Let's do away with rural

doi:10.1016/0743-0167(90)90079-N

Journal of Rural Studies

Volume 6, Issue 3, 1990, Pages 245-257

https://doi.org/10.1016/0743-0167(90)90079-N Get rights and content

Abstract

Research on rural areas has tended to adopt a theoretically undifferentiated approach to what is ‘rural’. Differences across rural areas have been recognized, but they have been inadequately theorized and similarities in causal processes across the rural-urban divide have received far too little attention. This paper argues that the complexity of structure-agency interrelationships is little understood, so that theoretical advancement is perhaps better approached by simplifying research designs by evaluating the circumstances under which similar structural contexts are associated with both similar and dissimilar behavioural outcomes. It is argued that if this approach is taken rural locations will need to be differentiated on account of their very different structural circumstances, while rural and urban places will often belong to the same population for the purposes of theoretical sampling.

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Citation Excerpt :
Rather more significant was the cultural turn in rural studies, and an associated argument that rurality was less an analytical construct related to the content of particular spaces, and much more a construct, as Hillyard (2007: 22) puts it, of "'the mind’ or cultural imaginations of ‘the rural'". Hillyard adds that this perspective was, in a sense, present in Pahl's work, through his reference to “a village-in-the-mind” (Pahl, 1966: 305), and can also be identified in Hoggart's (1990: 245) remark that he was “not calling for the abandonment of the word ‘rural’ in everyday expression”. As discussed in Phillips et al. (2021a, b), Pahl's reference to an idyllic ‘village-in-the-mind’ was a forerunner of research on rural representations that emerged in the 1990s (e.g. Cloke et al., 1994; Cloke and Little, 1997; Halfacree, 1995; Short, 1991), while Hoggart's arguments about abandoning the concept of the rural as an analytical category provided impetus for further discussion about defining rurality.
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Let's do away with rural

Abstract

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Rural manufacturers' characteristics and probability of plant closings

Growth and Change

A behavioral comparison of urban and small town environments

Microcosm-macrocosm relationships in North American agrarian society

American Anthropologist

Northern Plainsmen: Adaptive Strategy and Agrarian Life

Organization of production and community income distributions

American Sociological Review

The Changing Country-side

Segmentation in local labour markets

Poverty and dependency in village England

Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland

Agrarian radicals and their opponents: political conflict in southern Oklahoma 1910–1924

Journal of American History

Rurality and the residualist social welfare response

Rural Sociology

Jobs in the countryside: studies in North Lancashire and Cumbria

University of Lancaster Centre for North West Regional Studies, Resource Paper No. 4, Lancaster, U.K.

Class and social mobility: patterns of employment in rural and urban Scotland

Community autonomy in the national system

A theory of local autonomy

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

An index of rurality for England and Wales

Regional Studies

Rural geography and political economy

Rurality in England and Wales 1981

Regional Studies

Intra-class conflict in rural areas

Journal of Rural Studies

Belonging: the experience of culture

Appropriate areas for census analysis: an outline of functional regions

University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies Discussion Paper No. 41, New-castle-upon-Tyne, U.K.

Farm structure, social class and farmers' policy perspectives

Locality and community in the politics of local economic development

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Neighborhood Politics

Identifying areas of rural deprivation using social area analysis

Regional Studies

Housing conditions in rural areas: a commentary

What is locality?

Space, scale and locality

Antipode

Housing conditions in rural areas: a commentary

Government finance in declining central cities

Publias

Political power and city jobs: determinants of minority employment

Social Science Quarterly

Urban-rural variations in the level of heterosexual activity of young people

Area

Economic change and community power structure

Class formation and decomposition in modern capitalist agriculture

Sociologia Ruralis

The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian Americans

Rural-urban differences in attitudes and behavior in the United States

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Independent Local Politics in England and Wales

The rural-urban dichotomy in social care: rhetoric and reality

University College of North Wales Department of Social Theory and Institutions Care Networks Project Working Paper No. 31, Bangor, U.K.

Suburban political behavior: a matter of trust

Locality research: a case of conceptual duplication

University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, Discussion Paper No. 86, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, U.K.

The effects of rural residence on the socio-economic attainment process of married females

Rural Socioogy