Mass Observation has collected material about the home since it began in 1937. In this image, Alexa Neale compares material collected during the Second World War with more modern material.

An exploration of the relationship between children's rights and violence in their lives.

The collection of comparable estimates of Women with Disability (WwD) is essential for successful policy-making, and can be directly addressed to the reduction of the barriers that WwD have to face so to achieve full participation in all aspects of their lives. In order to minimize and prevent barriers for WwD, a common policy and a research framework is needed within the European countries. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to underline the issues related to availability, type, and comparability of European data about WwD, and to suggest how to overcome some of the open needs. In particular, the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) issued by the World Health Organization could be the core conceptual model for collecting data and measuring disability, acting as the basis for relevant social policies, since information at all levels on the functioning of WwD is essential for policy purposes.

BACKGROUND:
Due to the current economic crisis in Greece, effects on health and healthcare have been reported. The aim of this study was to present a systematic overview of the consequences that the financial crisis has had for health and healthcare in Greece.
METHODS:
Systematic literature review was conducted in order to identify articles that were published from January 2009 to March 2013 and explicitly referred to the effects of economic crisis on health or healthcare, in Greece. Data extraction and synthesis was performed with the use of thematic analysis.
FINDINGS:
Thirty-nine studies were considered for further analyses. Various existing and potential relevant effects were identified, including reductions in public health expenditure and changes in healthcare services and the pharmaceutical market, with an increasing number of admissions in public healthcare sector, and efficiency and organizational-related issues being evident, overall. Indications were found for post-crisis deterioration of public health with increasing rates of mental health, suicides, and epidemics, and deterioration of self-rated health.
CONCLUSION:
The recent efforts to reform the Greek National Health System have been focusing mainly on short-term effects by reducing expenditure, while the measures imposed seem to have dubious long-term consequences for Greek public health and healthcare.

Objectives:
This paper examines the context of health promotion actions that are focused on/contributing to strengthening social capital by increasing community participation, reciprocal trust and support as the means to achieve better health and more active ageing.

Method:
The methodology employed was a literature review/research synthesis, and a thematic analysis.

Results:
Four core themes emerged from the analysis: a) active ageing; b) the relationship between social capital and ageing; c) the importance of social capital in health promotion; and d) policy implications. The role of social capital in health promotion stresses empowerment, intergenerational support, the building of social trust, and the need to tackle loneliness among older adults. The importance of community/social participation emerged from the literature review as a key contributor to the maintenance and promotion of a healthier ageing population.

Conclusion:
Supporting long-term social capital building within communities can lead to improved public health and well-being for an ageing population.

This paper provides theoretical links between the model of health and disability based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and the complex notion of ‘social capital’. In practice, social capital mechanisms could contribute to better health through their use in health-promotion actions, and, in general, through their integration in inclusive policies and systems for facilitating the biopsychosocial model of disability. The present paper shows how ICF could offer an informational platform for conceptualizing and potentially measuring the causal linkages between social capital and health and disability.

Background

The current study describes the development of a preliminary set of quality indicators for public Greek National Health System (GNHS) hospitals, which were used in the “Health Monitoring Indicators System: Health Map” (Ygeionomikos Chartis) project, with the purpose that these quality indicators would assess the quality of all the aspects relevant to public hospital healthcare workforce and services provided.
Methods

A literature review was conducted in the MEDLINE database to identify articles referring to international and national hospital quality assessment projects, together with an online search for relevant projects. Studies were included if they were published in English, from 1980 to 2010. A consensus panel took place afterwards with 40 experts in the field and tele‐voting procedure.
Results

Twenty relevant projects and their 1698 indicators were selected through the literature search, and after the consensus panel process, a list of 67 indicators were selected to be implemented for the assessment of the public hospitals categorized under six distinct dimensions: Quality, Responsiveness, Efficiency, Utilization, Timeliness, and Resources and Capacity.
Conclusion

Data gathered and analyzed in this manner provided a novel evaluation and monitoring system for Greece, which can assist decision‐makers, healthcare professionals, and patients in Greece to retrieve relevant information, with the long‐term goal to improve quality in care in the GNHS hospital sector.

Bristol, the previous Government’s Prevent Programme was implemented collaboratively by public authorities and Muslim communities in the city, which manifested itself in the re-branding of Prevent as ‘Building the Bridge’. Building the Bridge emerged as a participatory mechanism for community engagement that established a new institutionalised relationship between Bristol City Council, the Police, diverse statutory agencies and Bristol’s diverse Muslim community. The multiagency forum was widely celebrated as a story of local success and a model of good practice, particularly in comparison with how Prevent had been implemented and received elsewhere. Our research examined in greater detail to what extent Building the Bridge facilitated a genuinely participatory engagement between public authorities and Bristol’s Muslim communities. We investigated the organisations’ dynamics of participation and representation, the kinds of activities initiated by Building the Bridge, and developed three models for how Building the Bridge could be taken beyond Prevent. Although its activities were chiefly concerned with the overall aim of preventing violent extremism, Building the Bridge enabled interventions that addressed some key community grievances and facilitated the engagement of young people, women and mosque communities in the city. For a short period of time, Prevent funding enabled a regulated form of community engagement, some of which has continued even after the withdrawal of resources. The Bristol experience demonstrates how local authorities can institutionalise regular civic interactions with minority communities in diverse localities. We argue that the city should draw on this success and further institutionalise this collaboration within Building the Bridge.

This chapter considers the role of played by adult trust in relation to children’s democratic participation. Following an analysis of how discourses of trust in relation to children construct the participating child in different spaces of participation we find a high degree of contingency attends on how trust and distrust are mobilised by adult in relation to children when it comes to including children in decision-making processes. From a participatory perspective we find that where participatory mechanisms are realised through formalised system processes of confidence this can serve in children’s favour but that where adults retain the warrant to override children’s views this is often articulated through questions of interpersonal trust and distrust. Finally, we argue that adults deploy or withhold interpersonal trust in relation to children as a class of person in ways which are akin to early Parsonian formulations of trust within familiar situations which suggests children as a category are held in a web of what could be characterised as ‘pre-modern’ relations to adults as a class.

The accommodation of Islam in European societies has received a great deal of negative publicity, especially since Al-Qaeda terrorism became increasingly perceived as a ‘home grown’ issue in Europe. In addition to heightened surveillance and policing, European governments implemented novel ‘integration measures’ focusing on Muslim communities. This book is concerned with the discursive framing of these integration policies in two European countries, Germany and Great Britain. Investigating formalized consultations with German and British Muslim community representatives and the introduction of new legislation protecting against religious discrimination, the study examines how salient discourses of citizenship conceive of social problems and their potential solutions and thereby frame the ‘Muslim question’ in Europe. Lewicki argues that citizenship studies need to move away from defining citizenship as a single, monolithic regime and account for its contested nature that is reproduced through competing discourses that can facilitate or inhibit the reduction of structural inequalities.

Even though the practice of phrenology was declining and falling into disrepute at the time Ned Kelly was executed, his head was still subjected to phrenological reading and his character analyzed from it, which was done in the name of science.

This submission focuses on one of the issues the Committee wishes to examine: the implications of an ageing population for the prevalence and type of long term conditions, together with evidence about the extent to which existing services will have the capacity to meet future demand. The submission gives evidence on:

• The rise of ‘new’ ageing populations (NAPs) and
associated long term conditions
• Psychosocial needs of these populations
• Professional careers and service provision for NAPs
• Prescription charges
• Research and recommendations

The often unremarked processes through which gender and generation play out in families with teenage children in, through, and over time, was the topic of a mixed qualitative methods study, drawing on the accounts of multiple family members – 14 and 15 year olds and their resident parent(s). Using this as a case study the paper critically considers a number of methodological, ethical, and political issues faced in undertaking the research, particularly with respect to research with children. These pertain to challenges of a social constructionist approach and to research from multiple perspectives. We argue that there are paradoxes and contradictions that arise between a social constructionist approach and the practicalities of carrying out research into dynamic phenomena, such as “generationing”, particularly when trying to understand this from multiple perspectives. But rather than consider these as flaws we show how they are in fact opportunities for insight into the interplay between the structural and the dynamic nature of intergenerational relations.

The thesis seeks to interrogate historically the relationship between multinational healthcare
service companies and states in the pursuit of market-oriented reforms for healthcare. It
constitutes a critical reading of the idea of globalisation as a concept with substantive
explanatory value to analyse the causal role of multinational service firms in a commercial
transformation in national healthcare service sectors. It analyses the development and expansion
of commercial (for-profit) healthcare service provision and financing in the healthcare systems
of OECD countries. The hospital and health insurance sectors in the US and UK are analysed as
case studies towards developing this critical reading from a more specific national setting.

The thesis contributes to developing a framework for analysing the emergence of an
international market for trade in healthcare services, which is a recently emerging area of
research in the social sciences. As such, it uses an interdisciplinary approach, utilising insights
from health policy and international political economy. The research entails a longitudinal study
of secondary and primary sources of qualitative data broadly covering the period 1975-2005. I
have also made extensive use of quantitative data to illustrate key economic trends that are
relevant to the changes in the particular healthcare services sectors analysed.

The research finds a substantive shift in the mixed economy of healthcare in which commercial
healthcare service provision and financing are increasing. However, while the
internationalisation of healthcare service firms is a key element in helping to drive some of this
change, the changes are ultimately highly dependent on state-level decision making and
regulation. In this context, the thesis argues that globalisation presents an inadequate and
potentially misleading conceptual framework for analysing these changes without a historical
grounding in the particular developments of national and international markets for healthcare
services.

In April 2014, the Law Commission published its report, Regulation of Health Care Professionals and Regulation of Social Care Professionals in England. This provides a timely reminder that medical regulation remains potentially problematic and contentious. In this article, I review the origins of the so-called state–medical profession bargain created in 1858, the history of its effectiveness, or lack of effectiveness, and the extent to which recent regulatory developments and the Law Commission proposals constitute significant renegotiation of the bargain. I conclude by considering whether the proposal may even represent the beginnings of state imposition of a new bargain, in which other health-care professions might significantly challenge the traditional dominance of doctors.

Purpose Uptake of cardiac rehabilitation services by older people is suboptimal. Offering suitable services may increase participation. This study investigated older heart failure patients' preferences between hospital, community and home-based service models and sociodemographic and clinical factors associated with these preferences. Rates of referral were examined. Methods Cross-sectional survey of patients aged 65 years and older consecutively admitted to elderly care, cardiology and general medicine wards in a large UK hospital with confirmed heart failure between March-December 2009. A 57-item interview schedule incorporating open and closed questions and standard measures was developed enabling both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Associations between patients' preferences and characteristics including disease severity (New York Heart Association [NYHA] classification) and comorbidity (Charlson comorbidity score) were analysed using Chi-squared tests and one-way ANOVA. Results One hundred and six interviews were completed (mean age 77.8 ± 7.3, 62% male, 47% lived alone). Most patients had moderate-severe heart failure (55% NYHA class III; 34% class II) and co-morbidities (mean Charlson score 3.3 ± 1.7). Most opted for cardiac rehabilitation (72%), preferring hospital to community classes. Those preferring hospital programmes were younger (mean 5.1 years, 95% CI -10.1 to -0.1, P = 0.043) than those preferring not to participate. Neither disease severity nor comorbidity was associated with preferences. Only 21% were referred to any cardiac rehabilitation service. Conclusion Most of these older heart failure patients wanted to attend cardiac rehabilitation, but few were referred. Age was related to preferring certain cardiac rehabilitation service models but not to an overall preference to attend. Referral processes need urgent improvement and offering choice of service models may increase participation. © 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS and European Union Geriatric Medicine Society.

Background: Participation of patients with heart failure in cardiac rehabilitation in the UK is low. This study investigated the availability of cardiac rehabilitation services for patients with heart failure in the UK and the views of service coordinators on ideal service models. Design: Our study was a cross-sectional national postal survey that was mailed to 342 service coordinators in the UK between April and June 2009. Methods: We developed a 38-item questionnaire to survey all cardiac rehabilitation service coordinators on theNational Audit of Cardiac Rehabilitation register in the UK in 2009. Results: The survey response rate was 71% (244/342). Forty three per cent (105/244) of coordinators did not accept patients with heart failure to their cardiac rehabilitation services. Most coordinators who did accept patients with heart failure offered their services to patients with a variety of cardiac conditions, though referral criteria and models of care varied widely. Services inconsistently used New York Heart Association classes and left ventricular ejection fraction measures to select patients. Few offered separate dedicated heart failure programmes (14%; 33/244) but where these existed they ran for longer than programmes which included patients with heart failure alongside other cardiac patients (10.9 vs 8.5 weeks; F=4.04; p=0.019). Few offered home-based options for patients with heart failure (11%; 27/244). Coordinators accepting patients with heart failure to their cardiac rehabilitation services tended to agree that patients with heart failure should be included in services alongside other cardiac patients (X2=6.2; p=0.013). Conclusions: There is limited access for patients with heart failure to cardiac rehabilitation in the UK. Local policies on referral and selection criteria differ and reflect coordinators views rather than clinical guidance. © The European Society of Cardiology 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.

Background: Control of infection and prevention of healthcare associated infections is an ongoing issue worldwide. Yet despite initiatives and strategies to reduce the burden that these infections cause, healthcare workers' practice is still reported as suboptimal and these infections persist. Much of the research to date has primarily focused on predicting infection prevention behaviours and factors associated with guideline compliance. While this has given valuable insight, an investigation aiming to understand and explain behaviours that occur in everyday practice from the perspective of the actors themselves may hold the key to the challenges of effecting behaviour change. This study questioned "How can nurses' infection prevention behaviour be explained?" This paper presents one of three identified themes 'Rationalising dirt-related behaviour'. Design: This interpretative qualitative study uses vignettes, developed from nurses' accounts of practice, to explore nurses' reported infection prevention behaviours. Participants: Registered nurses working in an acute hospital setting and had been qualified for over a year. They were recruited while studying part-time at a London University. Methods: Twenty semi-structured interviews were undertaken using a topic guide and vignettes. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using the framework method. Results: The findings demonstrate that participants were keen to give a good impression and present themselves as knowledgeable practitioners, although it was evident that they did not always follow procedure and policy. They rationalised their own behaviour and logically justified any deviations from policy. Deviations in others were criticised as irrational and explained as superficial and part of a 'show' or display. However, participants also gave a presentation of themselves: a show or display that was influenced by the desire to protect self and satisfy patient scrutiny. Conclusions: This study contributes to the identification and explanation of nurses' infection prevention behaviours which are considered inappropriate or harmful. Behaviour is multifaceted and complex, stemming from a response to factors that are outside a purely 'scientific' understanding of infection and not simply understood as a deficit in knowledge. This calls for educational interventions that consider beliefs, values and social understanding of dirt and infection. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

Increasing longevity and prevalence of long-term conditions contribute to older adults being the greatest users of health services. However, relatively little is known about the health and illness beliefs of the oldest old or how they decide to seek help in response to symptoms. Through analysis of in-depth interviews with day centre attendees aged 80-93, we find that a moral, hierarchical approach to health problems and help-seeking exists; similar to Cornwell's. findings among 50-60 year-olds of a similar social group 30 years ago. However, when acting independently, those in their eighties and nineties report modifying their health and illness beliefs and behaviour, in response to their own perceived old age. Some health problems are 'demedicalised', being increasingly attributed to age and by being self-managed. Others are perceived as potentially more serious, leading to increased consultation with medical services. When obliged to act outside their moral belief-behaviour framework by others, the participants expressed feelings of disempowerment, yet resisted modifying their moral beliefs. This may represent resistance to adopt the 'sick role', while seeking to maintain control over uncertain health as functional dependence and frailty increases. This study furthers theoretical understanding of the health and illness beliefs and behaviour of the oldest old, with important practical implications.

This study explores the relationships that form among practitioners in the new media industry – focussing on a particular locale, Brighton, UK. An aim is to understand the meanings that work and peer relationships have for practitioners. Another is to explore how peer relationships affect practitioners’ careers. Through the use of qualitative methods – semi-structured and unstructured interviews, and ethnographic observation – the research highlights the importance of locality and of interaction in shaping the meanings and practices around work and sociality in the new media industry. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas on field, habitus and capital it is suggested that the meanings practitioners attach to work are reflected in the aspirations inscribed in their habitus and the position they occupy within a geographically specific new media field. It is also suggested that social relationships among peers are constructed through interaction within Brighton’s new media community where personal biographies, industrial and local cultures structure and reproduce each other. The importance of interpreting practices within intersections of fields, in which people are embedded, is also emphasised. Drawing on Goffman’s ideas on the social organisation of co-presence, the logic of the new media field and the strategies that practitioners utilise – which are reflected in the ways practitioners manage their personal preserves inside a co-working organisation – is described. How career opportunities differ based on the position people occupy in the industry and how the use of different types of capitals effect career changes is also demonstrated. This study contributes to the research literature on the clustering of new media industries, to research looking at work and employment in the new media industry and, finally, to the literature on the networking practices of new media practitioners.

The current thesis attempts to discuss, critique, and repair the idea of public sociology as a public discourse and a professional practice. Emerging in the writings of C W. Mills and Alvin Gouldner in the late 1950s and 1970s, “public sociology” was given its name in 1988 by Herbert J. Gans, before it was popularised by Michael Burawoy in 2004, reflecting a recurring desire to debate the discipline’s public relevance, responsibility and accountability to its publics: academic and extra-academic alike.
Resisting a trend in the relevant literature to treat the term as new, it is argued that the notion of making sociology “public” is as old as the discipline itself, suggesting that the recent public sociology debate does not describe a modern predicament, but an enduring characteristic of sociology’s epistemic identity.
A detailed critical review of recent controversies on public sociology is offered as a compass with which to navigate the terms and conditions of the term, as it has been espoused, critiqued and re-modelled to fit divergent aspirations about sociology’s identity, status and function in academia and the public sphere.
An invitation to understand the discipline beyond a language of crisis concludes the thesis, offering eleven counter-theses to M. Burawoy’s approach that seek to reconstruct sociology’s self-perception, while also suggesting ways of making it public in the context of intellectual life at the 21st century.

There is mounting evidence to suggest that East European migrants in the UK have been victims of discrimination. Reports of pay gaps point to the possibility of structural discrimination, restrictions on employment operate as a kind of legal discrimination, and politicians and the media have constructed East European migrants as different and at times threatening. The Hungarians and Romanians we spoke with in Bristol also reported some discrimination, albeit in ways that deflected its racialised connotations. But they also denied that they were victims of discrimination. Why would the supposed victims of discrimination deny discrimination? We argue they did this to attenuate, and potentially reverse, the status degradations they suffered as disadvantaged and at times racialised labour migrants in Britain. We examine two discursive strategies they employed to negotiate this higher status. First, they claimed a higher social class status by embracing the meritocratic values of the dominant class. Second, they claimed a higher racial status by emphasising their whiteness and Europeanness. These were discursive attempts to reposition themselves more favourably in Britain's racialised status hierarchies.

The article explores the considerations that are at stake in assessing the prospects of cosmopolitanism today. It is argued that there is scope for fruitful dialogue between sociology and political science around the question of how a normative idea, such as global justice, becomes an empirical phenomenon. The idea of global justice should be placed in the context of the broader framework of cosmopolitanism. Rather than focus only on the normative project, attention needs to be given to the process by which cosmopolitanism emerges. Cosmopolitanism, in this view, involves socio-cognitive shifts for critical publics in ways in seeing the world. It is such changes in cognitive capacities and in individual and societal learning that often make possible the articulation of new normative principles or their application in domains where they previously did not apply.

Of the many challenging issues facing cosmopolitan thought today a major one is the problem of conceptual and cultural translation since it is often the case that cosmopolitanism is highly relevant to developments in Indian and Chinese thought, even though the term itself is not used in the sources or in the interpretations. Indeed, the actual use of the term may itself disguise more relevant applications if acceptable forms of conceptual and cultural translation can be found. There is also the question of which register of meaning should be privileged, western explanatory concepts or non-western concepts or whether it is possible to find an alternative language. This methodological challenge is central to the concern of this paper. Three problems are addressed, namely universalist versus contextualist positions, Eurocentrism, and the problem of conceptual and cultural translations between western and non-western thought. The central argument is that cosmopolitanism thought needs to expand beyond its western genealogy to include other world traditions. However the solution is not simply to identify alternative cultural traditions to western ones and which might be the carrier of different kinds of cosmopolitan values, but of identifying in these different cultural traditions resources for cosmopolitics. In this way critical cosmopolitanism seeks to find an alternative both to strong contextualist as well as strong universalist positions. The upshot of this reasoning is that all world varieties of cosmopolitanism reflect different aspects of the cosmopolitan imagination which cannot be reduced to any one tradition.

The slow university is said to be an alternative to the fast one. But what is behind speed at universities? In this article I argue that it is important not to fetishise speed or slowness and see them as autonomous processes, or the cause of their effects themselves. This distracts from where they come from. Instead we need to look for the economic and social processes behind speed and slowness. And what is slow about the slow university? We also need to ask if slow is what slow is really all about. This affects what solutions we look for to the problems that slow identifies.

In the wake of the Iraq war, the term Old Europe was appropriated by politicians, civil society and social movement actors alike to rally in defence of supposedly social and civilized values against the perceived predatory forces of American finance.

Against Old Europe sheds light on the social movement politics encapsulated in the protest slogan 'Fight Old Europe'. Within what is broadly labelled the global justice movement, it explores a particular, radical perspective that warns against the identification with European values by movements resisting neoliberalism. Exploring the work of key theorists critical of globalization, including Habermas, Negri, Holloway, Postone and de Benoist, the book examines critical theory approaches to alter-globalization, illustrated with concrete examples of movements within contemporary Europe. In so doing, it invites readers to explore the charges of nationalism, anti-Americanism and antisemitism brought against parts of the alter-globalization movement.

Providing a new perspective on critiques of globalization, Against Old Europe will appeal to sociologists and social and political theorists studying social movements, anti-globalization activism and European politics and identity.

This article argues that austerity is not necessary or externally determined. It is an active class project and an ideological choice of elites and the powerful. There are alternatives to austerity. One is based around equality and economic and social rights. Others involve the restructuring of work to a society based on less paid work, and freedom of movement in a global society of open borders. These would help counter austerity and have benefits of their own.

This chapter reports on the interaction dynamics of a workplace exercise group for beginners. Dramaturgical stress occurred here as individuals who already knew each other as competent colleagues felt embarrassed about encountering one another in this low ability exercise group. To resolve this role conflict, participants sought to define themselves as familiar strangers (which they were not) through minimal interaction in non-binding relationships. This was achieved through three types of facework strategy: not only the defensive and protective kinds that Goffman identified as saving individual faces, but also collective strategies, which sought to repair the face of the whole group. Paradoxically, therefore, in attempting to deny their “groupness,” these actors actually displayed and reinforced their solidarity as a performance team.

Based on research into qualitative responses to capital punishment in mid twentieth-century Britain, this article examines how letter writers to the Home Office constructed imagined communities in relation to capital cases. It uncovers a shift in these responses from creating respectable, local communities in the period 1930–45, when most letter writers had a personal connection to the condemned, to the creation of the imagined national community from the late 1940s onwards, when most correspondents in relation to high profile cases were not connected to the condemned. These post-war letters reveal how meanings of Britishness, particularly in relation to the important symbol of ‘British justice’, were negotiated in relation to capital punishment.

Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in 1965. At this time, the way people in Britain perceived and understood the death penalty had changed – it was an issue that had become increasingly controversial, high-profile and fraught with emotion. In order to understand why this was, it is necessary to examine how ordinary people learned about and experienced capital punishment.

Drawing on primary research, this book explores the cultural life of the death penalty in Britain in the twentieth century, including an exploration of the role of the popular press and a discussion of portrayals of the death penalty in plays, novels and films. Popular protest against capital punishment and public responses to and understandings of capital cases are also discussed, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of justice. Miscarriages of justice were significant to capital punishment’s increasingly fraught nature in the mid twentieth-century and the book analyses the unsettling power of two such high profile miscarriages of justice. The final chapters consider the continuing relevance of capital punishment in Britain after abolition, including its symbolism and how people negotiate memories of the death penalty.

Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain is groundbreaking in its attention to the death penalty and the effect it had on everyday life and it is the only text on this era to place public and popular discourses about, and reactions to, capital punishment at the centre of the analysis. Interdisciplinary in focus and methodology, it will appeal to historians, criminologists, sociologists and socio-legal scholars.

Drawing on contemporary theories of intimacy, this study explores the intimacy narratives and practices of single mothers at a time of, it is argued, social and cultural change in terms of intimacy. Narrative interviews of twenty-four single mothers draw out layers of personal, social and cultural complexity in terms of understanding, experiencing and making choices about intimacy in their everyday lives. The concept of ‘intimacy scripts’ (developed from Simon and Gagnon, 1973) is deployed to explore how single mothers develop blueprints for their intimate lives, drawing on a range of cultural, social and personal possibilities for intimate practices. This process is viewed within a wider context of gendered power relations and material constraints. Participants were often affected by stigmatizing depictions of single mothers and resisted these through their narratives which tended to emphasize how they had not chosen single motherhood. Indeed the transition to single motherhood was often experienced as traumatic, marked by shame, disappointment and loss. Perceptions of increased fluidity and the possibility for experimentation around intimacy are discernible, chiming with individualisation theorists (Bauman, 2003; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1992). However, basic economic survival often took precedence over the reflexive organisation of intimate lives (Jamieson, 1998). Intimacy narratives were unsettled, in turn depicting opportunities for intimate experimentations and invoking nostalgia for more traditional intimate forms, demonstrating ambivalence and liminality. Heteronormative ideals of coupledom, romance and traditional family remained aspirational for many, although the importance of equality in relationships was also highlighted. Yet many participants struggled to find suitable male partners and were aware of inequalities and the risks associated with re-partnering, often based on negative experiences. Intimate choices were shaped and constrained by socio-economic positioning; the protection of dependents; maintenance of their family unit; continuing gendered expectations and the ongoing centrality of heteronormative romantic couple-centred intimate practices.

My thesis develops an understanding of patient role and identity performances in psychiatric consultations. Recent increased attention to shared-decision making and patient-centred care in psychiatry is in large part influenced by changing ideas about the doctor-patient relationship, challenging power discrepancies and reconsidering notions of ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ contributions. Previous work surrounding this field has mostly focused on psychiatrists’ talk, asking ‘how can psychiatrists improve shared-decision making skills?’ While important, I argue that this focus is at odds with the principles behind shared-decision making by failing to consider patients’ own performances in their talk with psychiatrists.

I re-analyse recorded interactions in 92 psychiatric consultations with patients prescribed anti-psychotic medication. Drawing on the work of Goffman, I identify frames which are negotiated throughout the consultations and explore how these shape the roles and ‘footing’ adopted by patients. I demonstrate techniques used by patients to maintain a balance between making credible and influential claims and maintaining an acceptable patient role. Finally I consider the impact of family members attending these consultations. I explore how they collaborate and compete with patients in making claims, and the impact of their presence on patients’ own performances.

The thesis makes the case for considering patients as active participants in constructing the interaction in psychiatric consultations and the need to understand the work being undertaken by patients to construct their place in the immediate discourse and in their wider social connections. It moves towards developing this understanding by providing a detailed review of various techniques seen in this data set. In using a frame analysis it also provides a relatively new perspective on considering discourse and demonstrates how this kind of approach can be useful when analysing institutional talk.

A distinctive characteristic of sociology is that it’s a critical discipline. But a question that criticisms of society imply is - what’s the alternative? This lecture will look at alternative societies implied by criticisms of existing ones. What is the role of utopianism? After the collapse of socialism in the late 20th century and the spread of capitalism and liberalism, is communism an alternative? Can we envisage a world with much less work, or no borders in the way of free movement? What alternative types of living are possible, economically, socially, educationally, politically, ecologically and that overcome divisions of class, gender and race?

The purpose of the research conducted for this thesis was to investigate perceptions of
responsibility and blame for rising levels of consumer debt in the UK, focusing on two key
stakeholder groups often associated with the issues relating to consumer debt: individual
borrowers and consumer credit lenders. Research was conducted with these stakeholders;
debtors represented the individual borrowers and debt collectors from a large multi national
credit card company represented lenders. Three central research questions lay at the heart of the research: what are the respondents’ perceptions of why and how debtors use consumer credit; how are debtors perceived and treated by their creditors (i.e. through contact with debt collectors); what are the respondents’ perceptions of who is to blame for consumer debt?

A mixed method approach was adopted, using primarily qualitative research methods in
accordance with the interpretivist approach of the research. An online survey and in-depth
interviews were adopted for the debtor respondents and focus groups and in-depth interviews were adopted for the debt collector respondents. The debtor respondents were recruited from the National Debt Line website, the biggest online money advice website in the UK, by posting an online survey on the site. The debt collector respondents were recruited from the shared employer of the respondents and the researcher, a large multi national credit card company.

In answer to the research questions, the research revealed that, firstly, the majority of debtor respondents perceived that their consumer credit use was to supplement their low income, which contradicted previous stereotypes of debtors as reckless spendthrifts and, instead, proposed they are agentic rational decision makers. Secondly, debtors were negatively perceived and treated by their creditors (debt collectors) in that they were stigmatised and labelled as deviant. This occurred during the debtors’ social interaction with debt collectors during the debt collection process. In line with the labelling theory of deviance, this societal reaction then led to self-labelling by the debtors, who expressed feelings of shame. Thirdly, therefore, both the debtors and debt collectors primarily blamed the debtor stakeholder group as responsible for increasing levels of consumer debt, although the debtors also placed some of the blame on the creditors for acting unethically in their lending practices, namely by lending irresponsibly to debtors without an accurate assessment of the affordability of the loan.

This thesis makes an original contribution to sociological knowledge of the ways in which blame and responsibility for increasing levels of debt is perceived by different societal groups. A key part of the thesis’ originality exists in its utilisation of concepts drawn from different strands of sociological theory to explore perceptions of debt, in particular the sociology of deviance and symbolic interactionism, such as labeling, stigma and shame.

This paper is concerned with talk about and the practices of healthy living in relation to cholesterol reduction. It draws on qualitative interviews with 89 people who are current or former users of either cholesterol-lowering functional foods and/or statins for cardiovascular risk reduction. Focussing on people’s talk about the practicalities of their daily lives including food preparation, shopping and physical activity, we illustrate four repertoires that feature in this talk (health; pleasure; sociality; pragmatism). Using Gilbert and Mulkay’s (1984) notion of a ‘reconciliation device’, we suggest ways that apparently contradictory repertoires are discursively reconciled, for example through talk about moderation, but also note that there are other ways of distancing oneself from a concern with health. For example, we suggest that in contrast to the interactiveness of the repertoires of health and pleasure, a pragmatic repertoire concerning food provisioning, storage and cooking as well as the daily realities of exercise, stands apart from talk about health and remains relatively inert. Finally we question the implications of these repertoires for daily practices. The interview data suggest little emphasis on ‘coherence’ in people’s practices and illustrate the significance of temporal, spatial and social distribution in allowing people to pursue different priorities within their everyday lives. Rather than the calculated trade-offs of earlier medical sociologists such as Backett (1992) we draw on Mol (2002) to foreground the possibility of sustained multiplicity in daily practices.

The body is a site of impassioned, fraught and complex debate in the West today. In one political moment, left-wingers, academics and feminists have defended powerful men accused of sex crimes, positioned topless pictures in the tabloids as empowering, and opposed them for sexualizing breasts and undermining their ‘natural’ function. At the same time they have been criticized by extreme-right groups for ignoring honour killings and other ‘culture-based’ forms of violence against women. How can we make sense of this varied terrain?

In this important and challenging new book, Alison Phipps constructs a political sociology of women’s bodies around key debates: sexual violence, gender and Islam, sex work and motherhood. Her analysis uncovers dubious rhetorics and paradoxical allegiances, and contextualizes these within the powerful coalition of neoliberal and neoconservative frameworks. She explores how ‘feminism’ can be caricatured and vilified at both ends of the political spectrum, arguing that Western feminisms are now faced with complex problems of positioning in a world where gender often comes second to other political priorities.

This book provides a welcome investigation into Western politics around women’s bodies, and will be particularly useful to scholars and upper-level students of sociology, political science, gender studies and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in how bodies become politicized.

Encyclopaedia entry summarising the sociology of the body as an intellectual field.

Declarations of the end of race ignore the continuing impact of racism upon socio-economic inequality in ‘racial states’. Nevertheless, the idea of post-racialism has gained ground in a post-9/11 era, defined by a growing suspicion of diversity. Clearly racialized, this suspicion is couched in cultural-civilizational terms that attempt to avoid the charge of racism. Hence, attempts to counteract the purported failure of multiculturalism in Europe today pose culturalist solutions to problems deemed to originate from an excess of cultural diversity. This is part of a deepening culturalization of politics in which the post-race argument belongs to a post-political logic that shuns political explanations of unrest and widening disintegration in favour of reductive culturalist ones. The culturalization of politics is elaborated by relating it to the displacement of the political that originated with the nineteenth-century ascendance of race, thus setting ‘post-racialism’ firmly within the history of modern racism.