions inside the brand communities (critical mass; functional, hedonic and monetary benefits) were identified as antecedents of consumer engagement. Moreover, the study proved the positive effect of consumer engagement on the development of brand love. Furthermore, it indicated a positive influence of brand love on brand equity dimensions and outcomes. The current study contributes theoretically by enhancing our understanding of the concept of consumer engagement, particularly in the context of social media based brand communities in Egypt. More importantly, the inclusion of brand love is expected to contribute to the body of consumer-brand relationships literature. Also, this thesis contributes by providing a measurement scale for consumer engagement in the context of social media. On the other hand, the study provides some practical implications, where it provides some useful guidelines for companies to follow when advertising to young consumers on Facebook brand pages.

This dissertation aims to shed some light on the impact that changes in the socioeconomic environment can have on poor and marginalised ethnic minorities in developed countries. In chapter 1, I review the literature on the relation between the environment and the socioeconomic inclusion of immigrants and minority groups and provide an overview of the situation of the Roma in Europe and Spain. I hypothesise about how studying the integration of the Roma in Europe could help in gaining some insight into the study of the integration of minorities. I present my research project in Chapter 2 and a summary of some of the field work studies I conducted prior to starting the design of my research project in the Appendix. In chapters 3 and 4, I present the two papers I have written based on this research. In Chapter 3, I estimate the impact on children of a radical change in their socioeconomic environment, from marginalized slum settlements to normalized housing. I test the hypothesis that a child that is resettled from the slum at an early age will have better education and life outcomes than a child that is exposed to slum life in his childhood. I exploit the variation in “exposure to slum life” of Spanish Roma children aged 7 to 14 whose families were resettled from slum settlements to flats in a major European city (Madrid) over the span of 10 years. I make use of family fixed effects equations to correct for any potential family unobservables that could bias my results. I find that being resettled from the slum before age 6 has a positive and significant impact on the probability that a child aged 7 to 14 will not have repeated grade at school. I find no significant impact of the program on children’s integration and aspiration outcomes. In Chapter 4, I evaluate the impact of moving out of the slums for selected labour outcomes of Spanish Roma families resettled at different points in time into integrated flats in the Region of Madrid. I find that moving away from the slums and into integrated flats is positively correlated with a higher integration into the labour market of both male and female adults heads of household, as measured by the probability of having worked in a skilled job (apprenticeship) and in the formal economy and not having received the minimum income subsidy. The main reason why I cannot interpret these relations causally is the potential self-selection of families into the years in which they were resettled by the program, which would generate an omitted variable bias problem. I provide bounds to my estimates following Krauth (2011) to argue that this omitted variable bias could be very small and it could still be possible that leaving the slum earlier has a positive impact on the families.

National minorities, who claim autonomy and self-government rights, have always been a controversial problem in the fields of international law, political theory and nationalism. Multiculturalism and egalitarianism are two approaches that have long been discussed in all of these fields and implemented in various contexts. The success of policies that seem to be associated with these two approaches, however, has varied from one case to another. This study asks if failures of these approaches have anything to do with the contexts in which they take place. If so, what is the context in which these approaches prove to be futile? Theorists themselves explain aspects of an ideal context under which their theories can become fruitful. These ideal contexts and circumstances are, however, unrealistic; and their assumptions about the nature of social relationships do not always correspond with the reality. This study aims to find a more reliable criterion to assess the applicability of multiculturalism and egalitarianism. The thesis explains the relationship between national minorities and the state through a phenomenological paradigm. In this paradigm national minorities, the thesis argues, vary according to the state nationalisms they have experienced in the past. The thesis analyses the relational nature of minority and state nationalisms from this inter-subjective perspective. Within this framework, this study posits the hypothesis that multiculturalism and egalitarianism cannot produce viable solutions to the problems of national minorities who were persistently exposed to the policies of forced assimilation and civic state nationalism. The study reveals that a certain strand of multiculturalism that is ethnocentric cannot come to terms with such national minorities under the integrationist civic state nationalism because, from an inter-subjective perspective, the boundaries between the majority and the minority communities in this context are more fluid and diverse than they would otherwise have been. In such cases, resorting to ethno-centric multiculturalism and promoting the ‘authentic’ ethnic identities hampers the very diversity it seeks to promote. The thesis suggests that differenceblind egalitarianism is equally problematic in such cases because it cannot come to terms with the systematic injustice and the concomitant conflict that the policies of forced assimilation have created. As such its implementation weakens the very equality it seeks to promote. In order to explore and test this hypothesis, the dissertation makes use of a single in-depth case study of Turkey. In the period of candidacy for accession to the EU, Turkey is currently experimenting with ethnocentric multiculturalism to accommodate its Kurdish population more equitably. In Turkey, however, neither the contemporary discourse of ethno-centric multiculturalism nor the historical implementation of difference-blind egalitarianism seems to be a viable option from a liberal perspective. Observing the reasons for this failure enables the reader to develop a new insight to identify the cases where those theoretical perspectives could be more successful. Mindful of the fact that generalizing from a single case study is difficult, the case of Turkey will also be situated within a study of comparative cases to test the consistency of the hypothesis in this dissertation.

Traditionally, medicine and psychology have characterised mental handicap as an objectively diagnosable condition of the individual, in no way affected by society. Sociologists have reacted against this dominant paradigm by developing labelling theory accounts of how individuals and state agencies can create and maintain the category of handicap by stigniatization and differential denial of social resources, and there have been attempts to see the category as a functional one for industrial societies. However, these ahistorical accounts do not add up to an adequate sociology of retardation. Tracing the history of the condition, as the core of this thesis does, we find that it was not identified as a distinct 'social problem' in the West until the development of industrial capitalism. The key event appears to be the introduction of compulsory education, which presented to a state committed to universal education a group of children. The reactions to this discovery, however, must be construed as part of a whole culture and ideology, and the thesis traces the parallel development of scientific conceptualistions, popular attitudes and treatment provisions in the light of economic relations. (The historical analysis necessarily confounds industrialisation with the growth of capitalism, but limited cross-cultural material suggests the latter as the crucial variable.) The main aim of the thesis is to illustrate the importance of history for sociological theory. The thesis also considers the necessary role of microsociology and psychology in building a social theory of mental handicap which accounts for the experience of individuals aswell as the structures of society, and Chapter 7 describes three studies illustrative of what could be done. However, microsociology cannot provide a sociological understanding without a historically informed macro-sociology within which to locate it.

Within Victorian society there was a public perception that within the wider field of class there were a number of levels at the bottom of which was a criminal class. This, a very diverse group growing out of the working class, was considered to be responsible for the vast majority of offences ranging from begging to murder. Following the ending of transportation in the 1850’s the Metropolitan Police were faced with a number of new problems and responsibilities. These left them open to allegations that they were so targeting sections of the community that they were creating this criminal class from within the casual poor and those already known to police. As the period progressed the police were given wider powers to deal with the changed situation as well as extra responsibility for the compilation of criminal records and the supervision of released convicts. As a result of these changes allegations were made that the police so harassed those on tickets of leave and under supervision that it impossible for many to obtain employment. In order for this to have the case it would have been necessary for the police to be able to identify those with previous criminal convictions and to target their resources against them. The way in which resources were to be used had been established in 1829 with the objective of preventing crime, by way of uniformed officers patrolling beats and concentrating on night duty. Police resources were not efficiently used and failed to adapt to changing circumstances. In particular, whilst the available evidence especially for the early years is not complete it will be argued that, despite the allocation of considerable resources, the police were very poor at a very important part of their role, that of the identification of criminals. The concept of a criminal class has been examined in two ways. There was a ‘subjective’ public perception of the situation which included all those committing offences but it is argued that in reality what happened was that there were a series of legislative changes focussing on a gradually reducing group of habitual offenders which can properly be called a criminal class. This small group was responsible for the majority of serious crime during the period. As a result the police came to be targeting a very narrowly defined group and they as the agents, the public face of the changes, were the ones against whom complaints were most commonly made. This research shows that the Metropolitan Police were very poor at some important aspects of their role and that they were given additional responsibilities without always having the proper backing of the legislative framework. It also shows that the police were very aware of the difficulties they faced in dealing with released convicts and took great pains not only to allay public fears but also made contributions to the well being of many of those released from prison.

This dissertation offers an analysis of the dimensions of exile and considers how they are reflected in cultural products that emerge in the Iranian context. Exile has generally been understood to mean enforced displacement from a homeland. As a result, the cultural products of exile, for the most part, focus on the dimensions of exile in its physical, expatriated sense: what I refer to as external exile. Exile, however, is a complex phenomenon and it has a variety of dimensions. Exploring, analysing and exposing varieties of exile and exilic identities are important. Because, in the Iranian context, exile and the cultural products generated in exilic conditions play a key role in socio-political make ups of the country. The cultural products of exile, for the most part, aim to expose and through it resist oppression. Studying the dimensions of exile reflected in the selected cultural products show that even though the narratives of exile set out to resist enforced displacement they can instead perpetuate exile. This dissertation looks at three various dimensions of exile: external, internal and intrinsic exile. It begins by considering the cultural products of external exile, using Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. It suggests that the understanding of exile is too simplistic and proposes two other ways in which exile can be understood. The first of these is internal exile, which is the exilic condition of people still inside their homeland, using Ahmad Shamlou’s poetry and a film by Granaz Moussavi, My Tehran For Sale. The second is intrinsic exile, which is an exilic condition of people wherever they reside. The selected cultural products for understanding intrinsic exile are Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat and Azadeh Kanom and Her Writer or Dr. Sharifie’s Private Auschwitz, by Reza Baraheni.