Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
two border regions, in the east and west of Hungary that differ inmany respects. The western region is situated on the Austrianborder, quite densely populated with many small villages andmuch cross-border mobility; the eastern region is thinly populatedand located by the Rumanian border. At the time of the researchRumania was not yet a member of the EU and the border washeavily controlled to protect ‘Fortress Europe’. As a result therewas little mobility, apart from illegal immigrants and black-markettraders. The regions also differ in terms of their entrepreneurialhistory: the west was traditionally an area of feudal estates andpeasant farmers and the east dominated by an agriculturalproletariat. In addition the western regions has already beenparticipating in EU funded projects since 1995. In short, the tworegions represent extremes in terms of the influence of capitalismand their transition experience, which affected the inhabitants’attitudes towards transition, their values and social capitaland, as the authors highlight, the available entrepreneurialopportunities.
The research combined various quantitative and qualitativemethods, including a large scale survey of 351 male and femaleentrepreneurs, key informant interviews, unstructured in-depthinterviews, life histories of male and female entrepreneurs andfocus groups with female entrepreneurs. In addition employmentand population statistics were analysed, together with local regis-ters of entrepreneurs. The data were gathered between 1997 and2001, then briefly revisited in 2003 to check for subsequentchanges.
The book is divided into two parts: the first contains three chap-ters of literature based reviews and the second contains threeempirical chapters and the conclusions. The literature study covers(a) the historical development of the two regions and their transi-tion experiences, (b) the nature of rural peripherality in terms ofrural employment and the gender division of labour and (c)Hungarian entrepreneurial history. The empirical chapters reporton the general characteristics of the respondents and their entre-preneurial careers, the differences in social capital between theregions and across gender, and the impact of entrepreneurship ongender relations within the household. The final chapter drawsconclusions about the place- and gender-specificity of ruralentrepreneurship.
The book confirms the expectation that an open border andlocation close to a rich neighbour facilitates the start and successof rural businesses, because there are more opportunities to accesscustomers and various kinds of capital. But even in this relativelyfavoured area most women describe themselves as ‘necessityentrepreneurs’ who look for new and additional sources of familyincome as a response to losing their employment. Becoming anentrepreneur is presented by them as one of several householdsurvival strategies, not a personal ambition. Entrepreneurship hada limited potential for empowerment as women remained respon-sible for all the unpaid household labour. This is a familiar story toother studies on rural women’s entrepreneurship and suggests thatthe socialist past made little difference to rural women’s profes-sional ambitions, or at least what they dare to show of them. Ruralwomen entrepreneurs tend to conform with traditional ruralgender norms and defend becoming entrepreneurs by framingtheir decision as a family survival strategy and part of their ‘natural’caring role.
To me the most interesting part of the book regards the geog-raphy of entrepreneurship and the changing significance of loca-tions brought about by socio-political change. This includes thegeographical differences in terms of material and immaterialresources but also differences in entrepreneurial discourses. Onemight assume that Hungary’s socialist past would imply a lack ofentrepreneurial tradition. But as the authors demonstrate inchapter 4, Hungary actually has a quite a long history of small
and micro businesses. Throughout most of the socialist period thegovernment tolerated small-scale entrepreneurial activities intourism, artisanal production and farming, which were seen ascomplementing the planned economy. But legal requirementschanged over time, as did social appreciation of entrepreneursand there were hardly any available support services such as credit,advice or training. The entrepreneurship acquired a differentmeaning than in the west in terms of size, respectability, incomeopportunities and institutional embeddedness. This may helpexplain why most respondents framed entrepreneurship as a neces-sity and negative choice, rather than a personal dream or ambition,which we would consider more appropriate for a ‘real’/capitalistentrepreneur.
Another interesting feature is the historically changing nature ofperipherality within the two border regions. Transition is thoughtof as affecting countries as a whole, whereas this book demon-strates convincingly its different regional impacts– related to thechanging geo-political location of (border) regions, which providegreater or lesser mobility of people as well as knowledge, inspira-tion and optimism. In doing so the book demonstrates how thepattern of uneven regional development can change when borderschange. All of a sudden prosperous neighbours are within or out ofreach, influencing not only the accessibility of material resourcesbut also the local mindscapes of people and their expectations ofthe future. The authors see that both these factors as influencingbehaviour and entrepreneurial initiative.
The book provides interesting and worthwhile reading foreverybody interested in transition, entrepreneurship and thegender-specificity of both. It benefits from placing its findings inan historical context and following the opportunity structures ofthe two regions through time. That said, the authors could havebeen somewhat more selective in the information they provideand more rigorous in keeping to a clear line of argument. Nowand then the socio-economic statistics become overwhelming anddistract from the main focus of the book – how borders and theirchanging significance in times of fundamental socio-economic andpolitical change affect the gendered entrepreneurial landscape.
B.B. BockWageningen University,
Rural Sociology,Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN Wageningen,
NetherlandsE-mail address: [email protected]
doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.04.005
Book reviews / Journal of Rural Studies 25 (2009) 168–173 171
The Sociology of Rural Life, S. Hillyard. Berg, Oxford (2007).188 pp., £19.99 pbk, ISBN: 978-1-84520-139-5
Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to start with a book review.Sometimes, it’s hard to know what to make of the book. Sometimes,you can buy a book, read a book, think about a book, and end upeven more perplexed than when you started. Sometimes, youwish that book had never come into your life. Today is one of thosetimes, and Sam Hillyard’s The Sociology of Rural Life is one of thosebooks. I eye it up now, its brightly coloured cover of muddy willies,its blurb offering ‘a new model for rural sociology’. This book has, touse a colloquialism, done my head in. It has frustrated me, confusedme, depressed me. I have held it in my hands and tried to makesense of the story-behind-the-story it tells. I have tried to imaginehow the book came into being, to imagine the process from incep-tion to commission to writing to review to rewriting and finally topublication. I know that this is a fraught process, wracked with
Handbook of Rural Studies, P. Cloke, T. Mardsen, P. Mooney(Eds.). Sage, London (2006). 511 pp., £90 hbk, ISBN:9780761973324
The aim of this impressive collection of essays is to ‘expose ruralresearch to a wider audience’ and ‘to enhance its interdisciplinarystock’ (xi). Moving beyond the confines of individual subject areas,such as rural geography and rural sociology, it is claimed to bea celebration of the revival in, and mature state of, rural studies.In so doing, it brings together authors from different national anddisciplinary backgrounds, with a clear focus on theoretical andconceptual debates and with a minimum of empirical elaboration.Effectively, the book engages with the critical social sciences and, inparticular, aspects of political economy and the cultural turn. Forthose looking for more traditional positivistic approaches andelements of agricultural economics and marketing, they will notfind them here. Indeed, while advocating a ‘more interdisciplinarycritical rural social science’ approach (p. 4), it is rather controver-sially suggested that ‘agricultural economics departments havebecome isolated and moribund places for critical and theoreticalconversation’ (p. 5). Thus the book offers a particular framing ofrural studies, reflecting the interests and choices of the first twoeditors in the main.
Divided into three main parts, the book contains a massive 35chapters. Part I consists of seven chapters that take a retrospectivelook at changing approaches to rural studies. Each is well writtenand collectively they provide an ideal, but perhaps intellectuallychallenging, starting point for a new PhD student grappling withtheoretical and conceptual debates in rural studies. Part II thenfocuses on eight key theoretical themes in contemporary ruralresearch with three chapters on each of cultural representation,nature, sustainability, new economies, power, new consumerism,identity and exclusion. This represents the heart of the book andoffers a treasure chest of critical theoretical insights into this partic-ular framing of rural studies. There is something here for everyonewho has a theoretical interest in critical rural research and, whilesome chapters may initially appear to be more relevant than others,the reader cannot fail to be stimulated by the relatively short andinsightful accounts provided by the array of talented writers.More nervously, Part III offers a tentative insight into prospective‘new traces’ (xii) in rural studies revolving around four chapterson rurality and otherness, rural citizenship, new rural social move-ments, and performing rurality. As the editors admit, these are notmeant to represent ‘an exhaustive treatment’, but are seen as ‘newways of thinking and practising the rural’ and suggesting themesthat ‘require further theoretical and empirical concern’ (xii). Under-standably, there is some overlap in content and approachesbetween the different chapters, just as the authors elaborate theirown conceptual ideas with reference to varying parts of the devel-oped world in particular.
It is not recommended that one tries to read this collection ofessays in a couple of sittings, unless one gets pleasure in beingexhausted and overwhelmed by intellectual debate. Without a glos-sary of theoretical terms to help the reader, the book lends itselfinstead to the ‘dipping in and out’ of specific chapters. For thoselooking for specific debates on, for example, agricultural and
Book reviews / Journal of Rural Studies 25 (2009) 168–173172
compromise as publishers push for student-friendliness and askthat a book does more than any one book really could. And thensome more.
Let me start near the end. The book’s conclusion makes a pleafor a distinctive rural sociology, even as it chides sociology forlagging behind rural geography. The conclusion ends up sayingthat rural society is complicated, and that sociologists haveneglected to study it, despite a strong heritage. It returns to whereit started, to mapping a genealogy of rural sociology througha narrative assembled from key people, from Tonnies, Durkheimand Weber, to Newby and then on to those damned geographers(Marsden, Cloke and Co). In fact, this is one of the oddest featuresof this book: it tells the story of rural sociology by taking us througha list of key names (and their texts). I have never before seen a bookuse citations as subheadings; it makes for a strange readingexperience.
The book has many other quirks beside this funny way withsubheadings. For instance, it assembles self-styled ‘learning tools’at the end of each chapter: a short glossary and some questions.The glossary is very partial and often not especially useful, partic-ularly if the book is really pitched at the (sociology) student audi-ence. Key terms are either defined in quite confusing ways, or aremissed out altogether (chapter 3 does not glossarize ‘ANT’ or‘sociology of measurement’ even though it talks about both inthe context of Foot-and-Mouth). The questions are sometimesimpossible to answer from the chapter that they follow. But I’mgetting ahead of myself. I’ve shown you the end and the begin-ning, but what about the middle? After two chapters of (partial)genealogy of rural sociology (and some geography), the bookproffers three ‘case study’ chapters in order to show us whatsociology can (or could) bring to analysis of rural issues. Thecases are all UK based, and centre on the 2001 Foot-and-Mouthdisease outbreak, the hunting debate, and the politics of gameshooting. In each case, a limited selection of existing studies isdescribed and compared, and the gaps and tensions are broughtto light. A sociological analysis that favours ethnographic studyand a focus on ‘interaction’ is routinely asserted as the solutionto the deficiencies inferred from the literatures surveyed. Yetthe detail of this solution is never explicated, and the reader isleft waiting.
A final substantive chapter looks at first like it will help here, byfocussing on visual sociology and issues of rural representation. Butsadly, this chapter only serves to show why representation is anissue that should not be left to sociologists. The main focus of thechapter is images of dairy farming in children’s books – connectingto a growing interdisciplinary literature on media images of therural. Time and again here we are told here that the images are‘romantic’ (smiling cows, no mud) and ‘anachronistic’ (no high-tech equipment). The problem with this analysis is it totally lackscontext, in terms of understanding how children’s publishing(and children’s media more broadly) operates as a market anda production–consumption system. It seems to call for books toreflect the ‘realities’ of farming, as if there is some kind oftransparent relationship between reality and representation. Thechapter also highlights the common problem of writing visualsociology: images are described in words that can in no waycapture their richness, or make them available for alternativeinterpretation.
The Sociology of Rural Life is, in short, probably the oddest ruralstudies book since Writing the Rural, a book that Hillyard associateswith the excesses of the postmodern turn (a turn that she saysturned sociologists off the rural). It is odd for totally differentreasons, however: odd in its scope, odd in its style, odd in itsapproach. How to sum it up? As at best a book that fails to deliverwhat it promises; as a manifesto for a new rural sociology – well,you know how it made me feel.
David BellDepartment of Geography,
University of Leeds,Leeds, United Kingdom
E-mail address: [email protected]
doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.07.001
