What rural restructuring?

This paper emerges from a growing sense of disquiet over the regularity and often loosely utilised appearance of the concept ‘rural restructuring’ in the literature. The paper examines rural restructuring from two perspectives — as an analytical approach that emphasizes the need for a holistic view of change processes, and as a statement on the character of change in the countryside. The argument put forward is that restructuring ideas have much to commend them as an approach, even if theoretical improvement will require more diversity in ‘starting’ theoretical perspectives and a stronger willingness to engage with other theoretical stances when the weaknesses of a ‘starting’ perspective are revealed. This will entail approaching questions of rural restructuring from a broader range of perspectives than currently dominant visions, which are grounded in political economy. In exploring restructuring ideas as ‘facts’, the paper focuses on England, as this is a country in which rural restructuring is commonly reported to have occurred or be occurring. The paper argues that this vision of the English countryside is too poorly articulated and that support for this vision is far from convincing. It cautions that restructuring processes are less widespread than is often implied. Moreover, there are grounds for seeing restructuring processes are reifying the past, not heralding a new social dynamic.     

Advocating rurality? The repositioning of rural local government

Since 1979 the local state in Britain has experienced a period of considerable restructuring in which the power of elected local government has been severely diminished. As a new system of local governance, characterized by self-organising networks transcending the state, private and voluntary sectors, has emerged, so elected local government has had to re-imagine its role. This paper suggests that one strategy that has been adopted has been to re-position local councils as ‘pressure groups’, lobbying external actors on behalf of local interests. Furthermore, it is argued that in rural areas the restructuring of the local state has coincided with a wider social and economic restructuring and hence an intensified contesting of rurality. As such, it is argued that rural local government has become concerned not only with advocating local interests, but with advocating particular discourses of rurality. These assertions are discussed in the context of a case study concerning strategic planning for housing development in the district of Taunton Deane in Somerset.     

The Uplands after neoliberalism? – The role of the small farm in rural sustainability

The modernist project foresaw no role for small farms, but this can no longer be regarded as axiomatic as neoliberalism enters what Peck et al. call its “zombie phase”. This paper asks what contribution small farms in the uplands can make to societies’ goals, what role they might play in the sustainability of rural communities in such regions, and how this contribution might be supported by state policies. In Scotland and in Norway these questions have recently been the subject of policy debates which appear to offer exceptions or alternatives to neoliberal universalism, and these are considered specifically in this paper. In each case support for small farms is seen as necessary to maintain ‘lights in the windows’ of remoter rural areas. Moreover, each highlights the vital role of the state in offering not only financial support but also in regulating land transfers and occupancy. It is argued that the dismantling of such regulatory powers depletes the state’s ability to manage the tensions between continuity and change which are at the heart of sustainable rural development. The paper concludes that small farms can persist and can contribute to rural sustainability in ways that have been infrequently recognised under neoliberalism.     

Hidden losers? The impact of rural refugees and refugee programs on poorer hosts

Refugee relief organizations and refugee studies have refugees as their 1st concern and focus. Adverse impacts of refugees on hosts are relatively neglected. When impacts are considered, they are seen in terms of host country governments, economies, and services rather than people or different groups among host populations. In rural refugee-affected areas, the better-off and more visible hosts usually gain from the presence of refugees and from refugee programs. In contrast, the poorer among the hosts can be hidden losers. This is more so now than in the past, especially where land is scarce and labor relatively abundant. The poorer hosts can lose from competition for food, work, wages, services, and common property resources. Vulnerable hosts also lack refugees' option of sending their weaker dependents to camps and settlements. Development programs in refugee-affected areas and refugee studies will do a disservice if they neglect adverse effects of refugees on vulnerable hosts. These effects further strengthen the case for development to benefit the whole population in refugee-affected areas (author's).     

The restructuring of the U.K. financial services industry in the 1990s: a reversal of fortune?

Whereas for much of the 1980s the financial services industry was characterised by growth and expansion, the late 1980s and early 1990s was a period of redundancies and financial losses. This paper seeks to explain this reversal of fortune and the responses of the financial services industry. The restructuring of the financial System at a global level, through a process of disintermediation, and at a national level, in response to financial re-regulation, led to an intensification of competition between financial institutions and helped produce a developed countries debt crisis, founded in personal and corporate indebtedness. In the wake of this crisis, the financial services industry has been in transition. Bureaucratic labour market models have been overturned in favour of more flexible variants, while at the same time many financial services firms have engaged in the wholesale spatial reorganisation of their activities. One important consequence has been a process of ‘financial infrastructure withdrawal’, by which services and operations are withdrawn from certain social groups and certain localities. This process, which revolves around a rubric of risk reduction and a ‘flight to quality’, has introduced an element of exclusion and closure to the operation of financial Systems within developed countries. In this sense, the reaction of the financial services industry to the developed countries debt crisis mirrors that which followed the less developed countries debt crisis of the early 1980s; that is, abandonment and retreat to a more affluent client base. As was the case during the less developed countries debt crisis, the current process of financial infrastructure withdrawal has serious social and economic implications for those social groups and localities abandoned by the financial community.     

Networks — a new paradigm of rural development?

The network concept has become widely utilised in socioeconomic studies of economic life. Following the debates around exogenous and endogenous development, networks may also have particular utility in understanding diverse forms of rural development. This paper assesses whether networks provide a new paradigm of rural development. It seeks to capture a series of differing perspectives on economic networks — including political economy, actor-network theory and theories of innovation and learning — and attempts to show how these perspectives might be applied to different types of rural areas. The paper demarcates two main “bundles” of networks: “vertical” networks — that is, networks that link rural spaces into the agro-food sector — and “horizontal” networks — that is, distributed network forms that link rural spaces into more general and non-agricultural processes of economic change. It is argued that rural development strategies must take heed of network forms in both domains and that rural policy should be recast in network terms.     

The perfect storm? How to explain the rise of intergovernmental conflicts in Spain? (1984–2014)

As in other federal-like countries, intergovernmental relations in Spain are characterised by a series of conflicts between central and regional governments. But, which factors explain this dynamic of contention? This investigation operationalises intergovernmental conflicts through a specific dataset constituted by the volume of contestations between regional and central executives (and vice versa) in Spain before the Constitutional Court. This research demonstrates that from 1984 to 2014 the periods of absolute majority at the Congress and the victory of peripheral nationalist parties at the head of autonomous communities increased the level of intergovernmental contestations.     

The Who of Power?

How is the causative role of ideas appreciated in understanding the political economy of neoliberalism? What are the origin stories of neoliberalism and how are these related to the periodisation of capitalism? Is there a role for an explicit normative perspective in critiquing neoliberalism as a set of class relations? These broad questions are raised in this feature review, which looks at the latest work on the durability of embedded neoliberalism. It does so by highlighting the importance of revealing and critiquing ideas-centred assumptions within political economy in order to offer an alternative stance on the class relations, institutions, and ideology of present-day capitalism. As a consequence, reflecting further on the who of power remains an enduring challenge for political economy.     

Post-Fordism,union strategy and the rhetoric of restructuring: The case of Australia, 1980–1996

Theory and Society -     

What's rural about rural aging? An Appalachian perspective 1

Despite the recent proliferation of literature on the aged in rural society, considerable ambiguity remains concerning the appropriate conceptualization of rurality as a potential influence upon the experience of growing old. This paper considers three alternative conceptualizations: aging in rural environments, in which rural is viewed as an ecological context; the environment of rural aging, in which rural is viewed as a socio-cultural context; and the rural environment of the aging, in which rural is viewed as a phenomenological perspective of those who are growing old. The applicability of each conceptualization is considered in relation to insights arising from an ethnographic study of aging in a single rural Appalachian community and other research on the elderly of Appalachia. While each conceptualization has heuristic value, it is concluded that studies focusing on rural as a socio-cultural context or as a phenomenological perspective are the most likely to result in significant theoretical advances in rural gerontology.     

The role of the voluntary sector in the provision of rural services — the case of transport

The voluntary sector has become more fully involved in service provision in rural areas over the last 10 years and this paper attempts to assess its impact with respect to one particular group of services, namely transport. The importance of the initiatives which have taken place is outlined in a statement of recent policy changes, including the radical provisions in the 1985 Transport Act, and through a national review of the three principal kinds of voluntary transport services in rural areas — social car schemes, dial-a-ride and community buses. This review is followed by an in-depth analysis of the extent of the voluntary sector involvement in transport provision in Norfolk and Suffolk. Extensive tables are presented and the characteristics of the schemes outlined together with an assessment of the essential ingredients for success or failure.The conclusion reached is that the scope and scale of voluntary sector initiatives in rural areas is small, and they form no alternative to a more general and systematic provision of transport services. Further, voluntary sector activities may even increase the inequalities in service provision. Suggestions are made as to how the scattered developments could be brought together and developed through the parish councils, parish transport groups and the rural transport broker.     

The EU youth guarantee – a critical analysis of its implementation in Spain

The significant increase in youth unemployment in different parts of Europe caused by the economic crisis has led to the European Council Recommendation on Establishing a Youth Guarantee (2013). This Guarantee addresses the so-called ‘NEET’ (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) younger than 25 years of age and stipulates that employment, education or training shall be provided within a period of 4 months. As the initiative is relatively recent, in-depth analyses of its contents and implantation in the Member States are still missing. This paper analyses the European Recommendation and its implementation in Spain, evaluating its potential to improve the situation of the young people and society as a whole and its risks in provoking undesired side-effects. Our results question if the whole target group will be reached and highlight the measures’ low potential to promote a real and durable change. Increasing precariousness and insecurity and the tendency to only redistribute existing labour make it conceivable that the Guarantee may contribute to converting precariousness into a new labour paradigm for the whole population. The insufficient and retroactive funding of the Youth Guarantee can provoke negative side-effects for other social policies and the country's development. We conclude with several recommendations on how to improve the Youth Guarantee and its implementation.     

Once an outsider,always an outsider? The accessibility of the Dutch rural housing market among locals and non-locals

One of the most pressing questions in the rural gentrification literature is whether rural residents face difficulties in finding a home within their locality due to the influx of more wealthy newcomers. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which intended local movers and intended non-local movers have realised their rural residential preferences in their preferred municipality. We perform multilevel multinomial logistic regression analysis on data from two housing surveys for the Netherlands that are enriched with register data from the longitudinal Social Statistical Database (SSD). Our results show that, despite of their lower income, intended local movers are more likely to find homes within their preferred rural location than are intended non-local movers. Intended non-local movers move more often to a location other than that initially preferred, with urbanites facing a higher likelihood to move to an urban area. The findings suggest that ties to the residential environment are more important in successfully finding housing in one's preferred rural location than are financial resources.     

Is There Evidence of Loss Aversion in Saving Behaviors in Spain?

This study uses data from the 2005 Survey of Household Finances to investigate the existence of loss aversion in household saving behavior in Spain. Loss aversion refers to an asymmetry in saving behavior in response to increases and decreases in income, where income decreases have a greater effect than increases. Evidence of loss aversion in household saving behaviors in the U.S. has been presented in previous research, and evidence of loss aversion in saving has been found using aggregate data from Europe, but to date there are no household level studies on loss aversion and saving behaviors in Europe. The present results do not support the existence of loss aversion at the household level in Spain. The results indicate symmetry in the responses to positive and negative income changes, failing to provide support for loss aversion in household saving behaviors.     

Rethinking the changing structures of rural local government – State power,rural politics and local political strategies?

There is a notable absence in contemporary rural studies – of both a theoretical and empirical nature – concerning the changing nature of rural local government. Despite the scale and significance of successive rounds of local government reorganisation in the UK, very little has been written on this topic from a rural perspective. Instead research on local political change has tended to concentrate on local governance and local partnerships – on the extra-governmental aspects of the governance system – rather than on local government itself. In contrast, this paper draws upon strategic-relational state theory to explore the changing structures and institutions of rural local government, and analyse how these can be related to the changing state strategies of those groups which are politically powerful in rural areas. In this respect, the paper draws on current and previous rounds of local government reorganisation to illustrate how new objects of governance, new state strategies and new hegemonic projects are emerging as a consequence of such restructuring processes.     

Self-limitation of modernity? The theory of reflexive taboos

Theory and Society - This is not an introductory text in cosmopolitan sociology, but a next step into a cosmopolitan sociology, which preserves modernity, trying to construct taboos. It is a...