Constructuring The Countryside

An Approach To Rural Development

Terry Marsden, Jonathon Murdoch, Philip Lowe, Richard C Munton, Andrew Flynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781857280395
• eBook ISBN: 9781135371852
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

As the first book in the Restructuring Rural Areas series, "Constructing the countryside" presents a new methodological approach to the analysis of rural change. The authors seek to link wider developments in the global political economy to the behaviour of local actors and, in so doing, they place research into rural studies much more firmly than hitherto in the mainstream of social science enquiry. The outcome is a book that promotes a truly interdisciplinary approach through which the constant "reconstruction" of the countryside can be properly understood. This holistic perspective, sustained by an historical analysis of rural change, has been made possible by the extensive research experience of the authors.; The book is a product of the work done at the London Countryside Research Centre, which was set up in 1989 by the Economic and Social Research Council. The Centre's research has focused upon the social and political forces for change in rural areas and how these relate to rapid alterations in national economic circumstances and to public policies affecting the countryside for example, the Common Agricultural Policy of the EC .; On the one hand, the book provides a set of insights into the trends that will guide rural change in advanced economies into the next century; on the other, it offers a challenging account of how they can be investigated.; "Constructing the countryside" will appeal to both students and staff in a wide range of social science disciplines, including agricultural economics, environmental management, planning, land economy, geography and rural sociology, and to all those concerned with the future development of rural areas.; This book is intended for students and researchers in rural planning and environmental/geographical studies, whether within a geographical or a sociological milieu.

CHAPTER 1

Rural restructuring

Introduction

The postwar boom petered out in the 1970s. Its demise ushered in a period of upheaval worldwide, and we are still living with the consequent political and economic changes. Because these were largely unforeseen, they have presented a profound challenge to established ideas and theories about the nature of modern society. A major intellectual effort directed towards establishing a new understanding has followed. Agreement on which social processes should command our attention and how they should be treated is most unlikely. Even so, the research agenda will almost certainly include analyses of the increasing mobility of capital, the adoption of more flexible production methods, the complex relations between technology and environment, the influence of more clearly articulated consumer interests, and the widespread deregulation and reregulation of economic and political structures.

The combined effects of these global tendencies are major sources of uncertainty for nation states, local communities and families alike, undermining regional economic and political stability beyond the major trading blocs and fostering greater diversity of local experience within them. They are also eroding traditional disciplinary divisions within social science. If nothing else, the contemporary processes of global restructuring emphasize how the political, the social and the economic interact within and between different local, national and international spaces. No one process is dominant.

These tendencies challenge all aspects of social enquiry, not least that to which this book is directed—the rôle of rural space in the restructuring of advanced capitalist economies. For our enquiry, they pose two more specific questions. First, do they suggest a significant and growing rôle for rural space in the emergent social and economic relations of modern societies? Secondly, if they do, what kind of conceptual and methodological framework would best serve such an enquiry?

We argue strongly that there is an urgent need to draw the study of rural areas and issues out of the margins and into the mainstream of social science, to reflect the contemporary economic and social salience of rural space. Crises of accumulation in capitalist societies necessitate the periodic and radical restructuring of production processes in order to establish new opportunities for profitable investment; one consequence is a reassessment of resources and spaces once considered unproductive or marginal. For a number of reasons, some rural areas once thought of as quintessential backwaters of economic activity have come to be seen as investment frontiers.

We will suggest, for example, that from the point of view of production, rural space is often attractive to capital, being less encumbered by earlier Fordist labour processes and rounds of investment; offers many new and more pleasant places in which to work and live than represented by the modern city and suburbia; and has become much more accessible as a result of improvements in telecommunications and transportation systems.

Rural areas have also long been repositories of small-firm entrepreneurship, which is now seen to be a key source of economic dynamism and innovation. At the same time, some of the new wave technologies, particularly biotechnology and information technology, are seen to favour rural locations. As Howard Newby has put it: “for the first time since the industrial revolution, technological change is allowing rural areas to compete on an equal basis with towns and cities for employment” (Financial Times, 8 December 1989).

In terms of consumption, especially among those large and influential sections of affluent societies that now place a high priority on non-material and positional goods as well as the accumulation of assets, rural space provides many soughtafter opportunities, such as for living space, recreation, the enjoyment of amenity and wildlife, and a wholesome and pleasant environment. Beyond these are considerations of deep-rooted cultural and symbolic significance that two centuries of industrialization and urbanization have not diminished. As Williams (1973:296) reminds us: “there is almost an inverse proportion, in the twentieth century, between the relative importance of the rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas”. Our argument, however, is far more significant than simply to suggest the re-emergence of certain gemeinschaft notions concerning the “quest for community”, or the historical maintenance of a rural idyll. It focuses instead on how, within an increasingly internationalized and serviceoriented economy, the constant repositioning of rural issues, ideas and opportunities in the national polity and economy is a central feature of contemporary capitalist development.

The urgent need for a new conceptual framework arises not only because of the nature and significance of these changes, but also because rural issues have been historically marginalized in social science. Previous research methodologies are inadequate as starting points. On the one hand, the rural community studies of the 1950s and 1960s failed to engage with a wider world while, on the other, the Marxian political economy of the 1970s treated rural people and areas merely as passive recipients of the vagaries of national and international forces. Moreover, elsewhere in academia, government departments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the study of the rural economy has been almost exclusively restricted to inward-looking analyses of agriculture. Conducted through the medium of neoclassical economics, as if family farming businesses could be reduced to the rigorous assumptions of such an approach, and as if agriculture were all that the rural represented, these analyses have produced a partial outlook that is of diminishing relevance to advanced capitalist societies. Such an approach may now being broadened but only under the pressure of events, and especially the decline in the postwar food production imperative. It has therefore largely failed to relinquish its agricultural orientation, from which perspective other social and economic demands on rural space are perceived as being merely a function of agricultural weakness.

Only when the wider demands on rural areas are placed centre stage will engagement with the ideas of mainstream social science become the natural way forward. As we outline below, this way forward depends upon a revised understanding of the interaction between the social and the spatial as well as the derivation of new questions of rural change. This change of outlook means that rural sociologists, the disciplinary group most centrally concerned with these issues, must also go beyond traditional agrarian concerns, which focus upon the political and social position of agricultural labour. They must embrace the position and rôle of rural people, notions of rurality in contem porary society, and the processes and structures through which access to and use of rural resources are constructed. These are quintessentially social science questions.

It will also be argued that the nature of production and consumption in rural areas shapes and is shaped by both the labour process and the organization of property rights. New types of production are engendering new forms of labour relations (Marsden et al. 1992) and both rely upon the changing nature of property rights. These structuring mechanisms are critical to the reproduction of power in rural areas. What is crucial to rural economic restructuring in particular is the conjuncture between external, mobile capital and the distribution of local property rights. Productive capital still needs access to property rights, and at as low a cost as possible; it also seeks partial and fleeting fixity so as to permit maximum flexibility of use. In the rural consumption sphere, however, many of the holders of property rights wish to regulate, through the local power structure, the location, quantity and quality of capital to be fixed.

The book thus focuses on a set of key themes concerning the changing position of rural areas and “rurality”, and seeks to ground its methodological concerns within a case study of the UK in the late 20th century. These issues may be summarized in three broad questions:

• How are international processes of economic and social restructuring being expressed and mediated within one nation state?
• How is the state “regulating” rural change and to what extent does the late 20th century represent a break with the past?
• How can conceptual advances in mainstream social theory be applied to the rural arena and, conversely, how can locally based social action be effectively incorporated into our understanding of uneven development?

New questions of rural change

In recent years, a small body of literature has sought to examine change in rural areas within advanced capitalist economies through a focus on economic restructuring. It has largely concentrated upon the importance of labour adjustment and the diminishing significance of agriculture and its associated property relations in conditioning rural social change (Rees 1984, Barlow 1986). Specifically, it has sought to challenge the seminal work of Newby, which is based on a Weberian analysis of social interests in rural East Anglia (Newby 1977, Newby et al. 1978). Instead, emphasis has been placed upon the nature of industrial (mainly manufacturing) firms seeking out new rural locations, often to take advantage of pools of relatively cheap labour, but more generally to lower costs of production in greenfield locations. The growing internationalization of capital has brought a greater degree of locational “flexibility”, with the quality and cost of labour power assuming particular importance. As Urry (1984:55) suggests: “as long as there could be sufficient labour in a ‘rural’ area then expansion may well take place in that [greenfield] site rather than in alternative areas. Cities have become relatively less distinctive entities, bypassed by various circuits of capital and labour power”.

It is therefore not surprising that in the USA, and the UK and other parts of western Europe new firm formation rates were higher in small towns and rural areas than in large urban centres (Keeble et al. 1983, Fothergill & Gudgin 1982, Hodge & Monk 1987, Champion & Townsend 1990). Increasingly, in more urbanized regions, service activities have also relocated in rural areas, thereby accentuating an employment pattern already heavily weighted towards the service sector. Another postwar feature has been the relocation of large manufacturing plants, or the expansion of public sector activities requiring remoteness (e.g. the defence industry and nuclear power stations).

More recently, some rural areas have been seen as contexts ideally suited to flexible, accumulative strategies for small businesses in a post-agricultural, postindustrial world. As Paloscia (1991) points out with reference to Tuscany, small businesses, both related and unrelated to agriculture, and in particular the existence of conducive social and cultural preconditions can provide the stimulus for flexible industrial development. Indeed, within many of the core areas of northern Europe and North America, rural spaces are now considered to provide amenable social conditions (i.e. a predominance of small-scale enterprises, family businesses and a cheap and adaptable labour supply) within which a diffuse system of production and service provision can flourish.

These transitions may be highly contested and locally variable. They are frequently being moulded by local actors and regulatory authorities, the outcomes of their interventions challenging facile generalizations about the attractiveness of rural locations for industrial activity. In the UK, for example, the growth of a residential middle class in country towns has been primarily responsible for drawing into them employment in personal and commercial services and public administration, adding to the traditional employment of tourism, retailing and the rural professions, while that middle class has resisted where it can the intrusion of “urban” forms of manufacturing activity. Instead, the availability of relatively cheap female labour has also encouraged the decentralization of administrative and clerical work. Moreover, because of their accessibility, environmental attractions and availability of highly skilled manpower, favoured rural regions (especially East Anglia, North Wales, the South and the South West) have drawn in employment in scientific, technical and financial services.

The empirical work so far conducted has frequently taken a partial view of the restructuring process, limiting its attention to economic and often only employment trends derived from aggregated statistical sources. This approach is unsatisfactory since it tends to subordinate rural economic and social change to the broader capital and employment restructuring processes previously described. It assumes a “top-down” causal argument when seeking to explain the uneven pattern of development, reducing rural areas to uniform and passive spaces upon which past, present and future rounds of capital investment engender radically different spatial divisions of labour. From this perspective, even if by default, rurality is largely seen as a descriptive and marginal category lacking explanatory power, and in which the variability and significance of local social action is ignored (Chs 2 & 6).

The emphasis placed on “urban” and “regional” frameworks of analysis has obscured a thorough understanding of restructuring in the rural context, beyond a tacit recognition that a trend towards flexible systems of production allows firms greater opportunities to establish and rearrange their organization beyond their previous spatial confines. We wish to suggest, however, that there are common sets of particular structuring mechanisms that operate in rural areas. These extend beyond notions reducible to economic terms and take the debate into social, political and ideological spheres. They also encompass a range of factors associated with relative access to property, as well as labour-market participation and opportunities, and include the historical particularity of state action in rural areas. These mechanisms, and appropriate means of investigating them, have to be integrated into a broader notion of restructuring if our understanding of the transformation of rural areas is to be rescued from a conceptual hiatus. It is imperative to respond to Newby’s (1986) call for a holistic analysis of rural social relations.

In the first instance, it is necessary to explore the common conditions of contemporary rural development in advanced economies. To varying degrees, rural areas share a legacy that springs from the social and economic relations of agriculture and other forms of primary production. This is the basis of the distinctiveness of their labour markets, which are characterized by local conjunctions of working-class quiescence, petit-bourgeois ownership of capital and small-scale enterprises (Bradley 1985). The postwar technological revolution in farming has transformed its labour process and diminished its overall significance as a major employer of rural labour. Nevertheless, as Whitener (1989) argues for the USA, and Newby’s studies demonstrate for eastern England, agriculture’s historical predominance still has important implications for the development of rural areas, conditioning the comparative advantages or disadvantages they offer to other fractions of capital. A predominantly agricultural local labour market can be seen as advantageous for new firms wishing to relocate in relatively low-wage and non-unionized areas. Agricultural labour shed today from small, industrialized and technologically sophisticated farm businesses may also offer a wide range of transferable, practical skills.

As well as the labour opportunities provided by rural areas, their structures of simple commodity production can provide the conditions for rapid economic adjustment because they are characterized by small-scale, flexible accumulation and specialization, and a culture of entrepreneurship. State support for agriculture, moreover, has been capitalized in land values, giving rural landowners significant sources of collateral when they seek to develop and expand new businesses. Thus, in some rural areas, particularly those that form part of economically buoyant regions (such as East Anglia, Bavaria, Tuscany, Colorado and New England), the spatial and social structures established around agriculture and other forms of land-based production can offer advantages to both producers and consumers in the shift towards more flexible systems of production and service provision. Not only have such areas come to be seen as having a more attractive physical environment than the old industrial towns and cities, but also a more amenable socioeconomic environment, composed of small family businesses and a placid labour force little marred by sharp social conflicts or the so-called dependency culture.

Such shifts, however, may not be uniform or sustainable. To the extent that they have depended on high levels of public expenditure in agriculture, infrastructure, regional development, public services and defence, they are vulnerable to the cuts in public spending precipitated by neoliberal economic policies and the ending of the Cold War. At the same time, the increasing integration of rural areas into the world economy has increased their exposure to the vagaries of international markets, business cycles, shifts in production technology and, eventually, work practices. After all, rural areas in the advanced economies are but one type of locational option in the global space economy, and their wage rates, though comparatively low by the standards of advanced economies, are rarely competitive with those in the Third World (Dicken 1992).

Much depends on the interaction between the economic and political contexts. As Lawrence (1990) demonstrates for Australia and Summers et al. (1990) and Falk & Lyson (1989) for the USA, an over-reliance upon agriculture, combined with neoliberal macroeconomic policies directed towards deregulation and the national removal of tariff barriers, can expose rural areas to the full force of international competition in commodity markets. In both cases, national policies designed to accelerate productivity-oriented technological development in agriculture are further reducing the demand for farm labour. They are also redefining work rôles, local labour conditions and working practices, often with devastating social consequences, while reductions in social welfare provision have given rise to a rural “underclass”.

Thus, although agriculture may no longer dominate the economy in many rural areas, the degree of historical and contemporary reliance upon it, often artificially sustained by state support, is still a principal conditioning factor for new rounds of investment. Even if farming represents only a residual element in the rural economy, it often retains a disproportionate social and ideological significance in the moulding of social and economic change through the politically entrenched positions held by farmers and landowners. Their power as a political fraction may be locally variable and in the long term subject to historical decline, but through their involvement in village, county and national politics it can extend far beyond their local control over land.

Furthermore, access to property rights, and not necessarily all the bundle of rights attributable under common law to freehold ownership (Ch. 4), remains a major source of power and prestige in rural societies. The structure of ownership can significantly affect the ways in which new capital is fixed to property, allowing the previously dominant fractions of landed capital to continue to hold much greater sway over rural change than their contemporary national significance might otherwise suggest. In particular, although the current productive function of agriculture may be set to retreat, established farm families and other landowners will continue to act as significant gatekeepers in affecting the timing and pattern of access to rights by others. Rights to housing, and to amenity and industrial development, will all be partly mediated by the owners and occupiers of agricultural resources, even if they now constitute a tiny proportion of the rural population. Moreover, access to land and property tends to reinforce patterns of deprivation and wellbeing established in the labour market.

As the primacy of agricultural production (as food production) diminishes, new consumption-oriented rôles, such as recreation, leisure and environmental conservation, as well as other primary-production activities such as biomass and mineral extraction, are growing in prominence. In turn, these changes create new and locally specific accumulation opportunities, making rural areas the locus for new social and political conflicts. As Mormont (1990) argues, with increasing levels of mobility and new uses of the countryside, particularly by urban and exurban residents, the significance of the “rural” has come to be associated less with belonging to a particular place (Cohen 1988) and more with the varying levels of opportunity that rural areas afford. He draws attention to the powerful symbolic and ideological significance contained within the notion of “rural”: it is most effectively understood today as an active set of “representations” based upon competing and often conflicting principles linked to certain styles of living, working and recreation. Central to his position is the fact that spatial and cultural changes have enhanced the significance of consumption as a source of identity and political conflict. Consumption of the natural environment has become a distinctive feature of spatially extensive life styles associated with certain mobile and influential social strata. As we shall see in later chapters, the rural land development process (i.e. the methods and social actions surrounding the exploitation of land for different functions) forms a key arena in which these representations are mobilized and through which access is regulated to increasingly scarce resources.

The growing recognition that different forms of rural experience (in terms of leisure, recreation, housing, employment and heritage seeking) are desired attributes of an “urban” existence and of culture means that rural areas now attract different exploitative interests aiming to serve these growing markets. For example, the corporate house-building industry seeks out available land for “exclusive” housing, and the leisure industry purchases land for golf and other sporting complexes. Such interests are guided in their investment decisions both by the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Bibliography