This book explores the application of Soft Systems Methodology in educational research as a qualitative research tool to generate theory, and identifies the mechanisms that engender the behaviours and discourse of social groups. Grounded within the literature from philosophy and science, the approach is predicated on the ontology and epistemology of critical realism. The authors consider the tenets of systems thinking, recognizing that emergent features appear at higher levels of complexit...

Retail has never existed in a vacuum.This interdisciplinary volume explores how English commercial, co-operative and charity retailing were shaped by and in turn influenced their social and political environments, from the local to the global, between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.Historians, sociologists, archivists and heritage professionals engage with current debates on the rise of modern business and the decline of the high street, class and cred...