Whilst, at the UK level, there has been some research into the integration experiences of refugees and asylum seekers (e.g. Phillimore et al. 2008; Kirkwood et al., 2015; Basedow and Doyle, 2016) there has been little research focusing on the devolved Welsh context. This thesis seeks to address this lacuna through applying Ager and Strang’s (2004) Indicators of Integration Framework to an analysis of qualitative interviews with refugees and asylum seekers living in Wales. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 19 refugees and asylum seekers from 13 different countries of origin. Interviews are analysed using a discursive psychological approach (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), and focused on the ways that participants’ talk functioned in the interaction. In addition, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of seven UK and devolved government refugee integration strategy documents was also undertaken. Analysis of these policy documents revealed that each drew on notions of the individual nation having a ‘proud tradition’ of protecting refugees which worked to construct refugees as being in need of protection only, obscuring any economic or civic aspirations that they may have. Analysis of the interviews, by contrast, revealed that participants constructed integration in a more multi-faceted way in which they had aspirations of contributing to both the economic and civic life of Wales. The research finds that these constructions point to a need for re-thinking the categories “refugee” and “asylum seeker” and that the term “forced migrant” better reflects the protection and aspirational needs that participants constructed. As such, it argues for a shift in focus from integration “processes” to situated “practices” of integration. A further ideological dilemma (Billig et al., 1988) is also discussed between the UK government’s ‘hostile environment’ approach to migrants which seeks to deter asylum seekers from entering the UK and the stated aims of both UK and devolved governments of ensuring refugee integration. Policy implications are suggested including the need for the Welsh Government to better reflect the economic and civic aspirations of refugees and asylum seekers within its refugee integration strategies and to call for devolved responsibility over asylum support so that it can achieve its aims of seeing Wales become a ‘Nation of Sanctuary’.

It has been well documented that the success of any public policy is closely linked to its development and implementation. Less research has considered how devolved nations tackle the complex and unstable nature of public policy making and address the challenges of implementing national policy. This thesis aims to provide an historical account of the development of one specific welsh education policy, created just after devolution. This thesis follows a single policy from its conception to worked reality. In particular, this thesis aims to uncover how one specific case created during this unique time period, post devolution, was developed and implemented, The Advanced Level Welsh Baccalaureate Qualification (WBQ). The WBQ education policy is of great significance to Wales’ reform agenda and has undergone radical revision, since devolution, making this research particularly timely. This thesis shows how the WBQ can be viewed as a flexible policy that can be adapted at the micro level, to create an education package best suited to the unique needs of the individuals and wider economic realities found across Wales. The WBQ aimed to tackle some of the most challenging educational issues, such as the academic vs. vocational education, specialisation vs. generalism and dealing with disaffection. The thesis draws on interviews with key stakeholders representing the macro, miso and micro, in 2012. The findings highlight the challenges of public policy making in devolved Wales and address how policy is made and who is actually developing policy. The findings of this thesis have suggested that key individuals at the macro level were crucial in shaping and developing the WBQ. The research offers new insights into the importance of considering implementation in the development of public policy. This thesis highlights how organisations and individuals involved in the implementation of public policy actually shape its finalised form in both subtle and more extensive ways during their translation and adaptation of policy. The degree of mutation that arises during translation impacts on the policies success in eventually becoming institutionalised. Variation itself is not unexpected given the flexibility but the findings demonstrate that this flexibility is causing a huge variation in quality and incomparable delivery and structure across institutions. The success of the policy is linked to its original aims and the issues within the Welsh education system it aims to tackle. The WBQ has been successful in achieving some of its original aims whilst others have remained unchanged.

Following the Munro Review of Child Protection in England in 2011, the appointment of a Principal Child and Family Social Worker was recommended to provide practice leadership across child protection social work with children and families. Since this time, the experience of local authorities has varied greatly in the interpretation and implementation of the role. Using a multi-method qualitative approach, this study considered the views and perspectives of Senior Managers in the conception and implementation, and the experience of PCFSWs in undertaking the role, to interrogate the following research questions: - How has the role of PCFSW been implemented? - What does the implementation tell about management, leadership and professional status? - What does the implementation reveal about boundary spanning, organisational change, and complexity? - What are the implications for future policy development? The wider context of continuing changes in legislation, policy, regulation, and DfE lead reform was considered. Building on the systems approach advocated by Munro, this research was conceptualised with reference to boundary spanning and complexity theory. The findings suggest that current policy and practice in child protection social work has evolved in a closed system, where compliance and the features of managerialism prevail. In contrast, frontline practitioners more readily operate in a complex system. Tensions between the two perspectives continue such that the aspirations for reform instigated by Munro and articulated by the participants in this study have not been fully achieved. Such aspirations may not be achievable when one part of the wider system needs to be open and adaptive, while the authority in the system seeks to be controllable, and hence closed. These tensions are reflected in current DfE policy initiatives. Given this, it is unlikely that one role, the PCFSW, can singularly effect such change within the organisation or the wider system.

Psychiatric diagnosis has become a pervasive aspect of modern culture, exerting an increasing influence on forms of personhood, identity practices, and modes of self-governing. Debates surrounding the classification of psychiatric disorders are also prevalent, with particular disputes surrounding the relative merits of ‘biomedical’ vs ‘psychosocial’ understandings of mental health difficulties. There is arguably a need for further empirical exploration into the social and cultural implications of psychiatric classification and categorising practices within mental health service interactions. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted within several UK mental health settings, this thesis considers the role of diagnosis in constituting patient identities and in shaping professional categorisation practices, with a particular focus on bipolar disorder. Observations were conducted within sites where diagnostic identities are particularly salient: Psychiatric diagnostic and screening assessments, and a psychoeducation programme for bipolar disorder. Focusing on the formal and informal categorisation practices of service users and professionals, this study highlights the way in which psychiatric classifications can be negotiated, ascribed, and withheld in order to legitimate and contest particular kinds of suffering; in particular, it explores the way in which diagnostic categories – in particular bipolar disorder - can be used to interpret and medicalise morally problematic forms of experience and behaviour. Whilst diagnosis itself can function to medicalise aspects of moral life, its ability to perform this function is also shown to depend upon its conceptualisation as a biomedical disease entity. Findings suggest that bipolar disorder gives rise to particularly somatic concepts of personhood; its conceptualisation as an essentialised and reified illness category, with its cause located within the brain, enables a legitimisation of psychiatric ‘symptoms’ for both patients and professionals. In seeking access to more specialised mental health services with limited resources, potential patients can face trivialisation and deligitimisation of their problems by professionals, which at times manifests in the withholding of diagnosis. This is particularly the case within a mental health policy context which has increasingly moved towards the prioritisation of those with ‘severe mental illness’. As such, the study shows how the legitimising function of diagnoses such as bipolar disorder, can lead to a tendency for it to be both sought after by patients, but contested by professionals and amongst patients. In light of the apparent advantages conferred by this diagnosis, the moral and personal consequences of diagnostic membership, exclusion, and uncertainty are considered; in particular, the potential for this essentialised category to create divides between those considered to ‘have’ the disorder and those who are not, is contemplated.

The 2008 financial crisis has meant for the West a much wider social, political and economic questioning of its underpinnings. This delicate contingency combines with an increasingly evident ecologic crisis, indissolubly related to the capitalist, post-industrial, consumer economy that cracked in 2008. As the latter is proving unsustainable on all these levels, there is space for challenging this economic system and its underpinnings: development, industrialism and infinite growth (via consumption). Governments are putting in place measures that aim at environmental change mitigation, but with too little effect. With my study, I investigate the potentiality of the everyday as a site of ecological resistance, difference and creation. As a way of pursuing this, I designed a multimodal and multimedia participant observation study, focusing on energy use in everyday life. The locale is a town in the North-East of Italy, Vittorio Veneto, an interesting example of a formerly affluent area strongly hit by the recession. As a contribution to existent literature in this field, I draw and expand upon recent reflections that seek to go beyond the limitations of constructionism as the guiding approach to critical qualitative social sciences investigations. This “post-qualitative” literature calls for more attention to the ways in which language and discourses are co-emerging with, and co-constitutive of, the material, affective and non-representational qualities of experience. In line with this, I give special attention to the desiring and unconscious dimensions of energy use and everyday life more generally. Nonetheless, these are not conceptualised as subjective, interior or personal – but rather as trans-human flows that traverse and shape the social world. In this sense, focussing on desire is also a way to address the political and power-ridden aspects of energy use, little addressed in current research. Inspired above all by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (also with Félix Guattari), I look at the ways in which (collective) desire shapes the energy “assemblages” that we live through in ordinary life. If the dominant (libidinal) economy gears towards hyper-consumption and intensive energy practices, are molecular desires being mobilised that evade such hegemony? To what extent are they capable of a radical creation of more ecologically sensitive, life affirmative, assemblages? By making treasure of the different affordances of multi-media representation of the field, in my thesis I map contemporary everyday energy assemblages as they are territorialised and deterritorialised along lines of (ecological) becoming. I bring attention not only to the chances, but also to the risks and contradictions of emerging “lines of flight” from our unsustainable economy. This critical reflection is also applied to the theory informing my own study and its potential pitfalls. Finally, I reflect on the politics and ethics of social sciences in participating to draw lines of transitions towards sustainability.

The PhD is driven by a need to analyse what Scottish planning has come to represent in practice. It does this through a focus on how Scottish planning reform (Planning etc. Scotland Act, 2006) has been used to respond to the key public policy issues of achieving ‘sustainable growth’ and particularly planning for housing in growth- pressured city-regions. In England, Allmendinger’s (2016) recent critical consideration of the current state of planning despondently sees ‘neoliberal spatial governance’ where planning is focussed on ‘facilitating growth,’ through ‘post political’ process and driven by ‘narrow sectional interests’. This thesis analyses the extent to which such critique is a relevant way of understanding Scottish planning and how planning has come to be criticised from some perspectives as a tool for rolling out growth, while for others planning is still perceived as a drag on growth. It does this by analysing planning practice in two city regions – Aberdeen and Edinburgh - which have faced pressures for growth, particularly housing growth. Both have used the reformed Scottish planning system to deal with these pressures. In Aberdeen, it reveals why an ambitious growth agenda easily emerged, where planning actors utilised the reformed Scottish planning system to advocate an ‘ambitious strategy’. In Edinburgh, it reveals why, despite utilising the same planning system, a more complex and conflictual relationship around planning and housing growth has remained in place, as the city-region struggled to realise a spatial strategy that adapts to existing local political tensions. In each case the role of global and local structuring economic conditions are foregrounded. This qualitative comparative case study analyses the operation of Scottish planning in the period (2007-2016) in two growth-pressured Scottish city-regions. It involves 48 interviews conducted in the period 2013-2015 with public sector officers, councillors, developer interests and community and special interest groups and the analysis of documents associated with planning strategies. It has been conducted by a planner who has worked ‘in the field’ in the public and private sectors in both cases. It applies a broadly Gramscian analysis, utilising a Strategic Relational Approach, where planning actors pursue differing agendas and attempt to address wider and competing public policy concerns while operating within evolving structural conditions. It demonstrates the ways in which planning is a means by which particular interests can formalise their ambitions for growth but can equally be used to constrain and defer decisions around growth. However, both cases reveal planning as a form of ‘neoliberal spatial governance’ where the contradictions of current state-market relations mean Scottish planning is unlikely to meet its complex objective of delivering ‘sustainable economic growth’.

This work explores the commissioning arrangements in the NHS after the adoption of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). The thesis aims to explore how these new commissioning arrangements have affected the decision making process and why commissioners select the providers that they do. This data is then used to see whether or not the service is being subjected to privatisation as was feared with the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act (2012). This work will begin by exploring definitions of privatisation and marketisation before embarking on a description of the shape of the private sector in the NHS. This is followed by the development of an internal/external pressure conceptual framework, adapted from the work of Pettigrew et al. (1992) to understand the pressures that commissioners may face in the selection of providers. The research was underpinned by symbolic interactionism and studied the work of two CCGs, using example services to explore their decision making processes. The thesis explores the themes that emerged from the data by using the internal/external pressure conceptual framework and then discusses to what extent privatisation has occurred in the NHS using the earlier definitions. The research concludes that the ability of the commissioners to freely select providers is severely limited and that as such, the selection of private providers is clustered in specific services.

No description available.

This essay explores different perspectives on governance in Swedish education as expressed in two different government texts. The purpose is to show how the roll of the teacher might be understood in relation to the governance of education and its public and private goals. Theoretically the study relies on two main theoretical frames used in different stages of a three-step analysis. The first two steps use the concepts autonomy – control in order to analyze the governance of education. These concepts are applied to understand how the two texts that make up the empirical material formulate different types of governance. Specific attention is directed towards the teacher’s professional space considering autonomy – control looked at in the second step of analysis. The third step in turn uses the concepts public good and private good based in the largely Swedish field of curriculum theory to understand what implications different kinds of governance might have for larger questions about the purpose of education. The results show that the two texts that make up the empirical basis of the analysis form different perspectives on governance of education and seek to meet separate goals. One of the texts views governance of education highly as a mean to evaluate students, schools and the school system. This text therefore focuses mainly on technical aspects of governance. The other text in turn can be viewed as a reaction to a detailed technical view of governance as a mean for evaluation. Instead a perspective where governance of education should trust the knowledge of teachers is presented. Teachers in turn should be responsive to students’ needs and views on their education. The purpose of governance visible in this text leans mainly towards achieving goals that are not easily measured. The two unveiled perspectives show that varying types of governance fulfill different purposes based on their design. This in turn affects the way in which education is able to fulfill public and private needs.

Education in Swedish upper secondary school appears to be divided between different economic, political and social imperatives. The content and purpose of education also seemingly changes in accordance with the historical context. However, from 1918/1919, the Swedish curriculum is characterized as civic in its composition because of a recognition of interdependence between citizens. A hundred years on, the following study examines whether or not this is the case, specifically for the subject of civic education. The aim of this study can therefore be described as dependent on the completion of two separate objectives. Firstly, on an empirical survey that seeks to investigate what presently constitute the different aspects of the content and purpose of civic education within Swedish upper secondary school. This is done by using a curriculum theoretical textual analysis of the so called extended curriculum, involving different texts that represent the meaning of civic education. Secondly, on developing a new theoretical concept in the form of a subject code for civic education, which involves the content and purpose of the subject, as represented in the examined extended curriculum. The concept can be used as a curriculum theoretical tool for understanding civic education in the present. The results show that civic education can be described as containing several different characteristics regarding its content and purpose. However, a considerable emphasis seems to be placed on the scientific aspects of the subject and more specifically on the individual development of said aspects. The results also show that certain values bear influence on the content and purpose of civic education. These values however, tend to mainly emphasize individual rights instead of collective equivalents. In summary, this means that the current subject code does not recognize the interdependence between citizens, and therefore cannot be described as civic.