There has been concern, since the 1970s, that the education of children in the care of local authorities had been severely neglected. Reports into social services for children, such as Utting (1991), recognised this problem, and in 1994 a joint guidance circular was issued by the Departments for Health and Education. As recently as 1995, however, a joint report issued by the Social Services Inspectorate and the Office for Standards in Education stated that the care and education systems, in general, were still failing to promote the education of children in care. The Social Exclusion Unit's report (SEU, 1998) again recognised the problem and set targets for educational attainment. It was, however, the Health Select Committee (House of Commons, 1998) who drew attention to the pointlessness of setting targets when the Government itself acknowledged that there was a lack of data on the educational circumstances and achievements of children in care. This action research prOgram set out to address this lack of data by collecting educational information on a significantly larger scale and in a more comprehensive way than any previous study (i.e. by covering all looked after children of school age in one authority); by being longitudinal (i.e. to follow the progress of individuals for up to four years); and by incorporating care histories of the young people. It was designed with the aim of informing practice and raising attainment. The major findings were that children in care underachieve at all stages of their education and that disproportionate numbers have special educational needs; have poor school attendance; and are excluded from school. The analysis also indicated that the relationship between care experiences and academic attainments was more complex than suggested by the targets being set for local authorities in National Priorities Guidance.

This thesis starts with a critique of existing sociological and criminological studies. The major argument here is that, although interactionist studies are an improvement upon their positivist counterparts, they suffer from the inherent weaknesses contained in their astructural bias. Thus, although observational studies have been able to describe the effects of the process of interaction within the courtroom, they have been unable to explain why magistrates' justice is characterised by a relative lack of due process. In the main body of the thesis, we offer a structural analysis of the functions of magistrates' courts through an examination of the historical development of the magistracy culminating in its transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century. We show that the magistracy was created in its modern form as a lower court of summary justice specifically to act as an efficient method of punishing petty offenders with a conscious disregard for rights of due process. This did not simply reflect the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie but rather it was a product of the class struggle resulting from the particular formation of British capitalism, in which the gentry retained a powerful position. The central argument is that the particular form of justice that is administered in the lower courts of England and Wales reflects the compromise that was reached between these two sections of the ruling class in the period in which the modern magistracy was forged.

This thesis, focusing on the reasons beyond immediate terrorist and criminal events, studies ‘how’ and ‘why’ terrorist organizations (TOs) and organized crime groups (OCGs) act, react and evolve. It adopts a ‘criminality oriented approach’ that puts discrete pieces of terrorism under a microscopic examination and explains terrorist learning of criminality: how tacit knowledge required for terror tactics and organized crime is processed and saved in the secret domains of TOs and OCGs and how the knowledge is accessed and learned by other illegal organizations. Using Akers’ social learning theory, it explains that TOs and OCGs influence each other through a hybrid network structure and they learn non-traditional activities that require knowledge, skills and techniques (organized crime for TOs and terrorism for OCGs) through associations. It also argues that the associations among them result in the appropriation of tactics and modus operandi, and that the closer association of the two groups may cause the mutation of both organizations. It develops a dynamic model that explains the relationship between terrorism and organized crime and the mutative behaviours of TOs and OCGs. Depicting the present and future capabilities of TOs and OCGs and possible future forms of both terrorism and organized crime threats, it offers pathways to prevent TOs from learning and to strengthen counterterrorism measures.

There has been limited success in tackling the spread of the HIV epidemic among young people, despite years of interventions. This research contributes to an understanding of why intervention success has been limited by examining HIV prevention among young people in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa. Shifting the focus from the specifics of individual interventions, it draws on the theoretical work of Foucault to examine how young people and their sexuality are being constructed and understood within policy discourse, and how this relates to young people’s own everyday experiences of the virus. In doing so it highlights both the disjuncture between these understandings, and the ways in which, despite this, young people are engaging with policy narratives in often unexpected ways. Using qualitative approaches the research was carried out in four rural communities. Repeat dependent interviews (n=108) were conducted with young people (n=56) over a 10 month period. These were supplemented by participant observation, key informant interviews (n=15), and analysis of policy documentation. The study finds that the ways in which evidence is used to make knowledge claims about young people and their engagement with the virus is problematic. It argues that the dominance of particular forms of knowledge within policy processes work to exclude those forms of knowledge which are grounded within young people’s everyday lived experiences of their sexuality and the virus. As a result, in claiming to ‘know’ young people, this decontextualized knowledge works to construct a particular subject position of youth in which agency is ascribed to fit within dominant gendered and medicalised narratives of the virus. These constructions are in stark contrast to how young people themselves understand and perform their own sexual identities, which are spatially and temporally located. The research finds that young people come to construct and perform their, often multiple, identities in ways which reflect their subjective interaction with the context of their daily lives. It finds that young people’s narratives of sexuality and HIV are embedded in discourses of pleasure and poverty, and are shaped by a complex web of social and gender relations. Despite this disjuncture, the research finds that young people are not simply ignoring, but rather are engaging, with these policy narratives in complex ways, as they become part of their context of interaction. Drawing upon Long’s interface model the research finds that as policy narratives come to intersect with young people’s lifeworlds, new forms of knowledge and social practice are produced. Within this interface ‘youth’ as an identity emerges as an asset which young people can draw upon and utilise to make sense of their situation, as well as provide access to opportunities. At the same time young people appropriate the policy narratives of individual responsibility and the medicalised discourse of HIV to rationalise, and make sense of, their own risk taking behaviours. The thesis' methodological contribution examines research practices themselves as sites of knowledge production about young people. Turning the analytical lens on my own work, as well as that of others, it examines the challenges in conducting such research and the ways in which it can serve to reproduce the narratives it seeks to uncover. In going beyond identifying the disjuncture between policy narratives of youth sexuality, and those that young people construct for themselves, the research generates new insights on how we think about young people, their identities and behaviours, in relation to the virus. By moving from the specifics of interventions themselves to the assumptions and conceptualisations which underpin them, it draws attention to the importance, and problematic nature, of what we do know, what we can know, and the implications of these knowledge processes in the everyday lives of young people. In doing so it generates a number of key implications for policy and future research.

Crime in the Caribbean consists of drug and human trafficking, weapons smuggling and terrorism, and is fuelled by this region’s physical location as a gateway to the United States (US). Significant challenges to effective policing are transnational (TN), making the region an ideal testing ground to study transnational police cooperation (TNPC). Current cooperation is seen as reactive and hindered by the Caribbean’s topography, cultures, legal systems, nepotism and territorialism. Using a phenomenological perspective, this qualitative study investigates TNPC in the Caribbean region, focusing on Puerto Rico (PR) and the Dominican Republic (DR), assessing how TNPC works within this region, current structures and operations in the Caribbean. Other researchers such as Malcolm Anderson and Ethan Nadelmann have established the theoretical research base upon which this study is built. However, as empirical research is limited around this particular study, this paper primarily draws upon interviews with law enforcement agents in PR working for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Program, administered by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. This study investigates stakeholders’ perspectives and the various methods of TNPC with the aim of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of multi-agencies towards a practical model, as embodied by HIDTA. This research is the first of its kind, offering a new direction for theory and research.

This thesis is concerned with the statistical adjustment of survey-based indicators to account for unobserved and observed sources of heterogeneity. Recent years have seen a growth in the use of survey-based indicators to measure performance, but questions have been raised over their legitimacy due to high levels of nonresponse, particularly among certain groups, and the influence of factors unrelated to organisational performance, which complicate their interpretation. In light of this, this thesis uses a range of methods that go beyond those ordinarily applied to performance assessment, to explore the role that nonresponse and factors unrelated to performance, i.e. case-mix, have on indicators. The empirical analysis focuses on the Adult Social Care Outcomes Framework (ASCOF) indicators drawn from the English Adult Social Care Survey. The core concerns of this thesis are whether (i) nonresponse and (ii) adjusting for factors beyond the control of organisations affects the interpretation of indicator scores. Nonresponse has a limited effect on inferences about performance, but conclusions depend on the method used to explore the effects of nonresponse, the level of nonresponse, the importance of unobserved factors and the value placed on accuracy over intelligibility of indicators. Adjustment for case-mix has an important effect on the interpretation of indicators, but the adjustment method used was less critical for inference, at least where the aim is to compare organisations. This thesis suggests that the accuracy of some of the ASCOF indicators would be improved by adjusting for case-mix and, possibly, for nonresponse. It is important for future studies to explore the effect of nonresponse on indicators. Policymakers may also wish to consider amending the survey design to improve its representativeness of the adult social care population. Future studies of survey-based performance indicators would benefit from using a wider range of methods similar to those applied here.

Why is there no post-Westphalian world polity today, despite the globalism of recent decades? Is the construction of a world polity an impossible utopia? If it is possible, under what conditions, by what processes, and in what necessary social form? Available visions of a world polity form a debate and world polity formation theories offer limited explanations. In response, this study argues the emergence of a world polity is possible, but is an unlikely and fragile outcome in a late modern context. Two contributions are made to support this argument. First, a new world polity formation theory is developed that explains how systems of polities become single polities. A second contribution advances an account of the historically specific transcivilizational and planetary social form a world polity must necessarily attain if it were to be practically constructed in a late modern context.

This thesis addresses the complexity of the experiences of severely distressed contemporary combat veterans in the Western world. It examines the specific features of their affliction that is not accounted adequately for either by the existing psychiatric approach to mental health disorders or by the complementary psycho-philosophical “moral injury” paradigm. Following a systematic review of the relevant literature, a new approach is proposed to address these distressing phenomena of combat-related disorientation based on thymos, an ancient Greek anthropological concept. The “moral injury” paradigm has previously examined the relevance of thymos in contemporary veteran care, but has limited its consideration to Homeric material, and has also cross-interpreted the concept through modern psychological and physiological lenses in order to develop clinical applications. The original contribution of this thesis is the provision of a diachronic lens for investigating thymos in its organic philosophical context from Homer through the Golden Age of Greek philosophy, the teachings of early Christianity, and its current use in Eastern Orthodox Christian monastic tradition. This diachronic perspective provides an existential understanding of certain features of such combat-related disorientation that were previously unidentified. More specifically, it discerns a systemic dysregulation of three essential capacities for human flourishing that can occur, often sequentially, after exposure to intensely adverse events in combat: primary emotion, instinctive motivation to action, and moral intuition. Moreover, it develops a comprehensive account of two distinct features that are previously not addressed sufficiently: (1) the enduring sense of self-horror after a perceived “absorption of evil” in battle, and (2) radical loss of the ability to attribute meaning to events or to maintain narrative coherence of life’s experiences.

Young people in post-war Britain have grown up in a context of fast-paced change and constant attention; from transformation in state welfare in the 1940s and 1950s, concern about delinquent and subcultural youth in the 1960s and 1970s, and the consequences of recession and youth unemployment in the 1980s. Youth clubs at this time provided a space where young people could figure out myriad influences on their lives and emerging identities. To date, these significant organisations have been woefully under-examined by historians who have largely failed to look at youth groups except in uniformed or religious contexts, or as part of the solution to youth crime. Much practitioner research remains ahistorical in its approach. Early histories of youth movements such as John Springhall’s are being built upon by exciting new interdisciplinary research, for example by Sarah Mills. This thesis contributes to this emerging body of work and restores the place of the youth club in our understandings of youth in the post-war period. This research set out to establish the full range of roles that youth clubs and their membership associations had in the post-war period and how they linked with other forms of voluntarism, welfare and youth provision. Additionally, this research wanted to look at how youth clubs fitted into the lives of young people at a time when their leisure and cultural pursuits were the subject of much scrutiny. In uncovering the complexity and distinctiveness of youth voluntary organisations, local case studies are essential. They allow this research to demonstrate the local factors at work in shaping young lives and youth cultures and provide much-needed evidence about how voluntary service-providing organisations have contributed to the history of voluntarism and welfare in contemporary British history. Papers of clubs and associations held privately and in archives have been complemented by oral history interviews and a range of other sources to examine fully the voluntary youth club in South London and Liverpool. These sources show that clubs were shaped by unique mixes of geography, welfare politics, social issues, international influences, and young people themselves to create spaces for fluid youth cultures and clubs which could blend roles and relationships in order to adapt to local needs and experiences. Youth voluntary organisations were central to networks of youth welfare in London and Liverpool. By looking at how these organisations operated and their relationship with the state, this thesis establishes that voluntary youth clubs were on the frontier of the mixed economy of welfare. They were dynamic in the face of social change and effective in accommodating and responding to the cultural needs of the young consumer in the post-war period. The evidence presented here shows that youth clubs and associations had a pivotal role in helping young people navigate myriad problems. Furthermore, this thesis argues that the category ‘youth’ has concealed the way in which a wide variety of factors such as class, gender, race, and locality have shaped the experiences of young people. Finally, this thesis reveals the crucial role played by a new generation of youth workers, who challenged traditions rooted in uniformed organisations and older youth movements, in embedding permissive and radical approaches in to youth clubs. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the unfixed and contested identity of the youth club could react, respond and adapt to changing welfare, social and cultural pressures. This has given them an undefinable but central status on the very borders of local mixed economies of welfare in South London and Liverpool where the state, voluntary, consumer and cultural were all interconnected to create not only uniquely situated organisations but also micro-local youth cultures. The research presented here contributes to debates about civil society and the making of citizens. It aids understanding of how the category of youth has been constructed and used in wider society in the post-war period. It also adds to our understanding of what welfare provision has looked like and the boundaries between different types of provision. This in turn informs contemporary discussion of who should provide youth and wider welfare services and what forms this should take.

Advances in medical technology have led to increasing numbers of people undergoing heart surgery with decreasing hospital stay and decreasing mortality (Leske & Pelczynski, 1999). With patients being discharged home quicker and sicker than in the past, the immediate post discharge period is of concern to family carers (Theobald & McMurray, 2004). Much of the literature in this area, in fact, refers to Myocardial Infarction (Stewart, et al., 2001; Kristofferson, et al., 2007), with very little attention being paid to carers of cardiac surgery patients (Davies, 2000). In order to fill in this gap, it is important to understand the experience of carers of cardiac surgery patients following cardiac surgery after discharge. Aim： The aim of this study was to explore the experience of carers of cardiac surgery patients following hospital discharge. Methods： This study was conducted within the qualitative research paradigm using a phenomenological approach (Cohen, 1987). Purposive sampling was used and ten participants volunteered to join the study. Three weekly diaries and two semi-structured interviews [at 6 and 12 weeks] were used to collect the data. The Colazzi (1978) method will be used to guide the data analysis. Findings: The findings revealed that the carers considered the experience of caring for their relatives to be a journey. This consisted of three phases, which were „walking in the dark‟, where carers adopted a role for which they were not prepared; „getting on with it‟ where carers were more in control; „looking forward to the future‟ when life was back to normal. However, each participant‟s journey was an individual experience and the changes they presented in the phases, seemed generic. There were three overarching themes: „the changing nature of relationships‟, „reassurance‟ and „being there‟ these showed how they felt about their relatives, the help they needed and the reason why they cared. These themes were not evident episodically but rather continuously for all the participants. The essence of the journey was interpreted as a process of transformation and return in which carers moved from being a person to a carer to back to a person Conclusions: The results of this research revealed that carers lived a journey when looking after cardiac surgery patients. The essence of it was a process of transformation and return when carers moved from being a person to a carer and back to a person. It is essential for health care professionals to review discharge planning for these short term lay carers by being aware of their experiences to help prepare them to adopt their caring role.