Tourism-related urban regeneration in two UK city regions.

Tourism is widely seen as a tool for urban regeneration and many old industrial cities in the UK incorporate tourism into their regeneration plans. This study explores the people and organisations involved in tourism-related urban regeneration, including their roles and relationships. The research uses a critical realistic perspective and three theoretical approaches: the regulation, policy network and structure-agency approaches. It explores two urban waterfront regeneration areas in the UK with significant tourism dimensions: The Quays in Greater Manchester and Newcastle Gateshead Quayside. Research data for these two cases were collected using semi-structured interviews, document analysis and participant observation. The study findings indicate that in the case study areas tourism had more of a complementary and supplementary role rather than the lead role. The relationships between the people and organisations involved in tourism-related regeneration reflected resource dependency and they were often conflicting as well as collaborative. There were gaps and a lack of coordination between the actors involved in tourism marketing, tourism development, and urban regeneration. The tourism-related urban regeneration processes were heavily influenced by political and economic structures at the macro level, but the individual actors still exercised personal agency through their individual leadership, personality and commitment. The individual actors played important parts in building the inter-organisational relationships and in achieving tourism-related regeneration. The study explores tourism-related urban regeneration using a multi-level conceptual framework that connects the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, and also using a policy network approach that identifies gaps in coordinated policy making. These helped to advance understanding of the degree of integration between the actors and policy networks associated with tourism and with wider urban regeneration. The study also highlights the multifaceted and relational structure-agency relations involved in tourism-related urban regeneration

The discursive maintenance of gender inequality: Analyses of student and internet discussions.

This thesis contributes to a relatively small but burgeoning body of feminist and critical discourse analytic research into the social construction of gender and gender inequality conducted within critical social psychology. It begins by critically discussing the various theories of gender within the discipline. The thesis is an explicitly political endeavour. As is discussed, all work is political even if it fails to acknowledge this. This research aims to be openly reflexive about its ideological underpinnings and the historical and cultural climate in which the work emerges. Feminist theories of gender are also critically discussed. Having explored the various theories of gender and their relative de/merits, the adopted feminist social constructionist approach is explicated. Such an approach addresses the main failings of other approaches which are variously centred around, for example, inattention to power, language, multiplicity of identities and genders, essentialism, self-contained individualism and the historical, cultural and contextual relativity of meaning. These issues are explicitly attended to through the chosen methodology of critical discourse analysis.Three studies were carried out. All utilise the same analytical methodology but vary in terms of context, focus and data collection method. The first study analyses the interview talk of male psychology undergraduates at a northern English university. The men were found to present themselves, and men generally, as Victims'. The second study aims to address a wide-scale problem in social constructionist work on gender which also afflicts the first study presented here. Whilst theory has shifted away from essentialism, both theoretical and empirical work continues to promote an implicit essentialism by assuming that the biological sex of participants should correspond to the gender of interest (e.g. studying 'men and masculinity'). The second study includes both male and female volunteer interviewees from a similar sample population as the first study. Both sexes were found to be bolstering inequality by constructing a picture of equality between the sexes. This was achieved through three repertoires. One overtly constructed 'equality as imminent/achieved'. Another, the 'women as oppressors/men as victims' repertoire, presents instances of women's capability of inverting men's general power. The third, 'women as manipulators', was only utilised by the women and suggests women have a more covert power which counterbalances men's overt power.This greater focus on discourses and shift away from essentialism, evidenced in the diminished interest given to embodiment and identity, is more fully embraced in the third study which concentrates on an internet discussion board. In this context, embodiment and identity cannot be known with confidence. The discussion board contributors construct men and women as internally homogeneous and oppositional groups. Two repertoires are discussed: 'communication difficulties' and 'the spokesperson'. Men and women are said to find communication between them incredibly difficult. Contradictorily, men and women are solicited for, or take it upon themselves to offer, 'insider' views on their particular sex group. Taken together, the three studies therefore represent quite different contexts, samples, and methodological approaches to the problem of the net inequality between the sexes, and contribute to a growing body of research on how inequality is maintained through linguistic practice in particular contexts