Societal attitudes towards bisexuality have often been argued to be overwhelmingly associated with denial, erasure, and stigmatisation. Bisexual people are considered to be disadvantaged amongst other sexual minorities due to various complexities, such as its disruption to heteronormative ways of thinking in addition to harmful stereotypes that have come to be attributed to it over time. General bisexuality research up to this point in time have tended to focus on generalised bisexuality or have included bisexuality under the guise of LGB or LGBTQ+ etc. acronyms but without much focus on it as a separate entity. Moreover, media coverage of bisexuality sports athletes has also been found to be limited in comparison to other LGBTQ+ groups such as lesbian women and gay men in sport. This study takes the stance of a textual media analysis through which the narratives presented about bisexual people in sport were analysed and cross-examined with existing literature, in addition to theoretical lenses such as the…
This study explores how the mind-body connection (MBC) is conceptualised in one-to-one executive coaching in organisations. This study was motivated by the need to meet the increasing demands on executive coaching at this challenging time (Bachkirova and Jackson, 2024; Cannon-Bowers et al, 2023), the need to address the lack of empirical research underpinning this fast-growing area of practice (Bachkirova, 2022), my desire to learn more about it, and to contribute to evidence-based practice (Grant, 2016). Insights from my own executive coaching practice, and the practitioner literature, suggest change can be facilitated more quickly, felt more deeply, and be more readily sustained through coaching with the MBC (Strozzi-Heckler, 2014; Palmer, 2008; Sieler, 2012). It seemed possible, to me, that the connectivity between insight and felt experience may be key. Yet such perceptions lack empirical grounding hence need to be explored. This raises questions about how the MBC is conceptualised in executive coachi…
The recruitment and retention of the registered nursing workforce is both a domestic and global challenge. There is limited research studying why nurses remain and what they enjoy about being a nurse yet a growth in international studies exploring why nurses leave the profession. Aim of the study: To explore nurses’ experience of professional enjoyment and to understand the factors that enhance or diminish professional enjoyment in nursing. Methods: This qualitative study explored professional enjoyment of nursing using semi-structured interviews with 25 registered nurses in England. The purposive sample of nurses were recruited via Twitter and included nurses with a range of tenure in the profession, age, roles, employment settings and from all four fields of nursing. Six themes were developed from the data using reflexive thematic data analysis. Findings: This study found that the experience of professional enjoyment of nursing was strongly associated with ‘being a nurse’, ‘making a difference’, from fee…
This paper surrounds the discussion of Szasz’s ideas regarding mental disorders from his publication ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’. Not only are these ideas relevant today due to the mind-brain problem in psychiatry not being resolved, leading to varying ideas about the best practice in mental psychiatry, but also because of similar issues to those which inspired Szasz to suggest a new way to understand mental disorders still affecting mental healthcare service users today. Therefore, if Szasz’s ideas can be proved as defensible against their most common critiques, I claim they could be of use to improve modern mental healthcare. Specifically, I use hermeneutics to uniquely criticise Graham’s argument from the ‘In/Of’ Distinction, iterations of which have commonly been used to disprove Szasz’s ideas. This critique not only disproves that the ‘In/Of’ Distinction is enough to criticise Szasz, but also demonstrates the impact that our sociocultural context has on our expectations relating to mental disorders. I t…
This thesis emerges from the climate emergency of recent years and the international efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Although energy retrofitting residential buildings has demonstrated the ability to deliver up to a 90% reduction in energy use and offers multiple benefits on a national and dwelling scale, the level of retrofitting remains very low in Europe. This study aims to holistically investigate what the most effective energy retrofitting strategies are technically, economically and in terms of acceptance by homeowners, for improving energy use and thermal comfort in existing residential buildings in Albania. The evidence from 49 case studies of residential buildings in Albania reveals they have poor energy and thermal performance, overheat in summer and have low indoor temperatures in winter, making energy retrofitting an urgent need. Eight retrofitting scenarios have been investigated for eight main archetypes of the Albanian building stock, in terms of energy savings and improveme…
This PhD by Publication explores hospitality undergraduates’ and graduates’ perceptions of careers in the international hospitality industry. The thesis is based on eight published articles; the first published in 1990 and the final one in 2018. The selected papers include conceptual and empirical work, and used a variety of research methods including questionnaires, interviews and case studies. This thesis argues that, although past studies recognised that many hospitality students chose not to follow a hospitality career after they graduated, they did not attempt to understand sufficiently when their career intentions changed or to explain why. My work posits that the high attrition rate of hospitality graduates can only be understood by taking an approach at three different levels (individual, organisational and societal) and incorporating the views of undergraduates, graduates and employers. It is argued that the experiences and changing attitudes of these actors need to be examined in a variety of organ…
What characterises courageous people, and what enables them to be courageous? This practice-based social sculpture research project investigates these questions by analysing the pathways of people who became activists and through an introspective assessment of my own experiences as an activist. My findings are based on 21 semi-structured interviews with human rights and environmental activists, men, and women, between 19 to 80 years of age, from 16 countries, including Iran, Mexico, China, Russia, and Botswana. The sample is characterised as a group of people who engage publicly and for the benefit of others in sharing a humane, ecological, and just society without using violence. I recorded the interviews on video, analysed these recordings through a transdisciplinary and autoethnographic lens and made short films based on each interview. The reflective commentary complements the practice-based social sculpture research project: Courageous activists are not born but have been shaped by their families, role …
The general aim of the current thesis is to explore the impact of evolution on human subjective well-being. Its original contribution lies in exploring whether the kind of worries philosophers and psychologists might have when reflecting on human morality and reasoning in the light of evolutionary influences might also apply in the context of subjective well-being. Are there evolutionary influences that might produce biases, mistakes, or inauthentic judgments and evaluations of our own subjective well-being? As evolution only cares about an organism’s reproductive fitness, there seems – at least on the surface – to be room to be wrong in that domain.
Organisation and management studies often consider the notion of identity in relation to profession, professionalism and professionalization. What is under-developed is how professional identities are constructed in domains that are contested, under-defined or in transformation. Private security offers a unique research site. Contested yet increasingly legitimised following the Private Security Act 2001, the UK private security industry is under-researched as a site of meaning in professional lives. Using identity as analytical bridge between self and sociality, this thesis investigates the relationship between broader discourses of security and professionalization processes in the development of professional selves at different levels of analysis. Processes of professionalization have been expedited since the founding of the Security Industry Authority (SIA), tasked with ‘ensuring only fit and proper people and organisations deliver regulated private security services’ (SIA 2019). There are numerous stakeh…
The research investigates the relationship between acousmatic music and instrumental music, using developments in 20th century western art music to define its context including the compositional practices of Arnold Schoenberg (d.1951), Claude Debussy (d.1918), Nikolai Roslavets (d.1944), Luigi Nono (d.1990), Iannis Xenakis (d.2001) and Natasha Barrett (1972-). This was a practice-based PhD resulting in the creation of a series of new compositions for a variety of forces that addressed the following research questions: 1. What have been the problematics of the development of compositions for acousmatic and acoustic instrumental forces and how are these present in the work of the key practitioners referenced above? 2. What are the cultural conditions that have precipitated the perpetuation of the problematisation of the relationship between acousmatic and acoustic compositional practices? 3. Is it possible to generate a series of original sound compositions that explore and provide potential solutions to the pr…