Italy is characterised by large sub-national disparities between the less developed South and the more developed Centre-North. It comes at no surprise, therefore, that it has a complex history of population flows from the South to the rest of the country. This thesis focuses on a new trend in the dynamics of internal population flows: whilst historically unskilled workers constituted the bulk of Italian migrants, in recent years, the high skilled have become increasingly mobile. As the high skilled are a crucial input to both innovative activity and economic growth, their spatial movements can potentially affect the dynamics of local development and as such, deserve thorough investigation. The work analyses this internal brain drain, focusing on recent university graduates. As a group, they are especially interesting to study: not only because, as they transit between study and work, they are particularly prone to move, but also because they have, so far, largely been neglected by scholars. Whilst the existing literature has mostly compared spatially mobile to spatially immobile individuals, this thesis distinguishes between returners (who leave the region of study to move back to their home region), migrants (who leave the region of study to move elsewhere) and stayers (who remain in the region of study). This tripartite taxonomy enables us to identify new insights on the dynamics of spatial mobility. The study draws upon a wide and interdisciplinary literature and builds an original theoretical framework to analyse the knowledge flows generated by mobile graduates. Through this framework, it carries out a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of human capital mobility, at the micro, meso and macro level. The main contribution of the thesis is to explain the links between graduate flows and regional innovation. In addition, the study also explores the consequences of migration on job-satisfaction and the social nature of spatial mobility itself. Methodologically, it applies a wide array of econometric techniques to a survey on graduates’ entry in the labour market, developed by the Italian statistical office (ISTAT). At the policy level, the study sheds light on the connection between higher education, innovation and regional development, providing a new perspective on the long-standing debate on Italian sub-national inequalities

This thesis explores the ways in which civil and uncivil groups in Northern Ireland use the Internet to generate soft power. This research assesses whether the Internet creates a critical multiplier effect for marginal groups, such as terrorists and interface communities. A coding scheme, adapted from previous studies of political part websites, is used to determine whether these groups have realised the potential of the Internet as a tool for political mobilisation. The dissertation considers whether there are any qualitative differences between the online framing of terrorist-linked parties and the constitutional parties in the region. The phenomenon of amateur terrorism is also analysed through the lens of Loyalist and Republican solidarity actors. The analysis determines whether solidarity actors were more likely to justify political violence on their websites than their respective political fronts. In addition, the websites of rival residents’ groups are examined to determine whether the Internet can help generate social capital across sectarian interfaces. The analysis determines whether residents’ groups use the Web to strengthen in-group identities, or to engage in dialogue with rival interface communities. In doing so, the research tests the cyberoptimist assertion that the Internet will facilitate forms of communication that undermine unequal power relations within nation-states. The online audience for Northern Irish terrorists is modelled using Internet usage patterns and the ranking systems used by Internet search engines. Internet usage patterns are examined to define the potential audience available to Northern Irish terrorists via their websites. The study suggests that there is little to differentiate between the websites of terrorist-linked groups, such as Sinn Fein, and the websites of constitutional parties, such as the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). In contrast, Loyalist and Republican amateurs often use paramilitary insignias on their websites to demonstrate their opposition to the peace process. However, these websites do not constitute a new dimension of terrorist threat to the peace process. Analysis of residents’ group websites suggests that they further the competition of ‘victimhoods’ between Loyalist and Republican interface communities. Both sides use their web presence to claim that they were constantly under threat of attack from the community situated at the other side of the ‘peaceline.’ Moreover, the thesis suggests that there will be a limited online audience for both civil and uncivil actors in Northern Ireland. The online audience for these actors is likely to consist of Internet users who use the Web for political research and Loyalist and Republican supporters in the ‘offline’ world.

In recent decades, domestic abuse has been transformed from a private concern and personal tragedy into a key public issue across the globe. In the UK this has culminated in a contemporary policy focus on violence between intimate partners as one of a multitude of forms of violence against women. Consequently, much research has focused on the abuse of women in intimate relationships in attempts to understand the problem and formulate appropriate state responses to it. Feminist principles have guided much of this work, and both devolved and central UK governments accept the feminist analysis of the problem: domestic abuse is the result of perpetuating gender inequalities in the social, public realm. Public services such as health, education and social work, as well as the criminal justice system, seek to respond to the needs of women fleeing their abusive partners, and public money covers the cost of many Women’s Aid refuge places. However, some women’s immigration status precludes access to publicly funded services, and subsequently their options for support and ability to exit abusive relationships is constrained. Despite overt policy statements which recognise the universal nature of domestic abuse and the way in which it will affect very high proportions of women irrespective of their race, colour or creed, state support is therefore conditional. The experiences of women who are prevented from automatically accessing public services because of their immigration status has become of increasing concern in the Scottish context since the dispersal of thousands of asylum seekers during the last decade, as well as the rising number of women entering the country on spousal visas. This study therefore examines experiences of help seeking and escape from abusive relationships from the perspective of this particular group of women. Of central concern is the process of problematisation: the way in which issues are transformed from private matters into public concerns, warranting state intervention and investment, and the way in which this transformative process shapes the policies which proceed from it. Therefore, the study investigates the problematisation of domestic abuse in Scotland; the avenues of support it offers as a result of this process; and how this very problematisation shapes women’s personal experiences of help-seeking and escape from abusive partners. First a comparative discourse analysis of documents from Scotland and New Zealand illustrates how different definitions of ‘the problem’ result in differentiated public responses; then, drawing on data collected during in-depth interviews with participants at policy level, workers in support services, and individual women themselves, women’s journeys through and away from abusive relationships, as well as the social and political contexts which shape them, are discussed. Two key themes emerge from this piece of research: the operation of silences within a policy context; and the way in which this is dominated by hierarchical values, systems and processes. The thesis concludes that there is scope for a practical application of the findings which could enrich policy understanding and output in Scotland, to the benefit of women who are, at present, one of the most marginalized groups in Scottish society.

Increasing levels of poverty and social exclusion in Africa, and Malawi in particular, have heightened interest in social security with varying proposals for refonn. Feminist scholarship highlights how women experience social security differently. However, debates on refonn have not fully engaged with how social security can reflect the needs of women in a context of plural and competing legal discourses, nonns and values. This thesis investigates the interplay between nonns and values and the lived realities of women in social security from a feminist and radical legal pluralist perspective. It uses predominantly qualitative data from a case study of women in Zomba, Malawi, based on grounded theory complemented by discourse analysis and appreciative inquiry. This study found that women's specific risks and the disproportionately adverse impact of general risks on women are in the majority of cases marginalised due to struggles for resources and power. Plural social responses at family, community, market and state levels reflect this marginalisation. Dominant legal discourses in these institutions devalue non - material disruptions of life mainly related to care practices. This weakens solidarity and results in social insecurity for the majority of women. The marginalisation is further reinforced by dominant conceptions of umunthu and human rights which obscure the disparities in solidarity and care. At the same time, there is practical resistance to the dominant discourse using idioms of jenda and substantive complementarity being generated within the same or modified regulatory institutions. These practices are creating a gap which IS precipitating the changes aspired by women. The changes include increased access to both material and non-material resources and sharing of care within and between the family, community, market and the state. This reflects solidarity of care. The thesis argues that, social security systems should be underpinned by a legal discourse of solidarity of care in order to improve women's social security.

Overcoming actual violence is the driving, although hidden force behind modern modes of thought and investigation, the conceptualisation of civil society since Hobbes, Ferguson and Rousseau, and the unprecedented global effort at preserving human dignity in non-violent politics based on human rights undertaken in the 20th-century. It can even be argued that sociology as a discipline emerged from philosophy precisely as an attempt to contain violence by means of understanding the ways in which people can peacefully co-exist in a society. And yet violence itself is a phenomenon traditionally avoided by sociology. This thesis approaches the issues related to violence through the prism of the ways in which practitioners working in support of survivors endeavour to understand the problem. It is thus a second order critical study of sociological explorations of violence. The thesis begins by mapping the field of sociological exploration of the problem and reviewing the debates related to the theorisation and research of violence. In destabilising the category, the theoretical component of the thesis reveals that the process of understanding violence is a non-linear, always incomplete, and difficult process. The empirical research looks at the approach of practitioners in dealing with the consequent contradictions and ambiguities. Its findings show that in order to link understanding violence and supporting the survivors, one needs to define violence dynamically through the concept of trauma and to build a containing framework in which a holding environment can emerge. The holding environment is presented as a concept, which in practice demonstrates that the understanding employed to address violence is not simply an activity of mind but a social and relational category. This requires re-considering the properties of understanding violence and their linkage with other activities of mind in the social realm and with the practicalities of living. The thesis finishes with a recommendation for further research into the collective aetiology of the trauma derived from violence, for the purposes of designing an approach to sociology based on understanding as a nonviolent response to violence.

The promotion of 'active' ageing in later life has been a key development in recent health policy. These changes not only challenge the prevalent view of old age as an inevitable process of biological decline but signify the tendency of lay and expert discourses to increasingly use the notion of risk. Older people's social identities also need to be negotiated in the context of positive (active/freedom/fluid) and negative (passive/dependence/decline) images of ageing. This thesis explored older people's social identities; meanings about lifestyles, emotions, and bodies; and the salience and limitations to 'risk' and 'reflexivity' within everyday life. The research involved the intersection of in-depth qualitative interviews with photo-elicitation with 50 men and women aged between 50 and 96 years. Thematic analysis using Atlas Ti was undertaken. Three interconnected themes emerged: 1) Participants experienced their bodies as a taken-for- granted aspect of their everyday lives until moments when an awareness of the body interrupted their daily activities. At these moments the everyday visibility of the body was heightened and participants reflected on their own meanings and identities about ageing. 2) Emotions were significant as participants described their everyday lives and social interactions. There was a continual tension between inner (private) subjective feelings and experiences of emotions and the outer (public) bodily and spatial expression of these emotions. 3) Reflexive meanings about risk were multifaceted as participants drew upon diverse discourses when making choices about health-related lifestyles. A sense of embodied vulnerability associated with ageing was evident. Meanings and perspectives associated with ageing bodies were therefore central to everyday experiences of growing older. Alternative images of ageing were intertwined within the accounts of the participants as they fluctuated between a sense of ageing as a time of possibilities and a heightened awareness of their embodied vulnerabilities.

We study three topics on corruption that are of particular relevance to sub-Saharan Africa. Firstly, we address the question of why corruption is such an endemic problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Is it policy driven or "destiny"? We analyse indices of perceived corruption and test several theories regarding the causes of corruption. We find strong support for two arguments: Countries with a British heritage are perceived to be less corrupt, while those with a common law system are perceived to be more corrupt. We find weaker support for four further arguments: Countries with good quality institutions and a greater proportion of women in the labour force are perceived as less corrupt. Countries with greater natural resource abundance and with greater trade openness are perceived to be more corrupt. Secondly, we look at the supply side of bribery. Within the public procurement process, we study how a firm's uncertainty regarding the official's corruptibility and rival firms' costs influences the magnitude of the bribe it offers. Due to the illegal nature of bribery, we also explicitly consider different punishment mechanisms for corrupt firms. We find that secrecy leads to lower bribe levels, and that bribery can be completely deterred by either appropriate fixed fines or by firms being fined punitive damages. Thirdly, we investigate whether more corrupt governments receive less aid. We develop a theoretical framework that treats corruption as a tax on aid. Although we are unable to empirically test this model, we use it to motivate our empirical analysis of aid receipts using data on sub-Saharan Africa. We find a negative correlation between a country's perceived level of corruption and its aid receipts. However, we find no causal effect of perceived corruption on aid receipts. We revisit the results of an influential paper in the literature and find that their result of no evidence that countries perceived as more corrupt receive less aid is not robust to a sample of sub-Saharan African countries, although we find no evidence of a causal effect. We find no evidence that the impact of perceived corruption on aid receipts differs across sectors.

Sweden as the great welfare state where everybody is equally welcomed and cared for has for long been the prevailing view. Although Swedish integration policy seems to confirm this view, this is far removed from many people’s experienced reality. I argue that part of this disharmony lies in how West European languages contain and relate to an ‘identity’ construction, which perpetuates and is perpetuated through dichotomies that strengthen the social and political cogency of concepts such as ‘race’, ethnicity and culture. Based on this, I carry out a discourse analysis of Sweden’s major integration policy documents from the mid 1970s up to today. After an eclectic reading of discourses on migration and integration terminology, ‘identity’ and language, I assert the centrality of ‘identity’ construction to everything we do. With this in mind, taking the dialogism promoted by the Bakhtinian Circle as the dichotomy to monologism, I carry out a close dialogic reading in the tradition of Lynn Pearce (1994) and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986). Contextualising the policy documents, I present the history of migration and integration from a Swedish perspective. Focusing on the last five decades, I divide the different historic tendencies into themes ranging from: emigration to labour migration, refugee migration and the European Union, and from immigrant policy to integration policy. Believing that the conceptualisation and the handling of categorisation, segregation, culture, discrimination and racism are all central to a successful integration policy, I analyse the policy documents thematically accordingly. I show how the interdependence of the common ‘identity’ constructions and language sometimes obscures and frequently counteracts the intention of the author. As a result, I argue that the Bakhtinian Circle holds the key to a better understanding of the invincibility of stereotyping within racialised discourses, through applying absolute ‘identity’ constructions in monologic speech, and how this may be counteracted in order to strive for a dialogic approach to the world.

There are now in Britain some 200,00 homes with a drug-using parent, and this figure does not include the homes with an alcohol-dependent parent. These levels of substance-use seem set to increase, particularly among women of childbearing age. Research so far conducted indicates that women with substance problems are more reluctant than men to come forward for help, and this is especially the case if the women are mothers. Thus the study of the lives of substance-using mothers is an important area of concern, pragmatically in terms of social policy and sociologically in terms of studying a little-known, marginalised and vulnerable population. Despite this importance, little research has been conducted to date on the everyday experiences of substance-using mothers. This thesis addresses this gap in knowledge by researching the lives of forty-eight women with substance-dependency problems, using a grounded-theory approach to analyse data gathered with the aid of a range of research instruments, including a series of semi-structured interviews. The research respondents were interviewed about their childhood experiences, the context of their daily lives as mothers and substance-users, their relationships with their children, and their attitudes and perceptions towards their substance-use. The thesis argued that, in the everyday lives of substance-using mothers, a key narrative is that of taking and losing control, as the women struggle to maintain their family-lives in the face of disruptive forces. The women hold to traditional views of motherhood, and find themselves reluctant non-conformists to this ideal, as they share, together with other mothers under patriarchy, a sense of powerless responsibility for the wellbeing of their children. Substance-using mothers, it is argued, are an example of a conceptual category of 'problematic mothers' in that their failure to cope and protect their children effectively reveals some otherwise-hidden dimensions of normative motherhood.

The aim of the research was to investigate the concepts of, and attitudes towards, people with physical disabilities held by occupational therapy (OT) students, so that a theory of professional attitudes and professional action could be developed. The research was building on previous research by the author, which found that OT students tended to have a maternalistic and nurturing view of disabled people, and also as a response to issues raised by the social model of disability which questioned whether OT was an oppressive or empowering profession. Utilising an integrated methodology, the research sought to address the following research questions: what, amongst OT students, is a 'professional' attitude towards disabled people? are the attitudes of OT students towards disabled people any different from those of other students? do these attitudes change over time? are there any differences in the 'personal' and 'professional' attitudes of OT students towards disabled people? how accepting of disabled people are OT students, would they be willing to work with disabled people as colleagues? is there an hierarchy of relationships for people with different impairments? what does the 'professional' attitude mean in practice? how does this 'professional' attitude develop? what factors influence its development? does contact with disabled people have any effect on attitudes? do OT students express attitudes and values which oppress or empower their disabled clients? A case study approach was used with a variety of data collection methods. The main focus of the study was the collection of data, using a questionnaire and a series of interviews, from a cohort of OT students throughout the 3 years of their OT degree. The questionnaire included the Attitudes Towards Disabled People Scale, a suitability for OT training scale, and a semantic differential exploring stereotypes of disabled people. Data were also collected from other groups of OT students comparing personal and professional attitudes and attitudes in terms of social distance, using the Disability Social Distance Scale. Comparative data was collected from non-OT students. In order to explore attitudes in greater depth a small group of students was selected from the main OT cohort and interviewed about their attitudes and approaches to disabled people at 3 points during their studies. Analysis of the data revealed that the OT students held highly positive personal and professional attitudes towards disabled people. These attitudes were also demonstrated by the use of an empowering, client-centred approach to OT interventions. However, the OT students had a tendency to focus on an individualistic and personal tragedy approach to disability. This individualistic approach might result in oppressive practice. The findings were used to develop a conceptual framework for OT interventions with disabled people which should allow therapists to articulate and develop their practice within an empowering framework.