Constructuring The Countryside: An Approach To Rural Development (Restructuring Rural Areas , No 1)

189 Pages·1993·1.75 MB·English

by  Terry

Constructing the countryside
Terry Marsden
University of Hull
Jonathan Murdoch
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Philip Lowe
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Richard Munton
University College London
Andrew Flynn
University of Hull
© Terry Marsden, Jonathan Murdoch, Philip Lowe,
Richard Munton, Andrew Flynn 1993
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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First published in 1993 by UCL Press.
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CONTENTS
Preface iv
1 Rural restructuring 1
2 Restructuring the countryside: key conceptual developments in 14
assessing rural change
3 Agricultural regulation and the development of rural Britain 34
4 Property rights and interests in land 57
5 Planning and the rural land development process: the 82
reconstitution of the public interest
6 Locality and power in the analysis of rural change 107
7 Researching the rural land development process: key conceptual 128
and methodological issues
8 Constructing the countryside 144
Bibliography 161
Index 176
PREFACE
This book is the first in a series reporting on our work conducted under the
auspices of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Countryside
Change Initiative (1988–93). The work assesses the processes of rural change in
the advanced economies, with a focus on the British experience. It is aimed at a
wide audience of researchers, graduates and undergraduates in a range of social
science disciplines. This first book presents our conceptual approach to the study
of rural change. Its aim is to redirect and re-invigorate social science enquiry into
questions of rural development in advanced economies by developing a new
perspective on the nature of change and the methodological tools necessary to
investigate it.
Amongst the many colleagues who have given us their support we are
particularly grateful to Jacquie Burgess, Fred Buttel, Graham Cox, David
Goodman, Carolyn Harrison, Norman Long, Michael Redclift, Neil Ward and
Sarah Whatmore. We are particularly indebted to Julie Grove-Hills, who worked
with us for three years on the Cumbria case study under the Countryside Change
Initiative. We would also like to thank Patsy Healey for allowing us to reproduce
Figure 5.1. Thanks are also due to Mary Anne, Joseph and Hannah Marsden,
Suki and Jake Rynn, and David Shields who typed every line (including this one)
and helped administer the project.
TERRY MARSDEN JONATHAN MURDOCH PHILIP LOWE
RICHARD MUNTON ANDREW FLYNN
September 1992
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
2 RURAL RESTRUCTURING
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 sought-
after 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 service-
oriented 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
INTRODUCTION 3
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
4 RURAL RESTRUCTURING
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, post-
industrial 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
INTRODUCTION 5
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