This thesis will examine the collective identity of the English Defence League by utilising Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism. The empirical research contained within this study was gained via an ethnographic investigation of the EDL which included eighteen months of observations at demonstrations and twenty six narrative interviews conducted with a small group of EDL members. The study will utilise concepts that have been developed by Laclau in order to present a theoretical understanding of the way in which the EDL constructs its collective identity. By examining the role of demands and dislocation, equivalence and antagonism and the empty signifier in constructing the EDL’s identity this work will shed new light on how the EDL emerged and the way in which it developed as a populist social movement.

Since the 1980s, areas of public rental housing in South Korea have emerged as one of the targets of housing policy. The Korean government has developed public rental housing policy with the goal of contributing to social integration through providing the poor with decent and affordable accommodations. However, since the 2000s, there has been a growing concern that public rental housing estates have become stigmatised and isolated from the outside at a local level. The phenomenon of 'conflict' between public rental housing estates and local people not living on public rental housing estates has been debated under the term 'social exclusion' not only by Korean academia but also the government. This research maintains that a specific type of public rental housing estate is labelled as the neighbourhood for the undeserving poor by non-residents of the estates, who refuse to socialise with the estate residents. Drawing on available models to explain the social downgrading of neighbourhoods, this study concludes that social exclusion on public rental housing estates in South Korea is caused by a combination of the 'concentration effect' on the estates and the Korean welfare state oriented towards the principle of selectivity through 'targeting' in social provisioning.

Government policy has existed to protect adults who may be at risk of abuse since 1993 and was significantly revised in 2000 by ‘No Secrets: Guidance on developing and implementing multi-agency policies and procedures to protect vulnerable adults from abuse’. However, a catalogue of abuse of older people in care homes subsequent to 2000 confirms that abusive acts continue. This thesis examined the extent of abuse in English care homes and has sought answers to the question of why it endures. The research employed a mixed methods approach. An anonymously completed questionnaire was used to quantify and explore any previous experiences of abuse from newly appointed care staff in five newly opened care homes. Concurrently, thirty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted with care home staff working in a sample of established homes in five local authority areas to explore their perceptions and experiences of abuse. A clear conclusion from the findings is that action is required at both societal and care home organisational levels to strengthen the prevention of abuse.

This thesis presents a linguistic ethnographic study of language ideologies and identities in a multilingual, university community in Kazakhstan: a university aspiring to put Kazakhstan’s ‘Trinity of Languages’ project, aimed at developing societal tri-lingualism in Kazakh, Russian and English, into practice. Data was collected at a Kazakhstani university from 2012 to 2013, combining participant-observation and fieldnotes, audio recordings and interviews. Drawing on the concept of heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981), the research investigates how young people draw on ideologies of separate and flexible multilingualism (Blackledge and Creese 2010) and on the often contested indexicalities of Kazakh, Russian and English linguistic resources to negotiate identities as multilingual people in Kazakhstan, particularly in contexts of performance, and stance-taking. Consideration of these ideological and linguistic resources also sheds light on Kazakhstan’s wider ‘processes of ideological transformation’ (Smagulova 2008:195) and their real-life implications for multilingual people. Furthermore, the analysis highlights how participants construct stances towards translanguaging (Garcia 2009) and suggests that acts of contextualisation, which frame interactions as being more or less ‘on-stage’ or ‘off-stage’, shape the way that speakers draw on linguistic resources and their indexical meanings, and how these contexts can afford or constrain speaker agency in the negotiation of identities.

In the decade following the end of the Second World War, a mass migration of Italian workers came to the United Kingdom to be employed in Britain’s factories and mines. Amongst these, many were women. Thanks to official recruitment schemes drafted by the British and Italian governments of the time, young women left Italy in their thousands, to be employed as domestic workers or in factories, especially in the textile districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Here, they joined other migrants recruited through the European Volunteer Workers scheme, a government-led operation aimed at sourcing manpower from mainland Europe. The Official Italian Scheme was one of such recruitments, but one of the least investigated. The present research begins by studying the process of recruitment of young Italian women, within the wider context of Italy’s post-war emigration policies and its diplomatic relations with Great Britain. Subsequently, the research focuses on the entry of Italian women in the textile districts of Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Yorkshire and the process of their integration within British society. Finally, the thesis examines the attitudes of Catholic missionaries in Britain, the Italian expatriate community, the implications arising from mixed marriages and the formation of new multicultural families.

The life histories of Muslim teachers in Birmingham schools have been collected in this research. This interpretive research involved a systematic gathering and analysis of data using semi-structured in-depth interviews. Thirteen primary school teachers voluntarily participated for this to happen. This thesis is about Muslim teachers. It focuses on those Muslims who have, in principle, succeeded in education, and are deemed to be opinion-makers, models and leaders. It explores their conceptions, the meanings and significance which they attach to their decisions, their experiences, and events in their professional and personal lives. It concentrates on their views about the recruitment of teachers from underrepresented communities, and highlights the role of spirituality in their life. It reveals their understanding of what it means to be a Muslim teacher in contemporary Britain, and describes their aspirations and sentiments about the future. Much of the research on teachers’ lives, careers and work has been viewed predominantly from the perspective of class, gender and race. This research concludes that the experiences of teachers are not entirely affected by these configurations. Through the exploration of the life histories of Muslim teachers this thesis suggests that the significance of faith in the lives of teachers should be added to this genre.

This thesis employs Gramsci’s language of hegemony in order, firstly, to explore the role of civil society in legitimating and resisting state hegemony, and secondly, to examine the sociological basis of counter-hegemonic politics in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The thesis arose out of a critique of reductionist approaches in the theorising and study of changing state-society relations in post-2000 Zimbabwe that identifies civil society exclusively with opposition politics and excludes organisations aligned to the ruling party, and therefore resulting in functionalist discussions that view civil society as necessarily anti-state. This thesis demonstrates however that a dense hegemonic civil society also exists and it is organically aligned to ZANU-PF in its advocacy for a social change based on a radical transformed terrain of the relations of social forces of production, vis-à-vis land redistribution, albeit implementing this vision through coercive violence, persuasive but exclusionary discourses of radical nationalism, Afro-radicalism and nativism. Confronting it, is an equally militant counter-hegemonic civil society aligned to the MDC, and it deploys the discourses of constitutionalism and human rights to resist state hegemony and to unravel the violent nature of ZANU-PF’s nationalist project, but in ways devoid of a serious critique of the structural inequalities of a post-independent Zimbabwe.

This thesis presents a late-Durkheimian theoretical framework on civil society as a sphere of solidarity and applies it to the development from modern society to an „information society‟. The framework is used to identify the cultural codes that exist in different information societies and to show their role in integrating or dividing the members of civil society. The framework is applied to South Korean civil society entering an information age coincident alongside processes of democratisation. Three policy debates relating to information are used as case studies to show the coexistence of, and conflicts between, a „developmental code‟ based on economic growth and anti-communism deriving from the authoritarian period of state-sponsored capitalism, and a later „democratic code‟ based on human rights. The three cases are: the Electronic National Identification Card, the National Education Information System and the credit information system. The thesis argues that the values of a „democratic‟ code are becoming more dominant in recent South Korean society, despite continuous challenge for its validity. The cases provide evidence that democratisation and informatization can operate in tandem to establish the dominance of the democratic code in public discourse in South Korean civil society.

This study set out to take a definitive look at African Caribbean entrepreneurship by delineating the broad spectrum of historical and contemporary theories of ethnic entrepreneurship. It also looked in particular on the phenomenon of African Caribbean entrepreneurship through the lens of Pentecostalism, which is the most popular religious expression of African Caribbean peoples in the UK. The extent to which the socio‐cultural and psycho‐religious underpinnings of the African Caribbean person are amenable to entrepreneurial engagement was also subjected to analysis. This analysis focused on themes and perspectives, which are general to African Caribbean experience – individual, family and community. They were presented as age, gender or sex, education, family structure, motivation, and funding of entrepreneurial ventures. Also in connection with these were a number of factors, which operate at the nexus of African Caribbean Pentecostalism and entrepreneurship. These include historical antecedents, socioeconomic situations up to the 1950s, the ambiguity of Scriptures towards wealth as well as the impact of the psychology of time on the African Caribbean mind. All these provide a framework in which the existential and transcendental interact in the community of faith.

This thesis explores how Birmingham developed from a village of little note at the time of the Doomsday book to become the dominant settlement of the West Midlands conurbation. Central to Birmingham's development was its role in trade and industry and Birmingham's growth in this area is traced back to the mid-eighteenth century. Various different sectors of industry are examined; including the development of the jewellery industry. Part three of the thesis examines the South Staffordshire and Cannock Chase coalfields in terms of their historical development and impact on the wider region.