Liturgical interpretation is the application of the methods of patristic and medieval biblical exegesis to public worship. This thesis examines for the first time its importance in the religious culture of Scotland during a period of renaissance and reformation. The first section defines the genres and method involved with reference to the most popular liturgical commentary of that time, the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durandus of Mende (c.1230-1296). The reasons for the decline of this genre and its neglect by modern scholarship are then explored. The central section of the thesis employs a wide variety of evidence, including material culture, to argue, firstly, that liturgical interpretation was a fundamental part of the culture of Catholic Scotland; secondly, that interest in it was a sign of commitment to Catholic reform. It is also argued that it had an important place in the education system and influenced the design and understanding of churches and their furnishings. Drawing upon inscriptions in liturgical commentaries, networks of clergy in Scotland committed to Catholic reform and the liturgy are identified. The ‘Aberdeen liturgists’ were the most significant group. Formed by Bishop Elphinstone of Aberdeen who was consecrated in 1488, it is shown that their influence lasted beyond 1560 and created a distinctive religious culture in the North-East. The final section examines what happened to this intellectual tradition during the period of the Scottish reformations, both the Catholic reform associated with Archbishop Hamilton in the 1550s and the Protestant reform which triumphed in 1559-60. While interest in liturgical interpretation survived in Aberdeen after 1560, its use by Catholic writers declined in the later sixteenth century. A Reformed version of liturgical interpretation did, however, emerge combining an anti-commentary on the Catholic liturgy with the use of aspects of the medieval method to interpret the liturgy of the Reformed church. This can be found in official Protestant texts and, in its fullest form, in the 1590 sermons on the Lord’s Supper by Robert Bruce. This hitherto unnoticed genre demonstrates an important continuity across the Reformation divide. It suggests that ‘the Scottish Reformation’ is best seen as a phenomenon which was both Catholic and Protestant and that the reformers on both sides had more in common than they or subsequent historians allow.

Since the reintroduction of a Scottish parliament in 1999, and set against a backdrop of significant cuts in public spending, there has been much debate regarding law and order discourse from a Scottish perspective. In 2011, the Scottish Government conducted two consultations on the most radical programme of police reform for a generation. The consultation process ensued that on 8 September 2011, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice announced the Scottish Government’s intention to introduce legislation to create a single, national police service in Scotland with claims that it would deliver an estimated savings of £130 million a year and £1.7 billion over 15 years. Under this new legislation local policing became (for the first time) a statutory requirement, giving key responsibilities to local police commanders to devise local policing plans for each area in consultation with local authorities and communities. This localised focus raised questions as to the potential gains and losses of such a merger and prompted a renewed focus on enduring academic debates regarding local policing strategies, governance, accountability and the relative merits of different styles of policing across Scotland’s communities. Understanding the impact and implications of these local arrangements provides the focus for this thesis. The level of recent organisational change which has occurred across policing in Scotland is comprehensive in its scope and sits within the concept of macro level change. With regard to police reform, the majority of existing research has focused on micro level or operational changes; with an example of this being seen in the work of Skogan (2006) who examined the impact of community policing initiatives. Despite there being a large number of existing studies on police reform, there is a distinct lack of research which examines macro levels of reform, such as those recently experienced in Scotland. Therefore, this project, which was conducted parallel to the implementation of police reform in Scotland, is able to provide a unique and valuable snapshot of how reform was experienced on the frontline at the very time it was being implemented. Local policing strategies were chosen for this study as it is believed that this is the approach which bests suits an examination of daily interactions between the public and local police personnel. By employing a qualitative methodology using semi structured interviews and non-participant observations, this project is able to show both the individual and group construction of the meanings associated with post reform policing practices in each of the case study areas. The researcher does not attempt to make any broad generalisations regarding post reform local policing across Scotland from the findings, however, similar themes highlighted in the findings as being experienced by both case study area provides a framework for conducting further research. In terms of the thesis’ overall contribution to academic literature, the key findings reported here highlight that there is a requirement for a specific police organisational change theory to be developed which can fill the gaps in current change literature and assist in framing future police reform. This police change theory should include a directive that recognises the importance of the role of frontline staff in the translation of changes at an operational level and support the inclusion of members of the frontline in the planning and implementation of future police reforms.

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 thesis critiques the constructions of girls and young women who are in, or are considered ‘at risk’ of, secure care or custody by exploring the ways in which they are explained and understood by the practitioners who work closely with them. The research was shaped by feminist concerns and aims, and involved in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 50 practitioners working with young women in a range of settings related to criminal justice in Scotland: prison, secure care, social work, and third-sector community services. A key concern of the thesis was to contribute to the growing body of knowledge and understanding about these ‘at risk’ young women. The work that exists in the Scottish, and wider UK, sector offers rich insights into different aspects of the experiences of this marginalised population, but very little of this is focused upon the role of the practitioner, or on practice that is conducted with this group of young women. In adding to this under-researched area, the thesis makes several contributions. Firstly, it supports the work of other feminist scholars through adding to the limited body of UK-specific knowledge regarding young women’s pathways into criminal justice contact. Secondly, it contributes to feminist concerns regarding the different and changing modes of social control to which young women are subjected, finding that practitioner contribution of knowledge to such discourses can serve to exacerbate the responsibility that is placed upon them in working with these young women. Thirdly, the thesis details the aspects of working practice that practitioners viewed as key to their work, and by doing so, gives context to understanding why so many practitioners describe finding young women a ‘difficult’ group with whom to work. Lastly the thesis contributes by its exploration of the personal experiences of practitioners in conducting their work, and the working environment and conditions surrounding these, which are framed in the thesis as gendered emotional labour. The thesis makes the argument that practitioners often experience difficulties not only because they are faced with hearing about or experiencing distressing stories, but because of the precarious situations that many work within, and because of the ways in which gendered risk and gendered vulnerability act as tools of governance, leaving them anxious and uncertain about their own ‘risky decisions’ in these insecure work environments.

Some governments tackle poverty and inequality by creating well-functioning, rules-based distributive programmes. Others redistribute selectively, showering their loyal supporters with goods, services, and money while denying these things to other citizens, even when those other citizens are very poor. What explains this contrast? Why do some governments prefer politically neutral rules-based forms of redistribution while others prefer highly selective clientelistic redistributive arrangements? This dissertation answers the question by developing a new line of theory. I also test that theory against evidence from a number of Latin American countries, most notably Brazil. Although rules-based social policies are a cornerstone of the modern welfare state, we know surprisingly little about the politics behind these policies. In this dissertation I show how, in much of Latin America, the development of rules-based programmes can be traced to the electoral incentives of politicians, and of presidents in particular. Forging clientelistic deals with favoured constituents may be a winning strategy for legislators and local officials, but presidents cannot play that game as well and so tend to prefer less particularistic forms of redistribution. Over the past few decades, rules-based social programmes have emerged for the first time in much of Latin America. However, the reason why these countries have been embracing programmatic redistribution now is not yet clear. Some studies have stressed that the spread of electoral democracy has created incentives for politicians to shift distribution away from powerful groups and towards the poor. For these scholars the emergence of rules-based programmes is a reflection of weakening clientelistic linkages between politicians and voters. Others have argued that, as societies get wealthier, voters have the means to rebel against clientelistic schemes and vote for politicians that favour programmatic distribution. Others still make the point that the rise of left-wing parties is what is driving these transformations. Leftist parties organise and mobilise the poor, who in turn pressure for effective, rules-based distribution. In contrast with these explanations, my analysis attributes the new emphasis on rules to the shifting balance between the powers of legislators and those of presidents in much of Latin America. My argument is that clientelism remains a useful electoral strategy mainly for legislators and in local politics, where the support of well-organised networks of clients can make a difference between winning and losing public office. Presidents, on the other hand, have much larger and more heterogeneous constituencies, which makes investing in small networks of clients prohibitively expensive for them. Furthermore, presidents strive to be seen as strong leaders that are capable of designing effective policies that will be considered fair by the majority of citizens. In the case of presidents, creating rules-based social programmes is the most efficient way to redistribute income in a way that is compatible with their political priorities. I test this theory using a unique dataset of social spending in each of Brazil's 5,570 municipalities. Employing different identification strategies, I find broad support for the argument that legislators and presidents prefer very different kinds of social policies. These differences are systematic and do not depend on a legislator's or on the incumbent president's party affiliation. Even legislators who hail from 'pro-poor' parties on the left of the political spectrum seem to prefer clientelistic forms of redistribution, despite the fact that clientelistic practices can be quite regressive. At the same time, presidents almost always prefer programmatic distributive policies, which are famously progressive, even when they hail from parties on right of the ideological spectrum. These results - the product of numerous interviews and extensive fieldwork conducted in four states over the course of two electoral cycles - help explain why Brazil and other young democracies in Latin America have seen conditional cash transfer programmes and other rules-based income distribution schemes proliferate in the recent decades. As my analysis reveals, these schemes were largely driven by presidents. As presidents gained control over the design and the funding of social policies, they used these powers to create the kinds of programmes that furthered their own electoral interests. That said, inefficient spending on clientelistic arrangements remains a problem in Brazil, as it does in much of the region. This, too, can be explained by my theory: clientelism's staying power reflects the fact that, despite recent reforms, legislators remain powerful. Exploiting that power, legislators have continued to do what they always do, rewarding clients and punishing dissenters, as illustrated by my analysis of the case of Argentina. Latin American presidents may now be gaining the upper hand, but until the power balance shifts decisively in their favour, we are unlikely to see rules-based distribution completely replacing traditional clientelistic arrangements in Latin American or, for that matter, anywhere else.

Background and importance: Rising drug prices are putting pressure on health care budgets. Policymakers are assessing how they can save money through generic drugs. Objective: The aim of this Ph.D. was to explore issues relating to the prices and usage of generic medicines in high- and middle-income countries in five articles. This was done using quantitative and qualitative methods, including price and Herfindahl-Hirschman indexes, difference-in-differences regression analyses, semi-structured stakeholder interviews, and literature reviews. As a Ph.D. "thesis by papers", each of the five articles should be read as a stand-alone piece. However, the thesis presents an overarching narrative, outlined at the end of Chapter 1. Novelty and empirical contribution: My original contributions to knowledge are: (i) updated analyses of generic drug policies, prices, and usage rates in high-income countries, based on a large, representative sample of generic medicines from 2013 (Chapters 2 and 3); (ii) evidence on the impact of a pharmaceutical tendering system on medicines prices, demand, and competition over a 15-year period (Chapter 4); (iii) quantitative data on the impact of therapeutic tendering on drug spending and prices (Chapter 5); and (iv) qualitative data on how a country can move from a fragmented health-care system to a single-payer one, using tendering as the basis for a comprehensive drug-benefit plan (Chapter 6). Key findings: The prices and market shares of generics varied widely across Europe. For example, prices charged by manufacturers in Switzerland were, on average, more than 2.5 times those in Germany and more than 6 times those in the United Kingdom, based on the results of a commonly used price index. However, the results varied depending on the choice of index, base country, unit of volume, method of currency conversion, and therapeutic category. The results also differed depending on whether one looked at the prices charged by manufacturers or those charged by pharmacists. The proportion of prescriptions filled with generics ranged from 17% in Switzerland to 83% in the United Kingdom. The results of the first two studies indicated that the countries which used tender or tender-like systems to set generic drug prices in retail pharmacies (ie, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden) had among the lowest prices among the countries included in the studies. Tendering can be an effective policy to procure essential medicines at low prices, based on analysis of data from South Africa and Cyprus. For instance, the average prices of antiretroviral therapies, anti-infective medicines, small-volume parenterals, drops and inhalers, solid-dose medicines, and family-planning agents dropped by roughly 40% or more between 2003 and 2016 in South Africa. Many tender contracts in South Africa remained competitive over time, based on the Herfindahl-Hirschman results, with some notable exceptions. However, the number of different firms winning contracts decreased over time in most tender categories. Also, there were large discrepancies between the drug quantities the health ministry estimated it would need to meet patient demand and the quantities the ministry went on to procure during tender periods. In South Africa, the introduction of therapeutic tendering was associated with an estimated 33% to 44% reduction in the prices of solid-dose drugs in 2014. National governments in countries aiming to introduce national health systems (eg, Cyprus and South Africa) will need to adapt their tendering systems and other pharmaceutical policies during transition periods. Future research directions: More research is needed to better understand the drivers of differences in generic drug prices between countries. It is also important to examine why there are large differences in the prices of drugs in various therapeutic areas, both within and between countries. Also, data from more countries, especially low- and middle-income ones, are needed to determine which features of tendering systems are associated with lower prices. Future studies should re-examine the South African therapeutic tendering system once data from more post-intervention periods are available, possibly using other research designs like interrupted time-series models (ie, segmented regression analysis). Policy implications: Price indexes are useful statistical approaches for comparing drug prices across countries, but policymakers should interpret price indexes with caution given their limitations. This thesis offers useful data for policymakers using, or planning to introduce, tendering systems, especially in countries aiming for universal health coverage, like Cyprus (Chapter 6) and South Africa (Chapters 4 and 5).