Publications

In this paper we use the most recently available data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, April 2011, to examine the size of the gender pay gap in Wales. The paper looks at how the gender pay gap varies across industries and occupations in Wales and analyses how the gender pay gap has…

This article draws on investigations of worker response to two factory closures to develop recent discussions around mobilization theory. With many shared characteristics between the factories, both located in the garment manufacturing sector, and with similar workforces and union organization, certain key distinguishing features between the two provide insights into why worker protest became effectively…

The role of emotion in social movement mobilization and political protest has received renewed attention in the past decade. However, few, if any, studies have followed the emotional trajectories of activists through their involvement in protest activity. This paper explores the significance of emotion in rural protests in Britain since 1997. Drawing on first-hand and…

The south Wales’ valleys had been at the centre of the Industrial Revolution in the 1920s and so at the cutting edge of skilled practices developed in the mining and steel industries. Men came to these remote and typologically impressive places, settled, created communities, brought up families and passed down their skills. The last working…

This exploratory study examines issue salience and the discourse on human rights in the principal parties’ manifestos in UK state-wide Elections 1945–2010. Innovative aspects include the application of combined qualitative and quantitative techniques. These are used to test a series of hypotheses. The findings reveal the nature and extent of the party politicisation of human…

Recent developments in mapping and distributing geographical data using accessible Web 2.0 technologies and practices (such as Google EarthTM, WikiMapia and OpenStreetMap) as well as developments in user-generated online content through web-based and mobile technologies have raised the public profile of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in societal applications. There are numerous high-profile world-wide examples of…

Using data from the educationally mobile (EM) ‘sensitised group’ interviews1 this chapter responds to the question: do experiences of European educational exchange programmes or study abroad make the participants more ‘European’? The biographical approach allows experiences of international educational mobility to be interpreted within the life course as a whole and is designed to reveal…

This paper considers how shifts within the social sciences towards conceptualising spatiality in relational terms have unfolded in rural studies in particular ways over the past decade or so. A period in which networks, connections, flows and mobility have all established themselves as compelling conceptual frames for research, the rural has increasingly been recast in…

This is a final report for the Welsh Government New Ideas Social Research Fund project entitled ‘Public Sentiments Towards Immigrants and Minorities: The Difference Wales Makes?’ The aim of this project was to investigate public sentiments in Wales towards immigrants and minorities. The monitoring of what people think about immigrants and minorities has come to…

This article explores the responses of senior local government actors to the 2004 Wales Spatial Plan and its 2008 update. An example of the so-called ‘new spatial planning’ which has emerged in the movement towards regional devolution in the UK, this planning discourse foregrounds elements of relational thinking that seek to alternatively augment, destabilize and…