Publications

Health lifestyles are collective patterns of health risk behaviour that develop within a social habitus. An important area for research is the extent to which health lifestyles become more individualised over time and as people age, or whether health lifestyles remain socially structured. This article presents findings from a Multiple Correspondence Analysis of the British…

Sustainable development is widely regarded as a necessary principle for the resilience of Europe’s rural regions. However, formulating a strategy for sustainable development involves the careful negotiation of multiple scales of environmental discourse, from the global down to the local. Global environmental issues such as climate change are instrumental in shaping the parameters of regional…

Recent initiatives for increasing participation in UK elections have yet to replace the traditional method of in-person voting at designated polling stations. Recent research has shown that voter turnout can be sensitive to geographical factors relating to the costs of voting, such as distance travelled to the polling station; government policy has stated that accessibility…

This paper seeks to understand the status of and changes in the Welsh automotive industry in the wake of globalization and the consequent structural challenges. Hailed as a budding leader in Europe in terms of auto-component production (where Wales purportedly boasts of supportive institutions, high quality infrastructure and flexible labour conditions), its ambition to maintain…

Aim – understand the characteristics and outcomes of those participating in ESF funded projects Methodology – telephone survey of people who were identified as having left an ESF project during 2009. – Details of 10,201 learners provided by WEFO – P2 and P3 projects only – and partial coverage Wave 1 conducted 17th Feb to…

My concern in this commentary is the discrepancy between cultural psychologists’ theoretical claims that meanings are co-constructed by, with and for individuals in ongoing social interaction, and their research practices where researcher’s and research participant’s meaning-making processes are separated in time into sequential turns. I argue for the need to live up to these theoretical…

A created community, a Nation State, is strengthened by a sense of fair and equitable treatment. Within Nation States the allocation of public funds through national budgets acts to contain regional inequality and to provide a positive response to structural decline. The UK Treasury accepts need as the correct guide to spending on public services…

Something peculiar seems to have happened to education in Wales. Not long ago, there was widespread consensus that parliamentary devolution had allowed successive Welsh Assembly Governments to develop important and imaginative policies across the whole range of educational provision, from early years to the universities. These policies were celebrated not merely because they were distinctive…

Business entrepreneurs are at the heart of a dynamic, knowledge based economy. Understanding the early stages of business growth is critical to the development of a thriving economy. However defined, the rate of entrepreneurship in Wales consistently lags behind most regions of the UK. This policy brief reviews the connection between entrepreneurial activity and socio-economic…