Whilst risk assessments have come to assume an increased level of importance in mental health policy and practice in England and Wales since the 1990s, there has been relatively little focus on the way in which service users themselves experience such practices. This thesis examines the views of offenders subject to Ministry of Justice restrictions under section 41 of the Mental Health Act 1983 towards their own offending, risk assessments and supervision. A primarily qualitative methodology is used to examine the views of 19 service users. Using theories of identity, the thesis examines the way that research participants explained and justified offending behaviour. It is argued that mentally disordered offenders used illness as a form of mitigation, utilised ‘techniques of neutralisation’ or employed a combination of these approaches. The thesis moves on to use governmentality theory as a means to analyse participants’ awareness and views toward risk assessment practices and their conditions of discharge. Although participants believed that assessments were seen as important by mental health professionals, they were often unaware of the content of such assessments. Research participants usually had little or no knowledge of their conditions of discharge. Service user perceptions of the supervision process are then examined with reference to theories of social control. It is argued that service users held a range of views towards the supervision order, seeing it variously as a means of identifying and supporting them as mentally ill individuals; as a means of establishing internal controls or as a negative means of labelling socially stigmatised behaviours. The thesis concludes through considering the ways in which social workers might consider the use of risk assessment practices through an ethical framework. It I argued that social workers should seeks to bridge Kantian and utilitarian perspectives through a consideration of service user autonomy.

Business management includes a quick fix type of practice that promotes programatic shortcuts applied to individuals in an attempt to produce immediate business results. These quick fixes are adopted and abandoned with changes to time, industry, or culture. Despite the promise of the quick fix, the individual worker can be unaffected or even disaffected by attempted changes. This thesis looks at quick fix practice and the assumptions made about the individual. It is these assumptions that drive the programs aimed at modifying behaviour in order to increase work effort and meet business objectives. Looking at the assumptions that underlie the quick fix practice of business management, this thesis compares them to a sample of individuals to assess their accuracy. A repertory grid methodology is used to generate unconscious content from the internal world of the individual. An internal world that reflects the individual’s experience at work. It is the unconscious phantasies in this internal world that shape the actions of individuals. Psychoanalysis is the framework used to interpret the unconscious content to determine if the unconscious of the individual is a mismatch with the practice of quick fix business management.

It is becoming increasingly evident that the major challenges affecting organisations today and in the years ahead will emanate from the rapid and unrelenting pace of changes in the external environment and, the often, unpredictable ways in which such changes can affect organisations. The need to respond flexibly and in an agile manner to a vast array of requirements, pressures and demands, has never been more pressing. As a result, Wright et al. (1999) among many others, have argued that the traditional bureaucratic organisation paradigm clearly suffers as a guiding paradigm for organisations operating in turbulent and fluid environments characterised by constant change. Calls have been voiced time and again for replacing such an outmoded organisational paradigm, towards realising the desired agile organisation state, reflected in the organisational agility paradigm. In response to these calls, this study explores the concept of Organisational Agility in the National Health Service (NHS), through adopting a case study approach to investigating and exploring three major themes identified by the researcher as characterising the literature on organisational agility. These are concerned with: a) the perception and understanding of the concept of organisational agility, b) the need for organisational agility as essentially being driven by the nature of changes in the environment affecting the organisation, and c) the main factors / capabilities that underpin an organisation’s ability to attain agility. As a result, a major contribution emanating from this study is the consideration that it is the first known study investigating organisational agility in the NHS. Two NHS Hospital Trusts were designated as case study organisations for the purposes of this research: Trust A, which is a one star, lower performing Trust, and Trust B, which is a three star, higher performing Trust, according to the NHS Performance Ratings published by the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI) (2003). This can well provide useful and interesting insights that seek to explain such a difference in performance between the Trusts, from an organisational agility perspective/point of view, which is considered in its own right a major contribution of the study. Both: face-to-face in-depth interviews, as well as self-completion questionnaires, were employed for gathering primary data in each of the case Trusts. This provided rich triangulation between qualitative and quantitative data, which contributed to better understanding the current situation regarding the phenomenon of organisational agility in a healthcare setting. Findings emerging from exploring the nature of the environment affecting the Trusts, as well as their perceived need for organisational agility, strongly indicate that they both perceive that there is a clear need for a higher level of agile response on their parts, in dealing with the requirements placed on them by an environment that is characterised by: a highly important overall effect on the well-being of these Trusts in managing and delivering their healthcare services, as well as by reasonably dynamic and uncertain changes in its requirements and expectations. However, interestingly, the one star, lower performing Trust perceived that it requires a significantly higher level of agility to respond to changes. Also, fourteen “agility-enabling” capabilities were conceptually developed and empirically validated in this study. The role of such capabilities in facilitating the shift towards the agile organisation paradigm was found by both Trusts to be highly important. However, Operational Flexibility emerged as the only critical factor in explaining the agility of the Trusts. Ironically, Operational Flexibility was also found to be one of the least practised “agility-enabling” capabilities on the part of the NHS Trusts. Another interesting finding is that the three star, higher performing Trust, has emerged as being significantly more advanced in terms of its practise of a number of agility-enabling dimensions. Based on these results emerging from comparing the two differently performing case Trusts, it can be concluded that the ranking of Hospital Trusts according to the NHS Performance Ratings published by the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI), may well provide an insight into the overall ability of a Hospital Trust in effectively responding to and dealing with the various pressures, demands, and requirements placed on it by different environmental parties. This conclusion emerging from such a finding is considered a contribution on the part of this study, towards providing new knowledge concerning the usefulness of the Hospital League Tables.

The study, the first of its kind in the Maltese Islands, reviewed crime in a spatio-temporal aspect based on where offenders live, interact and commit crime. The study has sought to develop an understanding of the Maltese Islands’ crime within a social and landuse structure through the employment of high-end GIS tools. A study at European and Small Islands level resulted in a relative safety-danger dynamic score model that shows that Malta is safe, though progressively decreasing in relative safety. A 40-year analysis depicted increasing crime rates as well as changes in crime categories. Findings highlight a high foreign prisoner component, highly-specific local-offender social situations with residential and poverty clustering. The findings show that the Maltese offender is male, young, a recidivist, increasingly less literate, has had a secondary education, single, unemployed and increasingly partaking to serious crimes. Residential analysis show a preference for the harbour region where offenders live in areas characterised by poverty that have disproportionate offender concentrations when compared to their shrinking population concentration. Offences committed by convicted offenders fall within high dwelling concentrations, vacant dwelling concentrations, apartment zones and low population density areas. Offender-offence findings show that Maltese offenders commit crime close to their residence mostly travelling less than 5 km. Reported offence analysis results in high summer rates, with specific weekend to weekday differences, concentrated in a relatively small area within the conurbation with unique hotspots in fringe recreational localities. An analysis of landuse categories identified that residential areas host the highest offence counts, particularly serious crimes, whilst retail-related crime activities directly effect neighbourhoods through distance travelled from the retail entity. Outputs from the research include a conceptual model based on the crime, social and landuse constructs, a league-table of crime-mapping sites and the creation of a web-enabled Crimemap system for the Maltese Islands.

This thesis uses a Foucauldian approach to explore how lay people construct child neglect in England. The concept of child neglect developed after the Industrial Revolution in conjunction with the construction of ‘normal’ childhood. Both depend on developmental models of childhood produced by psy-complex discourse. However, the knowledge producing the ‘normal’ family and the disciplinary institutions producing and protecting the ‘normal’ childhood have been challenged by late modernity, with a potential impact on what can be considered ‘abnormal’ and therefore neglectful. Recent years have seen an increasing professional and political focus on both the importance of child neglect, and the role of lay people in child protection – ‘everybody’s business’. It is unclear how lay people construct child neglect, a category that properly results from political and moral choices made by society. To analyse how lay people construct child neglect, data was collected from focus group discussions between 46 self-defined ‘lay’ people. Children were constructed as having developmental needs during childhood, which, if unmet, could cause long term problems for child and society. Four clusters of needs were identified: physical, emotional, training and supervisory. If these needs were unmet, children could be seen as Deprived, Unloved, Uncontrolled or Escaping. However, this did not mean they were positioned as neglected. Neglect required some abnormal adult/parent behaviour. The normal parent was non-neglectful although sometimes temporarily Overburdened, the abnormal parent was neglectful, categorised as Clueless, Underinvested or Unsuitable. Lay people were constructed as having a responsibility to support parents and families within their midst. However the forces of late modernity, particularly globalisation, challenged the normal/abnormal family binary, leaving lay people unclear about where society and/or child protection professionals draw the line between normal and neglectful childhoods. The implications of these constructions for children, parents, state, professionals and lay people are examined and recommendations made.

Secured by Design (SBD) is an award scheme, managed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and supported by the Home Office, which aims to encourage house developers to design homes so as to minimise the crime opportunities which they present. Unlike many crime reduction measures, particularly those addressing the behaviour of offenders or potential offenders, the SBD initiative is proactive - the aim being to intervene prior to a crime problem emerging as opposed to reacting after the event. The implementation of SBD requirest he co-operation of a variety of agenciesf rom police and local authorities to architects and housing developers,and the mechanisms through which it aims to reduce crime have the potential to impact upon the victim, the offender and the location. Recent legislation,in the form of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Human Rights Act 1998, have placedcrime reduction on the agenda of many agencies for whom the issue had historically been of little importance. In the current climate of multi-agency working, initiatives such as SBD have the potential to flourish, but do they actually impact upon crime, disorder and the fear of crime, and are they being used to their maximum potential? This thesis addresses the past (history), present (current practice) and future (potential refinements) of SBD. How did planning become encapsulated in to criminology?Does SBD reduce crime, disorder and the fear of crime?What are the current weaknesses within SBD and how can the initiative be improved? The findings presented within the thesis reveal that properties built to the SBD standard experience lower levels of crime (and their resident's lower levels of fear of crime) than Non-SBD estates matched according to age, housing tenure, location and environmental factors. Whilst the difference in crime rates is not strongly statistically significant, the improving performance of the scheme suggests that a more recent sample would reveal a stronger relationship between SBD status and crime levels. Having established that SBD estates confer a crime reduction advantage the thesis focuses upon identifying how the scheme can be improved as well as the enablers and constraints which exist for those within the social and private sector in deciding whether (or not) to build to the SBD standard. Areas of improvement include ensuring that the scheme implements its own principles, incorporating repeat victimisation packages in to its standards and considering the threat to revoke the scheme for estates found failing to maintain the SBD standards. Levers to encourage social and private sector developers to build to the SBD standard include enhanced funding from the Housing Corporation, the appeal of additional security for homebuyers and the savings incurred through reduced levels of crime and disorder. Continuing its improvement orientation, the thesis presents a risk assessment mechanism to be used by crime reduction practitioners as a means of idenffying which properties will become vulnerable to crime if built (therefore allowing them to challenge planning applications)or in the case of properties already developed, allowing resources to be directed towards properties at most risk. The environmental factors which emerge as associated with elevated crime levels (and therefore score highly on the checklist presented)suggest that higher levels of movement past a property are generally associated with higher levels of risk. Thus in the somewhat heated debate about the role of permeability in enabling crime, the general thrust of the data suggests that high permeability (as proxied by the presence footpaths, levels of pedestrian and vehicular movement and road network) is indeed associated with higher levels of crime.

This Thesis examines the role that Automatic Number Plate Recognition surveillance plays within policing and public reassurance. The thesis is improvement orientated, exploring how ANPR could become a more effective policing tool and highlights implications for future policies and practice. The first two chapters set the context for the research, explaining what ANPR is, its place within criminology and gaps in research addressed in the Thesis. The literature review calls for a better understanding of ANPR’s potential and role as an investigative tool and an examination of the public’s views about ANPR surveillance. In the third chapter, reference is made to available methods used to address such objectives. Chapters Four, Five and Six present the results emerging from the empirical work in this Thesis. Chapter Four is concerned with police perceptions regarding current ANPR practice. The thesis highlights the complexity of translating policy into practice in the current political and economic climate, where objectives and priorities dictated by the government are constantly shifting. Continuing its improvement orientation, Chapter Five covers public perceptions about ANPR and outlines ways to address the balance between privacy and security without endangering both. The potential impact of ANPR on crime and ways to measure it is the topic of Chapter Six, which argues that establishing a causal link between ANPR and crime is not a straightforward process. The concluding chapter talks about the implications of the study and any interesting future avenues for research. The emerging findings from this research sit uncomfortably with the opinions and predictions of both supporters and opponents of ANPR alike and shed light not only on the management and use of ANPR by the police in Britain, but also on many of the ethical issues raised by the emergence of new surveillance technologies.

The complexities inherent in managing child sexual abuse stem from the intersection of micro factors (e.g., personal values, histories of learning and trauma in some cases), exo level factors (such as agency mandates and professional codes) and macro factors (e.g., socio-economic and societal attitudes). Professionals in Barbados who deal with gender-based violence (including sexual exploitation) have a key role to play in addressing this problem. The ways in which they respond, through their criminal investigations, child protection assessments and interventions, are critical in assisting with the amelioration of the effects of CSA and reducing its prevalence. This study furthers our understanding and expands knowledge on the subject by examining professional behaviours in responding to child sexual abuse. Factors such as professional identity and codes of ethics, together with institutional regulations and cultural mores, determine how professionals are likely to respond. A grounded theory approach was employed, in an interpretative constructionist manner, to explore the responses of twenty one (21) participants, comprising ten police officers, eight child care officers and focus group members comprising three new participants and four others previously interviewed individually. Two theoretical paradigms were employed as conceptual lenses to assist data exploration and analysis of emerged meanings. These were the socio-cultural theory of ‘community of practice’, and the feminist perspective, which helped to inform how gender and power might impact on responses. Sitting alongside these approaches is the ecological systems theory, which I have used to ensure that the problem (child sexual abuse) has been located within its wider socio-cultural context. The grounded theory to emerge from the study is that professional responses to CSA result in, and from, multisystem actions within hierarchies of power and status, which validate particular narratives of abuse and minimise others. Professionals are embedded within these systems and, therefore, often find it difficult to respond to CSA in ways that address root causes and provide justice to its victims. The study highlights the need for the training of police officers and social workers to facilitate a greater level of reflection on issues such as power and gender inequality, and to create opportunities for collaborative practice.

Anti-social behaviour (ASB) has emerged as a major community safety concern over the past decade. Reducing the number of incidents of ASB and lessening the impact these have upon the publics’ quality of life have become key components of criminal justice policy. The British Crime Survey has provided evidence of the types of ASB being experienced and quantified the proportion of people perceiving high levels of ASB in their local area. This research suggests strong links between high levels of deprivation and perceiving high levels of ASB. Attempts have also been made to determine what factors drive these perceptions, in order to produce evidence-based ASB reduction policies. This thesis builds upon existing research into public perceptions of ASB by exploring public perceptions in-depth, using a mixed methods strategy. A three phase, explanatory sequential design was employed. Phase one quantified public perceptions in selected hardpressed ACORN areas. These findings were utilised to inform the topics for further qualitative elaboration in phase two. The third phase qualitatively explored how practitioners address public perceptions of ASB. Inferences were generated from all three phases of data collection, providing a holistic, coherent and contextualised discussion of potential policy implications of the findings. The findings presented within this thesis uncover new attitudinal based factors that are statistically and independently associated with public perceptions of ASB. In addition, primary and secondary drivers of public perceptions were qualitatively identified in the hardpressed areas studied. New insight has also been provided into the methods practitioners use to address public perceptions, particularly into the difficulties associated with measuring perceptions and the reciprocal relationship that exists between practitioners and the public. The inferences generated suggest that public perceptions of ASB are complex, with the factors influencing perceptions often interconnected. This thesis calls for greater strategic clarification regarding the role perceptions play in ASB policy, in order for accurate, locally applicable perception measurement to be achieved and a reduction in perceived high levels of ASB to be obtained.

The increasing number of “orphans and vulnerable children” (‘OVC’) in sub-Saharan Africa has been the subject of much inquiry and intervention in research, policy and practice. Two major concerns have been highlighted: i) traditional mechanisms for their care and support are overstretched and ii) ‘OVC’ have poor socioeconomic outcomes. Dominant discourses emphasise adults’ central role in ‘OVC’ wellbeing while ‘OVC’ are cast as helpless, passive victims and not active social agents who demonstrate resilience and ingenuity in dealing with difficult circumstances. Focussing on Sheema district in rural Uganda, this study sought to give voice to ‘OVC’ and use their lived experiences to develop a robust framework of care and support. ‘OVC’ were engaged as producers of knowledge and agents of change using innovative child-centred approaches to explore representations of their care and support through verbal and visual representation of their lived realities. This methodology enabled the development of narratives and critical dialogue about social issues with grassroots social activism. For example participatory methods such as draw-and-write, community mapping and daily-routine-diagrams located the conceptual tools and analytic skills in the hands of ‘OVC’. This study found that the majority of existing ‘OVC’ representations are adult constructs not necessarily subscribed to by ‘OVC’ themselves. Acknowledging their difficult circumstances, most ‘OVC’ have devised solutions to their challenges and are optimistic despite being constrained by structural and cultural barriers. Traditional care mechanisms have evolved and require strengthening, particularly at community level. The lens through which most interventions have been commissioned, implemented and evaluated is paternalistic and does not acknowledge ‘OVC’ competencies. ‘OVC’ voices and lived experiences should inform interventions; also they should be constructed in a more balanced light – showing their challenges while acknowledging their agency in dealing with these challenges. This study proposes a more nuanced label for ‘OVC’ and also develops a robust theoretical framework for their care and support.