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Framing Rural Studies in the Global North
Mark Shucksmith and David L. Brown
Introduction
In 2011, the United Nations (UN) announced that one half of the worldās population lived in urban areas. More developed regions attained this level in the late 1940s, and typically exceeded 75% by the turn of the 21st century.1 However, the fact that population is concentrated in urban areas does not diminish the continuing importance of rural people, communities and environments. The vast majority of the worldās land and water is rural; most food and fibre is produced on rural land; energy and other natural resources are extracted in rural environments; major infrastructure such as transportation and communication is largely located in rural space; and, while a minority, rural population is still numerically significant even in highly developed and urbanised nations. Accordingly, rural population, economy and space still play a major role in producing national development and well-being. This book examines the organisation and transformation of rural society in more developed regions of the world. Moreover, while the bookās various chapters contribute to disciplinary knowledge of rural structure and change, they also provide a synthesis of current knowledge on various aspects of rural society, economy and environment that might inform public and private decisions and policies. Our focus is on the global north even though we agree with Woods (2012) that there is an āunbridged divideā between rural studies in Europe, America and Australasia (the āglobal northā) and the rest of the world.
Over the past 80 years, rural studies has developed into an international and interdisciplinary endeavour that examines a wide range of social, economic and environmental issues as well as policy responses to such processes and changes.2 This book is timely. In the decade since scholars last took stock of rural challenges and opportunities (Cloke, Marsden & Mooney, 2006), a global economic crisis has erupted and persisted; globalisation has penetrated ever more deeply into rural regions, economies and communities; new technologies for extracting natural resources have been deployed; and evidence that human activities, including those occurring in rural environments, are contributing to climate change has increased. All of these developments prompt much new thinking about the role of rural people, communities and environments in relation to economic prosperity, food security, global warming, environmental degradation, energy exploration, social justice and human rights.
What is āruralā?
But first, what do we mean by āruralā? This seemingly simple question is notoriously difficult to answer. Despite many critiques, rural and urban continue to be portrayed, if not as polar opposites, then at least as distinctly different entities. Many see the rural as epitomising the good life and being the antithesis of modernity. Others see rural in a less positive light, setting rural communities in opposition to the supposedly creative, dynamic, innovative and fluid nature of urban relations. As Murdoch, Lowe, Ward and Marsden (2003) have observed, two main conflicting narratives, pastoralism and pre-modernity, shape our perceptions of rurality. Pastoralists often see rural areas as repositories of cultural values or even national identities and seek to protect their romantic notion of rural life from outside influences. In contrast, modernists see rural areas as essentially backward and requiring transformation and development so that their residents can enjoy the tangible benefits of the modern world. A further view is that our separation of urban and rural is merely a construct of capitalism: rather than describing surface appearances we should focus on the underlying social and economic processes of global capitalist exploitation, āenclosureā and land ownership (Levitas, 2015).
Not all social scientists conceptualise and define rural and urban in a similar manner. Often a distinction is drawn between social constructivism and a more structural/demographic approach. The demographic approach came first and is still influential in research and analysis conducted by national and international statistical agencies throughout the world, and among a large share of rural scholars in North America, Australia and elsewhere. In contrast, the social constructivist framework is associated with the cultural turn in rural studies in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, and to some extent can be understood as a critique of the structural/demographic practice. However, neither approach is hegemonic, even in the USA and UK, let alone across Europe and internationally. Moreover, the view of rural as a social representation has itself been critiqued, as we shall see. The authors and editors of this Handbook acknowledge both these approaches and their critiques.
Social scientists in North America and elsewhere examine rural society and rural social change as part of the urbanisation process. Late 19th- and early 20th-century scholars were concerned with the impact of urbanisation and industrialisation on social life, social relationships and social control (Durkheim, 1938; Wirth, 1938). While this scholarly traditionās legacy lingers, contemporary scholars and researchers are less interested in examining the nature of rural social life, and more concerned with the implications of living and working in rural environments on life chances and opportunities, as well as the role played by rural communities, economies and natural environments in a nationās overall development trajectory and prospects. Accordingly, social scientific analysis of rural issues in present-day North America tends to focus on the determinants and consequences of structural transformations of rural economy and society, and on the interpenetration of urban and rural society that results from increased mobility of people, workers, capital, information and goods.
The structural/demographic approach typically uses quantitative or mixed methods research approaches. Most studies begin with a descriptive-comparative analysis that demonstrates how an outcome such as poverty, life expectancy, school dropout, underemployment, etc. varies across ruralāurban spatial units. It should be noted that the vast majority of scholars in this tradition reject the notion of a ruralāurban dichotomy, and rather operationalise rurality as a variable that spans from the most highly urbanised metropolises to hamlets and isolated dwellings (Champion & Hugo, 2003). Accordingly, the impact of rurality on socially, economically and environmentally important outcomes is not taken for granted, but is rather an hypothesis to be examined in theoretically shaped and motivated analysis. The main question is whether observed urbanārural variation is simply a reflection of differences in population composition (age, race, etc.) and economic organisation (the kinds of occupations and industries that make up local economies), as argued by Hoggart (1990), or whether more rural areas are different from their more urban counterparts net of these differences in composition. In other words, the social scientific question focuses on the role that rural place may play in determining life chances, health, other aspects of social well-being and economic security. More recently, attention has focused on the blurring of ruralāurban boundaries that results from a wide variety of mobilities that occur in the ruralāurban interface, a social and economic space that both unites and separates rural from urban (Lichter & Brown, 2014).
The structural/demographic approach to rural social science depends on being able to differentiate rural from urban as well as distinguishing important differences within the urban and rural categories themselves. Even the most hard-core analyst deploying this form of research would admit that quantitative distinctions among spatial units are somewhat arbitrary. However, this is true of virtually any classification of the natural, physical or social world. Most adherents to this approach would argue: (a) that classification schemes must be theoretically driven, for example, shaped by criteria such as population density, population size, and demonstrated interactions with external settlements, that are known to affect economy, society and environment; and (b) that the goal is to produce a classification system where within-category differentiation is less important than variability across the categories.3 More fundamentally, examinations of ruralāurban variability, and change therein, must be shaped and motivated by theoretical conceptualisations of the roles played by space and place in producing and reproducing locality-based social structure and social change.
Meanwhile, some European social scientists, especially rural geographers and sociologists in the UK, have been involved in a discursive journey to unravel the concept of rural. The main dimensions of this process are captured in Halfacreeās (1993) identification of four approaches to examining rural society and rural social change, and more recently in Halfacree (2006) and Woods (2009).
Descriptive studies rely on the premise that a clear distinction can be drawn between rural and urban areas that can be statistically measured, but these are tautological insofar as they rely on an intuitive sense of what is rural. The spatial determinism approach goes further, imbuing the environment with the power to determine social behaviour and relations, widely understood as an urban or a rural āway of lifeā (Tonnies, 1887; Wirth, 1938). Whilst such approaches have been criticised as empirically deficient (Pahl, 1965, 1968), the tendency to appeal to a rural identity remains important not least because of its common-sense appeal and political saliency. Rural locality studies drew on structuralist political economy approaches in the 1980s. These argued that forces of global restructuring had clear local manifestations and that these were different in rural areas, but Hoggart (1990) argued that causal processes transgress ruralāurban divides and so the restructuring thesis undermined the notion of ruralāurban distinction. A growing consensus then emerged within rural studies in the UK, associated with the cultural turn, that rural cannot be understood as a specific type of space, but had to be seen instead in terms of social representation (Halfacree, 1993; see also Mormont, 1990; Murdoch & Pratt, 1993; Pratt, 1996). Of course, this argument applies equally to urban space and to cities as social imaginaries (Amin & Thrift, 2002). Attention shifted, accordingly, to what people think of as rural, and the symbols, signs and images which people conceive of as rural. Such social constructivist approaches reinvigorated rural studies by examining what rurality means, and to whom. A focus emerged upon the social relations which overlie physical space, including their power-infused character; and upon the interconnections between different meanings of rurality and the institutional structures and processes of rural change. Building upon this are the deconstructivist approaches which stress the detachment of symbols of rurality from the practices of everyday life.
The view of rural as social representation has itself been critiqued since the 1990s, for example by Cloke (2006), with calls for the āre-materialising of the ruralā. One response has been the emergence of a ārelationalā approach to rural studies (Murdoch, 2003; Heley & Jones, 2012; Copus & De Lima, 2014), drawing on actor-network theory, hybridity and planning theory. Another attempt to rematerialise the rural is Halfacreeās (2006) threefold model of rural space as practised, represented and material, following Lefebvre (1991). This focuses on the interplay between distinctive spatial practices linked to production or consumption, everyday experiences of (rural) life, informal and formal representations of rurality, and the images and symbols which surround this. As the symbolic begins to take precedence over the material, the construction of rurality is contested between different groups ā it becomes a site of social struggle with very real consequences. For example, rurality in England may be constructed in such a way as to increase demand for rural residence while preventing supply, hence inflating property values and excluding middle- and lower income groups from the countryside (Sturzaker & Shucksmith, 2011). Halfacree himself illustrates his model with the example of the centrality of productivist agriculture in postwar rural Britain and its demise.
In summary, academic scholarship on rural studies in more developed nations is shaped and motivated by numerous contrasting conceptual/analytical approaches. Each approach offers different insights, and has its own strengths and weaknesses that readers must keep in mind when considering the results of empirical investigations. Regardless of their perspective, however, virtually all contemporary rural scholars reject the idea of essential differences between rural and urban areas, largely because economic, social and technological processes transcend such boundaries and empirical studies have exploded simplistic rural/urban dualities. The social constructivist arguments accordingly view rurality as an imaginary which has different meanings to different people, and whose meanings and symbols may be manipulated and contested as part of social struggles. Against this, āruralityā has a powerful and continuing resonance in lay discourses, such that rurality may be invisible only to the clever: the idea of rural only becomes problematic under close scrutiny by academics. More structural/materialist scholars focus attention on āmobilitiesā and how the increased velocity, volume and variety of movement in society and economy produces and reproduces places; restructures interactions within and among places; and transforms power relationships both within and between places, be they urban, rural or some combination of both.
Narratives of rural change
Change not stability is the normal situation for rural communities and regions. But change is not necessarily part of a ānatural processā. The fact that rural communities experience a wide variety of development trajectories is evidence that rural growth or decline is not simply part of a grand development narrative where natural endowments, geographic situation and other ascribed attributes determine a placeās future. Rather, rural places can be extremely active in shaping their own destinies. Hence, since rural places have highly variable assets, including social assets like institutional capacities, social relationships that contribute or inhibit mobilisation, and/or leadership, rural social and economic change typically results in spatial differentiation. However, while all places, rural and urban, have their own histories, it is possible to identify a number of meta-narratives that can serve as a heuristic framework for understanding rural change in the worldās more developed regions, and the competing, power-infused ways in which these are represented. The six narratives we identify are not exhaustive of the varieties of rural change, but they capture many of the accounts of rural change t...
