The process by which the classical music business operates in the UK changed significantly through the marketing of a classical music recording which took place in 1989. EMI’s recording of Vivaldi’s work Four Seasons with the violinist Nigel Kennedy was given a unique marketing campaign for a classical music recording. Instead of the traditional marketing approach for a classical music release, pop marketing techniques were employed. In a different but related development, in 1990, the first of the Three Tenors concerts was held in Rome to mark the final match of the 1990 Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) world cup competition. The success of this second record campaign lay in the novelty of three tenors performing together at a football competition. The result was classical music achieving worldwide exposure through global radio and television broadcasts. Both case studies help further classical music as a form of popular culture. Earlier precedent demonstrates pieces of classical music being used for adverts or films and becoming popular. For example Ravel’s Bolero was used in a seduction scene in the film 10 between Bo Derek and Dudley Moore in 1984, and by ice-skaters Torvill and Dean in the same year for the final of the 1984 Winter Olympics. Another example is Orff’s Carmina Burana sections of which have been used for aftershave and lager adverts as well as being sung at football matches. Because the reach of the audience is larger than that in a traditional classical music setting, the pieces achieve a mass cultural perspective in this context. My thesis examines the impact that the success of the Four Seasons and Three Tenors releases had on the classical music business and the development in marketing and selling techniques that emanated from their success. Examples of marketing campaigns post the Four Seasons are included to show the extent of non-traditional classical marketing techniques used subsequently by the classical music industry, some of which I devised and implemented. My research also analyses how trading over the internet has had an impact on the music business as a whole, and how the classical music sector has followed the pop area of the music industry in creating different ways of selling to traditional and new consumers through online trading. This part of the thesis focuses on the period between 2000-2010, especially from 2006 when developments in this field progressed. My study will draw on a Case Study approach using multiple data collection methods. Also employed is descriptive analysis using a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques, in particular through industry reports. The reasons for the sales success of both recordings are examined in my thesis. The Four Seasons achieved 2 million sales and an entry into the Guinness Book of Records as the best-selling classical music recording of all time at that point. The recording of the 1990 Three Tenors concert and the successive recordings of similar concerts in 1994 and 1998 led to these albums becoming the all-time best-selling classical recordings. For example, worldwide sales for the 1990 recording reached over 12 million CDs, cassettes and videos combined and 23 million for the 1990, 1994 and 1998 Three Tenors recordings. These projects not only gave increased exposure to the classical music genre by expanding its traditional consumer reach, they also created a force for change in business models affecting the marketing and visibility of classical music since 1989. A further significant factor in the success of these vocal recordings (as well as the chance for classical music to be heard outside its traditional boundary) was the use of the arresting aria Nessun dorma from Puccini’s opera Turandot. This was sung by Pavarotti and used by the BBC for all its programmes broadcasting the 1990 football matches in the competition. The effect of internet selling and downloading on the music business was encouraged by the creation of Apple’s iTunes program in 2001. The invention of the iPod in 2002 and the legal entity of Napster in 2004 led to much increased accessibility of music. For classical music with its long movements and being part of a slow-moving market (compared to pop music), this area of the business only witnessed an increase in activity through the expansion of Broadband nationally during 2006 and 2007, reaching 70% in 2009 (discussed on page 90, chapter 4). Since then, the growth of classical music e-tailers has forged a new way of operating in the classical music field. The thesis will give examples of the leading companies trading over the internet and their influence on the classical music market. Contributions from practitioners in the music business inform my thesis through their own witnessing of changes in the classical music business since the Four Seasons campaign. My own experience as a former Head of Press and Promotion for both Decca Classics and EMI Classics, and also currently as a marketing and business consultant for classical music organisations, offers a useful and relevant addition to my research. My contribution to knowledge is to identify the adaptation of pop music marketing tools by the classical music industry over a 20 year time frame. My close involvement in the EMI Four Seasons campaign places me in a unique position to identify and evaluate the significance of the publicity campaign of that recording not only at that time but in the years that followed.

This PhD examines the role of the transnational media in articulating and mobilizing different political and identity positions for migrants. It explores the complex linkages between Kurdish and Turkish transnational ethnic media and migrant communities. It is based on 74 in-depth interviews and 6 focus groups with Kurdish and Turkish migrants of diverse age, gender, political affiliation, occupation and length of migration in London, Berlin and Stockholm. Drawing upon the concepts of “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) and “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995), it seeks to understand how migrants make sense of the media representations of the ethno-national conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurds and how they position themselves in relation to these media texts. The thesis explores how the media impact differentially on migrants’ views and ethnic identities in the three countries. This study argues that transnational media speak on behalf of the nation to the nation, even if the members of these imagined national communities live in different places, connecting people across different geographical spaces and thus building transnational imagined communities. They create a sense of belonging to a meaningful imagined community defined as “our” nation. The mediated Turkish-Kurdish ethno-national conflict has contributed to this transnational imagined community. The analysis of interviews found that the mediated conflict has hardened ethnic-based divisions and differentiation between Kurdish and Turkish migrants in Europe. Transnational media have contributed to deterritorialization, differentiation and division among migrants. Kurds and Turks have developed distinct identities in Europe and cannot be viewed any longer as a homogeneous group. The thesis concludes by suggesting a three-way framework for the analysis of ethno-national identities of migrants, taking into account firstly the country of settlement, secondly Turkish and thirdly Kurdish media as significant in constructing imagined national communities.

Since the early 1990’s the number of corporate stand-alone reports produced by various organisations worldwide has increased considerably (Kolk, 2004; Owen, 2006). It is argued that introducing an assurance statement with the stand-alone report may contribute to enhancing the credibility of the reported information (FEE, 2002; Dando and Swift, 2003; ACCA and AccountAbility, 2004). This thesis reports on a multi-level analysis of assurance statements attached to stand-alone reports that were produced by the UK FTSE100 companies during the reporting years 2000-2004. Drawing on a research instrument (which itself has been informed by previous literature, namely O’Dwyer and Owen, 2005) as well as the most recent assurance guidelines and standards (such as FEE, 2002; GRI, 2002, AA1000AS, 2003; and ISAE3000, 2004), this thesis examines the extent to which assurance statements disclose information about crucial elements of the assurance engagement, the amount of disclosure as well as factors associated with the information disclosed. In this context, particular attention is given to issues of independence of the assurance provider; the methodology used to conduct the assurance engagement; the degree to which stakeholders have been engaged and their issues taken account of within the assurance process; and assurance results (namely presentation of the assurance opinion, findings and recommendations). The research results suggest that, despite the increased amount and quality of information disclosed within the assurance statements over the years, engagement of stakeholders and taking adequate account of their issues within the assurance process is still lacking compared to other dimensions of assurance. In the absence of generally accepted stand-alone reporting criteria and assurance standards for this type of reporting, various assurance approaches have emerged and these correspond to the nature of the assurance provider (for example, accountancy, consultancy and certification body). The FTSE100 companies (in almost in two-thirds of the conducted engagements) rely most heavily on consultancy firms for assurance and as a result, this approach dominates UK assurance practice. As a consequence, there are noticeable variations in the assurance methodologies, results of the assurance engagements (findings, opinions and recommendations) and shape of the assurance statements over the study. There are also changes that emerge over time and these are most strongly associated with the standards that are used to govern the assurance engagement and also the type of information being assured. These findings raise concerns about whether it is possible to harmonise assurance practice of the corporate stand-alone reports. This thesis concludes with some practical implications for the assurance of stand-alone reports, as well as recommendations for future research.

Conditionality has always been a feature of welfare benefit entitlements in the United Kingdom – however, over time, the extent to which conditionality has been exercised in order to change behaviour has drastically increased through the severity of sanctions. Universal Credit, the most recently enacted welfare programme in the UK, has strengthened conditionality even further through even more ambitious expectations, as well as stricter regulations and punishments. The mission of UC is to tackle worklessness, welfare dependency, and poverty by decreasing unemployment and thus, the number of people on benefits. Although UC may have been successful in addressing the first two issues, it is important to recognise that as a welfare policy and a response to poverty, UC is supposed to protect and benefit the wellbeing of people. My findings contradict this idea – UC has failed to address poverty in many ways, by defining poverty through a narrow and solely quantitative lens, by focusing on incentivising employment amongst benefit claimants as a solution to poverty, and by insufficiently accommodating for the needs of marginalised groups. Even so, conditional welfare policies have become the norm, a tool of many Conservative leaders in the United Kingdom. This is where the social policy focus has shifted. My thesis found that while UC and conditional welfare policies may achieve their stated goals of reducing unemployment and the number of benefit claimants, they do not adequately address the issue of poverty, as they ignore structural causes of poverty and disadvantage amongst marginalised communities.

This thesis examines Britain’s role in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Based on multi-archival research and interviews with key diplomats, it presents the first in-depth study of Britain’s involvement in the negotiations leading up to the Helsinki Final Act of 1 August 1975. It draws on Marc Trachtenberg’s notion of the ‘constructed peace’, and Alexander Wendt’s concept of ‘cultures of anarchy’ to elucidate how the rapprochement process at once stabilised and transformed the East-West conflict. This forms the theoretical framework of the thesis. The thesis revises the interpretation of détente as a status quo project driven by the imperatives of ‘Realpolitik’. Rather, different conceptions of stability and change challenged each other during the Helsinki talks. British diplomacy and the Final Act to which it contributed in fact linked the consolidation of the status quo to an ultimately transformative agenda that was infused with liberal ideas such as human rights. Realpolitik blended with Moralpolitik. To develop this argument, the thesis’ narrative first assesses Britain’s role in the early days of détente politics in the 1950s and 1960s. It then traces Britain’s role in the three main phases of the Helsinki process: the transition from bilateral to multilateral détente (1970-1972); preliminary talks (1972-1973); official negotiations (1973-1975). The British were defensive détente sceptics at the beginning of this process, but became ambitious and positive contributors over the course of the talks. The thesis thus argues that London played a significant part in the CSCE. British foreign policymakers were initially architects of the Cold War, but then early and active proponents of détente until the mid-1960s, when their continental partners adopted a more proactive approach. London was to return to the forefront of détente diplomacy when the CSCE process got under way. Its involvement in the CSCE also marked an important step in Britain’s own transformation into a European middle power. The multilateralisation of détente coincided with Britain’s integration into the European Community, providing a propitious environment in which London’s negotiators acted with determination and skill, thus reasserting their country’s influence despite its continuing relative decline.

The aim of diploma thesis Teachers personality in the 21st century is to point out the importance of the human spiritual dimension, as well as the importance of personality development of every teacher. The thesis is trying to disclose which of the challenges are teachers facing nowadays and how the students and pupils themselves are affected by their lecturers. The paper describes the transformation of the teacher's role in present-day society. Two different approaches in teachers training are presented and compared - classical higher education and Waldorf education. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with the definition of the personality concept regarding a psychological point of view, as well as the definition of teacher education paradigm transformation relating to key competences and professional teachers standards. One section of the text is describing the basic principles of Waldorf pedagogy. The empirical part consists of an analysis of two different teacher education approaches, obtained through interviews with representatives of the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague and Freie Hochschule in Stuttgart. The benefit of this thesis is to bring the description of the educational model, which emphasises on a artistic process in the future teachers education, into the...

In accordance with the main aim of the study, a widely accessible, modifiable tool was created for parties interested in maintaining the national electricity supply network and parties interested in informing policy on plug-in vehicle adoption schemes and recharging behaviour control. The Parry Tool enables the user to incorporate present limits to plug-in vehicle recharging demand scheduling as imposed by the state of present technology (no third party mechanism for monitoring and control of recharging), present human travel behaviour needs and existing patterns in electricity usage; into the investigation of the impacts of recharging demand impacts and the design of mitigation measures for deflecting (parrying) worst case scenarios. The second aim of the project was to demonstrate the application of the Parry Tool. The multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary information gathered by the Parry Tool was used to produce national demand profiles for plug-in vehicle recharging demand, calculated using socioeconomic and travel behaviour-estimated population sizes for plug-in eligible vehicles and vehicle usage patterns, which were added to existing national electricity demand for a chosen test week – this was the first scenario subsequently tested. The information gathered by the Parry Tool was then used to inform the design of two demand management methods for plug-in vehicle recharging: Recharging Regimes and weekly recharging load-shifting – these were the second and third scenarios subsequently tested. Unmitigated simultaneous recharging demand in scenario 1 (all vehicles assumed to recharge at home upon arrival home every day) severely exacerbated peak demand, raising it by 20% above the highest peak in existing demand for the year 2009 over half an hour from 58,554 MW to 70,012 MW – a challenge to the generation sector. This increased the difference between daily demand minima and maxima and made the new total demand have sharper peaks – a challenge for grid regulators. Recharging Regimes in scenario 2 split the estimated national plug-in vehicle populations into groups of different sizes that started recharging at different times of the day, with the word ‘regime’ being applied because the spread of start times changed over the course of the test week from workdays to weekend. This avoided exacerbation of the peak and reduced the difference between daily demand minima and maxima by raising minima, providing a load-levelling service. Scenario 3 embellished the Recharging Regimes with workday-to-weekend recharging load-shifting that therefore took better advantage of the often overlooked weekly pattern in existing demand (demand being higher on workdays than weekends), by allowing partial recharging of a segment of the plug-in vehicle population. Limited consideration of the impact of changing vehicle energy usage (for which distance travelled was assumed to proxy in this study) showed that the more vehicles used their batteries during the day, the better the levelling effect offered by Recharging Regimes. Greater utilisation of battery capacity each day, however, can also be assumed to lessen the potential for workday-to-weekend load levelling, because load-shifting depends upon vehicles being able to partially recharge or defer recharging to later days and still meet their travel needs plus keep a reserve State Of Charge (SOC) for emergency and other unplanned travel. Whilst altering vehicle energy usage did not change the finding that unmitigated simultaneous recharging exacerbated existing peak demand, it was noted that when limited mileage variation was considered this sharpened the profile of total demand – the rise and fall of the new peak far steeper than that of the original peak in existing demand. The Parry Tool combines a series of integrated methods, several of which are new contributions to the field that use UK data archives but may potentially be adapted by researchers looking at energy issues in other nations. It presents a novel fossil-fuel based justification for targeting road transport – acknowledging energy use of fossil fuel as the originator of many global and local problems, the importance of non-energy use of petroleum products and subsequent conflicts of interest for use, and a fossil fuel dependency based well-to-wheel assessment for UK road transport for the two energy pathways: electricity and petroleum products. It presents a method for the recalculation and ranking of top energy use/users using national energy use statistics that better highlights the importance of the electricity industry. It also presents the first publicly documented method for the direct consultation and extraction of vehicle-focused statistics from the people-focused National Travel Survey database, including a travel behaviour and household income-based assessment of plug-in vehicle eligibility, used to scale up to national estimates for battery electric and plug-in electric hybrid vehicle (BEV and PHEV) national population sizes. The work presented here is meant to allow the reader to perceive the potential benefits of using several resources in combination. It details the Parry Tool, a framework for doing so, and where necessary provides methods for data analysis to suit. It should however be noted that methods were kept as simple as possible so as to be easily followed by non-specialists and researchers entering the field from other disciplines. Methods are also predominantly data-exploratory in nature: strong conclusions therefore should not be drawn. Rather, the work here should be seen as a guideline for future work that may more rigorously study these combined topics and the impacts they may have upon plug-in vehicle ownership, usage behaviour, impacts of recharging upon the national network and the design of mitigation measures to cope with this new demand.

Due to the fact that corporate environmental reporting (CER) is largely voluntary and unregulated, practice has evolved in the absence of a meaningful conceptual framework. This lack of a normative theory stating what should be the content of CER as well as the methods for measuring reported information being largely volumetric or content based, is advanced as a major limitation in the existing literature. In this study, the wellestablished conceptual frameworks for financial reporting are adapted as the basis for a CER conceptual framework in which four characteristics of CER indicate its quality. Empirical methods for the measurement of such characteristics are also adapted from the financial reporting literature. The main aim of this research is to use the adapted framework to examine the extent of variation in the quality of CER and then to test its applicability to the key motivational theories. The empirical work involves a panel of US and UK firms over a two-year period. This allows cross-sectional comparison to be made between different financial accounting regimes (rules- vs. principles-based) as well as permits examination of the development of CER over time. Further, the empirical work is extended to investigate the interrelationship between the financial and environmental performance of a firm. Evidence in support of the legitimacy and institutional theory explanations for disclosure motivations is comprehensively found through the measures of the qualitative characteristics identified. That is, the use of a novel CER framework based on financial reporting quality here enables a more robust understanding of the reporting behaviours than previous work. Moreover, evidence for CER variation owing to the differences in financial reporting regimes is found and thus, it is reasonable to assert that the culture of financial reporting, to some extent, informs the nature of voluntary non-financial reporting. However, perhaps owing to the short time frame of the investigation, evidence of financial rewards from being environmentally effective or through providing CER is not found. The findings from this research will be of interest to preparers and users of corporate environmental reports as well as to policymakers, particularly in terms of enabling them to assess the quality of reporting and its level of fit with their expectations. Moreover, they also shed light on the link between environmental performance, as manifested in carbon emissions, and what is reported.

In the UK and Saudi Arabia, it is necessary for the contracting parties in insurance contracts to comply with the requirement of the doctrine of utmost good faith. In recent years, the doctrine of utmost good faith and the mutual duties of the contracting parties have developed in different ways in each jurisdiction. Both jurisdictions provide consumer protection in insurance markets by Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representation) Act 2012 in the UK and Insurance Consumer Protection Principles 2014 in Saudi Arabia. However, there are many differences between the conduct of each jurisdiction since the coming into force of the Insurance Act 2015 in the UK, which revolutionised the insurance law in several key areas. This thesis particularly aims to critically analyse the reform of the doctrine of utmost good faith and looks at how the current reform impacts on the interpretation of this doctrine between the UK and Saudi jurisdictions. This study critically analyses the insureds’ pre-contractual duties for consumers and businesses in the UK with a comparison to Saudi law.

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