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Is Britain an open and fair society? Do people achieve career success and social status through talent and hard work? Or, is where we end up in life primarily determined by the circumstances into which we are born? It is questions such as these that we will be concerned with in this research project. Recent research into 'social mobility' has uncovered some uncomfortable truths about how meritocratic Britain really is and how it compares to other modern democracies around the world. In short, the evidence suggests that Britain is not becoming more socially mobile and compares rather unfavourably with its international peers. Yet, existing research on social mobility has focused primarily on national level questions about trends in social mobility over time. We know much less about how rates of social mobility vary across different regions, cities, and towns in Britain, or how variation in social mobility has been affected by changes in the school system. In this research, we address some of these gaps in our understanding of social mobility in Britain. We ask whether some parts of the country are more meritocratic than others; is London the only stepladder to upward mobility, or can those from less advantaged backgrounds also find success in cities like Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, and Newcastle? Have regional differences in social mobility been stable over time, or have some regions witnessed increasing or declining rates of mobility? Recent research has revealed that 'hot' and 'cold' social mobility spots are evident in the United States. We will consider whether more local variation in social mobility is also evident in Britain. In addition to assessing the extent of regional variation in social mobility in Britain, we will also consider how the change from a predominantly selective to a comprehensive system of education in the 1970s affected social mobility. It is often contended by advocates and opponents of grammar schools alike that selective education promotes (or hinders) social mobility. Yet the evidence base on which such claims rest is thin. In this research we will produce new evidence on a longstanding debate that has been reinvigorated of late by the Government's pledge to expand the number of grammar schools in the next parliament. We will address these questions by analysing a unique data source - the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Survey (ONS-LS) - which contains linked census records for over two million people in Britain between 1971 and 2011. The LS has a number of useful properties for studying social mobility, which mean we will be able to track representative samples of the British population from childhood to adulthood. We will compare people's occupations at different points in their working lives to those of their parents when LS members were children, decades earlier. We will calculate and compare 'mobility rates' for cohorts of people born between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s. The very large sample size of the LS means that we will be able estimate rates of absolute and relative inter-generational mobility at regional, county, and Local Authority District levels. In addition, by making use of the geographic information in the LS we will be able to differentiate between areas with high and low concentrations of selective schooling and how this has changed over time, so we can compare social mobility rates according to the school system that LS members were exposed to. The applicants have made extensive use of the ONS-LS in their previous research on social mobility and are thus ideally placed to undertake these analyses.

To develop an innovative social media framework and solutions serving the knowledge management, commercial, people and organisational requirements and deliver benefits to clients.

My doctorate will trace China's soft-power interactions with Africa through a study of Chinese communication via state-media organisations. Joseph Nye described soft-power, his theory concerning the use of cultural activities as a source of international power, as the 'means to success in world politics' (2005). In the Chinese context, soft-power is most actively pursued through public diplomacy: 'a country's engagement and communication with foreign publics for the sake of communicating certain narratives and images of the country' (Hartig 2016, 656). These engagements and communications takes many forms, such as state visits and the now ubiquitous Confucius Academies, but in bulk is the work of China's international state-media apparatus. China's leaders have certainly shown an enthusiasm for utilising the term ruan shili ('soft-power') in prose and rhetoric of the Communist Party of China (CPC), appearing constantly in the strategy statements of China's state-media organisations. However, the funnelling of soft-power strategies through these organisations opens them up the interpretations of very divergent structures and agents, who use these interpretations of their roles as soft-power resources to create China's African news texts. Utilising a 'bottom-up' method, my study will investigate how diversity within China's African newsrooms creates diverse content, and will seek to question how coherent China's soft-power strategy in Africa actually is in light of this divergences. To investigate this, I will examine the strategies, structures, and production of four Chinese state-media outlets in Africa. This study aims to have far-reaching implications to the study of soft-power, particularly in terms of its interface with state-owned media and the potential of non-liberal nations to exert soft-power through public diplomacy, and also to the understanding of China's international relations in terms of its increasingly contested global roles.

The office of ombudsman has become increasingly popular over recent decades to the point where it is now a highly significant and permanent feature of the legal systems in many parts of the world. As a method to solve disputes outside of the courts, ombudsman systems deal with many cases per year in both public and private sectors. Although originally established in the public sector, as a link between citizens and government institutions, the ombudsman model has, in many countries, now been adopted by the private sector too. The ombudsman landscape throughout EU member states presents a variety of institutional and jurisdictional arrangements, operational styles and decision-making processes. Although this poses some challenges in being able to conceptualise a unified ombudsman institution, it offers distinct advantages for the study of the relationship between decision-making practices on the part of ombudsmen and perceptions of procedural justice and levels of trust on the part of users across different jurisdictions and cultures. Despite the significance of ombudsmen to our constitutional and civil justice landscapes, very little is known about users' perceptions of the fairness of their procedures and practices and the significance of these perceptions for levels of trust in particular ombudsman offices. This project will fill this gap, providing important data and knowledge which will be directly relevant to the development of national policies and EU level multiple networks of policy-making.