This thesis explores the relationships between punk and anarchism in the contemporary contexts of the UK, Poland, and Indonesia from an insider punk and anarchist perspective. New primary ethnographic information forms the bulk of the research, drawing on Grounded Theory Method and an engagement with Orientalism. The theoretical framework is informed by the concept of antinomy which embraces complication and contradiction and rather than attempt to smooth-out complexities, impose a simplified narrative, or construct a fanciful dialectic, the thesis examines the numerous tensions that emerge in order to critique the relationships between punk and anarchism. A key tension which runs throughout the PhD is the dismissal of punk by some anarchists. This is often couched in terms of lifestylist versus workerist anarchism, with punk being denigrated in association with the former. The case studies bring out this tension, but also significantly complicate it, and the final chapter analyses this issue in more detail to argue that punk engages with a wide spectrum of anarchisms, and that the lifestylist / workerist dichotomy is anyway false. The case studies themselves focus on themes such as anti-fascism, food sovereignty/animal rights activism, politicisation, feminism, squatting, religion, and repression. New empirical information, garnered through numerous interviews and extensive participant observation in the UK, Poland, and Indonesia, informs the thick description of the case study contexts. The theory and analysis emerge from this data, and the voice of the punks themselves is given primacy here.

This project aimed to explore the lives of people with epilepsy living in the UK and Kurdistan, Northern Iraq, using qualitative and quantitative methods with a particular focus on stigma and quality of life. This study further explored others’ perceptions concerning those with epilepsy, particularly in regards to knowledge and stigma about epilepsy. Participants were all over the age of 18. The UK sample was recruited from personal contacts and Epilepsy Action conferences. The Kurdistan participants were recruited from Neurology clinics and personal contacts. Data collection consisted of snowball and convenience sampling. The first study was a qualitative investigation looking at people with epilepsy, 10 participants from the UK and 10 participants from Kurdistan were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. The interview schedule was exploratory and non-intrusive. The transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis. From the analysis five main themes were uncovered; they were (1) The Experience of Seizures; (2) Impact of Living with Epilepsy; (3) Adjustment; (4) Coping and; (5) Stigma, each with two sub-themes. The second study was a quantitative study of people with epilepsy which looked at knowledge of epilepsy, seizure severity, perceived illness seriousness, perceived stigma, depression and quality of life. The total number of participants that took part in the second study was 84 participants in the UK group and 88 in the Kurdistan group. Using Hierarchical Multiple Regression, the results showed that depression and stigma, mediated by depression, are main predictors of quality of life amongst people with epilepsy. The third study investigated people without epilepsy which looked at knowledge of epilepsy and stigma regarding people with the condition. There were 116 participants in the UK group and 200 from the Kurdistan group. Using ANCOVA, Multivariate General Linear Model and Linear Regression, the results showed that the UK participants had significantly better knowledge of epilepsy compared to the Kurdistan group; however, although stigma was higher among the Kurdish group, a significant result was not observed.

This thesis seeks to analyse the policy making and policy implementation processes of elite sport in China and the UK, covering the period 1992-2012. Three sports are selected for detailed cases studies: artistic gymnastics, swimming and cycling. They represent a wide range of sports in two countries, based on their varying competiveness, weights and traditions. Key areas including organisational structure, financial support, talent identification and athlete development, coaching, training, competition opportunities, scientific research and others (including international influence and other sport- and country-specific areas) are identified to organise the discussion. The aim is not only to present key characteristics of the development of each sport in China and the UK respectively and to introduce the successful experience and problems but also to form a basis for the discussion of policy making, policy implementation and policy changes.

After being expelled from Bhutan in the 1980s and 1990s, more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees were forced to reside in refugee camps in Nepal. Twenty years later, in 2006, a global resettlement programme was initiated to relocate them in eight different nations: the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, and the UK. Since 2010, about 350 Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in Greater Manchester through the Gateway Protection Programme. This thesis is based on 14 months of ethnographic research with members of this community. This thesis analyses the complex relationship between forced migrants, social networks, and ruling, organisational entities, which facilitate refugee resettlement. This qualitative study looks at the structure, role and everyday utility of social networks amongst a small refugee community, and emphasizes that the creation of similarity and difference is an inherent part of community development. The research calls into question the assumptions of UK policy makers, service providers and academics alike, which hold that refugees are removed from their ‘original’ cultures through forced displacement, and thereafter strive to return to a state of ‘normalcy’ or ‘originality’, re-creating and re-inventing singular ‘traditions’, identities and communities. In response to these assumptions, policy makers and service providers in refugee camps and in the UK adopt a Community Development Approach (CDA). However, I argue that there is no fixed and bounded community amongst Bhutanese refugees, but that they actively reshape and adapt their interpretations, meanings and actions through their experiences of forced migration, and thus create novel communities out of old and new social networks. In the process, I juxtapose my informants’ emic understandings of community as samaj, with bureaucratized refugee community organisations (RCOs). This research shows that rather than a creating singular, formalized RCO to serve the ‘good of all’, the Bhutanese refugee community in Manchester is rife with divisions based on personal animosities and events stretching back to the refugee camps in Nepal. I conclude that RCOs may not be equipped to effectively deal with the divisive issues that arise due to refugee resettlement. The thesis is situated at the centre of anthropological investigations of forced migration, community, and policy, and uses interdisciplinary sources (such as policy documents, historical accounts) to highlight the complexities of forced migration and refugee resettlement. This critical research is also a response to the call to make qualitative, ethnographic research more relevant for policy makers and service provision, which is all the more important in this ‘century of the refugee’.

The aim of the research reported in this thesis is to investigate and understand the strategic management of airports. More specifically, the research focuses on regional airports in the UK; it charts the ways in which their strategic management capacities have changed in recent decades with regard to external pressures associated with increasing commercialisation and government policy on the ownership and control of airports. The significance of those external pressures is discussed, especially in the light of privatisation. Within this context, key concepts of strategic management are presented and the application of the cultural web model is discussed, in order to explore the links between strategic management, organisational behaviour and the external operating environment of regional airports. Using a case study approach and qualitative research methods, two regional airports have been selected for an in-depth comparative investigation: Inverness (which remains in public ownership) and East Midlands (which is in private ownership). The conclusions which emerge from the case study evidence suggests that there are significant differences in the strategic management capacities of regional airports in the UK, and these differences reflect their ownership and control. Although there is much evidence that differences between public and private airports are reducing - mainly due to the heightened commercial awareness of the former - it is clear that, unlike publicly owned airports, the transfer of ownership from public to private does indicate a transformation in organisational culture. Unlike their publicly owned counterparts, strategic objectives are clear and well established; minimising costs is a well focused strategic priority; and the pursuit of efficiency is a key strategic driver of change. The thesis concludes with sorne critical. reflections on the research undertaken and suggests areas for future investigation.

This study examines to what extent preposition stranding is used in connection with which, whom and who in three different UK papers. Also what factors influence the use of preposition stranding has been studied. The hypothesis that pied-piping is more common than preposition stranding has been confirmed. A factor that has a certain influence on the use of preposition stranding is the style of the paper. The more formal of the papers studied, The Times, did not use preposition stranding to the same extent as the other two, The Sun and Today. The subject domain of the texts has influence on the use of preposition stranding, with more informal domains such as sports and miscellaneous (e.g. gossip) using stranding to a higher extent than the other domains, e.g. business, politics and culture. The prepositions themselves also influence the use of preposition stranding with some prepositions, such as on, with, for and into, that are likely to appear stranded and others, such as in that are likely to appear pied-piped.

The thesis explores the interaction of the economic phenomenon of 'economic crisis' with the legal phenomenon of Collective Labour Law (CLL). This interaction is the thesis' main problematique. Rather than undertaking an all-encompassing investigation, it seeks to modestly contribute some new theoretical and comparative perspectives on the problematique. These perspectives are of potential value both to the highly underdeveloped area of the theorisation on economic crises and CLL and to the comparative labour law literature. On the theoretical side, the thesis puts forward a novel Marxist-critical theoretical framework for understanding the crisis' operation of CLL. Building successively on the Marxist-critical insights of a fundamental contradiction between the (capitalism) reproductive and (worker) protective function of CLL, the crisis theories' common assertion of economic rationalisation as the primary crisis response and a joint reading of Gramscian counterhegemony and Habermas' theory of legitimation crisis, a theoretical framework is constructed around a proposed concept: crisis (dis)equilibrium. These (dis)equilibria, which arguably determine the course of CLL's crisis developments are composed of two fundamental opposing forces: the force of economic rationalisation, pushing for reforms dictated by the need for intense capitalist restructuring and the opposing counter-legitimation force, which reflects the level of socio-political threat of withdrawal of support to the prevailing economic system or at least to the reforms dictated by economic rationalisation. The comparative side that serves also as a testing empirical ground for the theoretical framework, consists of an extensive interrogation of the recent crisis CLL trajectories in Greece and the UK. For Greece, the analysis observes and accounts for a dramatic collapse of the pre-crisis protective CLL edifice as a result of multiple and abrupt far-reaching CLL reforms bringing about the neo-liberal crisis movement. Subsequently, the thesis offers a response to why the protective constitutionalisation of CLL rights in Greece failed to prevent the de-construction by designating a de-constitutionalisation triangle of normative spheres. The triangle maps and explains how the neoliberal-oriented EU-IMF bailout conditionality prevailed over domestic-constitutional and transnational labour rights normative spheres through identifying a series of 'strong' and 'weak' legal and non-legal interactions. For the UK, the analysis dismisses a suggestion of a complete stasis during the crisis. Instead, it ascertains and accounts for a further -more gradual- neo-liberal consolidating crisis movement of UK's pre-crisis neo-liberal CLL paradigm. Hence the British crisis movement is described as neo-liberal continuity by consolidation. Very importantly, the thesis observes a significant crisis de-constitutionalisation process of CLL in the UK, which takes the shape of a constitutional attack on the political voice of unions by regulatory reforms. Eventually, the thesis finds a comparative crisis pattern of a 'Great Neo-liberal Convergence' between the two previously diametrically opposite CLL systems, since they moved closer and toward the neo-liberal end during the crisis. The 'neo-liberal convergence' finding is situated as a supportive case for the convergence theorists within the convergence/non-convergence debate over whether the European CLL systems are to converge. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates the explanatory value of the Crisis Equilibrium theoretical framework for understanding the crisis trajectories in both countries and suggests that crisis developments confirm the heteronomy of CLL to the theoreticallyidentified dialectic between the capitalist force of economic rationalisation and the social force of counter-legitimation.

This thesis addresses various food safety issues and investigates them from an economic perspective within four different, but related, studies. The studies are intended to provide policy-makers and other decision-makers in the industry with valuable information that will help them to implement better mitigation strategies and policies. The studies also present some applications of advancements in choice modelling, and thus contribute to the literature. To address these issues, various surveys were conducted in the UK.The first study investigates different stakeholder groups’ perceptions of responsibility among the stages of the meat chain for ensuring the meat they eat does not cause them to become ill, and how this differed with food types. The means by which this is achieved is novel, as we elicit stakeholders’ relative degrees of responsibility using the Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) technique. BWS is particularly useful because it avoids the necessity of ranking a large set of items, which people have been found to struggle with. The results from this analysis reveal a consistent pattern among respondents of downplaying the extent of their own responsibility. The second study explores people’s perceptions of various food and non-food risks within a framework characterised by the level of control that respondents believe they have over the risks, and the level of worry that the risks prompt. The means by which this is done differs from past risk perception analyses in that it questions people directly regarding their relative assessments of the levels of control and worry over the risks presented. The substantive analysis of the risk perceptions has three main foci concerning the relative assessment of (i) novel vs. more familiar risks, (ii) food vs. non-food risks, (iii) differences in the risk perceptions across farmers and consumers, with a particular orientation on E. coli. The third study investigates consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for reductions in the level foodborne health risk achieved by (1) nanotechnology and (2) less controversial manners in the food system. The difference between consumers’ valuations provides an implicit value for nanotechnology. This comparison is achieved via a split sample Discrete Choice Experiment study. Valuations of the risk reductions are derived from conditional, heteroskedastic conditional, mixed, and heteroscedastic mixed logit models. General results show the existence of heterogeneity in British consumers’ preferences and variances, and that the value of nanotechnology differs for different types of consumers. The fourth study investigates consumers’ perceptions of trust in institutions to provide information about nanotechnology and its use in food production and packaging. It is shown how the use of BWS and Latent Class modelling of survey data can provide in-depth information on consumer categories useful for the design of effective public policy, which in turn would allow the development of best practice in risk communication for novel technologies. Results show heterogeneity in British consumers’ preferences. Three distinct consumer segments are identified: Class-1, who trust “government institutions and scientists” most; Class-2, who trust “non-profit organisations and environmental groups” most; and Class-3, who trust “food producers and handlers, and media” most.

In the UK, dipping sheep with pesticides for treating ectoparasites has been one of the main pesticide applications and it was compulsory between 1984 and 1991 when organophosphates (OPs) were the main ingredients of sheep dips. As a result many current elderly sheep farmers have been exposed to OPs. The acute health effects of many pesticides especially OPs are very well documented, while the effects of long-term exposure are still unclear. Difficulties in assessing past pesticide exposure have been suggested to be one of the main reasons for this uncertainty. The overall aim of this PhD was to develop long-term occupational pesticide exposure models for UK farmers, specifically for OP exposure among sheep dippers, and to apply them to the Study of Health in Agricultural Work (SHAW) in order to examine the associations between long-term pesticide exposure and neuropsychiatric ill-health. A comprehensive conceptual exposure model to assess pesticide exposure during sheep dipping was developed and included five sources of pesticide exposure; handling the concentrate, dipping sheep in the bath, handling sheep after dipping, disposal of sheep dip, and any incidental exposure. Dermal, ingestion and inhalation routes were described for each source and different modifying factors for each route were identified. A semi-quantitative exposure algorithm was developed and all sources, routes and modifying factors were assigned scores and weights by assessment of the literature and expert judgement. The new model was evaluated by comparing its estimates of diazinon exposure among dippers who participated in the Health and Sheep Dipping Survey (HSDS) with diazinon urinary metabolite levels in spot urines collected after the dipping session. The model estimates generally did not correlate well with metabolite levels though there was evidence of an association between total metabolites and ordinal categories of exposure intensity. The uncontrolled conditions of the HSDS and the lack of 24 hr urine collections may have contributed to these results. A probabilistic model was also developed from the conceptual model and indicated that although handling the concentrate and dipping sheep are the most important exposure sources, other sources like handling dipped sheep and disposal of sheep dip should not be neglected. This probabilistic model was applied to different scenarios: probabilistic estimates may give a more comprehensive description of exposures than deterministic estimates as they take into account all conceptual variables. Occupational pesticide exposure among UK farmers in the SHAW study was then estimated using simple surrogates and more sophisticated models. The validity of self-reported exposure history among SHAW farmers was investigated by making comparison with data collected contemporaneously by the June Census. Farmers recall was generally reliable especially for a specific type of livestock or crop rather than the number of livestock or acreage. Associations between screen-identified ill-health and pesticide exposure were only demonstrated by using more developed metrics. Exposure to pesticides but not specifically OPs in sheep farming was associated with neuropathy and Parkinsonism. Exposure to OPs in sheep dipping was associated with a decrease risk of dementia. Depression was not associated with any exposure. In conclusion, this thesis developed a comprehensive model for pesticide exposure from sheep dipping and simpler exposure models for other farming sectors. The application of these models to the SHAW study suggests that long term pesticide exposure among farmers mainly via sheep dipping may result in ill- health; however the associations between exposure and outcomes may only be revealed by the use of more sophisticated exposure models rather than simple exposure surrogates. The study also indicates that even the use of well-derived deterministic estimates might lead to exposure misclassification. This misclassification may be investigated by using probabilistic approaches.

The aim of this study was to produce a grounded theory to describe the experiences of international students living in the UK and studying in a British university, and to understand and explain their behavioural responses to those experiences. Eighteen postgraduate international students were interviewed at a university in the south-west of England and the data was analysed using classic grounded theory methodology. The theory proposes that international students’ two biggest concerns are in regard to their English language skills and their detachment from home students. Students felt that their language skills were inadequate and they perceived themselves to be disadvantaged because of having to operate in a second language. They felt ignored when they attempted to reach out to home students and as a result they turned to co-nationals and recreated their home environment. International students were surprised at the size of the challenge they faced when they took up their studies and had to work hard to bridge the gap that existed between their academic and sociocultural skills and those needed in the UK. International students provided emotional, practical and academic support to each other but the academic support they offered to each other was not always good quality. International students engaged in a process of identity change during their stay in the UK which reflected the multiple and changing nature of their identities and during which they gained the skills they needed to be academically successful.