This research brings to light the Polish context of a post-socialist, post-transformation society of peasant roots and high religiosity which greatly contributes to the comparative criminological scholarship. The purpose of this doctoral research is to explore how a small number of Polish people understand punishment and justice, and how their narratives inform the viability of restorative approaches to justice. In so doing, this research recognises the value of lay opinion in the discussion of punishment and justice, and approaches punishment and justice as social activities, which echoes the argument that stories about crime and punishment are entangled with people’s daily routines, and as a result are lodged in their cultural imagination (see Garland & Sparks, 2000). The socialist past, hasty transition from socialism to democracy and from a centrally-planned to free market economy has influenced participants’ perceptions of the justice administration and the institutions involved in these processes. Lay Polish people shall be seen as Homo post-Sovieticus, whose perceptions of punishment and justice need to be analysed along with the legacy of the previous socialist system as well as post-1989 changes. Participants’ perceptions of the Polish criminal justice system, the Polish police and unpaid work assist to understand a number of factors that might influence the development of restorative justice in the Polish context. The findings of this study also encourage broadening the scope of the restorative justice discussion and examining its preconditions against wider sociological and criminological discourses on punishment and justice. Although the relationship might be defined as ‘uneasy’, restorative justice, since its conception, is interwoven with the two. One of restorative justice’s central hopes was to establish an alternative system of crime resolution that would eliminate the infliction of pain. However, the trajectory of restorative practices and demonstrates that the functioning of a majority of them is dependent on the criminal justice agencies and that there is a need to address better the notion of punishment in restorative encounters.

The thesis looks at three conflicts related to the 2014 World Cup preparation in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In each of the cases, affected groups – informal workers, informal residents and middle-class citizens – engage with the state to claim rights over space. It examines how the entanglements between social class and legal/institutional developments engendered through “peripheral urbanisation” shape the capacities of those groups to affect formal/informal boundaries and have their demands legitimated. This research draws on the findings from a fieldwork in Belo Horizonte, which lasted eight months in total between 2014 and 2016 and involved archival research, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with relevant actors. Three cases are considered, which include: the Mineirão stadium redevelopment that displaced a group of informal workers while creating a conflict in a middle-class neighbourhood; the demolition of an informal settlement to make way for a transport infrastructure project; the construction of a hotel in a middle-class area against the will of local residents. The thesis presents three key findings. Firstly, the urban space production is affected by citizens’ capacity to engage with the state. While the state-society boundaries are blurry, citizens are unevenly empowered to have their demands validated and avoid displacement, i.e. the loss of place. Secondly, while informal residents have their rights partially recognised thanks to the “insurgent citizenship” struggles of the past, informal workers are not entitled to compensation because of the disassociation of work informality debates from spatial considerations. Finally, middle-class politics matter, as middle-class residents are better equipped to validate their claims and protect their place in the city. The research contributes to recent postcolonial debates on urban space production and informality. I show that both informal working and housing practices are interconnected through the place-making strategies of the urban poor as well as of the urban middle-class, all of which generate important implications for the reproduction of socio-spatial segregation and thinking of the Brazilian urban future.

This thesis examines the lives of a group of young middle-class Egyptian men who experience a mismatch between their aspirations and their chances of realising them. It analyses the historical emergence of an under-recognised ‘falling’ middle-class in contemporary Egypt, by comparing their relative fall with another middle-class population which has experienced a dramatic rise in wealth and status in the aftermath of neoliberal economic change. I contribute to literature examining the rise of the middle-classes across the Global South in recent years. First, I reveal the importance of historically-owned rural land, cultural privilege, the legal and political remnants of state socialism, and international migration in the socio-economic rise of an Egyptian middle-class. Second, I move away from a predominant focus on consumption, and instead highlight how educational markers, and ‘character’ differences enable the exercise of a new form of ‘open-minded’ middle-class distinction. But finally, I challenge existing literature by uncovering the emergence of an alternative, less-celebratory middle-class in the late-20th and early-21st century, one which has experienced relative decline as the public sector jobs, education, and subsidies they relied on to forge their middle-class lives have been stripped away. The rest of the thesis uses eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork stretched over two years to delve into the lives of a group of young men in this falling middle-class category as they attempt to make the transition from education to ‘aspired to’ employment. It first establishes the existence of a rupture in the Bourdieu-like congruence between their aspirations for a globalised middle-class life, and their ability to reach it. The three main empirical chapters analyse the consequences of this ‘mismatch.’ By applying affect theory to the study of class immobility, I recast existing understandings of how people navigate conditions of ‘waithood,’ in particular through reintroducing a focus on stability and power. I argue that these young men survive their classed and aged immobility through forming a ‘cruel attachment’ to a discursive and material terrain of Egyptianised meritocracy that affects them with hope for the future. This terrain was continuously extended by certain labour market industries and institutions, such as training centres, recruitment agencies, and an entrepreneurship ‘scene,’ that constituted part of Cairo’s ‘hopeful city.’ The thesis therefore demonstrates how Egypt’s capitalistauthoritarian regime also survives, securing the compliance of young middle-class men, despite denying them access to respectable middle-class living, by continually regurgitating a hopeful promise of future fulfilment.

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) relies on evidence-based medicine to inform drug coverage recommendations about the most efficient use of resources. Despite appraising the same evidence based on similar methodological approaches, HTA recommendations for the same drug differ across countries. This thesis aimed to understand the reasons for these differences, and based on cross-national comparisons, whether they are a consequence of methodological challenges in HTA. A mixed methods research design was used to develop a methodological framework that allows to breakdown these complex processes in a comparable and understandable manner, by considering: (a) the evidence appraised, (b) its interpretation, and (c) how this influenced the final decision. Ten orphan drug-indication pairs appraised in four countries (England, Scotland, Sweden and France (N=35)) were systematically analysed and compared on this basis. Results present the criteria accounted for at each stage of the process in the decisions, the reasons for differences across countries, and how HTA bodies are dealing with issues relating to orphan drugs. Quantitative analysis of these provided information about agency-specific risk and value preferences, and measured agreement in interpreting the same evidence. There was heterogeneity within and across countries in the criteria accounted for and reasons for cross-country differences. Interviews to competent authorities provided insights about these differences and implications for HTA. Although agreement was seen in the evidentiary requirements or preferences, there were subtle differences in the circumstances where uncertain evidence may be considered acceptable, partly explaining diverging HTA recommendations. The three main contributions of this thesis are: (1) the development of a methodological framework to understand what criteria feed into HTAs, which can be applied to other drugs and countries; (2) through its application, the identification of a full taxonomy of criteria considered in decisionmaking; and (3) the ability to understand the differences in HTA recommendations across countries. A better understanding of HTA in different settings may help advance these processes, and, ultimately, improve access to treatments.

The thesis explores the interrelationship between career guidance, mental health, and well-being: an area neglected by the career guidance community in the UK. This topic is explored against a background of growing interest in the connections between work, worklessness and health. As a result of the global economic downturn the need to identify effective interventions to ameliorate the effects of unemployment is now pressing. Multiple theoretical perspectives were applied to generate possible causal mechanisms by which career guidance interventions might impact on mental health. The empirical literature was explored for evidence linking career guidance to well-being. It emerges there is a shortage of evidence that directly addresses the issue, but a plethora of evidence is available if the search is widened to include the relations between well-being and work (or substitute activities such as education or volunteering), variables related to well-being, and also to include other vocational interventions, such as training and rehabilitation. New data were generated using a mixed-method approach, underpinned by a critical realist philosophy. The sample population was unemployed adults recovering from mental health conditions, the service users of a specialist employment support agency in Scotland. This group throws the themes of the thesis into sharp focus, as they are on the cusp between work and worklessness, health and illness. Quantitative evidence from pre, post and follow up measures suggested that participants' well-being improved in the period during which they were engaged with the service. Levels of anxiety and depression followed the same pattern of improvement. Causality cannot be determined as there was no control group and attrition was high. Qualitative data from research interviews generated confirmatory evidence that well-being had improved while engaged with the service. Participants clearly attributed causality to the guidance service. Partial deterioration when interventions were completed was also evident. Three key themes emerge from the analysis: 1. Career guidance may have a direct impact on well-being via mechanisms analogous to therapeutic counselling. 2. Career guidance may impact indirectly on well-being by promoting engagement in work or learning. 3. If these effects can scale up to a population level, then the potential exists for career guidance to be a social intervention with public health implications.

Background: The available research on economic migration suggested that immigrants may be less happy than the indigenous populations. It was found that relatively stable dispositional factors such as optimism, and cognitive-behavioural factors such as income did not play an important role. Although useful, these studies did not examine a comprehensive range of predictors and most were not theoretically based. Furthermore all were based on quantitative designs and thus were unable to explain the relationship between these factors and well-being. Indeed, no qualitative studies have been conducted in the area of research. Aims: The aims of this study were to identify the level and determinants of well-being among Polish economic migrants living in Scotland, using a comprehensive range of predictors; to establish the extent to which the findings are supported by theory - the Sustainable Happiness Model (SHM) - and to provide greater insight into how factors have affected immigrants' well-being. Research Design & Methods: A sequential mixed-methods design was used in which the qualitative phase explains quantitative results in more detail. in the first phase, 188 participants selected by a combination of snowball sampling and advertising, completed questionnaires which were analysed by means of univariate and multivariate statistics. The second phase included semi-structured interviews with a subsample of 17 participants. The interviewees were selected using purposive sampling in the form of extreme case sampling, on the basis of the high/low scores on the predictors identified in the quantitative analysis. Transcripts of interviews were analysed by a thematic analysis. Results: Participants reported high levels of well-being. An earlier age at migration, good health and a proficient level of English predicted high well-being levels. The greater use of emotion-focussed coping, problem-focussed coping, higher social support, religiousness and tendency to make downward social comparisons, all predicted higher well-being levels. Emotion-focussed coping was the strongest predictor of all examined factors. Cognitive-behavioural and circumstantial factors accounted for more variance in well-being than personality, which contradicts the SHM that personality accounts for most variance in well-being. The qualitative study suggested that immigrants' adjustment process to a new country, their cultural values and the socio-economic background in their home country may explain such findings. Conclusions: The present findings contribute to the literature on economic migrants' mental health, in demonstrating that despite facing adaptation challenges and acculturative stress, migrants are capable of being happy. The findings demonstrate that emotion-focussed coping can be more adaptive than problem-focussed coping for immigrants who face difficult to change, adverse circumstances. The findings in relation to age at migration, perceived health status and language proficiency making a direct contribution to well-being, build on the previous research, which concluded that circumstantial factors have a minor impact on immigrants' well-being. The findings indicate the SHM, that was based on studies conducted on general populations from Western, rich, individualistic countries, may not be applicable to migrant populations from non-Western, collectivist cultures. A new well-being model is proposed which posits that well-being is explained mostly by cognitive-behavioural factors and circumstances. The study encourages future research to test the revised model across diverse populations. The study encourages future research to test the revised model across diverse populations. The study recommends the use of self-help cognitive-behavioural techniques to help maintain high well-being levels among immigrations.

Although previous research has widely acknowledged the phenomenon of film-induced tourism, there is a paucity of research in relation to management of film-induced tourism at built heritage sites. This research, underpinned by a constructivist paradigm, draws on three distinct fields of study – heritage tourism management, film-induced tourism and heritage interpretation – in order to provide a contribution to the heritage management field and address this particular gap in knowledge. Relying on the method of semi-structured interviews with managers, guides and visitors at Rosslyn Chapel (RC) and Alnwick Castle (AC), this thesis provides a rich understanding of how heritage interpretation can address a range of management challenges at heritage sites where film-induced tourism has occurred. These heritage visitor attractions (HVAs) were specifically selected as case studies as they have played different roles in media products. Rosslyn Chapel (RC) was an actual place named in The Da Vinci Code (TDVC) book and then film, whereas Alnwick Castle (AC) served as a backdrop for the first two Harry Potter (HP) films. Findings of this research include a range of management challenges at both RC and AC such as an increase in visitor numbers; seasonality issues; changes in visitor profile; revenue generation concerns; conservation, access, and visitor experience; and the complex relationship between heritage management and tourism activities. The findings also reveal film-induced tourism's implications for heritage interpretation such as the various visitors' expectations for heritage interpretation, changes to heritage interpretation as a result of film-induced tourism, and issues with commodification. These findings also demonstrate that film-induced tourism to some extent influenced visitors' preferences for heritage interpretation, though visitors' preferences differed from one to another. This thesis argues that, in the context of film-induced tourism at HVAs, as evident from the two case studies considered, heritage interpretation can be a valuable management tool and can also play a significant role in the quality of the visitors' experience.

This thesis provides an ‘insider account' of the process of making contemporary ‘observational' documentaries from within the broadcasting industry. Raploch Stories (2002) and Raploch Stories Revisited (2007) are seven television documentary programmes written, produced and directed by me for BBC Scotland. This critical appraisal examines the pathway from the formulation of the creative idea, through project research and development, filming, post-production, delivery and transmission, in order to assess and demonstrate the originality of these published works. This is supported by a reflexive commentary which examines the influence of the wider ‘community of practice' on my development as a film-maker. The study identifies ways in which these films demonstrate innovation and progress in technology and production methods, and examines the development of new hybrid forms of programming in the television documentary genre. These new developments are placed in the context of the history of the documentary film, and the on-going academic debate about the definition of the genre and the question of whether it is possible to achieve an authentic record of real life. By comparing Raploch Stories with other examples of social documentary film-making, such as Housing Problems (1935), Lilybank (1977), Wester Hailes – the Huts (1985) and The Scheme (2010), the thesis analyses how films in this sub-genre have evolved and assesses the ways in which there has been continuity in content and in the approach to filming. Finally, the thesis seeks to establish the significance of the published works and to demonstrate how these programmes contribute to the development of documentary television production in Scotland, and to the representation of Scottish working-class communities by the media. Through the reflexive examination of creativity, practice, production, textual interpretation, cultural impact, institutional history, and policy and regulation, the thesis provides a critical perspective on these overlapping areas of knowledge.

This thesis has two purposes. The first is to investigate the motivation for household migration - in particular, the associations between the different reasons for moving and the characteristics of owner-occupier movers in Scotland, their houses and the distances they travel. The second is to investigate the extent to which the migration decision is a longitudinal one, and from this longitudinal analysis to highlight the extent of latent migration. Little longitudinal research has previously been carried out on the migration decision. The thesis uses two recent, large-scale and under-utilised data sources to investigate each of these issues. Firstly, the associations with motivations for migration are investigated using the 'Migration and Housing Choice Survey' (MHCS) which contains information from 10,010 households. The advantage of this cross-sectional source lies in its provision of detailed information on motivations at a national level of coverage. The large-scale, national coverage makes it possible to investigate many types of migration flow. This advantage is not shared by any other British research into motivations for migration and only three other data sets elsewhere. Secondly, the extent to which the decision to n-iigrate is part of an on-going process is investigated using the 'British Household Panel Survey' (BBPS). This new and under-exploited source of migration data contains longitudinal information from 10,264 individuals in the first wave and holds approximately this sample size through each of the following four waves. This thesis makes four key contributions to knowledge. The first three are based on the detailed and systematic analysis of the reasons for residential migration behaviour of owner-occupiersin Scotland,u sing the MHCS. Firstly, the reasonsf or moving, as suggestedb y previously small-scaler esearch,h ave been confirmed by this large-scale data set. Secondly, this thesis has extended - and in some cases refuted - the findings of previous researchb y investigatingt he bivariate associationsb etween each of the reasons for moving and each possible explanatory variables (these being characteristicso f migrants, of their home and of the distancest hey move). This has been investigated using much wider selection of reasons for moving and of characteristicsth an hasb eenp reviouslyd one. Thirdly, this thesish as shown that lifecycle stage exerts a considerable amount of influence on the reasons given for moving, whilst still operating in conjunction with other variables, such as distance moved and housing features. The MIHCS can, for the first time, enable research into the connection between the factors influencing migration flows and the factors influencing motivations for migration. Fourthly, this thesis has investigated how migration decisions and preference for migration relate over time, using longitudinal data (the BHPS). This has shown that a considerable amount of latent mobility is present in Britain, and even more importantly, has identified the characteristics of the latent migrants and frequent movers. In addition, this thesis has offered some methodological pointers for future migration research. Overall, the use of these two important but under-utilised data sets, the MECS and the BBPS, have enabled analyses to be undertaken that are unique in the history of nýgration research. V

The research examined the experiences of professional workers engaged in the monitoring and evaluation of Scottish social inclusion projects, in order to address the research question "To what extent do the existing systems of monitoring and evaluation in Scottish social inclusion initiatives recognise the particular nature of social inclusion?" In-depth interviews were undertaken with 34 key players involved in the policy and practice of evaluation social inclusion projects. Interviewees included individuals involved in social inclusion projects at both project and programme level, funders and evaluators of social inclusion projects, and policy makers. The interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The research concluded that the respondents were very positive about social inclusion, with the key disadvantage of the term identified as its lack of meaning for the client groups with whom projects were working. Encouraging participation and empowering individuals and communities were seen as the key outcomes of social inclusion projects, with outcomes relating to poverty and tackling exclusion mentioned only by a small number of respondents. Respondents found indicators such as resident satisfaction, fear of crime and confidence useful. Relationships were noted to be an important area that projects had an impact on, but none of the projects involved were actively measuring their impact in this area. Qualitative methods were noted by respondents to be useful in recognising individual experience, and have a key role to play in establishing the additionality of projects, but respondents perceived a lack of credibility of qualitative research amongst funding agencies and policy makers. Respondents raised concerns regarding the views of individuals who did not, for whatever reason, participate in research, but noted the expense of methods that specifically targeted non-participants, and, on the other hand the dangers of survey fatigue. The conclusions of the thesis were that although social inclusion is a well received term and both the policy makers and practitioners are working toward the same agenda, there are a number of areas where there is a need for further development in order to make the monitoring and evaluation of initiatives meaningful. The conclusions note that the current systems meet the needs of neither funding agencies nor projects well.