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Purpose — This chapter examines links between mobility, risk of social exclusion (SE) and well-being and uses its findings to impute a value to improved (or reduced) mobility. It applies the relevant value to show the benefits of the Melbourne route bus network and to estimate loadings on individual services that are required for service user benefits to break-even with service costs.

Methodology — The research findings are based on econometric modelling of risk of SE and well-being, as a function of a range of likely contributory factors. The modelling draws on household travel survey data and on survey data specifically collected on factors thought likely to affect risk of SE and/or well-being. These factors include social capital, sense of community, household income and trip making, together with a range of psychological and personality variables.

Findings — The modelling shows that a reduced risk of SE is associated with increases in social capital, sense of community, household income and trip making. A lower risk of SE, in turn, is associated with improved reported personal well-being, which is also affected by a range of psychological variables and age. The analysis shows that additional trip making is very highly valued and that this value increases as household income declines. A case study that applies the resulting values shows that Melbourne’s route bus services produce benefits almost four times their costs and that the ‘social inclusion’ benefits calculated in this research comprise the largest single benefit component. This result is particularly important in supporting further investment in improved public transport services.

Queer theory is a form of critical analysis that aims to destabilize hegemonic discourses around sex, sexuality and gender, particularly in relation to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities. This discursive chapter focuses on how queer theory, when transformed into method, or queering, provides a more embodied and holistic understanding of student learning in higher education. It notes that, whilst queering has become an applied method in some areas of higher education research, it has yet to address the phenomena behind university students’ sexual orientation and a more general orientation towards or away from study and learning. Core to such a method is: a four-dimensional paradigm for understanding the power of dominant discourses related to the body and orientations to learning – performance, performativity, materiality, and incorporeality; explorations of orientations towards or away from learning in which sexually influenced pleasure/shame amplifies those orientations; and longitudinal narrative enquiry.

Self-regulatory organizations (SROs) can be found in education, healthcare, and other not-for-profit sectors as well as in the accounting, financial, and legal professions. DeMarzo et al. (2005) show theoretically that SROs can create monopoly market power for their affiliated agents, but that governmental oversight, even if less efficient than oversight by the SRO, can largely offset such market power. We provide an experimental test of this conjecture. For carefully rationalized parameterizations and implementation details, we find that the predictions of DeMarzo et al. (2005) are borne out.

Rational choice theory has numerous implications for the analysis of organizational governance structures. This chapter reviews some of these applications. The main emphasis is on relational contracting. It will be argued that repeated games theory, that is, a variant of rational choice that deals with rational agents who repeatedly interact, can explain the outcomes of relational contracting. There is some controversy about the merits of rational choice explanations. Can they deal with inefficient structures and their (alleged) stability, with path dependence and mimetic processes? Many of these issues have been addressed by new sociological institutionalists. It is argued that rational choice analysis is in fact consistent with many of these observations. There is, in other words, some convergence between rational choice and institutionalist approaches.

This paper describes and extends the game theoretic approach to network vulnerability assessment. The basic idea is to set up a game between the network users who are trying to minimise their expected travel time by choice of route and a network tester who is trying to penalise the users most by degrading a link through capacity reduction leading to congestion. The method therefore finds the worst possible location for a link degradation, taking re-routing options into account (an upper, lower bound of impact). The original game identifies the weakest link for routes between an OD pair in the network. Two variations are introduced in this paper in order to determine the weak links for a specific origin or a specific destination and for the whole network. All three game variations are tested on a small network in Leicester and the results are presented.