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Broadly speaking, this study aims to refine the traditional interpretation of the term "marginal colony" in an effort to illustrate how economic developments in each of the Bahamas, the Caymans, Belize, Anguilla, and Barbuda during the last half century or so of formal slavery in the British Caribbean impacted upon the life and labour experiences of bondsmen and women in these territories. More specifically, the study attempts to define the "marginal slave experience" by examining the occupations of slaves in these territories, their living conditions and general treatment by their respective owners within the wider context of these experiences for slaves in the sugar colonies of the British West Indies. In so doing, the study seeks also to establish and account for the significant differences in the organisation of slavery in the marginal territories of the region arising from the different economic function of that institution in those terrorities from that which prevailed in the sugar colonies of the British Caribbean.

The focus of this thesis is on how working class men live with physical interpersonal violence. The place of the research is in Easterhouse, a housing scheme on the outskirts of Glasgow in Scotland. The primary research methods employed are a reflexive engagement with in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation. This concern with a reflexive engagement with the research field and the research ‘data’ is theorised using the sociological tools crafted by Pierre Bourdieu; in particular, his stress on reality as fundamentally relational and his use of reflexivity, habitus, the body and fields to construct and understand human agency. In this thesis, these tools are used to open up moments of often `mindless’ violence and to understand what these moments might ‘mean’ to both those who experience this violence, and how this reality can come to be evacuated/excavated in historical and representational forms. To do this, the thesis considers the formation of habitus through time, across generations and indeed how a relationship to time is made and grounded in everyday experience of class relations and culture (and so the amount of resources or capital that can be brought to bear in the context of these relations). In this sense, the thesis endeavours to complicate what is meant by violence and what is mean by the ‘causes’ of physical interpersonal violence by situating moments of violence as elements in a total fact of life. The thesis situates contemporary forms of physical interpersonal violence in the new social, economic and cultural landscape formed post-1979. That is, continuities and discontinuities are assessed in relation to a tradition of having no tradition and the possibilities for historical self-understanding and agency that such a moment could provide. That is, now that working class culture has been ‘stripped down’ to its economic reality the culture of working class life is simultaneously a coming to terms with this ‘nothing’. Paradoxically, then it is in this ‘nothing’ that agency is found and where history, culture and politics can either come to be ‘reclaimed’ – ‘invented’ – or ‘mobilised’.

This thesis examines media representations and audience reception processes through a detailed study of media reporting and public understandings of asylum and refugee issues. It is based on sixty interviews in which refugees seeking asylum, professionals working with them and members of the general public were invited to comment on their own memories and beliefs using pictures from the TV coverage. The pictures used are included in a detailed thematic content analysis of national and regional broadcast news. Public understandings are systematically compared to the content of media reporting. In particular it explore people’s memories and beliefs of national and regional broadcast news. The content analysis revealed that the national news represents asylum in unsubstantiated and problematic ways whilst the regional news has a more balanced approach to representation of the issue. The thesis explores the diversity of audience reactions and the different ways in which people may accept or reject the media representations. However it also draws attention to the themes which recurred in all of the interviews and argues that there is strong evidence of media effects. The thesis highlights factors in media coverage which are particularly influential. It demonstrates how language, structures, and images may influence audience responses and examines how media representations may structure patterns of misinformation. The audience were poorly informed on asylum and refugee issues. In addition attention is drawn to viewers’ everyday relations and experiences. Some interviewees use specific knowledge to reject news reports. The research provides comprehensive and fruitful insights of cultural differentiation linked to ‘race’/ethnicity, gender, class and geographical location. The thesis concludes by arguing for a media studies schema which connects questions about audience reception with questions about media production and content as well as the construction of broader relations within society enabling researchers to contribute to current debates about power, control and social conditions.

The goal of this study is to investigate language use among a relatively young immigrant community in Britain with a view to finding out what role English plays in their lives, whether they still use their languages of origin, and what are the reasons for their particular language behaviour. Language use and maintenance in an immigrant minority setting is an important area of investigation if one is to understand some of the factors involved in the community's integration process, or the lack of it, in general, and to appreciate the role of language for integration in particular. Minority communities adopt a number of linguistic strategies for communication among themselves and their wider community. In most cases, these linguistic strategies are dictated by both the social and linguistic environment the immigrant minority finds itself living in. The thesis first looks at the sociolinguistic situation of Morocco in order to establish the linguistic background of this community. It then considers the British Moroccans from a socio-economic perspective with a view to identifying factors that may influence language shift behaviour. The empirical part of the thesis is concerned with establishing linguistic as well as non-linguistic determinants of language maintenance such as those that influence language choice, code-switching, attitudes and use of language-specific media. The study has two main hypotheses: first, the Moroccan community in Britain is undergoing a generational language shift, and second, typical Moroccan sociolinguistic patterns are reflected in the language use of Moroccan speakers in Britain as well. While the former hypothesis has, on the whole, proved correct, the latter did not hold true.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of theatre audiences and the ways in which they experience community. It is positioned within current debates on the mediatization and globalization of society, and the ongoing discussion as to whether social change has an adverse effect on community experience. Methodologically it emphasizes the investigation of audience contexts and collaborative practices among actors and theatregoers and between researcher and respondents. Audiences’ own terminology is considered vital to understanding what community means to them. The thesis examines community experience across the whole trajectory of the theatregoing event, from theatregoers’ backgrounds, through interactions at theatre performances, to discussion outside the auditorium and in their everyday lives. It argues that while theatre audiences conform to the perception that they tend to be middle aged and predominantly female, there are modifications to Bourdieu’s findings that cultural consumption is closely related to social class gradations. In particular, mainstream theatregoers extend across the spectrum of the middle class and their tastes in theatre are eclectic. Similarly, the research finds that there are other ways than through habitus that theatregoers acquire cultural tastes and practices. A close consideration of interactions at theatre performances, and the physical contexts in which they take place, identifies features of interaction and auditoria that encourage or discourage community, and relates them to interaction in everyday life. An investigation of why theatregoers prefer live to mediatized performance, and an examination of changes in audience perception and how much they are shared with others, contribute to an assessment of the transformative power of theatre and of how far face-to-face community is perennial in society.

Sociological accounts of political activism in African Caribbean and Asian communities in Britain have largely overlooked the role of black women as agents and have contributed toward an image of passivity, apathy and exclusion. This thesis examines the black women's organisations which have emerged since the early 1970s. Drawing on unpublished materials from over 30 organisations, participant observation at conferences and meetings and semi-structured interviews with 25 women activists. the thesis provides evidence that black women have been highly politically active despite immense barriers, both internal and external to their communities. This thesis explores the relevance of theoretical insights on identity formation, diversity and difference to black women's organising. I argue that black women's organisations have used a variety of strategies to manage the tension between the desire for a nuanced and differentiated notion of black womanhood and the need for political unity. In so arguing, I explore recent attacks on the term 'black', and identify a number of strengths in its continuing usage as a political and cultural definition. I also explore the extent to which increasing social stratification within black communities has the potential to undermine this unity and to create incompatible personal and organisational goals. Finally, I examine coalition building between black women and black men, white women and the labour movement. I identify a number of barriers to effective partnership but argue that there are a range of recent developments which may open up the possibility of building coalitions for social transformation. In conclusion, I argue that black women have formed independent organisations on the basis of a broad-based and visionary politics of transformation which has a number of unifying elements. These factors form the basis of a strategic unity which they have forged across differences of ethnicity, religion, nationality, class and sexuality.

Black-British young people are, on average, at least four times more likely to be excluded from school and experience significantly lower levels of academic attainment than their demographically matched white counterparts. This research adopts a social constructionist understanding of resilience to explore how ten Black-British students in an urban secondary school cope within their school and community. It is hoped that the case study of their resiliency adaptations will inform primary and secondary prevention. The interview transcripts were analysed using Grounded Theory methods (Charmaz, 2006). This involved the continuous analysis and comparison of data. This process produced 81 focused codes and 19 memos. These were conceptualised into three categories, which formed ‘Hope Theory.’ This theory suggests that having educational and vocational aspirations are important in shaping how all young people, not just those of black British cultural heritage, engage in school and in moderating the effects of communities that are perceived as unstable and threatening. Key to hoped-for goals is the ability to identify viable pathways towards their completion and a sufficient sense of personal agency or self-efficacy to attempt them. Comparisons were drawn between Hope Theory and the extant literature, highlighting the Working Alliance as a tool that could help EPs and teachers build social and physical ecologies that support hope and resilience in young people.

This thesis investigates gendered power relations, including violence, control and coercion, within teenage heterosexual relationships, and broader relationship cultures. It focusses on upper-middle class 14-16 year olds, whose sexualities – unlike those of working-class teenagers – are seldom seen as a social problem. It explores the interactions of romantic and sexual experiences with classed identities and social contexts, based on data generated within a large, high-performing state comprehensive in an affluent, ethnically homogenous (white) area of south-east England. The research, conducted in and outside school, used a mixed-methods approach, incorporating in-depth individual and paired interviews, and self-completion questionnaires. It draws on insights from feminist post-structural approaches to gender and sexualities, and is situated in relation to work that explores the negotiation of gender in “post-feminist” neoliberal societies. Despite (in some ways, because of) their privileged class positioning, these young people faced conflicting regulatory discourses. Heteronormative discourses, and gendered double standards, still shaped their (sexual) subjectivities. Sexuality was very public and visible, forming a claustrophobic regulatory framework restricting movements and choices, particularly girls’. But inequalities and violences were often obscured by powerful classed discourses of compulsory individuality, with young people compelled to perform an autonomous self even as they negotiated inescapably social networks of sexuality. These discourses could exacerbate inequalities, as participants denigrated others for vulnerability. A significant proportion of participants reported controlling, coercive or violent relationship experiences, but girls especially downplayed their importance. Girls shouldered the burden of emotion work, taking on responsibility for both their own and partners’ emotions. Sexual harassment and violence from peers were often regarded with resignation, and sometimes led to further victimisation from partners or peers. Policing of sexuality was bound up with classed prejudices and assumptions; participants’ performances of identity often rested on dissociation from the working class. Young middle-class people’s heterosexual subjectivities sat uneasily with educationally successful, future-oriented subjectivities; sexuality was an ever-lurking threat to becoming an educational and therefore classed success.

This thesis aims to extend the understanding of the maintenance of the institutional arrangements especially in the process of resistance to institutional changes, which were caused by a regulatory and a technological discontinuity. By doing that, this thesis addresses research gaps in new instiutional theory. In order to flesh out the resistance to institional change, the Japanese publishing field was considered to be an appropriate reserarch site. This is because the Japanese publishing field has been referred to as one of the "least changeable" industries. Furthermore, in the Japanese publishing industry, different types of environmental discontinuities were brought about. The incumbents resisted those actors leveraging these environmental discontinuites and skeeing to change the institutional arrangements.