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.

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.

The Coalition government’s (2010-2015) programme of public sector reform and austerity resulted in fundamental changes to the orientation of community development in England. This thesis investigates what happened to community development in England during this five-year period and its implications for professionals, volunteers and local people involved in community development processes. A post-structuralist discourse analysis methodology was operationalised and the empirical work consisted of 20 interviews with key social actors involved in community development processes in a case study local authority in the north east of England. Using post-structuralist discourse analysis, the transcripts were analysed alongside 54 key texts including: discourse by political and policy leaders, national and local policies, and academic debate. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by demonstrating how the Coalition programme silenced community development as a distinct and legitimate practice, and re-shaped it as social enterprise, volunteering and community organising. The empirical findings establish four available discourses of community development. Yet, the hegemonic Enterprise discourse totalised the policy landscape and ‘othered’ community development as a bureaucratic, top-down, inefficient and ineffective relic of the previous New Labour government. In conjunction with the public sector cuts, this resulted in the decline of the community development worker subject position in England; with community development professionals increasingly nudged to adopt the subject positons of social entrepreneurs, professional volunteers and, to a lesser extent, community organisers. Local people were similarly nudged to volunteer in community development, social enterprise and community organising processes; and more skilled volunteers encouraged to take on professional responsibilities unsalaried. These findings suggest that the silencing and re-shaping of community development as social enterprise, volunteering and community organising is a ‘new’ permutation of neoliberal hegemony to roll-out citizen responsibilisation where local people provide community services rather than ‘relying’ on state intervention and resources. This thesis concludes that the Coalition programme exploited the ambiguity of community development and, in doing so, exposed four historical problems in the community development field. To protect community development from future attacks, this thesis proposes a genealogical post-doctoral study to unearth these problematic roots to then cultivate a community development free of such underpinnings.

The post-conflict nature of the Kosovo society and economy led to an urgent need to address educational policy, specifically to raise the quality of the reconstituted formal schooling system. To address this priority major foreign aid and government subsidies were targeted at both the demand (students) and supply (school) side. One of the major contributors, the World Bank, aimed to improve the supply side by allocating development grants to schools in order to improve student performance. In this thesis the following four research questions are addressed: how appropriate are current evaluation strategies of education policy initiatives in developing countries, what has been the impact of school development grants on student dropout, attendance and student attainment, what are determinants of pupil dropout, attendance and attainment and what are the implications of the answers to the above questions for the reform of education policies in developing economies and the evaluation of policy initiatives. This is the first study that critically reviews previous attempts at evaluating educational initiatives in Kosovo and then employs econometric methods to measure the impact of school development grants on educational outcomes. A quasi experimental approach is utilised and comparisons made between schools with treatment and schools without treatment. A similar study for Cambodia serves as a reference for our research, though we have extensively refined the approach taken in that study. The empirical evidence presented in this thesis suggests at best only a marginal positive impact of these policy initiatives on educational outcomes. More specifically there is some evidence of reduced dropout but no effect is found on student attendance and attainment. These findings are consistent with the results of recent reviews of the literature on this type of policy initiative. This study seeks to act as an example of best practice which can be followed in future evaluations of policy initiatives in countries like Kosovo. It draws important conclusions about the need at the policy design stage to formulate appropriate evaluation strategy and to address related issues about data quality, collection and analysis.