The social model of disability, which provides the ideological basis for the recent UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, emphasizes the need for society to change, in order to remove all forms of disability discrimination and allow for full participation. However, literature debates have raised questions over the relevance of this ideology to the majority world context. This thesis aims to explore this dilemma, by examining the influence of the social model on a range of current approaches to promoting economic empowerment within Kenya and India - two countries that have signed and ratified the Convention. The methodology is based on a comparative analysis of 26 case studies, conducted between June 2010 and February 2011, which were focused mainly on three particular routes to economic empowerment: vocational training, formal sector employment and self-directed employment. The study concludes that, while inclusive strategies that were firmly based on social model principles tended to be among the most successful, a total reliance on this ideology would run the risk of excluding a large section of the disability population altogether. In particular, some of the segregated services were found to be continuing to play an important role in disability service provision.

This thesis explores how the Russian migration regime is reflected in migrants' experiences and identities. The conceptual framework developed in the thesis is informed by the theory of structuration. On the basis of this theory and the analysis of primary empirical data, the thesis seeks to refine the understanding of the concepts of 'migration regime', 'social exclusion' and 'territorialisation' of identity. The empirical research conducted for the thesis focuses on the period 2002-2009 and on the experiences and identities of a particular group of migrants, namely, former Soviet citizens from former republics of the USSR, who are currently living in post-Soviet Russia without Russian citizenship. The thesis explores and analyses, on the one hand, the structures which constitute the Russian migration regime and, on the other, the stories told by interviewed migrants about their lives in Russia. The thesis argues that the current migration regime of the Russian Federation represents 'a differentiated system of othering' and shows that this system is informed by two processes - nation-building and racialisation. It also argues that differentiations institutionalised in the Russian migration regime affect the social exclusion of migrants and through this the 'territorialisation' of their identities.

Solidarity was important in the creation and maintenance of the English NHS, which was the product of class compromise. Its founding principles were that it was to be free (at the point of access), universal, comprehensive and primarily funded from general taxation. In recent decades, successive governments have renewed the neo-liberal project. This has involved new governance mechanisms (quasi-markets and targets) being emplaced in the NHS and private healthcare companies (which have influenced government policy) being afforded increasing opportunities to deliver NHS services. Such privatisation is antagonistic to patient needs. I undertake an ideology critique of the NHS reforms of the New Labour governments and of governments since 2010. I examine the influences on, justifications for, resistance to, and potential reifying effects of, such reforms. Misrepresentations and mystification may legitimate and obscure legal changes. I identify the ideological modes and strategies that governments have employed to justify their reforms. I also analyse several modes of reification (identity thinking, instrumental rationality, depoliticisation and the legitimation effect of law) to assess whether the reforms produced estrangement, which is the opposite of solidarity. Many of the justifications for successive reforms were contested. Although such reforms have rendered healthcare more opaque, solidarity endures. Neo-liberal norms compete with residual norms (including the NHS’ founding principles) and emergent norms (which developed due to the problems of welfare states, such as their failure to empower recipients and the persistence of health inequalities). As validity has been given to residual and emergent norms, which have been superficially articulated within government discourse, but which are undermined by neo-liberal policies, a legitimation crisis may arise as public experience increasingly diverges from them. I advocate amending legislation which has undermined residual norms, democratising the NHS to empower patients and the public and increased intervention in capitalism to address health inequalities.

This thesis identifies the multiple ways austerity and welfare reform were experienced by staff and service users of a homelessness and resettlement service from 2011 to 2014. The research employs an ethnographic narrative and participatory methodology drawing on a critical feminist research paradigm. It draws on equality theory in research and community development theory in social action to offer a model of participatory equality studies as a way of working for social justice (Bourdieu, 1997; Baker et al., 2004; Ledwith, 2005). Experiences and change in the lives of vulnerable people is examined through a Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (May, Brown, Cooper and Brill, 2009) and co-researcher processes (Maguire, 1987; Baker et al., 2004). The research offers ethnographies of austerity at local level that document individual and organisational experiences, as workers and service-users negotiate significant change, within a broader neo-liberal context (Bourdieu, 1977; Okely, 2012). Qualitative data were collected at key points over four years. Twenty-eight interviews were conducted; ten with senior management and policy staff, eight with front line services staff, and ten with service-users. Two ex-service users acted as co-researchers for a phase of the research focused on the lived experiences of service users. Team meetings were observed that provided reflective accounts of collective and organisational responses to a rapidly changing context. Two external and one internal public engagement events provided a space for the research findings to be contributed to a wider public debate on austerity. Findings are contextualized in a review of emerging critical literature on the impacts of austerity measures in Britain. This thesis makes a contribution, as a critical ethnographic study of multiple and complex new realities for staff and services users as they contend with and understand changes in welfare and endeavour to negotiate changing discourses on the role and relationships between local authorities, individuals and charities. It reveals significant contributions and resilience in the day to day lives of service users, but also intense pressures on people as they ‘come up for review’ and the personal impact of negative community, media and officials attitudes to vulnerability by revealing the lived experiences of austerity. Finally, seven key themes are identified that could be offered as a wider contribution to a commentary of austerity from a local level and are suggestive of an emerging common story in the caring services.

The past three decades have seen a substantial growth of interest in children's play in scholarly and popular writing, the mass media and government policymaking. Implicit and explicit in this growing interest is the idea that children's play, or more specifically, a decline or lack of children's outdoor play, represents a serious problem in the UK and other western societies and that it therefore requires the intervention of a range of professional and political powers. The rapid and widespread affirmation that claims about children's play have received deserves critical examination. This study examines the construction of children's play as a social problem in four major UK newspapers. Focusing on the period from 1985 to 2016, it draws on theoretical and conceptual tools from the constructionist study of social problems and methodological tools from Qualitative Media Analysis to examine the roles played by various claimsmakers in the construction of the problem and the rhetoric used in support of their cause. It hence offers important insights into the prominent position children's play holds on the public agenda and identifies some of the underlying cultural currents from which claims about children's play draw.

This thesis contributes to existing knowledge on NGOs in the global South through examining the case study of RDO, an NGO in Pakistan, investigating the influence of historically structured formal and informal institutions and the politico-economic factors shaping its efforts for democratic and empowerment-oriented change in rural communities. It analyses RDO’s philosophy and practice regarding the formation of community organisations, which are intended to work democratically for their own development and to access government and other NGOs’ services. It does this by analysing 63 qualitative interviews, 20 Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), organisational documents and observational data from 8-months fieldwork. It is argued that, rather than democratising and empowering community members, whose relationships with each other and with the state agencies have been historically patronage-based (Gough et al., 2004) and marked by inequalities based on ethnicity, gender, and class, RDO tends to deal with the communities in a patronage-based manner. This is due to its inability to allocate adequate time to communities to institutionalise democratic values in place of path dependent structures (Pierson, 2000) of inequality and practices of patron-clientelism. This, in turn, emanates from its shift away from the empowerment agenda and subscription to neoliberal mode of interventions. Additionally, the interventions by national and international NGOs, most of which have burgeoned in the wake of post-2000 political and natural disasters, have also socialised the rural communities to perceive NGOs as providers of welfare goods. This has made it harder for RDO to work according to its goals. Hence, instead of changing path dependent structures (Pierson, 2000) of inequality and patron-clientelism (Gough et al., 2004), RDO, like most NGOs in the global South, has largely become an agent of its perpetuation.

The 19th century is seen by many as a crucial turning point in the history of protest in Britain and across the global north. In Charles Tilly's famous history of the period, the first few decades of the 19th century mark the transition from the violent, direct action of the premodern era to our modern, respectable, social movements (Tilly 1995, 2004). A study of rioting in Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow from 1800 to 1939, therefore, allows for a unique window onto that momentous period of upheaval. But it also has a sociological aim. The last decade has seen a resurgence of rioting in Europe and the USA, prompting many to suggest that riots will be the dominant mode of protest in the coming years (e.g. Badiou 2012, Mayer et al 2016, Clover 2016). But, as I will show, our existing sociological theories of riots tend to be overly narrow, to focus exclusively on one or two master variables without paying due attention to the variety of forms and behaviours that make up rioting. These are the two challenges I take up in this thesis. My main empirical contribution is a catalogue of four hundred riots across the three cities. This was produced by searching through national and local newspaper archives, Home Office documents, local police reports and secondary literature. The catalogue is presented in the Appendix. Using the rich, narrative accounts provided by these sources, I try to analyse the riots on their own terms, as a set of interactions and behaviours, as well as to embed them in the local history of each city. This reveals that riots are not the chaotic, unpredictable moments of madness that we so often think of them as. Riots are rather patterned by people's everyday use of time and space - they expand to fill the growing urban landscape of each city and their timing follows gradual changes to the working week. Riots are also embedded in culture and society more broadly. In fact, as those roots in local society were eroded in the last few decades of the 19th century, this led to a decline in the number of riots in Manchester, Liverpool and most of the rest of the country. Meanwhile, the actual way in which people riot also evolves over time. Riots changed from an autonomous form of protest, to one that was subordinated to the strike and the demonstration. Rioters also move away from targeting specific (often powerful) individuals to targeting people because of their identity as, for example, scabs, Irish Catholics or fascists. This history undermines the orthodox account of protest presented by Charles Tilly. Violent direct action continued to be a key part of urban life until far later than his account suggests. And those later riots are not accidental hangovers from a previous era, but in fact adapted to changing conditions. My catalogue also suggests that existing theories of riots can be synthesised and broadened by concentrating on the way that individual riots unfold over hours, weeks or months, on what I think of as their career through time. This sets up a flexible framework for analysing riots which I hope can be applied to other riots around the world. Finally, and more abstractly, this study suggests that riots have a particular relationship with time, that they are of the present but face the past, drawing on its traditions as well as their own history. This has implications for our vision of history itself, suggesting that time is not punctuated by spontaneous, era-defining events, but rather evolves gradually over the longue duree.

People across the globe are on the move due to environmental disruption and degradation, causing them to travel and find their future in new locations. Climate change will increase the number of people seeking to escape environmental pressures. What should be the appropriate response to this increase of migrating people, driven away from their homes as a result of climate change effects? From the perspective of normative political philosophy, it is more precise to ask two interrelated questions: what are the obligations in the context of climate change migration and to who should assign them. Previous research in normative political philosophy has focused on the high-profile case of small island states that can be submerged by the rising levels of the oceans, overlooking the wider ways in which human mobility will be induced by climate change effects. The thesis, then, fills this gap in the literature and provides a nuanced account that combines insights from political philosophy and writing on climate change and immigration. My dissertation answers the two above-mentioned questions, dedicating the first part to the ‘who’ question and taking up the ‘what’ question in the second part. The overall argument shows that states creating hazardous climate change incur obligations towards those adversely affected by it, including those relocating across international borders. And these states ought to amend or supplement their immigration policy in a way that advances the capacity of vulnerable individuals to cope with climate change. In the first part of the thesis, I establish state responsibility for the adverse effects of climate change, primarily focusing on its relation with duties towards climate change adaptation. I work with a backward-looking principle of responsibility, responsibility for causing bad outcomes, and explore its application to the case of climate change in the face of some conceptual and empirical challenges. I further develop a notion of responsibility for creating risk that can capture the collective adverse outcome states bring about by emitting greenhouse gases. I explicate the moral significance of imposing risks on others and the obligations that it gives rise to. Building on this theoretical groundwork, the second part of the thesis dives into the complex nexus of climate change and human mobility. I focus on a particular pattern of immigrationinternational movement due to gradual environmental changes associated with climate change that significantly restrict people’s life prospects. I defend a view that perceives such migratory scenarios as a way to cope with climate change, a form of adaptation. I argue that the obligations of states include providing admission to climate immigrants. However, they are part of a wider set of actions and policies to advance the adaptation capacity of all individuals vulnerable to climate change hazards: immigrants themselves, but also the immobile. This part of thesis shows that the adaptation duty of states is a complex balancing act between providing admission and supporting local adaptation. The last chapter elaborates on this challenge. Drawing on the research on climate immigration, I highlight the aspects of this movement that must be considered in a morally informed immigration policy. In addition, I put forward the possibility that states can allocate among themselves their obligations so some will do more in terms of admitting immigrants and some will do more in terms of supporting local adaptation.

This thesis provides empirical evidence on the relationship between demographic events and job satisfaction. Existing conceptualisations of job satisfaction are not fruitful for theorising the relationship between family context and job satisfaction. I develop a framework whereby job satisfaction is maximised when there are no mismatches between desired and obtained employment characteristics, while desired employment characteristics are in turn affected by family context. On one hand, family events may create negative spill-overs into well-being at work; on the other hand, work may be a buffer against negative family events. As family context I consider motherhood, length of paid leave after birth of a child for women and marital dissolution for men. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a longitudinal survey representative of German households that spans the period 1984–2013. This dataset is ideal for my research question because it is the longest panel survey of job satisfaction. Although I chose the SOEP due to its high suitability, I also exploit features of German society and policy. I show that family events bring about variations in job satisfaction in unexpected ways. Becoming a mother does not matter for trajectories of job satisfaction. However, factors such as availability of suitable employment and norms may be more important in explaining why childless women have lower job satisfaction than mothers in Eastern Germany, but not in Western Germany. A shorter paid leave brings about a lower level of job satisfaction at the return to work but only for women of a lower socio-economic standing. Men who divorce experience a temporary increase in job satisfaction that lasts for up to three years after marital dissolution.

This thesis examines working-class fatherhood and masculinities in post-war Scotland, the history of which is almost non-existent. Scottish working-class fathers have more commonly been associated with the ‘public sphere’ of work, politics and male leisure pursuits and presented negatively in public and official discourses of the family. Using twenty-five newly conducted oral history interviews with men who became fathers during the period 1970-1990, as well as additional source materials, this thesis explores the ways in which their everyday lives, feelings and experiences were shaped by becoming and being fathers. In examining change and continuities in both the representations and lived experiences of fatherhood during a period of important social, economic, political and demographic change, it contributes new insights to the histories of fatherhood, gender, family, and everyday lives in Scotland, and in Britain more widely. It argues that ideas and norms surrounding fatherhood changed significantly, and were highly contested, during this period. Fathers were both celebrated as ‘newly’ involved in family life, signified by rising attendance at childbirth and increased practical and visible participation in childcare, but also increasingly scrutinised and deemed to be losing their ‘traditional’ breadwinning and authoritarian roles. Although there were significant continuities, a combination of factors caused these shifts, including the changing structure and composition of the labour market, deindustrialisation, the increasing participation of mothers in employment and second-wave feminism. Shifting ideas about gender relations were also accompanied by changing understandings of parent-child relationships and child welfare, in the wake of rising divorce and the growth of one-parent families. In highlighting the complexity and diversity of fatherhood and masculinity amongst working-class men, by placing their relationships, roles, status and identities as fathers at the forefront, and by speaking to men themselves, this thesis adds an important and neglected insight to the Scottish family and provides a fresh perspective on men’s gendered identities. Fathers were central to, rather than on the margins of, family and home life, and fatherhood was, in turn central to men’s identities and everyday lives.