Since 1974, the steel industry in the European Community has seen a dramatic crisis of over-production. In a desperate effort to cope with the problems of surplus capacity and mounting losses, steel producers have closed tens of millions of tonnes of capacity and shed over three hundred thousand jobs. These job losses have been selectively concentrated in particular towns and regions where the steel industry has traditionally been the major provider of waged employment. International processes of change have been and are being experienced very visibly in these places. They were fashioned by capitalist production and in one sense swept aside as part of the continued dynamics of this process. In another sense, however, the people of these settlements cannot be swept aside, for attachment to place and community is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. We therefore seek to consider here just how these conflicting processes have been acted out in and through some of these places - Consett in north east England, Ravens Craig in Scotland, Dortmund in West Germany and the region of Lorraine in France.

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This is an investigation of the trade union role in the Social Contract incomes policies in Britain during the 1970s. In the context of the general political economy of the period, the study looks at the development in the early 1970s of an accord between the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Labour Party known as the Social Contract, examines the trade union participation in the series of voluntary incomes policies that followed the election of the Labour Government in 1974, and charts the development or opposition to such participation oulminating in the collapse of the policy in the winter of 1978-1979 and the subsequent defeat of the Labour Government in the 1979 general election. More specifically, the study focuses on the experience of six individual unions within the context of TUC policy-making: the articulations between their approaches to incomes policy and their collective bargaining policies, the anatomy of their responses and policies towards the various phases of the Social Contract, the mobilization of consent and/or opposition to TUe and Government policy in each union, and the limits placed on relative union leadership discretion to participate in TUC policy-making by the political and industrial processes and organizational structure of each union. The research has involved a variety of sources and methods. First, there has been an attempt to draw on and link the diverse areas of the industrial relations literature which are concerned with the relationship between trade Unions and incomes policies. These include the separate literatures on incomes policy, on the link between trade unions and the Labour Party and Labour governments, on trade union government and the sociology of trade union organizations, and on the debate over 'corporatist' types of arrangements between trade unions and the state. Secondly, the research has involved the use of a wide range of primary and secondary trade union and political documentary sources on this period of history through the 1970s. Finally, the detailed case studies of the six sample unions have involved both primary documentary materials and extensive interviewing. Thus, the materials collected for the study constitute a unique source on different approaches to the 1970s pay policies, on their industrial impact and the political processes that they engendered within individual unions, and on the broader relations between British trade unions and the state during this period. The theoretical contribution of the study is primarily exploratory in nature. It identifies the constraints to which national union leaderships are· subject when they engage or attempt to engage in macro-economic and political exchanges with the state. Such constraints are explored in an examination of the upwards and downwards mediations that occur within trade unions as illustrated by the variations within and between trade unions in the mobilization of consent and opposition to the Social Contract incomes policies. This analysis informs debates about the limits and/or viability of other corporatist or 'Social Contract' types of arrangements. It also investigates the organizational implications of voluntary incomes policies and compares the internal political processes and industrial practices of British trade unions: at the level of the TUC as a whole, within individual affiliates and, in partiCUlar, in the articulations between TUC and individual union policy-making and bargaining behaviour.

The central concern in the thesis is the relationship between the 'concept of ideology' and the philosophies, motivations and lived experience of Youth Training Scheme (YTS) trainees and trainers. This incorporates both the application, effects and impact of official ideologies, expressed in youth policy initiatives and ideologies of the wider society. This in turn is related to the cultural and societal reproduction of young people as gendered and class specific workers in a segmented labour market. The empirical data were collected over a 20 month period at two off-the-job training establishments in the city of Surfton in the South West region of Britain and consisted of questionnaires participant observations and interviews. The first part of the thesis critically reviews the social science literature relating to the new vocationalism, the YTS, labour market segmentation and the concept of ideology. This establishes a series of theoretical concerns which are then tested against empirical data. The thesis demonstrates how formalised official ideologies are mediated through the YTS curriculum and affect the philosophies of both the trainers who implement this curriculum and the trainees who receive this curriculum. The thesis illustrates that YTS participants may support, reinterpret or subvert the official philosophies of the YTS by actually bringing meaning into their lived experiences via ideologies associated with their historical, positional, family class and gendered backgrounds. The thesis will show that the trainees learn not so much technical knowledge, but how to acquire the ideological and practical cultural meanings of a series of workers for a segmented labour market, with greater or lesser collusion from their trainers. The thesis contributes to existing knowledge both at the level of data generation and by illustrating a series of complex, refined and subtle ideological mechanisms which contribute further to our understanding of the microsociology of inequality.

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The thesis is concerned with investigating the area of occupational commitment to marine engineering of students from various levels of higher education in maritime institutions. From a general description of socioeconomic change and its relationship to the seafaring profession, the study focuses on the case of Taiwan. A review of literature on commitment demonstrates that commitment may vary as the social-economy changes over time. As technology changes, ships' officers, more specifically marine engineers, are required by shipowners to be educated to degree level. The emphasis in this study is upon the commitment to the shipping industry of young engineering students at university. The theoretical model established takes individual intentions, willingness to study, and occupational commitment, as the dependent variables while students' demographic backgrounds, personal needs and values are taken as the independent variables. The theoretical model is tested with the aid of data from questionnaires administered to a sample of engineering students from various levels of academic institutions. The SPSS statistical package, including factor analysis and chi-squares, is employed on the data analysis. One result is that traditional Chinese cultural values, including "studying is superior to all other professions", and the current entrance examination system for Taiwanese universities, predominate in students "willingness to study", which in turn, affects the occupational commitment of engineering students. Another result shows that the "willingness to study" of students in seafaring-oriented departments is not related to their "occupational commitment". Marine Engineering at sea is not perceived as being able to satisfy the higher level needs of graduates. To overcome this disparity, the job characteristics of ships' engineer officers need redesigning to create a more challenging work context for graduate marine engineers. If, for whatever the reason, the job of the seagoing marine engineer cannot be redesigned to satisfy graduate engineers then the only alternative is to recruit non-graduate seagoing engineers from five year junior colleges.