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This PhD thesis tracks the history of the Italian unemployment welfare during the second half of the twentieth century, offering an account of why the Italian system of social security never established a universal safety net against unemployment, choosing instead a social policy system targeted on the core industrial workforce. During the post-war period, Italian unemployment insurance remained severely lacking compared to other European countries. To compensate, the country relied on the Cassa Integrazione Guadagni (CIG), a short time work scheme providing a wage replacement allowance to compensate employees in the industrial sector for a temporary reduction of their working time. Starting from the late 1960s, the scope and duration of the CIG were progressively expanded to tackle manpower redundancies, catering for the weakness of other forms of support. During the 1970s and the 1980s, short time emerged as the chief instrument to cushion the economic and social consequences of the industrial crisis of the country. This thesis explains the peculiar characteristics of the Italian unemployment welfare model as a consequence of the country's pattern of labour conflict, showing how industrial relations and social policy influenced one another. In the early postwar decades, while the unions were organisationally weak, the CIG emerged as a less expensive alternative to general unemployment insurance. This engendered a path dependent effect. Following the rise of industrial unrest and the strengthening of organised labour in the early 1970s, unions and employers favoured the increasing use of the CIG so as to protect their respective interests for job security and manpower flexibility, at the expense of the weaker strata of the labour market. Far from being a simple instrument of income maintenance, the CIG played a key role in shaping social relations of production at the work-place level and was used to diffuse industrial conflict on the shop floor. With the onset of deindustrialisation, during the 1980s, the CIG became a powerful tool for the demobilisation of organised labour.

Background: In this dissertation I examine the political economy of the post-socialist mortality crisis as experienced in deindustrialising towns in Hungary. I develop and apply a relational political economy of health framework, putting emphasis on the economic institutions of post-socialist dependent capitalism in Hungary, as embedded in the semi-periphery of the global economy, their gendered implications and their cultural construction. Methods: I follow a mixed-method strategy combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. I rely on a novel dataset comprising data on settlement, enterprise, and individual levels. 260 companies and 52 towns were analysed in two waves. I group towns into severely and moderately deindustrialised categories (1989-1995); as well as into dominant state, domestic private and foreign ownership dominated categories (1995-2004). Population surveys in these towns collected data on the vital status and other characteristics of survey respondents' relatives. I assess the relationship between deindustrialisation, dominant ownership and the mortality of individuals by random intercept multilevel discrete-time survival modelling. I also investigate the health implications of the lived experience of economic transformation in four towns with diverging privatisation and deindustrialisation histories through a qualitative thematic analysis of 82 in-depth semi-structured interviews. Findings: Severe deindustrialisation is associated with a significantly larger odds of mortality for men between 1989 and 1995 (OR=1.12; 95%CI=1.00-1.26; p=0.042). On the other hand, prolonged state ownership is related to a significantly lower odds of dying among women, compared to towns dominated by domestic private ownership (OR=0.74; 95%CI=0.62-0.90; p=0.002) or towns dominated by foreign investment (OR=0.79; 95%CI=0.65-0.96; p=0.019) between 1995 and 2004. The multi-sited semi-structured qualitative interviews revealed that companies are central institutions in the cognitive maps of workers and that the fates of these companies affected the health of workers in multiple ways, whereas state involvement was perceived as a cushioning mechanism. Interpretation: Severe deindustrialisation was a crucial factor behind the post-socialist mortality crisis for men, whilst prolonged state ownership was associated with the protection of life chances for women. The indirect economic benefits of foreign investment do not translate automatically into better health. Rapid economic transformations threaten health; they should be avoided where possible, but if this is not possible, strong safety nets should be in place.

This thesis is an exploration of the classed and gendered trajectories that lead to 'revolving door' incarceration for a group of men from working class backgrounds. Considering that men commit most crime and, in the UK, account for over 95% of the prison population, there is relatively little scholarship that explores the links between masculinity and crime and almost a dearth of ethnographic enquiry into the links between the social construction of masculinities and incarceration. In response, this study, employing qualitative in-depth life history interviews with thirty male prisoners housed in an East Yorkshire prison, examines the cyclical interrelations between cultural representations of masculinity, place, schooling, employment, crime and incarceration. Influenced by Connell's theoretical framework, including the relational concept of protest masculinities, and by the Teesside School's work on transitions and alternative careers, the main aim of this research is to examine if, and to what extent, significant cultural and institutional spaces were complicit in the construction and maintenance of versions of protest masculinities. The study reveals that masculinities negotiated over interconnecting sites of deprived neighbourhoods, inadequate children's residential 'care' homes and failing schools better prepared most respondents to serve time in prison than to work in contemporary deindustrialised labour markets. Formative teenage years spent negotiating impoverished prison regimes and living up to extreme prison masculinities contributed to many of the respondents spending more time inside prison than 'on the out'. The thesis concludes with recommendations for policy approaches to better facilitate crucial sites, such as schools and prisons, undoing, rather than reinforcing, troubling gender performances for young boys and men like these respondents. Reducing rising male prison populations, mainly made up of men from deprived neighbourhoods, might be more effectively tackled through innovative, gender informed, policy, ensuring that institutional spaces of learning, 'care', punishment and rehabilitation work harder to open up more positive avenues to doing masculinity.