Intuitive Learning from Locational Decisions

Vladimirov, Aleksandar B (2025) Intuitive Learning from Locational Decisions. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This PhD project focuses on intuitive learning from locational decisions. The main aim is to understand the experiences of learning resulting from such decisions. A learning perspective can help frame the investigation in a way that some relevant disciplines such as place branding and behavioural economics have not explored yet. The empirical study underpinning the thesis takes a qualitative approach that describes in detail the locational decisions of 19 participants over time in order to propose there could be structure to this long-term learning process. The participants faced multiple situations when they relocated. Their heuristical learning about how to best find their ‘fit’ was thematically organised. Participants’ descriptions of what it means to learn to make rational locational decisions are organised into a learning process including the relationships across themes. This learning process accumulates over time and is influenced by shifting identities, attachments, and priorities over life stages. A typology of heuristics describing how to navigate the process shows how these heuristics seek to satisfice practical, social, and emotional needs. Practical needs are organised under themes of jobs, cost of living and maintaining a familiarity with a type of place. Social needs are thematised under codes relating to the needs of close ones and the shift of focus towards their needs over one’s own in later stages of life. Finally, emotional needs are thematically organised to outline the tension between the practical and social, as a need to be oneself while fitting in with a place. This process and its components are defined as a novel concept of place-actualisation.