An important issue for the study of grassroots innovations and the geography of sustainability transitions is how scales affect transformative change. In this paper we will address the questions of ...1) how grassroots innovations for sustainable agriculture are scaled and 2) the consequences of crossing different scales and levels on the characteristics of the grassroots innovation. We propose a framework of five different scales to analyze the development of grassroots innovations and we apply this framework on the long-term development of an agricultural grassroots innovation movement that pioneered innovative dairy farming practices combined with landscape management. The results show how the initial innovation coalition built around low external input farming became fragmented. Each of the resulting new grassroots innovation coalitions used different strategies for upscaling and outscaling that depended on differences in their (regional) contexts and institutional support. The grassroots innovation thus developed along three parallel, at times intersecting, innovation pathways. The distributed agency of multiple actor groups working in parallel leads to a continuous renegotiating of meaning that poses a challenge to the idea of planned processes of outscaling and upscaling of grassroots innovations.
•Presents a framework to study upscaling and outscaling of grassroots innovations•The framework is applied to the innovation history of low external input farming.•Three innovation coalitions with other aims and means resulted in parallel pathways.•Distributed agency poses limitations to planned upscaling and outscaling approaches.
For many years, sociologists, political scientists, and management scholars have readily relied on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) for the purpose of configurational causal modeling. However, ...this article reveals that a severe problem in the application of QCA has gone unnoticed so far: model ambiguities. These arise when multiple causal models fare equally well in accounting for configurational data. Mainly due to the uncritical import of an algorithm that is unsuitable for causal modeling, researchers have typically been unaware of the whole model space. As a result, there exists an indeterminable risk for practically all QCA studies published in the last quarter century to have presented findings that their data did not warrant. Using hypothetical data, we first identify the algorithmic source of ambiguities and discuss to what extent they affect different methodological aspects of QCA. By reanalyzing a published QCA study from rural sociology, we then show that model ambiguities are not a mere theoretical possibility but a reality in applied research, which can assume such extreme proportions that no causal conclusions whatsoever are possible. Finally, the prevalence of model ambiguities is examined by performing a comprehensive analysis of 192 truth tables across 28 QCA studies published in applied sociology. In conclusion, we urge that future QCA practice ensures full transparency with respect to model ambiguities, both by informing readers of QCA-based research about their extent and by employing algorithms capable of revealing them.
Recently scholars have started to consider the persistence of peripheries in relation to how they are represented by others outside of the region. Drawing on Foucauldian knowledge/power processes and ...forms of ‘internal colonialism’, powerful core regions construct and reconstruct knowledge about peripheries as a weaker ‘other’. However this denies agency to passive, peripheral ‘victims’, compromising their capacity to contest their peripherality. We challenge this using Deleuze and Guattari's assemblages and the concepts of affect and perception to develop a conceptualisation of power which allows agency to weaker entities. This enables us to develop better tools for improving peripheral development. We use an innovative Public Engagement research method and a case‐study of Cornwall in the South West of the UK to consider an alternative model with regards to how ideas become accepted and adopted. We claim that analyses of the relationships between core and peripheral regions need to understand the complex cultural assemblages behind regional identities, because this helps us to explore the sites of possibility which offer space for development.
The article is a tribute to our colleague Iancu Filipescu, significant and representative sociologist for the 70s generation, who passed away in August 2019. He was noticed for his intense activity ...in the fields of rural sociology, industrial sociology and sociology of organizations, being an outstanding researcher and an elite professor. We will always remember fondly his name.
Discussion on food sovereignty and agro-ecology, and Anglophone rural sociology have blind spots when it comes to the Middle East/North African (Arab) region. This article explores them; outlines ...some initial concepts, discusses avenues for research, and notes some socio-political features of the region which make it distinct from others. It focuses on the necessity to include war and the national question to understand the regional agrarian question and advances and retreats in regional knowledge production. It proceeds by (1) establishing the relative absence of the region from the leading peasant studies journals; (2) synthesizing the region's political economy and waves of knowledge production; (3) highlighting local traditions which speak to the questions of food sovereignty and agro-ecology; and (4) listing a series of theoretical, historical, and analytical avenues which remain to be addressed.
Studies throughout Europe have suggested that voluntary agri‐environmental programmes often engender very little change in attitudes towards productivist agriculture among conventional farming ...communities. This study examines why this may be so, using case studies from Hessen, Germany and Aberdeenshire, Scotland. By constructing a conceptual framework based on Bourdieu's notions of capital we explore how farming activities are able to generate symbolic capital, and compare this with the symbolic value of conservation work. We find that voluntary agri‐environmental work returns little symbolic capital to farmers as, by prescribing management practices and designating specific areas for agri‐environmental work, such schemes fail to allow farmers to develop or demonstrate skilled role performance – thus inhibiting the development of embodied cultural capital. We conclude by suggesting that entrepreneurial production‐target based agri‐environmental schemes may be ultimately more effective in changing long‐term behaviour.
•The rural register population growth in China switched from positive to negative in 2000.•Rural settlement area in China continued increasing during 1996–2005.•Rural settlement area was decoupled ...from rural population during 1996–2000.•Rural settlement area was negatively decoupled from rural population during 2000–2005.•Village-hollowing and policy of restricted property houses lead to the negative decoupling.
In China, changes in rural settlement patterns are crucial because they may affect agricultural sustainability through encroachment on productive cropland and water resources and also reduce biodiversity. Rapid urbanization with accompanying socioeconomic transformation has resulted in decrease of the rural register population (RRP) in China since 2000. The effects of this change in RRP on rural settlement area (RSA) and the factors shaping the relationship between these measures of population and land use have attracted extensive research interest. We investigated the changes in RRP and RSA and used a decoupling model to analyze the relationship between them. We found that whereas RRP in China increased by 1.12% during 1996–2000, it decreased by 4.91% during 2000–2005. RSA increased by 0.62% and 0.09% during the periods 1996–2000 and 2000–2005, respectively. The RSA was slightly decoupled from RRP during 1996–2000 due to the shift in rural housing from one-floor houses to multi-floor houses. In the period 2000–2005, RSA was actually strongly negatively decoupled from RRP due to village-hollowing, which was driven mainly by a dual-track real property system (ownership by collectives, but use rights for individuals) as well as institutional–managerial and socioeconomic factors. In central and western China, the RSA was better able to be decoupled from RRP than in eastern China due to interprovincial rural migration.
This article highlights the new racial and ethnic diversity in rural America, which may be the most important but least anticipated population shift in recent demographic history. Ethnoracial change ...is central to virtually every aspect of rural America over the foreseeable future: agro‐food systems, community life, labor force change, economic development, schools and schooling, demographic change, intergroup relations, and politics. The goal here is to plainly illustrate how America's racial and ethnic transformation has emerged as an important dimension of ongoing U.S. urbanization and urbanism, growing cultural and economic heterogeneity, and a putative “decline in community” in rural America. Rural communities provide a natural laboratory for better understanding the implications of uneven settlement and racial diversity, acculturation, and economic and political incorporation among Hispanic newcomers. This article raises the prospect of a new racial balkanization and outlines key impediments to full incorporation of Hispanics into rural and small town community life. Immigration and the new ethnoracial diversity will be at the leading edge of major changes in rural community life as the nation moves toward becoming a majority‐minority society by 2042.
•Rural settlements have remained evenly distributed in Daxing.•Rural settlements were getting more regular and compact.•Role of market towns should be emphasized in rural development.•Larger ...settlements and settlements which have merged should be emphasized.•Controlling industrial land growth is important for rural land use.
Rural areas under urban pressure (rural areas under pressure) in China face a growing conflict between the expansion of developed areas and the protection of cropland. The concentration of rural settlements has been embraced by local governments as a strategy to alleviate the conflict between these two land-use needs. This paper used Daxing District, Beijing, China as a case study to discuss the evolution of rural settlements in China over the past three decades and to consider the policy implications for rural settlement concentration. The results showed that: (1) over the past three decades, rural settlements have remained evenly distributed, and in 2007 each settlement had an average of 609 inhabitants; (2) the area of rural settlements has increased by approximately 100% because of various factors such as decreasing household size, increasing numbers of migrants, and improvements in living conditions; and (3) the shape of rural settlements has become more regular. These factors pose challenges to concentrating rural settlements. This study recommends that rural settlement concentration and restructuring should pay special attention to the economies of scale of market towns and large and merged villages, which can house larger populations and better accommodate industry in the future.
Based on a critical literature review, the article argues that transformative learning (TL) that fosters a shift in consciousness towards a more ecological approach is an inherently place-based ...phenomenon. In this article we build a place-based approach to TL based on a literature review. Our theoretical framework is grounded in three key themes which emerge from the literature: (re-) connection, (self-)compassion and creativity. (Re-)connection involves all processes that evoke an experience of the interconnected nature of all life. (Self-)compassion, acting to alleviate suffering or doing the least harm, naturally follows a sense of interconnection. Creativity is the materialisation of a sense of interconnection and compassion or the means through which these can be experienced. This theoretical framework can be used empirically to research the extent to which people involved in place-based sustainability initiatives develop an ecological consciousness. Empirical research can then be used to further develop and anchor this framework, and seek the kind of practices that can evoke experiences of connection, cultivate the human ability for compassion and give space for creative living.
•Sustainability requires shifts in consciousness: a transformative learning process.•Transformative learning is a place-based phenomenon.•Connection, compassion and creativity emerged as key themes.
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