This thesis explores the impact of co-operative working upon feelings of personal and political efficacy and political consciousness amongst participants in job creation worker co-operatives. Based upon a longitudinal panel study of four job creation co-operatives in Scotland and the north east of England, the research monitors the factors influencing their commercial and organisational development. How this influences the scope for, and achievement of, personal change is highlighted. The research concludes that the job creation worker co-operative is not, per se, a vehicle for social and personal change in a capitalist society. Severe commercial pressures limit the scope for autonomous control identified as fundamental to the development of feelings of personal and political efficacy. Worker co-operatives are not identified by participants as part of a wider movement for social change and the experience of working within them has a negligible effect on political consciousness.

This thesis arose from an interest in examining from a critical micro sociological perspective the practice and procedure of a Youth Justice reform implemented at the beginning of a New Labour administration. Preventing youth crime at its early onset had been a key agenda for New Labour since their election to government in 1997. Their flagship Crime and Disorder Act 1998 brought about a raft of orders with young people that included the replacement of the juvenile caution with the Final Warning scheme that was meant to be at the cutting edge of multi-agency working in youth crime control. Engineered to send messages to young people that they could no longer go on offending with impunity it was anticipated that more uniformity and structure to diversion would not only 'nip crime in the bud' but also reduce professional discretion and promote greater conformity in practitioners working on the ground. To date Final Warnings have received only limited attention from academics and remain theoretically under developed and in need of greater critical scrutiny. That research which exists has highlighted the tensions between New Labour's expectations set against the reality of operational Final Warning practice on the ground. Missing is the nature and causes of these tensions, how they arise and why. Using a combination of in depth semi structured interviews and observational data with police inspectors responsible for administering Final Warnings, YOT officers who delivered early intervention and young people who received a Final Warning this thesis examines the basis for New Labour's policy with young offenders and explores how the participants interpreted the reform and the ways in which this informed their actions. Enabling an understanding of the Final Warning from the vantage point of all who participate in the initiative may go some way towards the development of best practice in 'joined up thinking' in youth justice. It is the argument of this thesis that local organizational culture and practice can inhibit government aspirations for reform. The Final Warning in the study area continued to exhibit many of the problems of the previous caution system with juveniles but within a more prescribed system that can disadvantage young people. The conclusion suggests reform in youth justice is unlikely to succeed without paying greater attention to local dynamics and the transformational tendencies at the ground level.

Previous research regarding the emergence of Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) has either been impact oriented (Cooper et al, 2006, Chatterton and Rowland 2005, Crawford et al, 2004) or has been concerned with their capacity to improve equality and diversity within public policing (Johnston, 2006). Despite the recent civilianisation of the patrol function (Crawford and Lister, 2004a) and increasing recognition of multiple police subcultures within the police force (Reuss Ianni, 1983, Chan, 1997, Foster, 2003), there has been little attention directed towards understanding PCSO working practices and decision making, their capacity to deliver reassurance or to the potential emergence of a distinct PCSO occupational subculture within the police organisation as a result of their differential role, remit and limited authority. This study aims to critically examine the existence and characteristics of a PCSO occupational culture and its influence upon the delivery of neighbourhood policing within a northern police force. Underpinned by an appreciative ethnographic approach (Liebling and Price, 2001), it provides an original contribution to understanding the operation of PCSOs and to existing theoretical knowledge and understanding of police (sub)cultures within the context of civilianisation and police reform. The research involved three hundred hours of participant observation of PCSO working practices, individual interviews with twelve PCSOs and two focus groups with neighbourhood police officers across two police sectors of a northern police force. The study revealed two key findings. Firstly, whilst PCSOs are able to deliver reassurance to ‘vulnerable’ and 'respectable’ residents within target communities, the pursuit of reassurance is secondary to the demands of crime control. The pull of the performance culture and high levels of public demand for service cause PCSOs to become increasingly utilised as a reactive resource and to be deployed in tasks falling outside their remit. Second, represented as a three-fold typology of PCSO culture, the study thus provides evidence of an emerging PCSO subculture within the police organisation. Widely held aspirations to become police officers amongst PCSOs combined with an emphasis upon and value attached to crimefighting within the dominant police culture (Reiner, 2000) leads to the construction of a PCSO occupational culture that is both similar to and distinct from police officers. PCSOs endorse characteristics of the dominant culture, including suspicion, solidarity and sense of mission in their efforts to either imitate police officers or support future applications to become police officers. However, their civilian status, limited authority and differential occupational environment also lead to the construction of distinct cultural characteristics and orientations to the role.

This thesis examines the Women’s International League (WIL) to explore the wider themes of feminism, pacifism and transnational activism during the Great War and the interwar years. WIL was formed in October 1915 as the British national section of what came to be known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). The thesis interrogates the concept of feminist pacifism by analysing WIL’s campaigns for peace, disarmament and international law alongside its pursuit of women’s rights. The thesis also demonstrates the interplay between activism on the local, national and international stages. In chronological terms, the focus is on the first twenty years of WIL’s activism: from the circumstances that led to its foundation in 1915 to the challenges faced in 1935 – a time when the political consensus within WILPF came under threat and when hopes that internationalism would secure peace began to fade. The study comprises five chapters. The first explores the foundations of WIL and examines the methods it used to link its opposition to war to its feminist demands. The remaining chapters are thematic and cover the organisation’s work during the interwar years. Chapter Two analyses WIL’s campaigns for women’s rights, including the nationality of married women and the debate over protective legislation. Chapter Three highlights the organisation’s gendered approach to peace, including its campaigns for disarmament. Chapter Four investigates WIL’s commitment to internationalism through an analysis of its organisational structure and its work at the transnational level. The final chapter examines how the organisation built and maintained a network of activists, exploring the shared interests between WIL and a range of other voluntary associations, including those working for peace, humanitarian relief, liberal internationalism and socialism. This study firmly places WIL within British and international movements for peace and women’s rights. Work by Leila Rupp, Marie Sandell and Karen Offen demonstrates the wealth of activism by and for women at the international level during the twentieth century. However, previous scholarship has not focussed on WIL in any depth. By offering a detailed analysis of this organisation, the thesis sheds light on a range of issues: the campaign for female citizenship and political participation; the connections between feminism and pacifism; the development of international organisations during the interwar years; and the nature of transnational women’s activism.

In different countries participation in the arts has become a significant theme of government policies which foster the instrumentalisation of culture; Yúdice (2003), Belfiore and Bennett (2010), Eagleton (2014). Increasingly it is claimed that the arts have positive effects on social, political and economic well-being. The emphasis on people changing the arts ― common in the political discourses of 1970s ― has been substituted by arguments about the power of the arts to transform people’s lives. This study tests these claims comparatively. The main questions asked are: what are the differences between instrumentalism from above or below in the political order; and how do the world of the arts and letters and the world of politics speak to each other today? Through extended interviews, life stories and discourse analysis, based on fieldwork in Britain and Venezuela, the study demonstrates the complex moral interdependency between European notions of aesthetic virtue and political or civic virtues. The political structuring of these virtuous relations is shown to be morally tenuous. It is argued they express the institutionalised but inadequate compensations associated with the ‘good-faith economy’ (Bourdieu 1977). Politically these relations are problematic; among other things they discursively separate the mind from the body which means that time and other basic needs tend to be neglected. It is argued that this complex relationship between aesthetic and political virtue is a significant factor in Statecraft, and in unmaking the militant role of the organised working class. It is suggested that these dynamics are a contributory factor in the ascendancy of the political far-right internationally. To counter the influence of the good-faith economy this study proposes greater public participation in the funding processes which support the arts.

The goal of this study is to examine the dynamics under-pinning the reproduction or transformation of gender power relations within two sport organisations. Across society we have images of women making ground and experiencing far greater prospects than ever before. Yet, on the other hand, this is bound up with continuous examples of little progress in work. For instance, while there are more opportunities for women across work than at any other point in the 20th Century, they continue to be segregated from men in a large number of jobs. Similar gendered patterns of progress are reflected in sport. There are now far more female participants in sport, however they remain concentrated in 'appropriate' sports which reflect historical images of femininity. Broadly, sport and work also dictate stereotypical images for male participants. While broad levels of change are occurring across society, central to this thesis is whether dominant patterns of gender relations are transformed or reproduced at the micro level of sport- related work. Critically sport organisations are selected because sport's history continues to demonstrate patterns of male dominance. Secondly, the growth of sport provision has occurred in a service area, an arena traditionally dominated by women workers. Finally, sport is one of the few sectors which traverses both the public and private industries, providing the basis for a comparative study. Therefore, employment within sport provides an opportunity to examine the ways in which gender power relations are challenged or reproduced when two diverse sets of relations meet. The theoretical framework draws heavily from feminist theory, particularly radical, socialist feminist and post-structuralism. A qualitative research strategy provides the framework for a comparative case study methodology. Seventy-five interviews were conducted across the two case study organisations, which are located in the North. Past Times is a contracted out leisure centre and Sporting Goods a privately owned sports clothing and equipment firm. Both companies are in the service industry but come from two diverse backgrounds. Sporting Goods developed from a manufacturing heritage and Past Times is breaking away from direct local authority control as a result of CCT. At the time of the research both establishments were experiencing high levels of organisational change. While Past Times breaks with tradition in having a female manager and Sporting Goods contrasts with a traditional management structure, hegemonic masculinity dominated across both organisations. Overall gender power relations were reproduced through day-to-day practices that appeal to, and perpetuate, common sense understandings of men and women's roles at work. The sport environment provided a critical site for the strengthening of homosocial relationships among men and enabled the identification of three interacting components of gender: bodies, identities and sexualities. These components together contribute to the ongoing construction of a logic of difference which is more highly defined in the sport environment.

This thesis argues that orthodox social constructionist and culturalist explanations of the mutation of interpersonal violence in the Anglo-American world over the past three decades need to be challenged. Macro-patterns of interpersonal violence appearing over historical time and social space indicate a direct correlation with changes in political economy. It is argued here that specific forms of physical and sublimated symbolic violence were functional to the development of mercantile and classic industrial capitalism, and thus they were cultivated and harnessed in complex forms across this time period. This suggests that the 'civilizing process' formulated in terms of evolving social relationships and emotional sensibilities is inadequate as an explanation for the decline in the murder and serious violence rates in Europe, and this concept needs to be reformulated in a direct relationship with political economy. The new concept of the 'pseudo-pacification process' arose from an attempted reformulation, which represents the internal pacification of the population as an accidental and rather fragile by-product of capitalism's functional requirements. Current rises in the rates of murder and serious interpersonal violence in vortices appearing in the shift from the classical productivist economy managed by interventionist state politics to a consumer/service economy managed by neo-liberal politics suggests that indeed the aetiological connection between political economy and violence rates needs to be returned to the foreground of criminological theory. The putative 'sensibilities' at the heart of the civilizing process are more likely to be emotional attachments to the rules and affectations that evolved as protective insulation for the brutally competitive practices that energise the capitalist economic project, and they are in danger of disintegrating as the pseudo-pacification process loses much of its functional value in the consumer economy and begins to break down.

Partnership is a dominant theme of public policy and service provision in England and in other western countries. It is also a concept that remains relatively under-researched and under-theorised, especially with respect to conceptualising underlying relational processes that can shape conflict and consensus within partnerships. This thesis draws on a richly textured ethnographic study, using an in-depth casestudy of a voluntarily-founded, network-like, cross-sectoral partnership, which aimed to develop and implement a community learning centre in the village parish of Broadley, located in the English Midlands. The research sees fieldwork conducted over twenty-four months, using multiple methods of qualitative data-generation including the observation of partnership meetings and activities, semi-structured interviews and the collection of partnership artefacts (meeting minutes, funding bid document, emails). It presents an ethnographic view of the inner workings of one partnership and follows its entire lifecycle. This partnership was not sustained and did not realise the vision to which it aspired. A central concern of this thesis is to investigate the development of conflict and consensus within partnership practice. The contribution of the thesis is to tease out how these elements are understood. This study challenges naive texts that prescribe simplistic, recipe-based formulas for achieving partnership success. Instead, it illustrates what can happen when partners do not develop sufficiently strong and balanced sets of social ties between one another. Consequently, this thesis sets up a new research agenda focusing more specifically on issues of community overlaps, identities and social ties. This thesis has value in terms of providing a deeply relational account of challenges facing the development of one cross-sectoral, network-like partnership. It draws together insights from partnership literature, community literature and fieldwork,and provides a strong basis from which further research can be developed.

This study explores the processes involved in the construction of female aspirations and expectations. Early research has a male centrality that excludes female experience which is seen as deviant. More recent research makes aspirational predictions based on single variables such as education or class, or works with single cohorts of participants. My interest lies not in what a woman's aspirations and expectations are, nor with making predictions, rather, I am concerned with the processes involved in how aspirations and expectations develop, in how these processes remain stable or change over time. By processes I am referring to knowledge constructions. Taken-for-granted knowledge has asserted that women naturally aspire to wife and motherhood. Regardless of the seeming inviolability of such knowledge, it does not represent absolute truth; it is constructed from discourses imbued with vested interest, power and control. Thus, from a social constructionist perspective, I explore the discourses instrumental in the construction of women's aspirations and expectations and the associated power structures that limit or expand women's options. I show that discourses are not static, that constructions change and are socio-politically historically relative. Survey data provide broad views that inform in-depth interviews. Voices from the literature form an integral part of the account and are not presented separately. A narrative analytic strategy synthesises all the voices to form a multi-layered socio¬political, historically situated oral history of two generational cohorts' aspirationallexpectational development, cohorts I have designated mature women and teenage women. In conclusion I show that legislative changes alone are insufficient to change women's aspirations and expectations. The mature women in the study illustrate how traditional discourses impacted on their lives and how, although individual agency is difficult, it is possible to bring about change which influences the options available to future generations of women. The teenage women in the study, whilst cognizant of increased opportunity and equality discourses, illustrate the persistence of traditional discourses and the conflicts they face in navigating their own lives.

Housing and related services (HRS) were developed as part of the deinstitutionalisation movement, as alternative accommodation arrangements for people living with mental health problems. Despite this movement starting over fifty years ago there are still many approaches to HRS, and no clear model of best practice. Furthermore, even with an extensive evidence base and many reviews of HRS, there is still no agreement on what a successful HRS organisation and service look like. The purpose of the study was to re-evaluate the area of HRS, working inductively rather than imposing parameters on the subject. The aim was to capture the experiences of HRS stakeholders in order to gain a richer understanding of how HRS are delivered and received in practice. A Case Study approach was adopted using an organisation that has provided HRS for people living with mental health problems for over thirty years. The stakeholders who constituted the participant group were tenants (service users) and staff (support staff, housing staff and executives on the board of trustees). The study was guided by a Grounded Theory framework, and the stakeholders participated in interviews, joint interviews and a focus group. The results were broken down into change, factors affecting HRS, and a conceptual model which formed the basis of substantive theory of HRS. A Critical Interpretive Synthesis (CIS) was undertaken to explore previous literature in HRS. The results explore descriptive information, ambiguity, black-box evaluations and theory driven evaluations in HRS. Together the study findings and the CIS were used to construct a conceptual framework which can be used to understand the processes and outcomes in HRS. Future work is needed to establish cause and effect of identified factors, but the work of this thesis makes important progress in critically exploring the area of HRS.