ABSTRACT
In the discussion of rural transformations so far in this book, a clear tension has emerged that is not unusual in either academic or popular discourse. In examining the character of rural Europe we have drawn attention to national rural traditions as a basis for a particular rural identity. Yet these traditions, embedded as they are in the peculiarities of a long historical process of socioeconomic, political-cultural change, are today confronted by a rapidity of change that some characterize as modernism, others as postmodernism, but which, for us, is more appropriately seen in terms of a dialectic of integration and differentiation within rural places. Significant elements of the socioeconomic adjustments that are being experienced in rural areas come from processes of ‘integration’; whether into national polities and econo mies, as in earlier centuries, through forces of social homogenization such as the emergence of the mass media; or into the international arena through more recent transmutations of political economy, such as economic globali zation and the assertion of transnational governance within the European Community. But set within this pattern of greater integration is a parallel differentiation of people and places. For some this is visible in a new localism (Urry, 1981), with the manner in which processes of ‘productive decentrali zation’ are grounded in local social practices offering one example (Chapter 5). However, while certain new socioeconomic spaces are a product of peculiari ties of local social forms, others can be completely transformed with almost no account being taken of local character or tradition. It is for this reason that we have serious doubts about some claims that an understanding of social structure has to be embedded in localities. Under circumstances of socioeco nomic change, even implicitly to provide the locality with an equal (or greater) causal importance than the extralocal forces that act upon it seems to us to deny the existence of inequities in power between human agents. At a very simple level we see this when areas receiving large in-migrant flows find their ‘traditional’ sociocultural existence swamped by the more assertive actions of new arrivals (Connell, 1978; Forsythe, 1980). At the same time,
major transformations in the economic base of areas can occur without provoking substantial change in a locality; as with government-inspired major investments in economically backward parts of Italy, which are commonly grafted alongside a local socioeconomic system with little interac tion between the new and the old (Davis, 1973; Schweizer, 1988), let alone any peculiar local socioeconomic features that encourage capitalists to commit themselves to that place (Wade, 1979). While we would wholeheart edly support the argument that local social organization is not the same as its national counterpart writ small (Pitt-Rivers, 1960; Urry, 1981), our note of caution is that much of what happens in localities is not decided by the specifics of local socioeconomic structures or traditions. This is perhaps especially true for rural locations, since all other things being equal, a small population size increases the chances that an outside force can have a major transformative effect.
