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Focusing upon solicitors working in private law firms in England and Wales, the study investigates the interrelationships between domain-specific and work-home interference factors and their predictive value in relation to different categories of strain symptomatology and satisfaction outcomes. The research also examines the moderating influences of gender and family type on the interface between work and home, and their differential impacts on well-being. Data were gathered in two stages. Stage one involved 20 interviews that allowed respondents to identify sources of work and home pressures for themselves. Content analysis of the interview transcripts facilitated the development of separate work and home pressure inventories. In addressing the difficulties associated with construct measurement, stage two developed an unorthodox approach for measuring both forms of work-home interference, which was part of an extensive survey instrument that included established outcome measures. The sample group was devised using a cluster sampling strategy whereby legal firms were grouped according to their size and then by regional cities. Nearly 2,500 surveys were distributed with a return rate of nearly 30%. The data set was split into two sub-sets via a cluster sampling strategy based on gender and family type to allow for a series of exploratory and confirmatory analyses in the development and testing of structural equation models of the work and home domain. A distinguishing feature of this study is its examination of the work-home interface at the microlevel, which involved developing a series of structural equation models relevant to the most salient sources of work-home interference and domain-specific pressures experienced by solicitors. Through a series of exploratory and confirmatory analyses, the study' tested three differing sets of explanatory relations as to the interplay between specific aspects of the two domains, and the implications of this interplay for a range of outcomes. The findings provide strong empirical support to assert that work-to-home interference (e. g., concerns over ability) and home-to-work interference (e. g., unfulfilled domestic responsibilities) represent two distinct dimensions of individuals functioning with different rates of prevalence and different role related antecedents and outcomes that indicate that solicitors are being stretched in both domains. The empirical evidence indicates an increasing convergence in the public and private roles of male and female solicitors, highlighting the importance of both sexes having the opportunity to attain a balance between the domains of work and home. The study also demonstrates that work-home interference is not exclusively a problem for employees located in traditional nuclear families and shows that solicitors within differing familial situations (e. g., single persons) experience high levels of work-home interference that can exacerbate domainspecific pressures resulting in a poor state of health and low levels of work and home satisfaction.

Taking hoarding as a model for amassing materials within art practice, this research questions the borders of a productive or rational relationship to collation and the development of pathology. In practice, I focus on how materials can be manipulated to reflect or imply attachments and value systems within disorder, collection and their interpretations/ analyses. Using historical examples, I question how disorder is formed, spatially, aesthetically and through clinical record-keeping, making specific reference to written/visual case-studies from Charcot and Freud. I question whether disorder can ever be seen as a culturally produced phenomenon in parallel to its clinical counterpart and suggest its uses to knowledge production within the fields of Fine Art and critical theory. I suggest hoarding – and the cultural construction of disorder - as collagist and create works, which reflect on the borders of psychopathological attachments to ‘stuff’; psychologies inherent to accumulation; and conscious and unconscious spaces occupied by both object and analysis. Creating new collagist and fictive methodologies out of the construction of case histories, and through the cooption of diagnostic tools and narratology used in psychoanalysis, I write about the work and within the work. This research questions how psychological disorder is re-narrated through fictive and visual forms within culture and via collective understandings of psychoanalytic subjectivities. I suggest how these fictions connect, accumulate and reflect back on themselves, affecting research and crossovers within psychoanalytic, spatial and cultural fields. I make links between the modern city and psychological disorder, drawing on the psychical affects of changes in urban space. Examining collation, the construction of psychological spaces and temporality in art practice (from Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau to Michael Landy’s Break Down and Tomoko Takahashi’s collation of objects) alongside new clinical research into Hoarding Disorder, I relate compulsion and space to a rationalisation of clutter in contemporary practice.

This thesis sets out to explore the processes involved when family therapists decide to introduce an action method into a therapy session. Action methods are defined as therapist led physical activities which are introduced into the session for the purpose of enabling the healing of relationships. The literature is examined in relation to connections between family therapy approaches using action and psychodrama psychotherapy relation to work with families and couples. Literature which integrates the two approaches is identified. The core of the study is composed of five interviews with experienced and senior family therapists about how they use action with clients in sessions. It focuses on the beliefs, behaviours and actions which are present at the moment the therapists decide to use action. The interviews examine the therapists’ training and current practice culture, their guiding beliefs and principles about the use of action and the theories on which they have drawn in considering the implementation of action methods. Participants were asked to describe an episode of action by giving a verbal account as well as undertaking a sculpt of the episode using ‘small world’ figures. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using a unique approach blending psychodramatic role analysis (Williams 1989) with the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) (Cronen and Pearce 1985) a communication theory approach used by systemic psychotherapists. The findings indicate that systemic therapists do not have one overarching theoretical approach to using action in therapy, but draw on a range of different models which may be derived from different systemic approaches. The findings further indicate that theories of action which include neurobiological information processing and embodiment are introduced into systemic trainings as important in understanding how action methods impact on individuals and families. A format for therapists to evaluate their use of action methods is proposed for use in supervision or training. It follows the format that is used in the analysis, using psychodramatic role analysis and a CMM hierarchical structure which proposes opening space, spontaneity and playfulness as markers for the culture, identity and relationship levels of the analysis.

This dissertation is a critical sociology of sociology in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia. It explores the construction of sociology as a field of knowledge, academic discipline and professional practice in Kyrgyzstan (formerly the Kirgiz Soviet Socialist Republic) from 1966 to 2003, focusing on the late and post-socialist project to transform sociology from a heteronomous to autonomous field of knowledge and practice. It draws especially on the sociology of knowledge and science to explore the localised processes through which social scientific knowledge and political power have been co-constituted on the imperial periphery. Through a comparative case study of sociology in Kyrgyzstani universities, as well as smaller case studies of 'public science' in the national press, it reveals how sociologists have negotiated a fundamental tension in the institutionalisation project - the separation of the production of sociological knowledge from the logic of political power, on the one hand, and their simultaneous association, on the other - to establish both scientific legitimacy and social relevance for sociology in the republic. The types of sociology that emerge from this negotiation - the positivist, applied-professional model and the post-positivist liberal-critical model - are interpreted not as inevitable consequences of the Soviet collapse, but rather the product of decisions made by sociologists within particular intellectual and structural constraints and through the lens of partial bodies of theoretical knowledge. The ascendance of positivist and empiricist sociology in the post-Soviet period is explained as a deliberate, if often extremely uncritical, attempt to reorganise the relationship between power and knowledge in Kyrgyzstani society and to democratise the latter. Finally, the dissertation demonstrates that academic debates about the possibility of scientific truth assume deep personal and political significance when conducted in the context of pronounced social fragmentation and inequality, specifically, in the contexts of authoritarianism and neocolonialism.