The decision-making process, as the human component of the system, has been either neglected or oversimplified in many ways producing negative effects on the development of useful and fully adopted decision-support systems and in the identification of research priorities, recommendation domains, targets and media in technology transfer activities. These weaknesses of the Farming Systems Research and Extension have diminished their impact in producing development in agriculture. The study of this process seems to be fundamental to overcome the above explained weakness through incorporating the human "block" in the building process that is already taking place within this discipline of the agricultural sciences. The aims to this thesis were: 1-To develop a conceptual model of the decision-making process based on the literature and identified key issues to be studied. 2-Study the Objectives hierarchies, the Decision-making units and the Personal Information sources, as components of the process, in terms of factors affecting them and defining the population profiles. 3-Quantify the impact of these decision-making profiles on management and on the bio-economical performance of the farms. The conceptual model developed showed a very complex decision-making process with multiple components, steps, information flows, actors and activities. Three aspects i.e. Objectives, Decision-making units and Personal information sources, were identified as very relevant to be studied. Results showed that a synergetic affect of age, educational level and the dimension of the farm had the biggest impact on the Objectives hierarchies, Decision-making units and actors involved, and on the preferences towards different personal information sources. In terms of Objectives hierarchies, a very diversity of orientations was found, from the monetary maximisation to familiar and personal orientations, being the former the most frequent. In terms of Decision-making units the results showed that the importance of the units depends, apart from the farmers'/farms' characteristics, on some intrinsic characteristics of the farming decisions and that some very strategic decisions are either delegated or shared with several actors.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:662242 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Solano Patiño, César |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/27436 |
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