This thesis proposes an empirical approach to the history of film distribution and exhibition in Scotland before 1918. It deploys geo-database tools as a way to collect and analyse data from a range of archival and print sources, and to engage with historiographical questions about the emergence of cinema as an institution in a non-metropolitan context. The first part introduces the theoretical and methodological premises that underpin the project, situating it in relation to growing academic interest in early distribution and local film practices. A research method is outlined, involving the construction of a relational database documenting the places of film exhibition and the geographical variation in programming practices. This database, working alongside more detailed archival case studies, constitutes the foundation for broader discussions about the commercial, social and ideological roles of film and cinema. The analytical framework incorporates notions such as the commodity nature of film and the tension between different conceptions of the social role and position of cinema within Scottish communities. The emergence of institutional practices and structures in Scotland is thus described as occurring in a complex field of forces where two main polarities appear as prominent: Firstly, a tension between decentralised, local practices and the increasingly globalised operations of the film industry; and secondly, a shifting balance between regularisation and distinction, or the ordinary and the extraordinary. It is in terms of this fluid equilibrium that two overlapping moments in the history of the early Scottish film trade are described in the second and third parts of the thesis. Part II follows the creation and expansion of the Scottish market and popular demand for moving pictures, showing how different forms of film supply enabled the coexistence of various types of itinerant exhibition, and then of a gradual transition to fixed-site shows. It starts by exploring the continuities between film exhibition and existing cultural forms such as lantern lecturing and the music hall. It highlights the significant level of agency exercised by local exhibitors and renters within an open-market model that allowed the outright sale of films, and which also established a commercial interdependency between city-centre and peripheral exhibition. Part III argues that, once the market reached a relatively stable state with the regularisation of supply and the growing standardisation of the film product, the increasing concentration of capital and power in larger companies (both in the regional and the global scale) marked a shift in the balance of forces, away from unrestricted circulation and towards exclusivity. This is seen as a reformulation of the commodity status of film, associated with the emergence of feature programming. The consequences of the new textual and industrial trends for the Scottish distributors and exhibitors are considered, revealing geographical variation in their adoption, as well as incipient forms of resistance to the emerging institutional practices.

Broadly speaking, this study aims to refine the traditional interpretation of the term "marginal colony" in an effort to illustrate how economic developments in each of the Bahamas, the Caymans, Belize, Anguilla, and Barbuda during the last half century or so of formal slavery in the British Caribbean impacted upon the life and labour experiences of bondsmen and women in these territories. More specifically, the study attempts to define the "marginal slave experience" by examining the occupations of slaves in these territories, their living conditions and general treatment by their respective owners within the wider context of these experiences for slaves in the sugar colonies of the British West Indies. In so doing, the study seeks also to establish and account for the significant differences in the organisation of slavery in the marginal territories of the region arising from the different economic function of that institution in those terrorities from that which prevailed in the sugar colonies of the British Caribbean.

The thesis aims to examine the effects of adverse shocks and sectoral growth patterns on poverty. The issue of adverse shocks has recently drawn the attention of academics and policymakers alike, but evidence of the persistent impacts of different types of shocks on poverty is limited due to a lack of data; the significance of the impacts compared to other factors has also not been well studied. With the advantage of the unique data set for Vietnam, this thesis deals with the above issues and provides the most comprehensive study of the effects of shocks on poverty. Secondly, it is argued in the current literature that sectoral growth pattern matters for pro-poor growth. Current findings in the literature reveal a mixed picture regarding which industries contribute most to poverty reduction. It is stressed that a labour-intensive feature tends to make an industry more pro-poor. This study provides a wider and more consistent approach to explaining the mixed results in the literature, and compares different growth patterns in terms of poverty reduction. The issues have been examined in the context of Vietnam, a country successful in fighting poverty over the last decades. The two issues are investigated in three core chapters, in addition to the introduction and conclusion chapters. The first core chapter deals with the issue of adverse shocks by applying an econometric method. It confirms that four types of shocks, namely natural disaster, illness of a household member, crop failure and disease of livestock, generate a negative impact on poverty. The effect of natural disasters and health shocks can be persistent, lasting for more than three years and keeping people in persistent deprivation. The negative effect of shocks on poverty is significant enough to nullify the poverty-reduction achievements of other policies, such as the education policy. Government intervention in relieving the negative impact of shocks is necessary, and has helped Vietnam reduce its poverty headcount rate by up to 10%. The second and third core chapters study the effects of sectoral growth pattern on poverty and inequality by combining a Social Accounting Matrix multiplier decomposition technique and a Computable General Equilibrium micro-simulation modelling. The first approach is used in the second chapter, where it allows examination of the issue in the short term and identifies the factors that can affect the pro-poorness of the sectoral growth. The results show that some agricultural sectors, food processing and some non-financial services sectors contribute most to poverty reduction in Vietnam. The magnitude of the poverty reduction from sectoral growth depends on four features of the industry, namely labour-intensiveness, production linkage with the labour-intensive sector, the degree of sector interdependency, and the poverty sensitivity to income of the people who benefit from the growth of the sector. The growth rate of the sector itself also determines its contribution to poverty reduction. Sub-sectors of either agriculture, industry or service sectors can have these features; this explains the mixed findings in the literature. The second approach is applied in the third core chapter, which examines the issue in the medium and long term. The issues of inequality and spatial and ethnic poverty are also discussed in this chapter. The result confirms that more rapid growth of the sectors identified as the most pro-poor in the previous chapter is the most pro-poor long term sectoral growth pattern. Even the most pro-poor growth pattern generates a difference in spatial and ethnic poverty, and increases inequality. The thesis contributes to the improvement of the research methodology and a better understanding of the relationship between shocks, sectoral growth and poverty. The findings of the thesis provide policy implications for poverty reduction. There is an urgent need to improve the safety net system that helps people cope with adverse shocks. Promoting labour-intensive industry is not the only way to promote pro-poor growth. Industries that have a close production linkage with labour intensive industry have a strong interdependency with the rest of the economy, and the high poverty sensitivity of the people who benefit from the industry growth can also contribute largely to poverty reduction. As a result, the most pro-poor sector can be a sub-sector in the agriculture, industry or service sectors. This introduces more diversified and broader insights into the pro-poor sectoral growth pattern, which can widen policy choices for countries and be tailored to the country’s condition rather than narrowly advocating the development of the agricultural sectors.

This thesis unites the issues derived from the research on the relationship between culture and performance, where commitment is regarded as its vital index, in the domain of international business (IB). Despite its importance the concept of transmission of culture has not been examined quantitatively, regardless of qualitative studies proving that organizational culture has significant influence on a firm’s overall performance, and particularly on commitment. In addressing the above gaps, the present thesis develops a resource-based framework that examines whether organizational culture can be regarded as a strategic resource of a multinational company (MNC), what are the factors composing two concepts such as ‘organizational culture’ and ‘organizational commitment’ and whether there is a relationship between these concepts at three levels: a) HQs level in the home country, Japan, b) individual subsidiary level, located in the host country, Thailand, which is culturally very similar to the home country, and c) individual subsidiary level, located in the host country, India, which is culturally very distant to the home country. This theoretical framework essentially integrates theoretical perspectives on HQs-subsidiary relationship and transmission of culture in the multinational company in Asia under the Resource-Based View (RBV). This constitutes an innovative approach both in MNC-related literatures and literatures on culture and commitment. This study adopts positivism as a philosophical approach and uses the extensive review and analysis of literature to build a theory and three studies to test the theory. The methodology of quantitative research employs the three-stage research design; thus, triangulation, a research technique, is used to enhance the rigor of the research findings. Quantitative data analysis involved hypotheses testing using Correlation Analysis, Covariance Analysis, Factor Analysis, Discriminant Analysis, Multiple Regression Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) research techniques. Major contributions to theory include the development of a research methodology which provides robust conceptualization and measurement of the culture-commitment link and transmission of the culture of the HQs of multinational companies to their subsidiary operations in Asia under the Resource-Based View (RBV) theoretical framework for the analysis of multinational companies in the era of globalization. The results of this research may lead to the conclusion that (a) culture can be regarded as a valuable strategic resource of a company based on the fact of the existence of a strong relationship between culture and commitment, where commitment is considered to be one of the indices of performance, and (b) the transmission of culture in the form of a successful transfer of its major value-components from HQs to subsidiaries indeed takes place. This enables the creation of commitment of the employees in subsidiaries similar to that in HQs, which in turn provides the company with unique and valuable resources that should be regarded as the sources of competitive advantage of this Japanese MNC.

The dissertation examines the personal and public reactions to the emigration taking place in the Border region of Scotland at the turn of the nineteenth century. Separated into four parts—the landed, the church, the press and the families left behind—it explores the perceptions of each group and the motives and rationales behind this varied response. The assessment of landholder policies and rural population management indicates that a long-held interest in maintaining and expanding the population did not wane among the greater landholders until around 1830 when estate improvements were completed and rural manufacturing declined. Rather, those most likely to advocate population management were the lesser lairds and rate payers. These men and women had less of an attachment to the eighteenth-century paternal relationship and were likely to view population as an economic resource or burden rather than a social asset. Therefore, the importance of landowners as agents of emigration in these counties is likely less than previously believed. The examination of the Kirk found that its ministers’ oft-quoted emotive language against emigration was in fact derived from a long-held belief that numerical depopulation was a sign of economic and moral decay. They felt that the reorganisation of the rural population was detrimental to religious education and social deference. When agricultural rationalisation and urbanisation brought a rise in material wealth and a stricter, rather than more lenient, eye upon working-class behaviour, the objection was to some extent recanted. Their concern was less for the immediate welfare of the emigrants than for the survival of the rural community. Concerning the provincial press, the extent to which these papers relied on pandering to public opinion in order to survive offers rare insight into demand-side economics in this period. Though all of the editors spoke against emigration, the papers were heavily supported by advertising for emigrant passage and devoted a sizable proportion of their local news to emigrant advice and colonial “intelligence”. Their conflicting content indicates that while the editors personally disagreed with emigration, this stance was not commercially viable. Finally, a comparison of reactions by family and friends remaining in Scotland suggests that most saw the practical benefits of emigration, both to the emigrants and those left behind, but had a very strong emotional reaction against it nonetheless. It further suggests that when present, emotional factors, such a need for communal identity and support, were usually more important than economic issues in dictating long-distance migration. Overall, this dissertation argues that a re-examination of the role played by sending communities is vital to a more accurate understanding of the emigration process as a whole.

The impact of Irish nationalism on central Scotland, 1898 – 1939 The years 1898 to 1939 were momentous ones for both Irish and Scottish history. The rise of Sinn Fein, the impact of the First World War and the Easter Rising, followed by the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921 and Eire in 1937 all occurred within these forty or so years. This thesis explores the nature and extent of the impact that Irish nationalism had on Scotland in this period. This thesis divides these years into four segments: from 1898 when Irish nationalists began to renew their activities in Scotland in earnest, to the Easter Rising in 1916 (i); from the suppression of the Easter Rising until the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 (ii); from 1922 until the 1931 census when anti-Irish prejudice was widespread again in Scotland, coming in particular from the Church of Scotland and associated institutions (iii); from the Depression to the coming of the Second World War in 1939, when these institutions altered their campaigns to become anti-Catholic in general and the IRA once again looked to Scotland for assistance. There can be little doubt that Irish nationalism had a profound effect on Scotland and had its many different aspects: the organisation of IRA supply and training activity; the military and intelligence responses by the British government; the reaction of the Protestant churches, and the anti-Irish or anti-Catholic campaigns of the Church of Scotland in particular; the influence on the movement for Scottish Home Rule and the founding of a nationalist political party with the NPS in 1928; the electoral benefits enjoyed by the Labour Party from an already politicised ‘Irish’ vote; and the conflict between constitutional and militant Irish nationalist politics. This mixture of both positive and negative effects demonstrates the deep impact made on Scotland during a transitional period of economic adjustment amid continuing urbanisation. It was in the industrial towns and cities of central Scotland that this impact was most keenly felt, on both sides of the religious divide, and this presents itself as an underlying cause of the continuing religious bigotry felt in central Scotland to this day.

There has recently been a proliferation of historical studies of mental deficiency in late nineteenth and early twentieth century England, exploring the subject within its administrative, medical, educational and social contexts. This thesis contributes to the history of mental deficiency by describing developments that took place in Scotland. It focuses on the sharp increase in the proportion of the Scottish population labelled mentally defective during the period. This increase can be ascribed to the implementation of state policies geared towards the identification and segregation of mental defectives, but it also reflects a tendency amongst influential professional groups (notably, doctors and teachers) to broaden their definition of mental deficiency to include more people of higher ability. People were labelled mentally defective who would not have been regarded as such in earlier years; as one contemporary put it, 'the present policy tends to manufacture mental defectives'. This broadening of definitions occurred within the context of the Poor Law and lunacy administrations, but an analysis of quantitative and qualitative source material shows that it was within the state education system that most of Scotland's mental defectives were initially identified and segregated from their peers. The thesis also describes how various forms of segregated provision for mental defectives developed and expanded in Scotland over the period, taking into account special education, institutionalisation, boarding-out and other community-based forms of care and supervision. Finally, the roles of mental defectives and their families are considered, illustrating how they could influence mental deficiency provision through acts of co-operation and resistance, but also how their influence waned as the state assumed greater powers to intervene in the private lives of its citizens.

Archaeology, the study of people in the past through their material culture, recognises the potential of space and the built environment to create and transmit social statements. Country houses were dynamic and active elements in the history of Scotland. Landowners did not act in a social vacuum. As society changed, houses, as the clearest physical expression of identity and status, were used to negotiate relations with others, and with the natural world. Houses were used to appeal to traditional power bases, while at the same time allowing a response to, and involvement in, the changing political and social world. This thesis uses a multidisciplinary approach in an attempt to understand architecture not just as art, but as a reflection of, and element in, the social lives and relationships of the people who lived in, worked around, viewed and visited the country house.

The focus of this thesis is on how working class men live with physical interpersonal violence. The place of the research is in Easterhouse, a housing scheme on the outskirts of Glasgow in Scotland. The primary research methods employed are a reflexive engagement with in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation. This concern with a reflexive engagement with the research field and the research ‘data’ is theorised using the sociological tools crafted by Pierre Bourdieu; in particular, his stress on reality as fundamentally relational and his use of reflexivity, habitus, the body and fields to construct and understand human agency. In this thesis, these tools are used to open up moments of often `mindless’ violence and to understand what these moments might ‘mean’ to both those who experience this violence, and how this reality can come to be evacuated/excavated in historical and representational forms. To do this, the thesis considers the formation of habitus through time, across generations and indeed how a relationship to time is made and grounded in everyday experience of class relations and culture (and so the amount of resources or capital that can be brought to bear in the context of these relations). In this sense, the thesis endeavours to complicate what is meant by violence and what is mean by the ‘causes’ of physical interpersonal violence by situating moments of violence as elements in a total fact of life. The thesis situates contemporary forms of physical interpersonal violence in the new social, economic and cultural landscape formed post-1979. That is, continuities and discontinuities are assessed in relation to a tradition of having no tradition and the possibilities for historical self-understanding and agency that such a moment could provide. That is, now that working class culture has been ‘stripped down’ to its economic reality the culture of working class life is simultaneously a coming to terms with this ‘nothing’. Paradoxically, then it is in this ‘nothing’ that agency is found and where history, culture and politics can either come to be ‘reclaimed’ – ‘invented’ – or ‘mobilised’.

Introduction: Existing literature focuses on the risks that prostitutes pose to society rather than the occupational risks they face. Most of this work has been conducted with women who work on the streets, although estimates suggest that indoor prostitution (saunas and private flats) in particular is a growing area of commercial sex. This thesis aims to examine the social and economic organisation of commercial sex work in the UK across the three settings of street, sauna and private flats, paying particular attention to the health and safety implications for the women involved. Results: Women in the study reported high levels of social disadvantage that influenced their entry into prostitution; almost half were first paid for sex before they were eighteen and a minority were first forced into prostitution. The working conditions and routines of the three workplaces are described, focusing on the key social and structural features of the workplace, women’s autonomy and working rules, along with their potential impact upon general health, work related stress and safety. Few differences were found in the sexual and reproductive health of women working in different settings. However, as a group, prostitutes had far poorer sexual and reproductive health than non-prostitute women. High levels of violence were reported across the study, mainly from clients, but also pimps and other women. This was patterned by workplace, with street workers significantly more likely to experience violence than either sauna or flat workers. Conclusion: Prostitutes do not represent a threat to the health and safety of their clients; rather, data from this study suggest that the reverse is true. Prostitute health (e.g. sexual and reproductive health, drug use) is poorer than that of non-prostitute women in the UK, and as such, prostitutes represent a group with specialist health and welfare needs. The illegality, stigma and organisation of prostitution further impede women’s health and safety. The findings of this study can be used to tailor health services for prostitutes, as well as inform policy and future research