Farmers' Market consumers: a Scottish perspective

Farmers' Markets in Scotland have gradually developed since 1999 as an alternative retail outlet for consumers. Throughout the UK, shoppers have become increasingly concerned about the quality and safety of their food and as a result seek healthier, locally grown organic and non‐organic produce. Thus, the growth of Farmers' Markets is directly related to consumer demand for fresh foods, direct from source, with the high quality of products being a primary reason for shopping. Farmers' Markets are not only seen as a place to buy ‘good food’ but also as a means to express consumer values associated with food choices. Scottish Government efforts to revitalize rural economies through local enterprise initiatives is evidenced by funding the initial establishment of the Scottish Association of Farmers' Market (SAFM), formed in 2000 by market organizers to further their development. The benefits of fresh local produce for Scottish consumers, the revival of a sense of community and the concept of ‘new consumption spaces’ tied to locality means the rural economy benefits from the increase in activity and profits through direct sales. This research investigates consumption habits at farmers' markets through the use of attitudinal theories along with food behaviours and motivations for purchasing. The results demonstrate that a positive attitude is important but the influence of others and barriers are not. Consumers are particularly motivated towards resource conservation and there are distinct differences in attitude between urban and rural shoppers. This research provides a unique insight into the attitudes that influence and motivate Farmers' Market consumers in Scotland.     

Factor pricing in a finite economy

Prior theoretical derivations of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) bound an aggregate measure of the deviation of mean asset returns from that predicted by a linear pricing equation. It is conceivable, given this bound, that some assets might be badly mispriced by the model. In this paper, a more intuitive derivation of the factor pricing equation is presented which describes the deviation on an asset by asset basis. The deviation is shown to be small for assets in a realistic finite economy and is arbitrarily close to zero for those assets with arbitrarily small size relative to aggregate wealth. It follows that the linear pricing equation provides a good approximation for the mean returns of all traded assets.     

Rediscovering Deep Time: Sustainability and the Need to Re‐Engage With Multiple Dimensions of Time in Leadership Studies

The current article makes the case that increasing our comfort with and responsiveness to extended timescales—both the far future and past—is essential to leadership against the backdrop of wicked challenges that shape the current and future leadership landscape. We offer a loose structure of four dimensions of time—present, near, distant, and deep time—to help advance this work. We frequently fail in thinking about the broader impact of our leadership work for generations to come and to ground that work in our extended, collective history. In order to think about lasting leadership, and particularly when utilizing a framework of sustainability and peace, it is essential that we critically examine our relationship with time and better incorporate it into our leadership theory, practice, development, and education. We need to further develop our ability to relate to and make sound decisions based on an informed consideration of the futures we wish to create and the deep histories that have led us to where we are now.     

The Effect of Style,Feedback, and Context on Portfolio Exploratory Behavior

This paper reports empirical evidence for the impact of investor style differences and context on exploratory behavior within the management of investment portfolios. The paper looks at the effect of short-term feedback and context on behavior and offers new perspectives on the processes by which decisions are made under conditions of rapid change and uncertainty. The results show that search behavior is affected by feedback on short-term investment returns and the volatility of those returns, conditional upon investor style and context, with considerable evidence of both reactionary behavior and avoidance within the domain of losses. No evidence is found to support the disposition effect, with investors instead found to be more likely to review and cut material losses based upon overall context. The paper briefly considers cognitive explanations for the results and examines further evidence relating to the process of decision making within complex systems, the applicability of feedback loop models, and the impact of uncertainty on choice preference.     

Have economic educators embraced social media as a teaching tool?

In this article, the authors discuss the results of a study of the perceptions of a national sample of economics faculty members from various institutions regarding the use of social media as a teaching tool in and out of the economics classroom. In the past few years, social media has become globally popular, and its use is ubiquitous among students. As such, some instructors have incorporated social media into their courses to engage students. Others are reluctant to embrace social media, citing privacy concerns, social media being more of a distraction than a useful tool, and the challenge of keeping up with social media developments, among others. The authors characterize economics faculty's perceptions of the use of social media platforms for economic instruction.     

The limits of utilitarianism as a professional ethic in public sector leisure policy and provision

In a previous issue of this journal we developed a moral philosophical account of the relations between the paradigmatic leisure profession, leisure management, and it's clientele. Professional status was characterized as a set of relations necessarily involving moral authority and not merely technical expertise as is commonly supposed. In that account, professional paternalism was interpreted and justified differently in relation to the specific roles and relations incorporated in leisure management ranging from national policy planning to operational delivery. That position is developed and contextualized here by setting out an account of the nature of utilitarianism which is commonly thought to underwrite state paternalism in policy issues. The account charts the development within utilitarian thinking from its classical hedonistic beginnings in the thinking of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill into more sophisticated versions of welfarism in Amartya Sen. The essay sets out some critical difficulties in the application of a moral theory to leisure practice. It explores the limits to which utilitarian theories may specifically underwrite the leisure professional working in the public sector in a manner which, though paternalistic, is not disrespectful of the autonomy of its clients: citizens and consumers.     

The neoliberal project—Local taxation intervention in Scotland

This paper is concerned with one of the central economic aspects of neoliberalism namely taxation. The shifting of the burden of taxation from the rich to the poor has been one of the raft of neoliberal economic reform policies. However, there has been a growing social movement in the UK against such a regressive form of taxation. This was led by a socialist political party in Scotland.¹ This party devised a new taxation system which was specifically designed to reverse some of the economic inequalities brought about by the neoliberal turn. The new form of taxation, the Scottish Service Tax formed a bill (the Council Tax Abolition and Service Tax Introduction (Scotland) Bill) which was put before the Scottish Parliament in February 2006. This paper, taking a political-economy perspective, sets the possibilities presented by the bill within the context of neoliberalism.