ABSTRACTStudents developing their theses/dissertations can find it difficult to justify their methodologies from a philosophical perspective. The objective of this article was to provide guidance to higher education students and to help them to select the right philosophical framework for their chosen methodological approach. For this purpose, a simple and concise description of key research philosophies currently used for either qualitative, quantitative or mixed method research is provided.

Recent research has identified a connection between ancient identities and the surrounding landscape during the Roman era in Shropshire, UK. Specifically, archaeological sites associated with distinct identities, characterised by abundant material culture remains, tend to be located in highly visible places. This suggests that their placement was intentional, possibly to signal wealth, status, and territorial control or to oversee slaves and tenants working nearby. This article aims to build on that research by examining the relationship between these identity-linked sites and the broader landscape using ArcGIS techniques. The analysis found no significant correlation between the identities and the wider landscape. Instead, all sites—regardless of identity—are situated near watercourses, Roman roads, and areas that minimise human effort and energy expenditure. These findings imply that ancient groups’ perceptions and management of the landscape varied depending on the spatial scale considered.

Estudios de la participación laboral según género normalmente consideran un solo sector económico a nivel país. Si bien esta simplificación permite obtener resultados apropiados para políticas generales de igualdad laboral, este nivel de agregación podría ocultar dinámicas laborales más complejas que se verifican a nivel regional, particularmente en países con gran diversidad geográfica. El objetivo de este artículo es precisamente estudiar esas dinámicas en dos macrozonas de Chile, conocidas por ser áreas menos desarrollas. Tal como se esperaba, los resultados sugieren que una política nacional no es suficiente para abordar la participación según género, pues un tipo de impacto económico tiene distintas repercusiones según se trate del sector y del territorio que se analiza. Basándose en esta evidencia, este trabajo propone que sean las Autoridades Locales quienes también se sumen a las Políticas Públicas Nacionales para la nivelación de la participación laboral.

A common form of cooperation in rural areas corresponds to informal alliances in which farmers save productive costs, for example, by sharing inputs, machinery, and information. By reducing costs cooperatively, these alliances contribute to agricultural land management by increasing efficiency. Despite the benefits, these alliances are typically formed by a small number of farmers. Some researchers attribute this lack of participation to distrust. To model this type of cooperation, this article extends the traditional Network of Collaboration approach which has traditionally been developed in an oligopolistic context. While oligopoly is a type of market structure that can exists in agriculture, most of the farmers who participate in informal cooperation are small enterprises suggesting that the price-taking assumption is a more realistic description for these farmers. We use this market structure extension to show that profit-maximising farmers consider the positive impact of cost reduction; the negative impact of distrust; and the expected gain in output when joining new informal alliances. As such, recommendations are provided to integrate these three factors to facilitate the formation of beneficial informal network alliances in the rural landscape and their positive externality in agricultural land management.

The distribution of archaeological sites in the rural landscape has attracted the attention of researchers over a long period of time, leading to the several site distribution approaches that have been proposed to explain existing patterns. The main disadvantage of some of these approaches is that they assume a priori a site distribution based on some assumed behaviour such as profit maximisation, among others. The objective of this article is to propose a methodological approach, based on network theory and visibility data, that can generate models that emerge from existing data without imposing a priori assumptions on site distribution. In this approach, archaeological sites are seen as nodes, and visibility between them as links. The approach was applied to a sample of Roman Britain sites located in the Marches of the Welsh Borders. As expected, a model of site distribution emerged from the proposed approach, and the results suggest that people in the Roman period organised the landscape in subareas according to functional as well as symbolic considerations.

This article proposes a novel methodology designed to identify past/ancient identities from archaeological information available in rural landscapes. It consists of a quantitative stage based on network analysis followed by a qualitative analysis based on phenomenology. Such methodology contributes to the field of mixed method research in two ways. First, in contrast to existing approaches that use people’s opinions to collect data, the proposed methodology extracts information from archaeological remains and the landscape; second, it extends the scope of topics considered by the field of mixed method research. The methodology was applied to the study of identity evolution in the Romano-British period in Shropshire. The results illustrate the potential of the proposed methodology to understand the formation/evolution of past identities.

This article outlines the development of landscape archaeology in Britain from two perspectives, namely: methods used to identify patterns and changes in the landscape; and theories used to explain these changes.Current conflicting theoretical views are discussed, and the adoption of the mixed method approach as a possible future development that may bridge these contrasting views is examined.

Several policies have been proposed to reduce the environmental impact of agricultural trade. However, a number of these policies have low efficiency on a global scale due to side effects on third-competitor countries. The objective of this article is to assess the consequences of these policies under the existence of market failures that characterise the agricultural sector (i.e., ex ante price uncertainty and oligopoly in international markets). In particular, it is shown that some of these policies could cause instability in the agricultural trade system in the short/medium run, as well as permanent adverse side effects on competitor countries. Using a theoretical dynamic model that includes these failures, it was found that instability could be reduced by supplying information that could help producers to improve price forecasting. Likewise, the adverse side effects could be prevented by means of sustainable policies adopted co-ordinately by competitor countries. This latter result is consistent with the general strategies stated by the Climate Club.

Purpose This research explores the purchasing behavioural drivers of young Chinese consumers purchasing foreign clothing brands. The aim is to include a range of drivers identified by different investigations into a single approach, to determine direct and indirect channels by which these drivers influence purchasing behaviour, and their relative importance in quantitative terms. Design/methodology/approach The methodology is based on an extended version of the theory of planned behaviour that considers hypotheses based on a number of studies revised in the literature review. This theoretical framework was used as the basis for a questionnaire applied to a sample of 362 young Chinese consumers. A Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling approach was used to analyse the collected data. Findings The results revealed three main channels influencing purchasing behaviour which were shown to share the same root, corresponding to the influences of the social network young consumers belong to. This result suggests that social norms have a key role in explaining young consumers' purchasing behaviour through its impact on their needs for status and social recognition, their attitudes towards foreign cultures and foreign brands, and their beliefs regarding the attributes of foreign clothing. Practical implications The work therefore provides companies operating in the foreign clothing market the confidence to devise business strategies that focus on the channel demonstrating the highest influencing power. A strategy likely to have the highest influencing power is one that uses celebrities to promote the reputation of products and reinforce the messages associated with status and social recognition. Reinforcement of these strategies could include secondary strategies linked to the other channels such as the one related to the adoption of foreign cultural symbolism. Originality/value In contrast to the majority of related studies, this investigation also explores indirect channels or paths by which a behavioural driver affects the behaviour of young Chinese consumers. In fact, this investigation not only simultaneously identified the different paths influencing young Chinese consumers purchasing behaviour but also quantitatively identified their relative importance.

A significant number of deserted medieval rural settlements have been identified in Europe. These sites are at risk of disappearance as a consequence of current urban development and cropping intensification implying that relevant features of the cultural landscape informing about past rural traditions in the European countryside may be lost. The objective of this article is to illustrate this fact by means of a case study consisting of a deserted medieval rural upland settlement in Wales. A field walk carried out in this site revealed that old rural traditions and past ways of living can be identified from its own bodily engagement with the surrounding landscape. This evidence is used to argue that strategies that involve personal experience of deserted medieval rural settlements such as agroturism may be implemented to protect these sites and the cultural information contained in them.

A number of drivers of innovation in rural areas have been identified by different researchers. However, the robustness of these drivers through different business environments (i.e. stable vs. turbulent business environments) has not fully been explored so far. The objective of this article is to fill this gap by analysing farmers’ incentives to innovate before and after a policy shock referred to as the Sugar Regime reform. For this purpose, a probit econometric model was adopted and run with data obtained from a questionnaire supplied to ex-sugar beet farmers in Shropshire, UK. The results revealed that drivers of innovation may change under different business environments. Based on this result it is proposed in this article that farmers reach a steady state in stable environments where they have few incentives to innovate in order to favour long run goals. In contrast, in turbulent business environments this steady state is broken and short run drives of innovation are triggered.

It is commonly argued that today's historic landscapes are the result of change in the past and it is in the nature of the landscapes to be changed as society's needs evolve. This article provides an argument against this proposition. This argument suggests that the evolution of society's needs may also lead to preserved landscapes when both these needs can be satisfied in these landscapes and when individuals place high value upon them. In considering this idea, it is argued that an increase in the society's need for heritage tourism may lead to preserved landscapes.

The stability of international trade networks has been investigated using the pairwise stability concept. This concept is suitable to study the formation of bilateral agreements. However, it cannot be used to determine the stability of global trade agreements. This article proposes an alternative stability concept that can be adopted to determine the stability of global agreements such as the Doha agreement. This concept is named in this paper Global Treaty Stability.

Current evidence has revealed that international markets of a number of agricultural commodities operate under oligopoly. This paper uses a theoretical framework to show that under this market imperfection and when farmers do not have perfect information about the prices they will receive in the future, an unstable model arises. It is predicted from this result that high degree of export instability might arise as countries continue to sign international trade agreements. The paper argues that in order to minimise this problem, informational strategies should be implemented at the farming level.

The anthropogenic effect on the landscape is a well known phenomenon. This effect not only can be identified from archaeological remains, but also from old and modern maps showing changes in the landscape character in terms of historical attributes and remains. In order to study and manage the historical dimension of these changes, characterisation-based approaches have been developed. This article describes the main characteristics and principles of these approaches and their possible evolution in the future. The article also shows some applications that have been made in England with the purpose of illustrating the potential of characterisation-based approaches to manage historic landscapes in other countries.

A recent study in the area of international trade networks found that global free trade (GFT) is pairwise stable. This finding has led to the conclusion that bilateralism is a building block for GFT. The current article uses an alternative stability concept to show that international networks other than GFT are the only stable networks when governments are politically biased. The main implication of this finding is that the use of bilateral agreements as a political tool to reach GFT can in fact lead to inefficient stable networks.

International trade of organic food has increased dramatically over the last decades and it is dominated by a South-North relationship in which small farms of the South hemisphere export their production to countries of the North. These farms are currently facing important challenges in this relationship that negatively affect their ability to compete in international markets of organic goods. It is argued that the use of family labour can help farmers of the South to gain competitive advantage. The objective of this article is to present a counterargument based on the idea that the use of family labour is not feasible in some countries of the South given the nature of their rural labour market. This counterargument is supported by a case study.

The aim of this article is to review economic approaches that have been adopted to explain how farmers adjust in response to business environment change (e.g. policy reforms). In the first part, traditional economic approaches to farmers’ behaviour are described. After that, an important existing research gap in this academic area is highlighted.