Smallholders now grow most of Malawi's main export crop – burley tobacco. Based on nineteen months' fieldwork in the Central Region, this article offers a sociological interpretation of why some smallholder growers spend a proportion of burley income on conspicuous consumption in rural towns...

The vibrant debate on randomized experiments within international development has been slow to accept a role for qualitative methods within research designs. Whilst there are examples of how „field visits? or descriptive analyses of context can play a complementary, but secondary, role to...