This thesis investigates migration aspirations and experiences of female Polish migrant workers and returnees, who have been working and living in the UK. In the face of theoretical debates and a lack of knowledge on the experience of Polish women as migrant workers in the UK, a contextualised study prioritising the narratives of the interviewees was established. The theoretical and methodological approach is characterised by grounded theory methodology informed by theoretical sensitivity, which is combined with the analysis of biographical narrative interviews, semi-structured expert interviews, and secondary quantitative data. Through this approach, the conditions and influential factors that shape female Polish migrant workers’ aspirations and experiences, as well the way in which they make meaning of them, are scrutinised. Different patterns of migration aspirations have been constructed by the informants’ narratives – migration as a solution, as a family strategy or as an opportunity. Furthermore, specificities of working and living in the UK have been established, marked by different routes into employment, migrant and feminised work, and different patterns of work trajectories; as well as social networks, transnational lives and experiences of women and family life. Constructions of return decisions or the lack of return motivations, as well as experiences after return, bring forth the relevance of expectations resulting in the question: ‘return to what?’ Additionally, return plans have been adapted in the face of structural constraints or because of individual preferences, which were at times overruled in the context of return as a family strategy. Return was also constructed, however, as path to personal or professional fulfilment, as an opportunity, or as a result of disappointment. In the context of the conditions of the enlarged EU providing the freedom of movement, the post-transformation labour market in Poland, and the gendered and migrant labour market segmentation in the UK, as well as gender regimes, female Polish migrant workers actively mediated their migration aspirations and experiences.

This thesis examines the history of Scottish settlement houses from 1886 until 1934. The Scottish settlements have attracted little attention from academics and no overarching study of these organisations has previously been done. This thesis seeks to address this lacuna and situate their achievements within the wider context of the changing role of voluntary organisations in this period. Using archival resources, it argues that settlements made important contributions to Scottish society through social work, training courses and adult education. They pioneered new methods, explored new areas of work and provided their local communities with access to services that they may not otherwise have received. This thesis demonstrates the way in which voluntary bodies evolved in response to local and national pressures and changing social attitudes in order to remain successful and relevant in a period during which their role was changing. There were six settlements in Scotland, each with their own agenda and areas of interest. The settlements remained distinct and independent organisations and there was a limited amount of cooperation between them. This diversity in both location and aims of the settlements gives rise to a range of themes that will be examined in the thesis. The original settlement ideal focused on ameliorating class differences by reforming the characters of working-class individuals through personal connection between them and middle-class settlers. The thesis will examine how this evolved over time. As the state at both a local and national level assumed more responsibility for social services, the role of settlements adapted to encompass training for professional social workers and as the working classes gained more political power the settlements sought to make them ‘fit for citizenship’. Likewise, as the original settlement ideal had denied the legitimacy of working-class culture and community, this attitude also evolved and settlements began to focus on developing strong communities within working-class areas.

The increasing international concern about the consequences of warfare for civilian populations has led to a growing body of demographic and health research. This research has been essential in providing estimates of war-induced excess mortality, a primary indicator by which to assess the intensity of wars and the adequacy of humanitarian responses. Far less attention has been paid to war-induced changes in fertility and population health, and the limited existing literature has rarely adopted a longitudinal approach. This is especially evident in the case of the 2003–2011 war in Iraq. Several studies have sought to quantify excess mortality, whereas other demographic and health effects of this war have been largely overlooked. This thesis fills substantive knowledge gaps using longitudinal data from the 2000, 2006 and 2011 Iraq Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (I-MICS). The data collected during wartime are found to be of similarly good quality as those collected during peacetime. The analysis shows that, besides causing a heavy death toll, the Iraq war also had profound long-term consequences for women and newborns. It provides the first evidence on the effect of the war on early marriage and adolescent fertility, with implications for women’s empowerment and reproductive health. It is also the first to quantify the effect of the war on neonatal polio immunisation coverage, with relevance for the recent polio outbreak. It finally assesses the main challenges to Iraq’s health sector rehabilitation efforts, namely the ongoing insecurity and persistently high rate of population growth. Overall, the findings have important documentation functions for the international community and serve as inputs for the design of humanitarian relief strategies in Iraq and similar war-torn countries, such as neighbouring Syria.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Lavasa, a new town planned, built and managed by a private company in India. It examines the ideologies, institutional arrangements, and political processes at work in the making of this town. It takes seriously the attempt to create a ‘market utopia’ (an inclusive, environmentally sustainable, properly planned, and profitable town), treating it as an empirical phenomenon with social consequences, and asks: why, how, and with what effects did Lavasa come to be? In tracing its conception, production, and contestation, the dissertation analyses the processes and consequences of transforming a rural landscape into an urban place. I make two main arguments. First, the construction of Lavasa is fundamentally speculative and is centred on the ability to transform cheap rural land into urban real estate. I show that the land market that enables the city is actively manufactured by the state, through powerful local political actors, and networks of brokers and agrarian intermediaries. The construction of this land market produces a speculative environment: one in which trading in land simultaneously becomes an opportunity to make money, a cause of dispossession, and a way to lay claim to the city. Second, such speculation generates both resistance against and support for the project. It also, paradoxically, emboldens the ideological project of city-making. Collective action is rendered difficult as it is mediated by the same conditions and state that created the land market. Therefore the contestation takes another form that moves beyond the domain of land, is couched in environmental concerns, and leverages a different level of the state to ultimately stall the project. I demonstrate how the symbolic power of this ‘market utopia’ conceals the conditions of its possibility, that is, the ways in which it was made through the state, through speculation, and the discursive and material operations of the land market. I show how this land market is historically and socio-politically constructed, and how its construction shapes and informs the politics of planning, privatisation, and resistance.

Social media has become a global phenomenon. Currently, there are 2 billion active users on Facebook. However, much of the research on social media is about the consumption side of social media rather than the production or operational aspects of social media. Although research on the production side is still relatively small, it is growing, indicating that it is a fruitful area to study. This thesis attempts to contribute to this area of research to unravel the inner operations of social media with one key research question: How does social media platform organize information? The theory of digital object of Kallinikos et al. (2013) is used to investigate this question. Information display that users of a social media platform interact with is a digital object and it is constructed by two key components which are a database and algorithms. The database and the algorithms shape how information is being organized on information displays, and these influence user behaviors which are then captured as social data in the database. This thesis also critically examines the technology of recommender system by importing engineering literature on information filtering and retrieval. While newsfeed algorithm such as EdgeRank of Facebook has already been critically examined, information systems and media scholars have yet to investigate recommendation algorithms, despite the fact that they have been widely deployed all over the Internet. It is found that the key weakness of recommendation algorithms is their inability to recommend novel items. This is because the main tenet of any recommender system is to "recommend similar items to those that users already like". Fortunately, this problem can be alleviated when recommender system is being deployed in the digital information environment of social media platforms. In turn, seven theoretical conjectures can be postulated. These are (1) navigation of information display as assembled by social media is highly interactive, (2) information organization of social media is highly unstable which would also render user behaviors unstable, (3) quality of data aggregation casts significant implications on user behaviors, (4) the amount of data captured by social media platforms limits the usefulness of their information displays, (5) output from the recommendation algorithm (recommendation list) casts real implications on user behaviors, (6) circle of friends on a social network can influence user behaviors, and (7) metadata attached to items being displayed casts influence on user behaviors. Data from Last.fm, a social media for music discovery, is used to evaluate these conjectures. The analysis supported most of the conjectures except the instability of information display and the importance of metadata attached to items being displayed. Some kinds of information organization are more stable than initially expected and some kinds of user generated contents are not so important for user behaviors.

The present research concerns the global 'value chain' of the açaí berry, a NonTimber Forest Product (NTFP) derived mainly from the Tocantins Estuary region in the State of Pará, Brazil, and which sustains its mostly riverine population. Through the adoption of methodologies employed in studies of Global Production Networks (GPNs), the study aims to identify how contextual factors have, over time, influenced the formation of the chain by actors across geographical scales, how they sustain the chain in its current configuration, how they enable or preclude the capture of value regionally, and influence development outcomes. Existing research and interventions continue to be predicated on locally-based approaches that aim to cut out middlemen or otherwise reshape local extraction and processing arrangements, without taking into full consideration the ways in which the chain is embedded into different social, economic, and cultural contexts across geographic scale, conditioning chain formation, value distribution and actor behavior. The empirical work was carried out in the form of semi-structured interviews, supported by secondary data and field observations. Field research sites included several locations in the interior of State of Pará, its capital Belem, the States of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Southeast Brazil, as well as coastal towns in California, USA. From these findings, key policy recommendations are made, which are applicable to this specific NTFP chain, but which can be extrapolated to other NTFP chains. The research also employs knowledge about consumer cultures, and the subjectivities concerning value determination, to investigate the role of consumer myths about a product in contributing to its value chain. The conclusion indicates that a whole-chain approach, which appreciates in a reflexive fashion the ways in which actors negotiate territorial specificities to configure chains, is instrumental in the development of efficient, strategic policy programs that aim to improve the income of forest communities that exploit NTFPs. In order to understand, and build trade-based development interventions, researchers and practitioners must engage with the structures, material and cultural, that encase chain relations across geographical scales.

A successful transition into the knowledge economy is said to depend upon higher level skills, creating unprecedented pressure on university systems - as they expand across countries - to provide knowledge-based labour markets with the skills needed. But what are the political economy dynamics underlying national patterns of high skill formation? This thesis argues that existing theoretical approaches are not well-suited to answer the question: ideational and structuralist frameworks downplay persistent national differences, while institutionalist accounts assume that national differences rest upon the very lack of higher education expansion in some countries, downplaying the crossnational trend of higher education expansion. The thesis proposes a framework that accounts for distinct national trajectories of high skill formation within the convergent trend of higher education expansion. In particular, two crucial variables are identified to theorise the relationship between higher education systems and knowledge-based labour markets: (i) the predominant type of knowledge economy in a given country; and (ii) the degree of inter-university competition across different higher education systems. It is argued that the former explains what type of higher level skills will be sought by employers and cultivated by governments, while the latter helps understanding of why some higher education systems are more open at the outset to satisfy labour market demands compared to others, determining whether institutional change in a given higher education system is likely to be encompassing or marginal. Cross-national descriptive statistics and systematic process analysis across a set of diverse country case studies (Britain, Germany and South Korea) are used to test the theory. By highlighting the agency of universities, governments and businesses and by linking higher education policy with knowledge-based growth strategies, this thesis provides a theoretical and empirical contribution on processes of institutional change in higher education and on broader trajectories of institutional change across advanced capitalist countries.

This thesis investigates the possibilities and forms of subaltern politics through an empirical study of Brazilian domestic workers' mobilisations. Domestic work, often described as a legacy of slavery in Brazil, is characterised by the intersection of gender, race and class matrices of oppression, which makes domestic workers a subaltern group. As a result of their subaltern status and characterisation as 'non-standard' workers they are expected to be harder, or even impossible, to organise and represent. Yet, Brazilian domestic workers have been organising since 1936; they formed their own autonomous trade unions, and won partial recognition in 2015 when the Brazilian Congress approved a law extending basic labour rights to them. Thus, my thesis examines how this subaltern group has been able to organise, and argues that instead of considering subalternity as an impediment to collective action it should be understood as a potential resource for mobilisation. I have identified three paradoxes of subaltern politics. First, I show how the professional identity 'domestic worker' is both necessary for political recognition in the Brazilian corporatist state, but also rejected, as it re-inscribes domestic workers into the raced-gendered power relations they want to challenge. Furthermore, I find that while the intersecting nature of their oppression is what has constructed domestic workers as a subaltern group, it has also enabled the formation of broad-based alliances with women, black and workers' movements, thereby turning subalternity into a resource for collective action. Finally, domestic workers have used their perceived vulnerability to force recognition from the Brazilian state, yet, this has led to a paternalistic mode of recognition and a certain demobilisation of the domestic workers' local unions. As domestic workers gained partial recognition as workers, they were also forced into an industrial relations model that did little to respond to the complex and multi-sided forms of oppressions they face, posing new challenges to their modes of organising.

This thesis studies the political and social practices of prosperous bazaar merchants and traders to understand the dynamics of power and authority in contemporary urban Pakistan. Broadly, it considers how propertied groups, such as traders, maintain their dominant position in Pakistan's political sphere, and how the consent of subordinate classes is structured to reproduce this persisting arrangement. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a large wholesale bazaar of Lahore, this thesis demonstrates that bazaar traders accumulate power and authority through a fused repertoire of transactional bargaining, material patronage, and Islamic civic leadership. By mobilizing voluntary associations, and forming personalized relations of reciprocity with state functionaries and political elites, traders are able to reproduce their material and status privileges through political access and co-optation of public resources. Such networks also position them as patrons and brokers for the urban poor who work in marketplaces, helping the latter resolve pressing issues of everyday subsistence, while sustaining ties of exploitative dependence in the process. These ties are simultaneously legitimized through an accompanying cultural politics grounded in religious ideals. Bazaar traders remain deeply embedded with Islamist actors and play a central role in administering mosques, seminaries, and religious charities. Therefore, notions of piety, divinely ordained class and status hierarchies, and benevolent civic virtue - disseminated and popularized through their articulation and performance by bazaar traders - shape the cultural frames under which class authority and material conditions are interpreted by subordinate groups in marketplaces. Ultimately, these processes act as the building blocks of a persisting arrangement, wherein the influence bazaar traders possess through economic resources and their authority over the urban poor is transacted with weak political parties during elections, thus underpinning the reproduction of Pakistan's elite-dominated political sphere. By documenting the everyday power practices of a dominant group and the microprocesses that feed into the political sphere, this thesis rectifies deterministic statist and structuralist explanations for Pakistan's lasting regime of elite power. It also contributes to ongoing debates on the roles played by the state, political parties, and civil society in the articulation of hegemonic political arrangements.

This case study research focuses on the experience of Migrant Student Mothers (MSM) as a particular stakeholder group in an inner city Higher Education Institution (HEI) within a context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Widening Participation (WP) and the Employability agenda of the contemporary Higher Education (HE) environment are given a particular focus as relevant aspects of the discussion with regard to MSM and the importance of considering a CSR approach to HE stakeholders. Affect Theory was utilised as the lens through which the data was thematically analysed, given the affective attributes that mothers assign to CSR and the affective overarching embodiment of affects as emerged from this research. This study argues that the central theme attributed to affects in the individual's experiences is hope. The findings highlight the invisibility of MSM in HE and that the significance of a reciprocal relationship between material experiences and affective understanding, enables this particular subgroup of the students, to act and progress, both as migrant mothers and as students, through their migration and education trajectories, enabling both themselves and their children to occupy a place as future global citizens. The findings support that the material vehicles available to stakeholders groups are paramount in facilitating such hope and therefore the needs for business entities to actively respond to the needs of these stakeholders. The research approach that was undertaken, adopting an interpretivist paradigm, was carried out through case study method, utilising several data collection tools in order to gain a rich and in-depth picture of the chosen case. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken at two key points of the academic year with four different stakeholder groups, including over 230 hours verbatim transcription; biographical personal self-definition forms, research diary; and, an in-depth investigation of the University's policies, documentation, existing statistics, generic emails, management address and publicly available information such as the university website. The thesis points out that across the many CSR definitions and research there is still an untouched discourse that fails to recognise the heterogeneous complexity of stakeholder groups and within them 'invisible stakeholders'. Building on a synthesis of Hopkins' (2016) CSR definition which adopts a stakeholder orientation, the thesis builds on current stakeholder theory by promulgating a three-phase CSR process, encompassing a new CSR model: The Triplex-Invisible Stakeholders, which recognises the heterogeneity of different stakeholder groups through exploring linkages between them, and thus making the invisible stakeholders visible.