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This study aims to draw observations on the current status and potentials of the Philippines as a farm tourism destination and identify the underlying factors that inhibit farm tourism development. It intends to gauge the challenges that Filipino farmers face in diversifying farms and operating farm sites and uses these challenges in crafting strategies and policies for relevant stakeholders. It also provides Philippine farm tourism literature to address the limitations of references in the topic.

The study adopts an exploratory type of inquiry method and secondary data collection from various sources, such as published journal articles, news articles and reports, to gain insights and relevant information on farm tourism. The study also uses a threats, opportunities, weaknesses and strengths analysis approach to develop competitive farm tourism strategies.

The Philippines, with vast agricultural land, has the necessary base for farm tourism, and the enactment of the Farm Tourism Development Act of 2016 bridges this potential. With low agricultural outputs, the country draws relevance for farm tourism as a farm diversification strategy to supplement income in rural communities. While having these potentials, crucial initiatives in physical characteristics, product development, education and training, management and entrepreneurship, marketing and customer relations and government support must be implemented. Farmers' lack of skills, training and capital investment potential to convert their farms into farm tourism sites serves as the major drawback. Thus, developing entrepreneurial and hospitality skills is crucial.

This work presents a historical narrative of initiatives and measures of the Philippine farm tourism sector. It also provides a holistic discussion and in-depth analysis of the current state, potentials, strategies and forward insights for farm tourism development.

This study aims to explore the relationship between folk religious place-making and the development of urban public spaces and summarize its influence on community network construction and daily behavior to discover the authentic practices and role of folk faith culture in social space.

Taking Macau's Shi Gandang Temple and its belief culture as an example, on-site research, historical evidence and interviews were used to elaborate and analyze the processes of place-making, social functions, management mechanisms and folk culture to establish a new perception of folk religious place-making in contemporary urban spaces.

The article argues that the culture of folk beliefs profoundly influences urban spaces and the social management system of Macau and has a positive significance in building the local community and geopolitical relations. In addition, it suggests that the participation of folk religious places in local practices is important as key nodes and emotional hubs of local networks, reconciling conflicts between communities of different backgrounds and driving urban spaces toward diversity while forming a positive interaction and friendly cooperation between regional development and self-contained management mechanisms, governance models and cultural orientations.

This study takes an architectural and anthropological perspective of the impact of faith on urban spaces and local governance, using the Shi Gandang Temple in Macau as an example, to complement related studies.

As many businesses faced economic disruption due to the Covid-19 pandemic and sought financial relief, existing bank relationships became critical to getting a loan. This study examines factors associated with the development of personal relationships of rural small businesses with community bank representatives.

We applied a mixed-method approach. We employed descriptive statistics, principal factor analysis and logistic regression for data analysis. We distributed an online survey to rural small businesses in five states in the United States. Key informant interviews with community bank representatives supplemented the survey results.

A business owner’s trust in a banker was positively associated with the establishment of a business–bank relationship. However, an analysis of individual trust’s components revealed that the nature of trust is complex, and a failure of one or more components may lead to decreased trustworthiness in a banker. Small businesses that preferred personal communication with a bank were more inclined to relationship banking.

Due to the relatively small sample size and cross-sectional data, our results may not be conclusive but should be viewed as preliminary and as suggestions for future research. Bankers should be aware of the importance of trust for small business owners and of the actions that lead to increased trustworthiness.

The study extends the existing knowledge on the business–bank relationship by focusing mainly on social (instead of economic) factors associated with the establishment of the business–bank relationship in times of crisis and high uncertainty.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of two micro trends on the future marketing functions of national tourism organisations (NTOs): the increasing power of individuals and the irreverence of NTO’s current marketing functions.

Through a discussion of the literature driving the two identified micro-trends, a number of supportive sub-micro trends were also identified and explored.

The paper concludes that NTO’s have failed to recognise the growing distrust of monolithic organisations. NTO’s seem to be more concerned about their own survival, rather than providing a service to both their citizens and tourists. Also NTO’s have failed to acknowledge that tourists are much more confident in making their own decisions, based on marketing information from their own trusted “closed friendship groups”, rather than relying on NTO’s.

The paper is based on a discussion of issues from only two micro-trends, but tourist decision-making processes may be more complex than suggested.

The paper concludes that in the near future there will be an increasing rejection of NTO’s marketing information, and in the longer term this may result in the demise of NTO’s. However, if NTO’s are to survive, it suggests two actions they could take to ensure their future relevance to both its citizens and tourists.

Questioning whether national/state organisations always act in the best interests of its citizens, challenges the trust in NTO’s. The paper suggests that NTO’s recognise that their power relationships are more strongly linked to ideals of nationhood and endorsement by their international peers, rather than providing services to tourists.

This paper questions the implicate assumption that NTO’s should be a trusted source of marketing information. It suggests that NTO’s have failed to recognise the changing methods tourist use to help in their decision making.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors that make Beirut a fashion hub by studying the characteristics of creativity and the role of the different stakeholders in setting an environment that encourages creativity in Beirut.

The methodology of this research is based on a literature review and information collected through semi-structured interviews with the different stakeholders of the sector.

The research reveals three results. First, this dynamic fashion design in Beirut is explained by the international success of some Lebanese fashion designers. Second, as there is an absence of any form of governmental intervention, the development of the sector is totally based on private business initiatives. Third, the research demonstrates the importance of the local culture, knowledge exchanges and lifestyle in shaping creativity and designers’ careers in Beirut.

These findings contribute to the clarification and critical analysis of the current state of fashion design in Beirut, which would have several policy implications.

The retail sector is not largely studied in Italy. The study offers a comparison between youth retail shift work in Milan and London. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the one hand on youth work and on the other hand to the debate on agency and structural factors in life planning, representation of the future and the transition to adulthood, observed in the United Kingdom's and Italian labour market. Even if the second one is a Southern European Country, these contexts are both characterised by a service-oriented economy and the widespread of precarious and flexible jobs.

Qualitative methods were used: one year of ethnographic observation, 50 interviews and two focus groups were carried out between 2015 and 2018 with retail workers and trade unionists. The contexts are Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, Italy, and Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom. Analysing young workers' discourses, the author identifies narratives that allow to grasp their present agency and imagined future.

Observing the crisis of the narrative (Sennett, 2020) allows to highlight the social consequences of working times on young workers' everyday life and future. The author argues that young workers struggle with the narrative of their present everyday life and the representation of the future. This relates to the condition of time alienation due to the flexible schedules and the fast pace of work in retail, both affecting the work-life balance.

The social consequences of flexible schedules in retail and fast fashion sector, which are new issues not yet sufficiently explored, are here investigated from the perspective of young workers. The study is focussed on the representations of young people working with customers in social and economic contexts characterised by flexible schedules and the deregulation of shop openings, the so-called 24/7 service society, not largely investigated in the sociological scientific literature, above all in the Italian context.

This study primarily aims to analyse stakeholder management challenges and how these emerge in the stakeholder landscape in a large hospital project. From this analysis, the authors aim to identify the implications that stakeholder management has on value creation in a hospital project.

The research method is qualitative. Empirical data were collected in three cycles: project internal documentation, thematic interviews and survey. The literature related to hospital projects, stakeholder analysis and management, stakeholder salience and landscape is summarised, informing the qualitative design of the study.

The authors noted the importance of project-specific stakeholder identification, salience analysis and landscape description. The regulatory, formal and contractual stakeholders give an over-simplistic picture on stakeholder map. The operative stakeholder map and landscape describe the complexity, uncertainty, dynamism and institutional context inducing the challenges for the stakeholder management. There is an evident potential of utilising the stakeholder landscape and its elements in the resulting collaborative value creation in hospital projects. Multiple and changing stakeholders with differing expectations are an important opportunity to improve the value creation process.

Stakeholder management has recently attracted much attention in the industrial project setting. This research attempts to identify the operative stakeholder landscape in a large hospital project, not to mention its impact on value creation. This study offers a framework that can help academics and project management practitioners tackle the challenges amongst project stakeholders.