An economic enquiry into the welfare effects of fair-trade

PhDThe copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the author.Fair-trade is investigated at three levels. Each level relates to a specific group of actors. The first group are the consumers of fair-trade. In this respect fair-trade overlaps with altruism. A model is developed which seeks out parameters by which to judge whether or not a person will engage into this gesture of altruism, and accordingly measures the fair-trade utility of the consumer. On the basis that it is voluntary, fair-trade is deemed to be virtuous in that it either uplifts consumer utility, or else the consumer withdraws their patronage. Information is hypothesised to play a key role in determining the depth of this relationship. The second group are neighbouring producers, that is the non fair-trade producers who compete in the same market. A situation is modelled in which fair-trade is viewed as a switch in demand preference rather than new demand. The model allows an evaluation based on the standard tenets of welfare economics: to inform upon which movements are value-creating, which are merely transfers, the symmetry of those transfers and where Pareto improvements can and cannot be realised. The policymaker is afforded a logical overview, but with the implication that many of the relevant variables may be lie beyond their direct influence. The third group are landless vineyard labours in South Africa who are empirically analysised. We observed the strongest performance of fair-trade with respect to subjective improvement in wellbeing and the sort of participation that could be categorised as empowerment.Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC

A dynamic theory of personality and emotions

This dissertation presents a dynamic theory of personality and emotions. The theory offered is explicit in its incorporation of an evolutionary-functionalist perspective and suggests that personality and the emotions are dynamic within the limits imposed by the functions of each. The dissertation begins by discussing the ubiquity of goals and goal-organising constructs in living systems. Personality, it is argued, is most validly conceptualised as being a complex goal-organising construct. Specific attention is then given to the consideration of innate motives in a motivational model of personality, the process by which innate motives become representational goals the place of emotions in the elaboration of innate motives, and the place of consciousness in goal, developmental and emotion processes. Following this, a functional conceptualisation of emotions and conscious emotional experience consistent with the motivational model of personality is developed. Empirical attention is devoted to the relationships between goals and emotions, the nature and measurement of conscious emotional experience, and the place of emotion in generating adaptive behaviour. Overall, the dissertation suggests that emotions and personality are necessarily related phenomena, each contributing to, and reflecting the other in the process of human striving

A pacifist critique of imprisonment

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Spoken English as a world language: international and intranational settings

This thesis sets out to characterise English as a World Language, in contrast with English used in homogeneous, intranational settings. After a brief introduction, the relevant literature is reviewed in two chapters: firstly the concept of an international variety of English is challenged and, following this, there is consideration of current thinking under the headings of English as an International Language and English as Lingua Franca. This preliminary part of the thesis leads to some hypotheses concerning the way in which EWL might be characterised, with particular attention to attitudes among different sorts of speaker. Chapter Five introduces methodologies (1) for finding data-providing participants and (2) assessing their language-related attitudes relevant to the research questions. It continues by (3) examining ways of obtaining spoken data and (4) of transcribing and (5) analysing it. Chapter 6 presents the specific methodological choices for this thesis. The following four chapters provide results. Firstly, brief results are given of tests applied to ascertain participants' language-related attitudes. Following this, the results of analysing and explaining the spoken data itself are given. Chapter 8 closely compares one EWL conversation with one homogeneous one and draws tentative conclusions about what might be found in the remaining conversations: that EWL may be characterised by greater convergence among speakers, irrespective of whether or not they are native speakers. Chapter 9 examines the whole suite of conversations in this light and the previous results are generally confirmed: the speakers in homogeneous conversations tend to be as divergent as they are convergent, where in EWL conversations they try their best to maintain an atmosphere of comity. Chapter 10 completes the results section by comparing the performance of six speakers in particular, who each participate in an EWL conversation and in a homogeneous one. They are found to draw on convergence strategies for their EWL conversations while being more direct and divergent in their homogeneous ones. Chapter 11 attempts to summarise the preceding chapters and to draw some conclusions from the results