Contemporary Rural Geographies

Land, property and resources in Britain: Essays in honour of Richard Munton

Hugh Clout, Hugh Clout

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134083121
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Scienze fisiche
• Sous-sujet: Geografia

This book provides a cohesive set of research statements on critical related issues in British rural geography, as well as echoing the priorities identified by an influential figure in British rural geography, Richard Munton. This book demonstrates that the rural world needs to be seen in a far wider perspective than that of agriculture/ food production, in order to comprehend how resources are being appraised and exploited in new ways, and to respond to the pressing challenges of sustainability for the decades ahead.

Chapters adopt a time perspective to explore a series of key themes:

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• the rise of productivist farming

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• ways of conceptualising agricultural change

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• the evolution of landownership and property rights

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• rural and urban agendas for nature conservation

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• the gap between policy and action for sustainable development.

The final set of chapters is devoted to policy-related issues associated with agricultural change and the profound challenge of rural diversification for the future. The last chapter traces the prominent career of Richard Munton.

1 British rural geography

A disciplinary enterprise in changing times

Philip Lowe and Neil Ward

Introduction: disciplines and sub-disciplines

Ron Johnston’s studies of the evolution of human geography since 1945 remind us that the content of an academic discipline cannot be understood without reference to its context (Johnston 1991). The same can be said for sub-disciplines such as rural geography, which emerged in Britain in the 1970s. This chapter sets its history in the context of changing conceptual approaches and patterns of institutionalisation in human geography and other related fields, such as agricultural economics and rural sociology. It argues that British rural geography has been a successful sub-discipline of human geography, in large part because of its openness and responsiveness to wider intellectual currents and public concerns. Most social scientific work is set within disciplines yet at the same time builds (or dismantles) those disciplines. The development of ideas, concepts and empirical inquiry is therefore inseparable from the act of constructing disciplines. Disciplines are structured contexts that are re-created through the efforts of scientists producing knowledge in pursuing their careers. Disciplinary structures provide exclusive access to research and career resources, and this is why boundary maintenance is so essential. Boundary maintenance occurs within a wider ‘commonwealth’ of scientific knowledge production in which boundaries between disciplines cannot legitimately be maintained simply through the exclusionary practices of a restricted trade or freemasonry but must be reproduced through recognised knowledge work. The epistemological structures of disciplines are therefore inevitably co-produced with their institutional structures, and reciprocally so with other disciplines.

A major part of disciplinary boundary work is the maintenance of sub-disciplines. Created typically at times of disciplinary expansion, sub-disciplines reflect the needs of scientists to differentiate what they produce and generate new professional niches. However, such a process may be forced into reverse. Cloke et al.(1991: 21) recount the salutary instance of American geography, a discipline for many years in retreat. They quote the President of the Association of American Geographers who warned, ‘We are a small discipline. To be small these days is to be vulnerable’, and his admonition that ‘Geography’s continual splitting into smaller clusters has become hazardous to our collective health’ (Abler 1987: 518). Similar forebodings were heard in UK geographical circles in the mid-1980s, but British geography proved more firmly rooted. Moreover, the outlook of young and ambitious researchers, even when the prospects for their discipline may seem unpromising, may not concur with the instincts of their seniors to consolidate. Munton and Goudie, for example, dismissed the ‘unease expressed by some geographers about the continuing fissiparous tendencies within the discipline’ (1984: 27), and the related calls to strengthen the traditional core areas of the subject, with the confident assertion that

geographers will continue to draw upon theory derived from related disciplines in their search for explanation or greater understanding. The search for such theory may lead to centrifugal tendencies, but there need be no concern for the core if geographers take advantage of the numerous emerging areas of research to which many believe they can make a distinctive contribution.

(ibid.: 39)

The dynamics of sub-disciplines thus illuminates not only centre–periphery relations in discipline building and knowledge production but also generational change within disciplines, as well as the competition between disciplines as they rub up together at the edges.

Andrew Abbott’s book Chaos of Disciplines (2001) argues that disciplines evolve through essentially similar processes that he characterises as a fractal pattern of continuous internal division and occasional external convergence. Drawing on the example of the relationship between history and sociology, he concludes that supposedly contrasting disciplinary specialisms, such as social history and historical sociology, may have more in common with each other than with the mainstream of their parent disciplines, thus allowing considerable traffic of people and ideas between them. Abbott analyses how distinctions are played out over time and shows that when lines of inquiry wither away, their concerns are often subsumed by, or ‘remapped’ on to, other branches. Neighbouring disciplines and sub-disciplines therefore evolve through processes of engagement, dialogue, conflict, bifurcation and ingestion.

While Abbott’s analysis focuses primarily on the internal dynamics of disciplinary development, he recognises that moments of differentiation and absorption can be shaped by external factors. These may be to do with newly recognised problems in the wider social or political world that may either enlarge or reduce the resources available for disciplinary expansion. Fractal processes expand to fill whatever space is available when disciplines expand. The emergence of environmental economics, environmental politics and environmental sociology in the 1980s and 1990s is an example. Conversely, less diversity and more concentration is the outcome when resources are more limited. However, the processes of coming together and breaking apart regularly occur and follow a similar pattern. One side loses and the winning side then becomes characterised by further fractal development and ‘remapping’ of the loser’s interests and concerns.

Abbott’s model provides a useful starting point from which to examine patterns and processes of innovation, consolidation and decline in the development of sub-disciplines, and we draw on it to analyse the way in which ‘the rural’ as a field of inquiry has been subsumed into the social sciences in the United Kingdom. We argue that the 1980s were a key decade in the emergence of the rural as a focus of social science inquiry. This was a period of considerable turmoil in the social sciences in the United Kingdom, marked by twin trends of radicalisation and professionalisation among academic social scientists. Besides other developments, the 1980s saw the birth of a critical interdisciplinary rural studies that then, and subsequently, has provided fertile ground for interchange between disciplines, re-energising some but depleting others. Rural geography, in particular, was able to grow in strength at the expense of other sub-disciplines such as rural sociology and agricultural economics. In analysing the dynamic interaction of the disciplines, we start first with a brief review of the status of rurally oriented social sciences up to the 1970s.

Rural studies in the United Kingdom up to the 1970s

The constitution of the rural world and the dynamics of agrarian change were major preoccupations of the classic social science disciplines: economics, geography and history. Only in economics had this been institutionalised as a distinct sub-discipline in Britain, that of agricultural economics. However, rural topics pervaded mainstream scholarship in history and geography, with considerable overlap in interests in the parallel sub-disciplines of agrarian history and historical geography.

Agricultural history had always played an important part in the syllabi of British economic and social history degrees. Questions of agricultural change, land use and settlement systems were even more central to the discipline of geography, however. Indeed, the rural landscape was key to the main traditions of geographical research, of regional survey and historical geography. The epithet ‘rural geography’ would have smacked at least a little of tautology. It is notable, for example, that the prominent geographer David Harvey has never been identified as a ‘rural geographer’ (Castree and Gregory 2006), even though his doctoral research, completed at Cambridge in 1962, and early publications examined agricultural and land-use change in rural Kent (Harvey 1962, 1963, 1966, 2006). Harvey, of course, went on to be a leading figure, in quick succession, in spatial science and then Marxist urban geography.

The trajectory of one of his contemporaries, Ray Pahl, is also illuminating. Having been associated as a postgraduate with the advent of the ‘new geography’ (namely spatial science), his Ph.D. which was the first study of the impact of counter-urbanisation on a village community, would surely qualify him as a father figure of either rural geography or rural sociology (Pahl 1965a, b). However, he moved quickly into the sociology of urban planning (developing critiques not dissimilar from Harvey’s) and was soon a professor of sociology.

If the rural was not a destination for avant-garde geographers by the 1970s, there was nevertheless a growing demand from geography students for teaching that covered rural issues beyond the specific realm of agricultural production, whose geographical researchers were headed by J. Terry Coppock (Clout 2002). Hugh Clout produced the first rural geography text in 1972 (Clout 1972). Recently, he has reflected that this was done ‘unashamedly to plug a gap in the textbook literature of the time’ (Clout 2005: 376). Most revealingly, he goes on:

My cultivation of ‘rural geography’ at University College London was part of a personal survival strategy. I simply felt that I required another systematic support to complement my main interests in historical geography and France. The textbook – along with several others – was woven into a ‘personal safety blanket’ to keep me going since my part-time doctoral research advanced slowly.¹

Geography was still a strongly teaching-oriented discipline (Stoddart 1986). The production of textbooks, then and now, explicated fields of study for an undergraduate audience while also demarcating areas of scholarly competence (see, for example, Phillips and Williams 1984; Pacione 1984; Gilg 1985; Woods 2005).

The Geography Department at University College London in the early 1970s was stocked with historical geographers (Clout 2003). Once the foundation of British geography, historical geography was undergoing something of an identity crisis as the post-war American vogue for spatial science swept through the discipline. For a young lecturer trained in historical geography, a focus on contemporary rural issues provided a new distinctive niche. As Clout explained:

My Rural Geography omitted any reference to the ‘less developed world’ and excluded all the historical material that I taught as rural geography to large numbers of second year undergraduates at UCL in the late 1960s and during the 1970s.

(2005: 376)

With the swelling number of undergraduate geographers in the post-Robbins expansion of the universities, there was a need to give geography teaching a more contemporary appeal. It was this requirement rather than academic fashion that drove the delivery of rural geography. As Clout himself observed at the time, with academic and professional attention increasingly focusing on the quantitative analysis of urban and regional change, the rural had been relegated from being at the core of geography to an inferior position. His proposed solution was to refocus academic skills on the problems of relevance to countryside management and rural planning. The renaming of the Agricultural Geography Study Group of the Institute of British Geographers (IBG), founded by Coppock, as the Rural Geography Study Group in 1974 should thus be seen as an effort to refurbish a field of activity that was in danger of becoming marginalised within contemporary geographical research. The focus shifted to the geographical analysis of rural problems and away from efforts to delineate the agricultural regions of various parts of the world. The Rural Geography Study Group was one of the Institute’s most popular. By 1983 its membership stood at 280, which placed it fourth among the IBG’s study groups, after ‘urban’, ‘quantitative’ and ‘geomorphology’.

Agricultural economics was the only rural sub-discipline that was institutionalised in the United Kingdom, with agricultural economics departments in the Universities of London (at Wye), Reading, Oxford, Exeter, Cambridge, Nottingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. These departments had their roots in the early 1920s, when the Ministry of Agriculture had established provincial advisory centres in universities and colleges to provide advice to farmers. Each of these centres was equipped with an agricultural economist, and they built up expertise in farm management and production economics, although some also pursued other interests, including rural sociology and history (see Colman 1990). Agricultural economics also became a recognised specialism within government, and economists in the Ministry of Agriculture maintained a close professional relationship with agricultural economists in the universities and colleges. The Agricultural Economics Society, founded in 1926, brought the two groups together, and with its Journal of Agricultural Economics (begun in 1928) the society became an influential forum for the analysis of the state of agriculture and agricultural policy. After the Second World War, the government reorganised what had been the provincial advisory centres into a separate government research and extension service, but agricultural economics was left with the universities and colleges. With a much-reduced advisory role, agricultural economists concentrated on the development of teaching and research. In some cases they were brought together with academic economics departments, but in most cases they existed in separate agricultural economics departments, often alongside departments of agriculture. Many of the younger agricultural economists in post in the 1960s and 1970s did graduate training in American universities, where they were subjected to a more rigorous theoretical and mathematical training than had been available in the United Kingdom. Back home, they re-established agricultural economics on a stronger basis of neo-classical welfare and trade theory and, in particular, a thoroughgoing and highly quantitative pursuit of inferential econometric methods. As a cohesive and well-institutionalised discipline, agricultural economics thus dominated social science research on agricultural issues throughout the post-war period.

In the United States and most other European countries, an institutionalised rural sociology sat alongside agricultural economics, because the post-war modernisation of agriculture was seen to imply a wider transformation of rural society that went beyond improving the productivity of farm labour. No such institutionalised rural sociology, dedicated to easing the pace and effects of agrarian transformation, existed in the United Kingdom. Among sociologists and social anthropologists interested in kinship there was, though, a tradition of ‘localistic studies’ that in the 1950s and 1960s had examined the cohesiveness of isolated farming communities, but whose findings had served to undermine the very assumptions on which they had been based concerning the intrinsic and abiding characteristics of rural communities (Bell and Newby 1971). A range of British scholars, including many who were not sociologists but who took an interest in the social aspects of farming or village life, belonged to the European Society for Rural Sociology, founded in 1957, and contributed to its journal Sociologia Ruralis.

The predominance of agricultural economics in the United Kingdom left little scope for the institutional development of rural sociology. Often through American graduate school experience, many UK agricultural economists had been exposed to rural sociological ideas, and some showed a professional interest in social analysis of farming and rural communities (see, for example, Wibberley 1960; Gasson 1971; Jones 1973). Agricultural economics departments, however, were accused of ‘exclusionary practices’ by the sociologist Peter Hamilton, in not appointing professional sociologists and in allowing issues that might have been the subject matter of rural sociologists (such as agricultural labour mobility or farm management) to be ‘hived off into strange culs-de-sac by agricultural economists and given obfuscatory names such as “agricultural adjustment” ’ (1990: 229). More generally, he lamented the fact that there had been no demand in post-war Britain for a broader rural sociology, ‘either from the agricultural sector or rural society, but more significantly . . . from the profession of sociology itself ’ (ibid.: 229). This was a function of the fact that sociology as a discipline had only a limited intellectual purchase in Britain and, seen as a science for understanding and resolving social problems, it was preoccupied with urban and industrial issues.

The 1980s: the birth of interdisciplinary rural studies

The 1980s were a pivotal decade in the evolution of rural studies and more generally as critical social theory swept across the social sciences. This was a period of a polarised and ideologically charged politics following the breakdown of the dominant post-war social consensus. The empiricism and positivism that had marked most British social science fell out of favour. A new generation of young researchers radicalised by the student politics of the late 1960s looked to professionalise their work. However, the lack of secure career prospects within academic departments detached them from allegiance to established disciplinary perspectives and traditions. In response to the attacks from the New Right, they sought to institute a notion of independent academic study as a critical conscience within society, and found inspiration in European structuralist and post-structuralist theorists. One...