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Academia is facing increasing demands in the design and delivery of their degree programmes due to resource constraints and the demands to embrace. The purpose of this article is to examine the requirement for quality education in the field of supply chain management. The approach adopted here is a reflective one, looking at recent trends in postgraduate Supply Chain Management (SCM) education and focusing in particular on a new mode of delivery, that of e-learning. The paper considers the development of SCM education and presents the range of supply chain management programmes and modules being offered across a selection of UK universities. The article also highlights the dynamic character of SCM education and considers whether the e-learning format is capable of responding to the requirements for quality in this field. Through a focus on one particular programme, the wholly online postgraduate programme in Operations and Supply Chain Management at the University of Liverpool. The conclusions are that new forms of teaching and learning are opening up to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The aim of the\ud research was to discover the real time dynamic of SCM practice and theory, objective and subjective perspectives.

A small part of the self-help housing campaign has been the slow emergence of the Community Land Trust (CLT) movement. CLTs are heterogeneous not only in terms of their scale and urban/rural contrast, but because the motivation behind their inception appear to be so different. In this paper we draw on the concepts of resistance put forward by those such as Ward (1996) and Scott (1985) and look specifically at two CLTs. In our two cases we find activists who work within the conditions and constraints under which home ownership ideology is generated. Both cases are located in major US cities, one in Boston and one in New York, and offer an insight into why a particular type of community organizing took place. We see a stand against gentrification in the heart of Manhattan, radical action to secure the ownership of land and to prevent displacement in a Lower East Side neighbourhood. In contrast, the second case shows a stand against the violence exerted in the degeneration of a South Boston neighbourhood. Here we see a community conversant with civil rights struggles who were able to secure the compliance of the local state through their direct action. Our work shows how narratives of resistance rely on activists and professionals who both share similar aims in resisting the hegemony of private capital and the state and in their resistance, highlight the contradiction between housing as commodity and housing as a process, something that is a central dialectical puzzle to the CLT movement.

This research applies Karl Polanyi’s theoretical framework to explain how entrepreneurship is constructed in the context of place by focusing on north Liverpool. Entrepreneurship research continues to be dominated by an economic tradition that presents a growth-focused, profit-seeking ‘entrepreneurial hero’. Although this has been addressed in approaches that emphasise processes and context, the underpinning thinking often remains rooted in economism. This is particularly problematic for low-income places like north Liverpool, where economic thinking results in market solutions for problems created by market failure. The experience in Liverpool illustrates that policy prescriptions to address social welfare and local economic transformation based on economistic analysis are not working. This research suggests a Polanyian approach to re-socialise entrepreneurship by considering interrelated instituted economic processes of market exchange, reciprocity, redistribution and householding. A two-stage qualitative approach sought to understand the broader context of entrepreneurship through in-depth interviews with stakeholders, followed by case-study research comprising ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with two business support providers and their clients. As key influencers on business start-ups, these support organisations provided a lens through which to view the influences, strengths and weaknesses of the dominant heroic entrepreneurship narrative, and to understand the other instituted processes at play. Analysis revealed the contested nature of entrepreneurship in Liverpool: The mainstream market logic epitomised by the growth-focused entrepreneurial hero, coexisted and intertwined in reciprocal, redistribution and householding processes that were underpinned by supporting social institutions of market, community, state and family. The Polanyian framework applied, challenges mainstream approaches to offer a re-socialisation of entrepreneurship. Consideration of interrelating instituted economic processes offers an enhanced understanding of entrepreneurial context by drawing attention to underpinning structures that influence context creation; and democratise entrepreneurship by opening it up to diverse motivations and influences. Recognising that new business creation relies on markets, government, community and family, has implications for policy and practice. Revealing the level and nature of existing state support justifies its redirection to create inclusive local economic growth that values community businesses, social enterprises, small business and the self-employed. Offering scope for transformation in low-income places like north Liverpool.

Overall, this thesis is concerned about what makes who feel good and function well, by offering an epistemological, methodological and theoretical framework for wellbeing research. To mobilise these ideas, throughout this thesis I build on and contribute to three sets of literatures: i) relational wellbeing is the understanding that being and becoming well is a process of unfolding possibilities with other human and non-human actors and environments across multiple scales of people, places and power (Atkinson et al., 2017), ii) feminist version of dwelling challenges the dichotic assumptions of wellbeing and dwelling (like ill/healthy, outward/inward, alone/together, nature/culture) and argues that we need to engage in the in-between spaces of these spectrums to develop wellbeing possibilities (Todres & Galvin, 2010), and iii) feminist epistemologies and theory are critical about the way that we usually produce knowledge around who is deemed healthy or functional and looks at tools to challenge these power dynamics (Ahmed, 2017). I bring these literatures in conversation with questions pertaining to mental health and wellbeing and their interface with political precarity, austerity, and home (Hall, 2018). I understand home as a nexus or site where a variety of different trajectories and scales (like the intimate, socio-material, economic, historical or political) come together, jump across one another, and are, in the process of researching them, explicitly brought to the fore in the form of personal stories and idiosyncratic experiences. The main body of this thesis comprises three articles: i) a conceptual engagement with wellbeing epistemologies, ii) an empirical study that looks into the experiences of 18 mental health service users through an an arts-based method called Story Houses, and iii) another empirical study that combines Story Houses with interviews of 14 community land trust activists, a type of social housing. My empirical findings together with the theoretical underpinnings put forward an integrative, cross-scalar framework for thinking about wellbeing in a web of wider persisting inequalities, and socio-political and environmental changes.