Entrepreneurialism,commodification and creative destruction: a model of post-modern community development

The desire to experience the countryside ideal is a growing trend among North American residents. Entrepreneurs have reacted to this by commodifying the countryside and its associated rural heritage. The result has been the creation of heritage shopping villages: centres of consumption providing postmodern consumers with tangible keepsakes of the past. While contributing to the accumulation of capital within the community, investment in commodification may lead to destruction of the rural idyll. The process by which this occurs is outlined in a stage model of community development. The model is then tested in the community of St. Jacobs, a picturesque village located in the heart of Ontario's Mennonite country. It is concluded that the model presented here may be a useful tool for geographers and planners interested in guiding the fate of communities whose development has occurred around the commodification of the rural tradition.     

The politics of marginality in Wallowa County,Oregon: Contesting the production of landscapes of consumption

The state of Oregon’s (USA) land use planning framework has long been characterized by tensions between state and local authority, between traditionally-defined “urban” and “rural” concerns, and between the competing interests of various landowners. An examination of Wallowa County, Oregon’s implementation of House Bill 3326, a 2001 law giving counties the power to define certain agricultural lands as “marginal,” and therefore exempt from restrictions on subdivision and development, illustrates the ways in which these tensions become magnified as rural communities attempt to govern private land use in the context of rural restructuring. Implementation of HB3326 highlighted the tensions between landowners interested in capitalizing on development opportunities afforded by HB3326, neighboring producers concerned about interference from future amenity migrants, and existing amenity migrants with interests in protecting their rural idyll. Contestations over nonfarm development took place in the context of a strong agricultural community identity, concerns about the effects of economic restructuring on producers, and local resistance to the rural gentrification process. The process of defining marginality came to encompass not only technical issues of land productivity, but also broader community contestations over the continuation of traditional land uses and the legitimacy of various actors to govern private land.     

Rescuing a small village school in the context of rural change in Hungary

The paper discusses local responses to schooling policy in the context of the uneven differentiation and sharp social polarisation of the Hungarian countryside. Counter-urbanisation, on the one hand, has brought affluent urban middle classes to suburban spaces, on the other hand, peripheral areas are becoming impoverished with high unemployment, while there are rural areas where a process of ghettoisation is taking place. Parallel with these processes, rural education has had to face demographic decline and the shrinking ability of municipalities to maintain schools. The case study presented in this article illustrates the cultural and spatial barriers impeding the creation of co-operation in the field of education. Given that the community of the village concerned is remarkably vibrant, with strong intra-community horizontal ties, the concept of social capital is used to explain how bonding and bridging networks as well as “missing links” influence community actions, in this case a school-rescue operation.     

Power,capital, and artistic freedom: contemporary Chinese art communities and the city

This paper offers a critical review of the proliferation of the contemporary art colony in China since the beginning of the twenty-first century in the context of China's promotion of cultural creative industries as one of the strategies for urban development and economic growth. Through analyzing cases in Beijing, Xi’an, and Sanya, cities ranging from ‘first-tier’ to ‘third-tier’ in their size and status, the paper explores the challenges and opportunities many contemporary Chinese art professionals find themselves face amid the competitive city image building campaign, a top-down movement led by local state and private investors in cities across China. It is evident that contemporary art and alternative art spaces associated with it have been drawn into the process of commodification, inadvertently recruited to play an ancillary role in the reproduction of the hegemonic collusion between political power and capitalism in a rapidly urbanizing China. Nonetheless, I argue that the inclusion of contemporary art communities as a player in the production and reproduction of the urban space has provided critical-minded artists, critics, and curators opportunities to participate in the reconfiguration of the physical and cultural landscape of Chinese cities, albeit not always with positive outcomes. As such, some art professionals are able to appropriate the process of capitalist urbanization to create their own ‘infrastructures of resonance’ [Thompson 2015. Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century. Brooklyn: Melville House], which support artistic freedom and facilitate the growth of diverse forms of cultural creation and exchange despite the coming dominance of ‘power plus capital’ [X. Wang 2003. A Manifesto for Cultural Studies. In: C. Wang, ed. One China, many paths. London: Verso, 274–291].     

“Either Side of Delphy Bridge”: A deep mapping project evoking and engaging the lives of older adults in rural North Cornwall

This article reports on work to date by an arts practice-led research team exploring older adults’ conceptions of, and connectivity with, the physical, social and cultural landscapes in which they locate themselves. The team is based at the Department of Art and Design, University of the West of England (UWE) and has conducted fieldwork, interviews and small-scale interactions in an area of rural North Cornwall with a view to “deep mapping” older adults’ “lived landscapes” using a variety of practical methods derived from creative arts practices, critical reflection on deep mapping, ethnographic approaches, and referencing a range of theoretical positions. The project forms part of a work package within “Grey and Pleasant Land? An interdisciplinary exploration of the connectivity of older people in rural civic society” (abbreviated below as GaPL), funded by the UK Cross-Research Council ‘New Dynamics of Ageing’ Programme. In what follows we will describe and critically discuss the fieldwork undertaken and the various ways in which the performative interactions and the creative multimedia evocations that draw on the team’s interactions with older people might extend the growing dialogue between deep mapping, visual and other innovative ethnographies, and critical gerontology.     

Les métiers flous du développement rural

Along with the notion of development, new jobs have emerged characterized by: a vague, overall definition; an ambiguity as to roles (especially in dealings with locally elected officials); makeshift statuses; and occupational itineraries that cannot be reduced to civil service careers. As this examination of their work over three decades shows, the autonomy of rural development agents has been related to a “phase of invention”, when the switch was made from rural planning to development. Role ambiguity still prevails and has even spread, owing to the social conditions of employment, to occupational itineraries. Given the cofinancing of public authorities’ “territorial actions”, we see a couple forming between elected officials, who want to take hold in an intercommunal territory, and development agents, who “create their jobs” by capturing subsidies. Over this 30-year period, a peculiar image of “fuzzy jobs” has emerged.     

Weaving new retail and consumer landscapes in the Scottish Borders

New retail locations and formats and changing consumer capabilities and behaviours (including “switching”) have encouraged “outshopping” from rural to urban areas. Rural areas have been suffering from a decline in the provision of services, including retailing. One “solution” has been the strengthening of market towns in rural areas by the development of new major retail stores. The effects of this are perhaps not fully understood, particularly where the rural area comprises a network of towns rather than a single centre. Three comparable consumer surveys (1988, 1998, 2004) of shopping behaviour in the Scottish Borders are analysed. Consumer place and store switching data are used to examine the impact of new retail opportunities on shopping patterns. Two different switching strands are identified: clawback and redistribution. Redistribution within the rural network is a new finding.     

Sylvanian families: The production and consumption of a rural community

Concepts relating to consumer behaviour are brought together with notions of the idyllic English rural community to begin examining the importance of material culture in the formation of attitudes towards the English village. The resulting commodification of rurality is examined with the help of case studies of producers and consumers of Sylvania, a ‘collectable toy’.     

Needs for rural research in the northern Finland context

The aim of this paper is to discuss the needs and demands which rural research faces at the interface between research and development. The case study area is northern Finland, which constitutes the most remote and sparsely populated areas of the European Union. This paper is based on the tradition of rural research since the 1980s in connection with the development of programme-based rural and regional policy. Rural researchers are desired actors in rural and regional development projects and programmes both at the national and regional level, but their challenge is to fulfil both academic standards of their background research organization and the often very practical needs of local and regional rural development actors. According to the opinions of rural actors in northern Finland, the definition of rural research is somewhat unclear and multidisciplinarity of rural research seems to give a free hand to carry out many kinds of research under the title. The needs and demand for rural research(ers) are quite practical and are mostly connected to the creation of new job opportunities outside primary production and development of villages via proposals given by researchers. The major result of this study is that rural research is highly appreciated both in programmes and among actors on the “field”, although the real role given to research remains unclear in most cases.     

A conceptual framework for the strategic urban project approach for the sustainable redevelopment of “villages in the city” in Guangzhou

China’s recent wave of rapid urbanization generated a specific form of urban development called the “village in the city” (ViC). It is characterized by the dual urban-rural structure and it accommodates, to begin with, the monumental housing needs of rural migrants. Although the issues of ViCs are very specific and enormous, they evidently have a lot in common with those of slum areas and dilapidated urban areas in developed and developing contexts, in which there already is a long experience with upgrading or urban renewal operations. Also in this specific context of upgrading and urban renewal, the strategic urban project approach is generally being advocated. It emphasizes vision development, the coproduction by stakeholders and the implementation of actions. Strategic urban projects are the cornerstone of this approach. This paper sketches a conceptual framework for the strategic urban project approach for the sustainable redevelopment of “villages in the city” (ViCs) in Guangzhou. It makes an attempt to translate the methodologies of the strategic urban project approach to the Chinese context. Adapting the method to deal with the multi-stakeholder environment and complex issues in ViCs is indeed necessary in order to obtain a sustainable redevelopment of ViCs. Consideration is given to the roles and partnerships of key stakeholders, visions at different levels, and specific actions that deal with opportunities and issues in strategic locations.     

Comment transformer un produit en marchandise et lui attribuer un prix : le traitement de la viande dans la grande distribution

Several social science studies have described the conditions under which goods and services become merchandise. In 2002, Sociologie du travail [Sociologie du travail 44 (2002) 255-287] presented contrasting approaches to “quality” by focusing on the processes of identifying and evaluating goods. Approaching this question from the angle of meat-packing provides us with means for accurately describing the relevant operations in this commodification as well as the way that mass marketing has shaped the two aforementioned processes. By leaving aside operations specifically intended for customers and concentrating on those used in mass marketing, we see how meat is “objectified” as it circulates, and how its value and price depend on processing the data ensuing from this objectification.     

Grandchildren's perspectives on grandparents in rural New Zealand

Within studies of ageing, rurality and family relations, the prevalent “point of view” is based on the perspectives of adults, particularly older people themselves. However, taking seriously the reciprocal nature of kinship relations also challenges researchers to find ways to explore younger people's views and experiences of intergenerational ties. The study on which this paper is based addressed this challenge, by considering the dynamics of ageing in rural families through the lens of young people's experience. In the South Island of New Zealand, Area Schools serve families in rural regions specifically defined in terms of a catchment area based on distance from any other state school. This research study selected five (from 16) of these schools, and invited the classes of Year 7 and 8 students to take part in a classroom activity, led by the researcher with support from the class teacher. The activity involved a total of 98 young people (aged 11–13) in written completion of a survey which outlined their relationships and contacts with the people they know as grandparents, along with basic demographics of their own age, gender, family and household situation, and length of attendance at the school. From this survey, information was derived about 380 grandparents (of whom 73 were no longer alive), the nature and frequency of their contacts, and the types of activities they shared with these grandchildren. Around 40 percent of the students have daily or weekly contact with a grandparent, one third “regularly do things together”, and one fifth say they have “a special relationship” with a grandparent. By controlling the age group of the grandchild, and focussing on rural families, this study adds insights and detail to a growing body of research interest in understanding the roles and contributions made by grandparents to New Zealand families, in particular those in rural communities.     

Coming out and coming back: Rural gay migration and the city

This research focuses on the complex meaning and role of the city in American and French rural gay men’s imaginary and life experience. It explores how gay men who grew up in the country build their sense of self through back-and-forth movement from rural to urban spaces. Therefore, it questions traditional gay migration studies, which have often equated gay migration and rural–urban migration, positing a unidirectional pattern. After contextualizing rural male homosexuality, this paper presents four life itineraries which highlight the central role the city has for rural gay men when exploring their same-sex desires and attractions. Based on the analysis of their life narratives, we show that for most of them, their coming out, their first same-sex experience, and coming to terms with their sexuality happens “far from home” in a city or a college town. However, this research suggests that the city has a more ambivalent role for rural gay men. While the city exists as a space of social practices where alternative sexualities can be experienced and explored, at the same time for many rural gay men the city remains substantially unattractive. In their view, the perceived “effeminizing power” of the city questions and challenges their attraction for this space. Therefore, the experience of the city becomes both liberating and disciplinary – liberating because it allows the exploration of their same-sex desires and attractions, disciplinary because it (re)presents a gay identity in which they find no resonance. Thus this research indicates that rural gay migration to the urban spaces, which is key to identity formation, includes not only departure to the city but also a necessary return to the country to maintain rural gay men’s understanding of themselves.     

Dissolving borders: Reframing risk,delinquent peers,and youth violence

Although “association with delinquent peers” is commonly identified as “a risk factor for youth violence,” this framework leads us to blame individuals and ignore the complex lives of youth who face state, symbolic, and interpersonal violence. This study is based on interviews with young adults about their adolescence in a low-income immigrant gateway neighborhood of Oakland, California. Most of the interviewees have peer networks that are racially/ethnically diverse and also include both delinquent and conforming peers. We show that having these “doubly diverse” friendship networks helps youth move through their neighborhood safely and feel anchored to their community even when they leave to attend college. Even successful youth in our study do not erect borders between themselves and “delinquent peers.” It is easy to assign blame to youth for their friendships, their violent behavior, their lack of education, their unstable and low-paying jobs, but this calculus ignores both the structural factors that constrain youth choices and the benefits that seem to be linked to diverse friendships, even with delinquent peers. Growing up in a site of global capital accumulation and disinvestment in the era of neoliberalism, our interviewees challenge us to reframe risk.     

Le modèle de « l'État-stratège » : genèse d'une forme organisationnelle dans l'administration française

Since the 1990s, a new organisational form of the administrative system in France has been steadily redefining relations between central administrations and local state units. Labelled “the steering state” or the “managerial state”, this new paradigm hinges on separating the strategic functions of steering and controlling the state from the operational functions of execution and policy implementation. The making of this new form of state organization involves two parallel processes: political and cognitive. For one thing, the adoption of concrete measures for “government at distance” results from power struggles between three major ministries (Home Office, Budget and Civil Service). For another, a new legitimate “categorization of the state” is being formed in the major committees involved in the reform process of the 1990s; it is borne by top civil servants and inspired by the ideas of New Public Management. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

State making and state terror

Conclusion The interesting question, therefore, is this: why have we seldom heard about the destabilizing consequences of Central government policy in the pre-1949 Chinese countryside? Surely one reason has to do with the fact that the well-known models put forth by Western historians to comprehend modern Chinese history and politics by and large left out the interest of the Central government. Up until the time Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions there were, generally speaking, three such models. In the first of these models, the Central government was said to have been a state blown apart by military separatism. Advocates of a second model acknowledged that Chiang Kai-shek led the Central government to defeat most of the aristocratic warlord armies of the 1927–30 period, but nonetheless portrayed the center as lacking the bureaucratic machinery necessary to penetrate the vast rural interior and halt the devolution of state power. According to Philip Kuhn, William Wei, and Philip C. C. Huang, this devolutionary process played into the hands of entrenched local elites who were against state building, or who, as Prasenjit Duara has brilliantly shown, acted as brokers to alter Central government claims in order to serve their own interests. Yet a third model was sketched out in the insightful historical studies of Lloyd E. Eastman. According to Eastman, the Republican center was real enough, but the plans of its policymakers to create economic wealth and expand their controls over rural society were confounded by factional infighting and cut short by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.To be sure, each of the preceding models has enriched our understanding of the relation of the Republican polity to rural society within a given time frame and in a given place. William Wei's study, which shows that Chiang Kai-shek's Central government was more or less compelled to compromise with local strongmen in order to pacify Jiangxi province in the mid-1930s, is but one convincing example of the warlord devolution of state power thesis. Thus Wei strikes a familiar Skocpolian note — that of a Republican state permeated by rival social interests — when he concludes that the inescapable irony of it all was that by restoring the rural elite to power, the Guomindang had actually undermined its long-sought goal of placing the countryside fully under Central government control.By way of contrast, the formation of collective protest among the peasant salt producers of North China cannot be explained by merely evoking one of the well-established models of the Republican polity. That the Central government and its political interest is missing in most scholarly accounts of the coming of the Chinese Revolution is not surprising, for as Bruce Cumings wisely has pointed out, scholars of agrarian political systems have not developed a sufficient understanding of what prompts rural people to rebel largely because they seldom know what the politics of particular state structures are. I suspect that the precepts of the past, in combination with the current preoccupations with social history, have blinded us to the larger questions about the Republican state and its role in inciting rural disorder. Yet by following Tilly, and by exploring the macrohistory of the Republican state, we can see that there was a Central government, and that Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Song, H. H. Kong, and other state makers made up the core of a ruling national clique bent on developing a political economy that would serve its own political interest. Having grasped this piece of the puzzle, we are in a better position to comprehend the political origins of collective protest in the countryside. Clearly, the Chiang Kai-shek center did have a major interest in salt revenue, and just as clearly the grievances and gatherings of the country people were linked to the revenue demands of the reconditioned gabelle. The emergence of popular collective action thus can be explained by the fact that China's country people could not adapt their lives to the Central government attempt to establish a political economy based on state monopoly and state-organized violence.Clearly, also, the Central government under Chiang Kai-shek did attempt to build its own state apparatus - its army, police forces, and bureaucracy — by developing new sources of revenue. By detailing the Republican state interest in taxing, or taking over, trade in rural products such as timber, salt, and coal we can begin to explore the process whereby the center reached deep into the countryside, and thereby advance our understanding of the progress made by the state in imposing its claims in the face of competition from provincial warlord regimes, county level actors, and village society. Few if any of the authors of the well-established models of the Republican polity have in fact looked systematically at the Central government quest for one specific type of revenue, or traced the development and extension of state revenue machinery within a given region, province, or county - let alone a village - over the long duree of modern Chinese history. My challenge to Skocpol, and the literature upon which her thesis is based, rests on just such a research strategy, that is, on evidence that the Central government was expanding its control over salt trade and over revenue from salt taxes in the North China interior during the Nationalist decade, 1927–37. By surveying the politics of salt, we have seen that the Central government Ministry of Finance was making some measure of progress in overcoming warlord controls, overriding the objections of local elites, and obliterating the structures of everyday peasant resistance.What does all of this suggest about the weakness of the Nanjing Central government? When Central government fiscal policy is placed firmly in the context of evolving state power, the Chiang Kai-shek center appears less anemic than is usually assumed - at least in this one issue area. To make this case, we need not deny that a condition of multiple sovereignty persisted in Republican China, or that Chiang Kaishek's Republic was not fully effective in its attempted expansion. But neither should we neglect the fact that the Chiang Kai-shek center was attempting to build a state in China, and that its state strengthening policies misfired and triggered collective protest. Such ill-conceived policies, along with the popular resistance to police efforts to enforce them, combined to place a major constraint on the state-building experiment.Thus, the fiscal claims of the Republican Central government itself combined with microlevel factors to produce this particular episode of collective protest. Gabelle-based income was one of the main pillars of Central government revenue from Yuan Shikai to Chiang Kai-shek. The center's attempt to transform China's long-established system of salt tax collection into a big profitable business was of course undertaken to pay off war indemnities and foreign debts and to underwrite state development. The problem was that progress in this sphere came at the expense of thousands upon thousands of village dwellers who shared an interest in the old earth salt economies of inland China. Understandably, the revved-up revenue collection machinery of the Central government's Salt Bureau - specifically the efforts of its tax police to seize the earth salt produced in peasant villages, which historically had been opposed to the official monopoly - drew the country people into confrontations and clashes with the agents of the state. Hence at the heart of this little known story is the resistance of China's salt land villages to a system of bureaucratic police controls supportive of the expansion of central state power. Of course for a more searchingly nuanced and complex explanation, we could factor in warlord politics, local elite inputs, and the factional intrigues of the Chiang Kaishek clique, but the important point is that the problem facing the country people was systemic, that is, the state-making process itself.Finally, the spirit of this episode of collective protest was not anti-capitalist. Rather, China's country people turned to collective action in order to preserve their longstanding rights to produce for the free market. The struggles of the peasant salt makers thus underscore the prevalence of the deeply structured market forces of which G. William Skinner has written, and remind us that rural protest sometimes took the form of a broad popular statement against state market controls. At the lower rungs of the rural marketing hierarchy, the peasant salt producers joined other pro-market groups, including local merchants and lower gentry, to prevent the Central government police from subordinating their communities to the state drive for revenue. Whether the Republican state was on the verge of winning this war on the popular market before World War II remains to be seen. But one point is clear: Central government interference in the popular market prerogatives produced a cast of angry characters who gained experience in organizing collective actions that transcended village politics, and their actions attracted the attention of Chinese Communist Party cadres who also were suffering from the repression of the protostate.     

Discourses on rurality in post-socialist news media: The case of Lithuania's leading daily “Lietuvos Rytas” (1991–2004)

The Soviet regime defined rurality as a collective-farm or kolkhoz-based society. Since the late 1980s such a state-imposed definition of rurality was rapidly unraveling under the tensions and conflicts produced by perestroika and post-socialist reforms. In the new politics of the rural, the role that the news media was playing in shaping public opinion on rural matters was of growing importance. The paper analyzes 3827 articles on rural issues published during the post-independence period (1991–2004) in the leading Lithuanian daily “Lietuvos Rytas” (LR). Two types of discourses in rural coverage are discerned. During the 1990s rural coverage in LR was reflective of conflicts and tensions between relatively prosperous urban classes which benefited from post-socialist reforms and pauperized rural population. Rurality was increasingly associated with the failure of “the moral modernization” of the rural population. Rural population was stigmatized as deficient in values and character, remaining in the grips of the Soviet mentality and state dependency and, therefore, unable to take advantage of opportunities created by the reforms. Since the early 2000s when economic situation in the country improved significantly and Lithuania started negotiations on European Union membership, rurality in LR coverage was gradually re-defined in EU terms as a socio-spacial entity shaped by regional, national, and local policies promoting multifunctionality of rural areas, well-being of rural communities, and active citizenship. Factors that influenced changes in rural discourses are analyzed. Impacts of changing discourses on rural identities, rural politics and policies are discussed.     

Les apories de la solidarité familiale Contribution à la sociologie des configurations de justice entre les familles et l’État, dans le cas français

Despite its many meanings, “solidarity” has once again become current in French to describe macro as well as microsocial relations. Social relations in and outside the family have not always been understood as instances of solidarity. But is this solidarity the same as the one established by the welfare state? Forms of family solidarity that have risen in esteem over the past two decades are “deconstructed”. The conditions for family solidarity are examined; and conceptual paradoxes, described. This approach suggests that family solidarity, as this concept is normally used, mixes together several systems of justice that should be clearly distinguished, especially if we want to put this phrase to a judicious social use.     

The situated self and the negotiation of a “bad” identity in therapeutic foster care

This article presents one of the three main findings from twenty-three observations over four months. The study critically analyzed the naturally occurring discourse used in two foster homes between caregiver and youth to negotiate the self. Three main discourse genres included, “you're bad,” “boys to men,” and “learn the hard way.” This article focuses on the “you're bad” genre and the linguistic tools used to impose and refute the “bad” identity. The findings elicit theoretical considerations, such as addressing aspects of selfhood (e.g., behavioral demonstrations) apart from the naturally occurring day-to-day context within which the self developed (e.g., the pre-placement living environment). It is recommended that future discourse analytic research examines the ongoing development of self upon the return to the pre-placement living environment or other permanent environment.