The impact of deindustrialisation on masculine career identity: an intergenerational study of men from naval repair families in Medway, Kent

This thesis addresses the impact of deindustrialisation and the subsequent move to a post-industrial 'new economy' on skilled working class men and their sons and grandsons. The decline in manufacturing and growth of service-based jobs has prompted many social theorists to argue working-class men’s ability to construct meaningful careers and identities is becoming ever more limited. This thesis explores 27 career history interviews collected in South-East England from 13 former Royal Dockyard tradesmen and 14 of these men’s sons and grandsons. Closed in 1984, Chatham’s naval shipbuilding and repair yard had been the major employer for generations of men and their families for over 400 years. To explore this generational significance and consider the long-term, residual effect of deindustrialisation on male work identities a mutigenerational sample was used. In the process of doing thematic analysis, it became clear that cross-generational themes were being continued and reinterpreted by these men. Three intergenerational themes were central to the men’s explanations of how they tackled transition in their working lives. The first theme ‘getting on’ reflects evidence that the men’s career motivations and attitudes were primarily focused on upward career mobility and better job security. The second theme ‘personal adaptability’ was the men strategy of adapting skills and embodying new work identities to actualize their desire to ‘get on’. However in the transition to post-industrial employment, men did not lose their engagement with their trade learning and hands on work. The third theme ‘a craft outlook’ illustrates that men developed unpaid craft projects, to retain a ‘linear life narrative’ (Sennett, 1998), which gave meaning to their evolving careers and lives. These craft projects also created channels through which fathers, sons and grandsons talked about their growing and changing relationships with each other. In light of these themes, this study generates four main findings. First although men had to deal with change in their careers this did not cause a rupture in their working identities. Instead they used powerful life themes (Savickas, 1997), to take ownership of their own working lives. So they navigated deindustrialisation and employment change in a manner that left many now viewing these transitions as positive in either personal and/or economic terms. Second, class and occupation were still fundamental to men’s identity. But, unlike career writers who suggest that a self-driven career is a middle class, professional notion this study found these men did construct sophisticated career narratives. That incorporated both their private and paid work, akin to Mirvis and Hall’s (1994) notion of a ‘protean career’. Third, the PhD finds that neither sample experienced a working class male crisis due to feeling they could not satisfy traditional gendered identities and masculine practices. Instead, intergenerational transmission was based on each generation making something of what had been passed to them, a process Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame (1997: 93) term the ‘transmission of equivalents’. The replication of occupations was not the desire of any generation in this study. Finally, this study finds that craft had a continued and evolving meaning for the majority of men. Craft gave men practices on which to structure a linear life narrative, produce familial solidarity and create a powerful labour ethic of performing quality work. Overall findings from this research challenge the idea that most men were/are passive victims of industrial change. By contrast, the majority of men in this study managed to carefully adapt to and navigate the transition from industrial to post-industrial work. Whereas this study only speaks for a section of the skilled working class, these findings suggest that the current literature needs to be modified in three ways. First, the manual working classes should not be considered a homogeneous or static group when responding to deindustrialisation. The skilled men in this study demonstrate a distinct experience of work transitions. Second, the experiences of the men were mediated by the regional employment context of the south-east, whereas the current literature is largely based on relatively isolated communities in the North of England or Celtic fringes. This studies results therefore questions the validity of generalising the impacts of this process at a national or international level. Third, unlike static studies of geographically located collective community experience, this research has followed generations of families. These individuals’ career stories reflect the important accounts of men who strategically moved away or commute to work outside these former industrial areas. Overall the omission of these factors has led to an over passive account of deindustrialisation and the move to the new economy, which robs many working-class men of their individuality and active agency

Identification of the intermediate allosteric species in human hemoglobin reveals a molecular code for cooperative switching

The 10 ligation species of human cyanomethemoglobin were previously found to distribute into three discrete cooperative free energy levels according to a combinatorial code (i.e., dependent on both the number and configuration of ligated subunits). Analysis of this distribution showed that the hemoglobin tetramer occupies a third allosteric state in addition to those of the unligated (T) and fully ligated (R) species. To determine the nature of the intermediate allosteric state, we have studied the effects of pH, temperature, and single-site mutations on its free energy of quaternary assembly, in parallel with corresponding data on the deoxy (T) and fully ligated (R) species. Results indicate that the intermediate allosteric tetramer has the deoxy (T) quaternary structure. This finding, together with the resolved energetic distribution of the 10 microstates reveals a symmetry rule for quaternary switching - i.e., switching from T to R occurs whenever a binding step creates a tetramer with one or more ligated subunits on each side of the α1β2 intersubunit contact. These studies also reveal significant cooperativity within each α1β2 dimer of the T-state tetramer. The ligand-induced tertiary free energy alters binding affinity within the T structure by 170-fold prior to quaternary switching

Children’s Agency in Translocal Roma Families

Peer reviewe

On the Treatment of Airline Travelers in Mathematical Models

The global spread of infectious diseases is facilitated by the ability of infected humans to travel thousands of miles in short time spans, rapidly transporting pathogens to distant locations. Mathematical models of the actual and potential spread of specific pathogens can assist public health planning in the case of such an event. Models should generally be parsimonious, but must consider all potentially important components of the system to the greatest extent possible. We demonstrate and discuss important assumptions relative to the parameterization and structural treatment of airline travel in mathematical models. Among other findings, we show that the most common structural treatment of travelers leads to underestimation of the speed of spread and that connecting travel is critical to a realistic spread pattern. Models involving travelers can be improved significantly by relatively simple structural changes but also may require further attention to details of parameterization

Measurement of the inclusive and dijet cross-sections of b-jets in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

The inclusive and dijet production cross-sections have been measured for jets containing b-hadrons (b-jets) in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements use data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 34 pb^-1. The b-jets are identified using either a lifetime-based method, where secondary decay vertices of b-hadrons in jets are reconstructed using information from the tracking detectors, or a muon-based method where the presence of a muon is used to identify semileptonic decays of b-hadrons inside jets. The inclusive b-jet cross-section is measured as a function of transverse momentum in the range 20 < pT < 400 GeV and rapidity in the range |y| < 2.1. The bbbar-dijet cross-section is measured as a function of the dijet invariant mass in the range 110 < m_jj < 760 GeV, the azimuthal angle difference between the two jets and the angular variable chi in two dijet mass regions. The results are compared with next-to-leading-order QCD predictions. Good agreement is observed between the measured cross-sections and the predictions obtained using POWHEG + Pythia. MC@NLO + Herwig shows good agreement with the measured bbbar-dijet cross-section. However, it does not reproduce the measured inclusive cross-section well, particularly for central b-jets with large transverse momenta.Comment: 10 pages plus author list (21 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version published in European Physical Journal

Search for displaced vertices arising from decays of new heavy particles in 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

We present the results of a search for new, heavy particles that decay at a significant distance from their production point into a final state containing charged hadrons in association with a high-momentum muon. The search is conducted in a pp-collision data sample with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 33 pb^-1 collected in 2010 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Production of such particles is expected in various scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. We observe no signal and place limits on the production cross-section of supersymmetric particles in an R-parity-violating scenario as a function of the neutralino lifetime. Limits are presented for different squark and neutralino masses, enabling extension of the limits to a variety of other models.Comment: 8 pages plus author list (20 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version to appear in Physics Letters

Measurement of the polarisation of W bosons produced with large transverse momentum in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS experiment

This paper describes an analysis of the angular distribution of W->enu and W->munu decays, using data from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2010, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 35 pb^-1. Using the decay lepton transverse momentum and the missing transverse energy, the W decay angular distribution projected onto the transverse plane is obtained and analysed in terms of helicity fractions f0, fL and fR over two ranges of W transverse momentum (ptw): 35 < ptw < 50 GeV and ptw > 50 GeV. Good agreement is found with theoretical predictions. For ptw > 50 GeV, the values of f0 and fL-fR, averaged over charge and lepton flavour, are measured to be : f0 = 0.127 +/- 0.030 +/- 0.108 and fL-fR = 0.252 +/- 0.017 +/- 0.030, where the first uncertainties are statistical, and the second include all systematic effects.Comment: 19 pages plus author list (34 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, revised author list, matches European Journal of Physics C versio

Observation of a new chi_b state in radiative transitions to Upsilon(1S) and Upsilon(2S) at ATLAS

The chi_b(nP) quarkonium states are produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV and recorded by the ATLAS detector. Using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.4 fb^-1, these states are reconstructed through their radiative decays to Upsilon(1S,2S) with Upsilon->mu+mu-. In addition to the mass peaks corresponding to the decay modes chi_b(1P,2P)->Upsilon(1S)gamma, a new structure centered at a mass of 10.530+/-0.005 (stat.)+/-0.009 (syst.) GeV is also observed, in both the Upsilon(1S)gamma and Upsilon(2S)gamma decay modes. This is interpreted as the chi_b(3P) system.Comment: 5 pages plus author list (18 pages total), 2 figures, 1 table, corrected author list, matches final version in Physical Review Letter