Class, Power and Social Construction: Issues of Theory and Application in Thirty Years of Rural...

Class, Power and Social Construction: Issues of Theory and Application in

Thirty Years of Rural Studies

Simon Millerat

HIS ARTICLE HAS been prompted by the recent publication of two books: T Writing the rtcral(l994) by Paul Cloke, Marcus Doel, David Matless, Mar- tin Phillips and Nigel Thrift, and Reconstitlrting rurality (1994) by Jonathan Murdoch and Terry Marsden. The latter followed hard on the heels of a con- nected work, Constructing the countryside (1993), written jointly by Marsden, Murdoch, Philip Lowe, Richard Munton and Andrew Flynn.

I believe it is useful to approach these books as symptoms of an important moment in the development and direction of rural studies. Partly because their authors are dominant figures in the field (and wield considerable influence), but mainly because the books themselves represent the mainstream by virtue of a shared intellectual root and common subject-matter: respectively, the Rural Economy and Society Study Group (RESSG), and the progressive presence in the countryside of a new middle (or ‘service’) class - otherwise Ray Pahl’s “dispersed city.”

In this way it is possible to think of these works as the culmination of a trend spanning the last fifteen or so years, the fruit of a protracted gestation. The background experience has been composed of an exposure to similar ‘theoretical’ influences alongside an interest, essentially derived from those ‘theories,’ in the same empirical field - and yet it has produced very different books at the end of it. It may well be that this difference will come to mark a sharp division within the outlook and direction of UK rural studies, a parting of intellectual and methodological ways. Given this current contrast and future prospect I have decided to examine the books’ differences somewhat indirectly within a wider consideration of the rural studies’ post-Pahl trends and, in particular, to address the issue of the way in which ‘theory’ has been used within the field.

’’Centre for Rural Research and Policy, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 lJF, UK

8 1996 European Society for Rural Sociology. Sociologia Ruralis Volume 36, No. 1, 1996

and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. ISSN 0038-0199

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It will become clear in the process of this consideration that I am sceptical of the value of much of the rural studies’ writing that aspires to the status of ‘theory.’ I believe this to be a general problem within contemporary academia, afflicting areas well beyond the rural field. It seem to me that ‘theory,’ insofar as it is derivative and secondary (and most is), is perilously seductive for two reasons. First, it is quicker and easier to write (woven within the seclusion of the monastic office) and therefore responds admirably to current pressures of ‘publish or perish.’ Yet (the second) it paradoxically attracts attention and prestige within academia - perhaps as a function of post-modernist disillusion- ment with the Enlightenment project (and its associated empiricism, foundati- onalism and realism), as well as more general cultural imperatives for the contemporary individual to be free of the specific, as reflected in ‘globalization,’ the information super-highway, jet mobility, and even winter suntans. Why people (of all persuasions, Marxian as much as post-modernist) succumb to this abstractionist seduction cannot of course concern me here (and I do not deny that original and nondwivative ‘theory’ has its proportional place in our intellectual endeavours), but what I believe is urgently needed in rural studies is a more critical appreciation of the way in which the field has emerged from this epoch - and an exposition of the serious dangers incurred in the separation of abstract thought from the specific moorings of empirical research.’ To this extent one of the books prompting this article, Writing the rural, might yet serve a useful purpose. But let us now try and unravel the route to these crucial cross-roads, the better I believe to be prepared for the future. The best place to start is 1966.

The 1966 watershed: mainstream theory and the eclipse of ‘community’

None of the leading lights from the past thirty years of British rural studies has dissented from the oft-asserted view that their research area has been fundamentally flawed by an “aversion to theory” and a commensurate adherence to “shallow empiricism” (Newby 1980, p. 23 and 18). Somewhere or other you will find such an argument, frequently high-profile, in the writings of Newby, Lowe, Marsden, Thrift, Cloke, Winter, Whatmore and Murdoch - just to name the most prominent and prolific of the last years? And all of them would mark the break into a new approach with the appearance in 1966 of Ray Pahl’s demolition of the traditional conceptual apparatus of rural studies - the ‘rural-urban continuum’ - which had held sway in the area for close to a hundred years.3 In this same journal Pahl opened his critique with words which (often- cited) continue to resonate within the field, casting doubt on the very utility of even conceptualizing the world in terms of such a polarity. “In a sociological context,” he asserted, ”the terms rural and urban are more remarkable for their ability to confuse than for their power to illuminate.” The very idea of a sociologically distinct world denominated ‘rural’ - in turn the basis of the “professional

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identity” of many researchers in the field - was fundamentally challenged as misleading and out of date (1966, p. 299). The gauntlet had been thrown down and the days of the ‘rural’ as a separate category seemed numbered.

Given the cast of Pahl’s critique and the atrophied state of the research field it was unsurprising that no-one accepted the challenge to defend the old continuum. One major effect of this, abetted by another 1966 publication - Commu- nities in Britain by Ronald Frankenberg - was to draw to a conclusion the long-standing community-studies’ tendency of equating the ‘rural’ with ‘traditional,’ ‘organic’ communities of homogeneity and social cohesion - or the world we had apparently lost in the corrosive process of industrialization and urbanization. The long-overdue demise of this nineteenth-century dichotomy, even to some extent still upheld by Frankenberg in 1966, had been delayed in part by its association with the peculiar imprint, especially in England, of a pervasive and popular cultural idealization of ‘the rural way of life’ - an idealization which, as shown by Lowe and Buller (1990) in a stimulating comparative account, has also made a deep impression on the British tradition in social science. But this is another story which cannot detain us here.4

Of course no single year or intellectual work can mark an abrupt discontinu- ity in academic thinking, but it is nonetheless useful to think of 1966 as particularly significant in bringing together a new awareness of the problems afflicting rural studies. The ‘rural-urban continuum’ was thus exposed as an inade- quate ‘theoretical’ construct for the modern world, and at the same time it became clear that the equation of the ‘rural’ with a cohesive ‘organic community’ beyond the reach of the city was driven largely by ideology - and in any case, in research terms, it clearly left a great deal out. In particular, as Franken- berg (1966, p. 252) highlighted as “one of the most glaring gaps in the literature,’’ it neglected those rural areas which were characterized by the presence of “capitalist organized business farming.”

The East Anglian cases: mainstream issues in a rural context

The consummate effect of Pahl’s cleansing intervention was to create a space in the research field - or in Howard Newby’s terms, “a theoretical vacuum.” This was filled by the emergence of a new theoretical strand, ‘critical rural sociology,’ which came to expose the rural world to a very different analytical light. This rural world was no longer to be regarded as sociologically distinct, nor would it be conceptually defined antithetically to the city, but instead would fall within a more theoretically-informed and holistic focus where the notions of change, class and social conflict eclipsed those of continuity, community and social cohesion.

It would, however, remain a recognizable and specific kind of space - designated ‘rural’ - for researchers to work on, and as such, the denomination would signify nothing more than this, an academic specialism, serving just the

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same conventional purpose as similar labels do in ‘Labour history’ and ‘women’s studies.’ It was abundantly clear at this early stage of the field’s reorientation that the use of such a convention would in no way imply a categorization of any explanatory content, but that, on the contrary, the term would be a conve- nience whereby researchers were directed into a delineated area of the un- known - in short, “an empirical referent” (Newby 1980, p.. 9), a way of limit- ing the research parameters of questions, rather than providing apt.iori answers.

A great deal of effort has since been deployed on this vexed question of what this label ‘rural’ means. In my view much of this has been excessive, and symptomatic of a debilitating malaise within the subdiscipline. I believe the British scene would be better documented today if greater attention had been paid to Newby’s 1980 Trend report: ruraLsocioLogy, admittedly addressed primarily to a North American audience. The lead for this was available in Newby’s diagnosis of “this problem of definition” (Newby 1980, p. 8) - it was incisive and clear, and the recommended resolution offered conclusive.

In line with the adoption of the holistic focus of political economy Newby thus came out clearly with the assertion that “there can be no theory of rural society without a theory of society tout court,” but at the same time acknowl- edged the necessity of a specific focus by designating ‘rural,’ the “demonstrably appropriate object of study,” as those “geographical localities where the size and density of the population is relatively small,” and (following a discussion of Castells’ and Harvey’s contributions to the question of space in advanced capitalist societies) where the economy - agriculture - uses “space (land) in a very extensive manner.”5 Swiftly and succinctly, the “empirical terrain” was thus set out without ever the merest suggestion that such a delineation implied either a homogeneity or an a priori elucidation. On the contrary, all it did was to direct attention to a research field of historicallycontingent variation - almost all of it crying out for empirical attention and analysis.

Newby’s first main work, The hferentiuf worker (1977), had effectively responded to just such a cry. And in the spirit of trying to fill the “post-Pahl theoretical vacuum” it was designed to take a ‘rural’ subject (“a study of farm workers in East Anglia”) and relate it to theoretical issues in the mainstream of sociological debate. As a result, on cue from the general influence of the then ongoing debate over the nature of British working class and “problems of class awareness and class consciousness,” Newby’s documentation of the case study referred directly to the more holistic and complex relationships between structure, class and action, to the arguments over ‘embourgeoisement,’ and to an analysis of “the social bases of political commitment and class-based identity” (Newby 1977, p. 105).

The whole drift of the work thus turned on the concept of deference as a variant of working-class consciousness under capitalism, and on “the realm of ideas in the fashioning of structural stability and change” - and in this way Newby relocated rural studies within mainstream conceptual analysis which had moved beyond the more structuralist models of social change. A measure


of the success of Newby’s conceptual shift can be found in the occasional attempt to engage in the sterile secondary exercise of classifying his work within the grand theoretical traditions of the sociological mainstream as either ‘Weberian’ or ‘Neo-Manrist.’6

Newby had taken a cue from Frankenberg’s comment on the neglect of ‘capitalist’ agriculture. As a result he located his examination of these general sociological issues in an area where the ‘traditional’ rural life-style had been eclipsed by all the hall-marks of advanced capitalism - dynamic market-orienta- tion, a high concentration of hired labour, and in turn, “readily identifiable class divisions” (Newby 1977 p. 101). At the same time, Newby’s cue from Pahl could hardly have been more explicit in his rejection of the old polarity of rural and urban. For him this study of farm-workers was first and foremost a question of class formation within capitalist development, and as such bore no relation to the tradition of rural studies as a site-specific field of research: “there is nothing,” he argued, “in the social structure of the East Anglian countryside that could not be found in an urban setting, and nothing in the atti- tudes and behaviour of agricultural workers which could not be found among certain groups of urban, industrial workers” (Newby 1977, p. 100). The analysis (he concluded) could be regarded as a piece of industrial sociology, “the industry merely being agriculture.” Exactly the same position was taken up by Newby and his fellow authors for the research into capitalist farmers in East Anglia, published the following year - a study thus designed “to be as much a contribution to research on social stratification in modern Britain as a piece of occupational, or even rural, sociology” (Newby et al. 1978, p. 17).7

The quality of these studies gave them a milestone position in the evolution of the new rural studies. They established a clear break from the past concentration on the rural as ‘organic community’ and ‘traditional’ agriculture (where, for the analytically myopic, the relative absence of hired labour had obscured the nature of the productive regime), and in its place inserted a central dialectic of class division and their expression in terms of political commitment, class identity, and local power. These studies were thereafter just as likely to inform consideration of general class formation as they were to issues specific to the rural location of the subject-matter. As a result the new rural studies which they heralded emerged with a central preoccupation with class and class identity (both proletarian and entrepreneurial middle), and the work also had the effect of consolidating the lead taken by Pahl of relegating the duality of town and country to the conceptual dustbin - at least within academia: beyond this world, the duality’s appeal was if anything strengthened and gave rise paradoxically to the subsequent research focus, urban exodus and the new rural middle class. Above all, however, the impact of these substantive studies was to demonstrate the methodological value of applying theoretical perspectives to specific subject-matter - and then of elaborating a generality from the particular case.

Perversely, however, the explicit focus in this Essex-based research on agriculture as an integral part of the capitalist economy had an additional effect in

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relation to Pahl’s perspective. In this sense Newby et al.’s initiative restored to the new rural studies an older focus where farming and property relations played a central role, whereas in Pahl’s case the conceptual drift was informed by an empirical base selected specifically for its non-farming character (the dispersed city), and consequently related to an academic tradition defined as “metropolitan region theory” (Pahl1965, p. 11): Given this fundamental interest in an ‘urban’ subject-matter, it is something of a paradox that Pahl has been attributed with such a key role in the formation of the new post-1966 d studies - but as I shall show later, his influence remains implicitly important.

Meantime, however, it was the Newby-led &sex School which carried the new direction forward, with the result that Pahl’s “dispersed city” lost ground to the more ‘traditional’ concern with agriculture. Perhaps the most important aspect of this development, at least as perceived by Newby et al., was the way in which “this ‘rediscovery’ of agriculture as a legitimate focus of rural sociology inquiry was largely inaugurated by representatives of. . . (a) new theoretical tradition in rural sociology” (Buttel and Newby 1980, p. 15).

In brief, it seemed to them that two birds had been killed with one stone. On the one hand, the old site-specific foci of the rural studies of the rural-urban continuum genre had been replaced with “decidedly different empirical terrain” albeit still ‘rural,’ thereby transcending the polar divide by approaching agriculture as an integrated part of “advanced capitalism,” and in turn by concentrating on holistic issues such as =state agricultural policy, agricultural labour, regional inequality, and agricultural ecology” (Butte1 and Newby, p. 15). And on the other hand, the adoption of the “neO-Marxist and kindred perspectives’’ that had directed this empirical attention in the first place provided the new rural discipline with a theoretical sophistication Cpolitical economy”) it had always lacked. With the examples of The defmential worker and Property, paternalism andpower already on the shelf, here at last with the start of a new decade was a clear research agenda ready to fill the *post-Pahl vacuum.”

The post-Newby era, restructuring and power in the locality

As it turned out, however, this new momentum of 1977-80 was somewhat fore~talled.~ In the wider world Thatcherism had succeeded what has now been termed ‘ Fordism’ and modern capitalism entered a ‘new’ phase of accumulation and transnational divisions of labour marked by processes of ‘deregulation’ and ‘global restructuring’ - manifest, in turn, in the demise of the Western manufacturing sector and the commensurate emergence of ‘services.’ ‘Theory’ mush- roomed as the social science’s response to this profound dislocation and the urge to adopt the (increasingly elastic) holism of political economy became ever more imperative. So much so that the sharper the impact of these changes in the real world, the more ethereal and diffuse were the academic searchings for their global source.


Rural specialists were not immune to this virus. The momentum developed by the East Anglian cases was thus largely baulked by a new enthusiasm for ideas that had emerged from the ‘restructuring’ analysis of ‘post-Fordism’ - and in particular, how such trends were seen to have transformed (or ‘reconstitut- ed’) the rural realm and its determinant social relations. Prominent within this new firmament were the figures of Doreen Massey and John Urry - especially in the case of the latter’s early involvement in the ESRC-funded Rural Econo- my and Society Study Group (RESSG), and the inclusion of his piece on “Capi- talist restructuring, recomposition and the regions” in the group’s first publication Locality dnd mralzty (Bradley and Lowe 1984).

Implicit within this seminal contribution by Urry (1984) was an attempt to draw a line under the Essex School and its agrarian focus. The article actually set out to review the problems besetting rural sociology (as seen by Urry), and i R particular “the serious difficulties” associated with Newby’s “holistic” attempt to tackle them. This opening was, however, prematurely abandoned without any systematic treatment of the substantive East Anglian studies, and the gist of the argument abruptly shifted to the notion of “the ruralization of industry.” It focused in particular on Fothergill and Gudgin’s (1982) highly schematic account of the shift of capital and employment from ‘urban’ areas to those previously designated ‘rural,’ and thereafter pursued an alternative a priori explanation as to why such areas “have become important locations for capital investment in recent years” (Urry 1984, p. 55).

These meditations on “the spatial indifference of capital” in its search for cheap, quiescent labour (echoed by Rees (1984) in the same volume as ‘‘green”) and its commensurate impact on the processes of social recomposition at the local level eventually led Urry to conclude (close to twenty years after Pahl’s intervention) that “the notion that there are distinct ‘rural’ localities” was “problematic” (Urry 1984, p. 59). A lame finale, perhaps, but it is clear that the abstracted and ‘theorized’ procedure of his argument left an indelible impression on rural studies - not least on Nigel Thrift, one of the leading pacemakers in the field. So profound had apparently been the impact of this “ruralization of industry” and the invasion of the countryside by ‘spatially indifferent’ capital that (for Thrift) the category ‘rural’ became problematic - such that he proposed to exclude from it “a large area of Britain,” especially the South of England, as “one vast created and manicured urbadsuburban space” and lacking the quality of ‘rural’ in “any meaningful sense” (Thrift 1987, p. 77).

The ‘restructuring’ literature thus redefined the subject-matter of rural studies in the post-Newby era. Whereas the East Anglian case studies had placed an emphasis on property, and especially landownership, as “the defining principle of rural social relations” - thereby giving the field an agrarian focus, the main drift of the RESSG moved with Urry to argue that “changes in the spatial division of labour perform a much more significant role in the structuring of contemporary rural society” (Cloke and Little 1990, p. 17). What this meant in practice was a shift of research activity from that of agriculture and the class

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relations generated by it (including the nature of the entrepreneurial rural middle class) favoured by the Essex School, to one of Pahl’s “dispersed city” and the “phenomenon of counterurbanization” (Cloke 1989, p. 180).

In the process of this change of focus familiar arguments for the “urgent need to draw the study of rural areas and issues out of the margins and into the mainstream of social science” were rehearsed - and it was asserted that the success of such a project would depend upon the field moving beyond its “traditional agrarian concerns” (Marsden et al. 1993, pp. 2-3). I believe that this general point has been overstated (and indeed that the extension of the research focus recommended within it had in fact been anticipated by the second of the East Anglian cases - see note 7 below), but nonetheless there can be no doubt that the rural subject matter includes more than just the issues of landownership and the division of agricultural labour - particularly as wider ‘restructuring’ developments have taken their toll on the rural world. Here it is worth noting that the countryside was no mere passive recipient in this, but rather a full player in a two-way process in which the development of capitalist agriculture (in its second, ‘capital-intensive,’ phase and exemplified by the East Anglian studies) had played its own part in the general process of rural recomposition - primarily, I would argue, from the way in which profit-squeezing and labour-displacement provided rural space for development and an urban exodus, rather than quiescent ‘green’ labour attractive to ‘spatially-mobile’ capital.

Rural recomposition, class analysis and the unit of application

In any event, the clearest manifestation of this process was the mushrooming presence of a new social formation in the countryside, anticipated in Pahl’s account of the “dispersed city” as more and more urban exiles were able to pursue their rural dreams of “the village in the mind.” This ‘social recomposition,’ coinciding as it did with the progressive disappearance of employed labour from agriculture, has had the important effect of transferring the perceived fulcrum of rural tension from the realm of prodrrctwn to that of consumption. For this reason Murdoch and Marsden (1994, p. 7) recommend that “class formation be disarticulated from being ‘grounded’ in production,” whilst Cloke and Thrift (1987,1990) emphasize the importance of the service class in the countryside as a force (“the engine of social change”) driven by interests of lifestyle rather than livelihood.

The bulk of the research energy in the post-Newby period of rural studies has thus signified a marked concentration on issues of consumption. This in turn has entailed a switch, foreshadowed in different ways by both Urry (1984) and Newby et al. (1978), to the question of power and how it is wielded at the local level within the realms of both the state apparatus and civil society. Thrift (1987, pp. 78-79), for example, pitches the debate over the urban-rural shift in terms of the rise to ”prominence” of the service class, and how this position of superior “causal powers” has been underpinned by economic advantage, “social


and cultural hegemony” and increasing domination of the local state. The crucial developments (and research foci) have thus revolved around the use of the countryside as place of vesidence rather than of production, with the service class’s pre-eminence “enabling it to take the lead in manufacturing the created space of the South of England, and increasingly other parts of Britain, in its own image” - that is, in the image of Baldwin’s 1926 pastoral where the cow- tryside was traditional, eternal and the quintessence of Englishness, in short, preserved. Mayerfeld Bell’s (1994) recent study of an “exurban” village in Hampshire provides a detailed illustration of this general process, as does Chap- ter 2 in Murdoch and Marsden’s (1994) treatment of Buckinghamshire: in both cases the evidence confirms the popular assumption that the middle class exodus from the city has been driven by a search for qualities associated in the public mind with the rural - tranquility, peace of mind, closeness to nature, and a sense of ‘belonging’ to a community.’O

Despite this shift of focus, however, the research perspective has retained a methodological emphasis on “class.” The new research field has thus been dominated by people with a declared commitment to “class analysis” within the “political economy paradigm,” and variously to the specific issues of “class formation” and “collective action.” Paul Cloke and Nigel Thrift, for example, remind us of how rural studies had previously been hamstrung by “a neglect of class-based analyses” such that “work on rural social change has remained largely descriptive (with) few attempts . . . made to link it to the evolution of property and labour relations or to the wider process of economic restructuring” (Cloke and Thrift 1990, p. 165) - and that, in general, the empirical material on rural conflicts between the indigenous and the incomer had been used “uncritically and untheoretically” (Cloke and Thrift 1987, p. 321). In similar vein, Johnathan Murdoch and Terry Marsden regret that “class analysis still seems to be of secondary concern to many sociologists and geographers working in rural studies” (1994, p. 2).

As a result, the revised research agenda of the ‘restructuring’ thesis has paid almost exclusive attention to the way in which this new rural class coheres (or fragments) around consumption - or within the participation in an ongoing pursuit of the “rural idyll” in all its various constructions. Such participation inevitably entails instances of “collective action” - where class members articulate common values and aspirations, and pursue their realization, in the course of which are formed and consolidated collective identities, particularly in relation to other classes. Instances of such action and its context thus provide the raw material for research within this perspective, even though such a methodological step tends to overlook the critical issue of what exactly constitutes the ‘clu5s divisions’ thereby identified. This is too complex a question to be treated here, but it is nonetheless worth stressing that rural studies urgently needs a clearer exposition of what this drift away from the social relations of production implies for the latent but over-arching assumptions of dialectical change and the dynamics of historically significant deve1opments.l‘

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This aside, the subject-matter of this new agenda can be seen as taking place - both actually and for our purposes of research application - within a manage- able context, or locality. As Marsden et al. (1993, p. 148) rightly say, the pressure for documentation and analysis must therefore be on “the institutional relationships which govern the reproduction of spatial structures” as well as “a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between locally based action and that deriving from outside the locality.” Given that the 7aison &&re of the new middle class in the countryside revolves around the consumption (actual or desired) of a realized rural idyll, the axis of tension and contradiction in this ‘restructured’ world must therefore hinge on the balance between the principles and dynamics of ‘development’ as against ‘conservation’ - the importance of which has been admirably covered in Philip hwe’s work on environmental lobbies and in Marsden et al. Constructing the countryszde.

This in turn means that the new rural studies agenda must devolve from theory to application with reference to case studies of public policy, state action, and local participation as mediated by class action within civil society - to the extent that each has a bearing on the “reproduction of spatial structures.” Most high-profile rural research since the Essex School has in this way concentrated on these themes but it is clear that such a focus has required some elasticity in the concept of ‘class conflict’ - when, for instance, tensions have developed around new housing projects designed to accommodate secondary or even tertiary waves of in-migrants from the same service class in an ever more contentious pursuit of the rural idyll.

As a result, Cloke and Thrift, for example, place the emphasis of their conceptual interpretation on the way in which this ‘incomer’ class had been mis- construed (by Newby et al.) as homogeneous and unified in opposition to the ‘indigenous.’ The outcome is inevitably a further shift in the deployment of heuristic terms, away from class conflict and towards factional or group analysis, thus: “What is lacking in these traditional wisdoms is a clear understanding of the exact nature of the impact which diffwent middle class groups have in the social, economic and political aspects of rural life. This vacuum points towards a study of intra-class conflicts as the engine of much contemporary rural change” (Cloke and Thrift 1987, p. 323 italics in original).

This much of the new agenda is clear - the emphasis placed on the incidence of ‘intra-class conflicts’ and the way in which these reflect underlying social dynamism in the countryside - “the engine of much contemporary social change.” The key question for research application, then, is when, where and why such conflict occurs - such that social change and the processes of class formation might be explained. On this crucial point, Cloke and Thrift identify a pnori “five fault lines” within the service class: “public/private sector, gender, life cycle, consumption practices and types of locality” (1990, p. 176, outlined too in 1987, pp. 331-332). The research imperatives for Cloke and Thrift are thus defined as the examination of these points of contention, but also related areas of the fractions’ “main axes of differentiation,” “the relative strength of

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their internal organization,” “the nature of conflicts and compromises between (them),” their relations with “other classes and interest groups in rural areas (landed capital, petty bourgeoisie, farmers, developers),” and finally, the question of “the aggregate effects of particular conflicts in changing the general class character of an area” (Cloke and Thrift 1990, pp. 177-178).

There can be no complaint with this framework, although we might differ on the question of research priorities from within this list. It sets out clearly a range of research foci and is right to emphasize the importance of the dynamic aspects of the new rural formation, implying in turn the need to examine the relationships between the component classes and factions. But, as ever, the proof of the theoretical framework lies in its empirical application.

From theory to application: class, factionalism and the local state

Some empirical work was conducted (presumably within this perspective, since the timing is more or less right) by Cloke (and Little) in ten parishes all within 7 miles of the county town of Gloucester. Preliminary results from the project first appeared in Geoforum in 1987. The data is set in the context of the revised agenda: that is, in opposition to “the curiously standardised conceptual view of the changing social composition of rural communities in Britain,” itself a refrac- tion of a “lack of progress” and “the theoretical vacuum” in the field, as well as “the explanation of social change (being) somewhat naive and the debate . . . sterile” (Cloke and Little 1987, p. 403). In line with the perspective adopted, claims are made for the importance of an emphasis on class and the employment of “the political economy approach.”

As it turns out this portentous preamble is somewhat misleading and the main body of the piece is disappointing. The survey data on ‘class’ bears no relationship to ‘political economy’ but is driven instead by the Registrar Gener- al’s six categories of occupation (plus those of ‘retired’ and ‘unemployed’), and are produced to demonstrate how the processes of “gentrification” and “geriatri- fication” have overtaken rural society, as well as “the growing importance of the middle classes” (1987, p. 411). This is basically an exercise in population categorization and totally static - more worthy of the sociological lepidopterist than the political economist, and there is no attempt to interpret the data in terms of class (or intra-class) relationships. Nor is there any mention of the five “fault-lines” enumerated above. Insofar as any attempt is made to address the central political-economy issue of class conflict (and its commensurate contribution to “class formation,” much favoured by Thrift in a clear and interesting exposition from 1987’3 we are limited to a reference to “perceived social divisions” - and the lame and rather disconcerting ratification (for Cloke and Thrift) that contemporary rural society is polarized (after the fashion of the “traditional wisdoms”) between ‘locals’ and newcomer^."^

When the analysis available lacks any real class or even factional dynamism (as it does in this case) it is little surprise that ‘rural’ research “lacks progress.”

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But this first publication was only provisional and the authors suggested that a “detailed discussion” of the issues would appear in the full-length book on The rural state - which in turn promised the parallel development of ‘theoretical’ discussion with empirical application (Cloke and Little 1987, p. 411). There is, however, no real change in the direction and quality of the analysis in this longer work and exactly the same static data on occupational distribution forms the core of the book. Even so, it is worth noting that the fuller narrative reveals just how a more dynamic analytical frame might have produced an illustrative case-study of middle class presence in the countryside.

The surveyed parishes of the research fell within the Gloucestershire ‘structure plan’ for 1980s state-directed development, inevitably revolving around plans for housing, health, education and transport. Coverage of the planning process in this specific case, and of the administrative interface between central state (DOE) and local government (County and District councils), shows how the central point of contention concerned the relative weight given to ‘development’ policies (aimed at reversing ‘rural decline’) as opposed to ‘conservation and the preservation of the environment’ - all in the midst of a wider context of restructuring, deregulation and the increasing centralization of power at the expense of local level. In this respect, however, it should be said that the significance of these neo-liberal trends from 1979 are hardly brought out, giving the case-study a weakly constructed context, and that the importance of such a detailed framework becomes clear when comparing this sketched account with the more historically-informed analysis of Tory “shire traditionalism” in Msrs- den et al. Constmcting the cosrnnyside (1993).

Work done on the bureaucratic procedures (which Cloke and Little, armed with political economy, aim to expose as ideologicallydriven as opposed to consensus-seeking) revealed that modifications to the Plan imposed by the Secretary of State tended to tilt its emphasis away from the “socially progressive” elements based on the “principle of resource dispersal” in favour of environmental preservation: as the authors say, “the direction of the secretary of state’s amendments appear generally to be subordinating the needs of rural communities to the aims of conservation” (1990, p. 151). For political economists there seems to be something of a ‘traditional’ implication here of an imputed homogeneity of the rural ‘community’ which a more dynamic class or factional analysis would have exposed. Again, comparison with Marsden et al. (1993, Chapter 5) shows what might have been - where discussion brings out the distinctive political culture of the Tory shires, designated and how this sets up an important tension between sectors of the local and the national.

Cloke and Little’s main failure thus concerns the key issue, so prominently emphasized by them elsewhere (including in the first chapter of this book) as ‘theoretical’ premise and exhortation, of class formation and class (and intra- class) conflict. The fundamental notion of class a a relationship, an essential to the political economy perspective”, seems to have been lost in the shift from theory to application - with the result that the specific case-study of the Glou-


cestershire Plan ends up without the basis of class (or factional) analysis and we are left with little light shed on the way in which power and policy-implementation operate at the local level.

What they do show, however, is that the outcome of the Plan and its balance between development and conservation depended upon the final interpretation of the policy directives at the level of the District. In other words, there was a chance to put some empirical flesh on the bare bones of the observation that “the adoption of a political-economy approach presupposes that the cost and benefits of resource allocation will vary amongst different groups in the rural population” (Cloke and Little 1990, p. 159). The choice of the designation ‘group’ in place of ‘class’ rightly leaves open the treatment of the different “fractions” of the middle class as suggested by Cloke and Thrift (1987) elsewhere, but in the absence of any dynamic analysis it is clear that the work suffers from the lack of just that kind of theory-and-application mix promised to us in the book‘s Introduction.

This is especially unfortunate given the clear possibilities of the case study where three separate organizations (RCAP, RAG, and ‘the Cotswold Cavalry’) appear, almost in passing, as key players in the struggle to define the final profile of the Plan and its implementation. Research into these local factions - their class composition and their relationships with other institutions within the local civil society and state apparatus - would have provided an excellent context for the testing-out of the Cloke-Thrift propositions on restructuring, the rise of the service class and its intra-class conflicts as “the engine” of rural change (as well as overall class formation) - just as was prompted by their check-list of research foci covered above. As it is, for all the theoretical prepara- tion it seems that at the empirical stage these dynamic dimensions were overlooked, and the “detailed discussion” of the class issues deferred from the 1987 article was omitted once again - on account of “insufficient space” and “a number of deficiencies . . . in both methodology and its application,” albeit unfortunately unspecified and unanalysed (1990, p. 160).

These were lost opportunities for testing out the purported advances in ‘theory’ and the progress these years of ‘theorizing’ might have made to our understanding of spec+ rural change in class terms. Additionally, the admission of problems in the application left open the possibilities of a more detailed account of the very real difficulties of moving from the theoretical premise to empirical operation - and thus it was a serious error of judgement not to take advantage of critical reflection on the research results and their shortcomings. And so on this showing we would have to conclude that progress made in the field has not been accelerated by ‘theoretical’ refinements, although to some extent, of course, we might mitigate such a judgement as a failure more of application than theoretical outline. Up to a point this is borne out by a reading of Murdoch and Marsden’s Reconstituting rurality (1994).

With the authors coming from the same RESSG stable it is no surprise to find some familiar ground covered on the processes of ‘restructuring,’ its im-

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pact on the countryside and the commensurate importance of the new rural middle class. Similar emphases are placed on the imperatives of documenting “class formation,” on the centrality of collective action in this process, and on how such middle class emergence is “highly variable over space” (Murdoch and Marsden 1994, p. 112). Again, consistent with the agenda of the post-Newby era, the focus concentrates on consumption as the motive force behind change (within the contextual tension between “land development” and ‘envimnmen- tal values”), noting “the role of the rural in the making of the middle class” (ibid., p. 9) and the post-structuralist need to “dismiculate class formation from being grounded in production” (ibid., p. 7). Nor are the roles of planning, the state apparatus and civil society (the “locality”) overlooked - key arenas all for the contending fractions and values of the middle class. Above all, the book pays close attention to the methodological problems of pursuing these themes and interests in empirical case studies (recommending a route of ‘action-in- context”), and to the essential task of working beyond these towards generaliza- tions “in class terms” (ibid., pp. x-xiv).

All of this is impressively systematic, even though various ‘ideal types’ are introduced (such as the dichotomized “paternalistic” and ‘contested” country- sides, echoing the old duality of ‘traditional’ and ‘businesslike’) which demand much closer scrutiny and extended empirical application. The whole detailed and complex account of four different villages and various “development” initiatives in Buckinghamshire (an instance of intensive ‘restructuring,’ the “ruralization of industry,” and “preserved countryside” dominated by consum- ers and the middle class) is precariously held together by a thesis on “class formation.”

In the context of relations of consumption the core of this critical process derives from the accumulation and display of “property and cultural assets, and how these become intertwined in particular places” - as well as the way in which such values provide for shared identities and collective action (in ‘net- works” and Massey’s “meeting places”) in defence (or promotion) of them, especially in relation to identity-threatening developments associated with other classes or fractions. Within such a cultural milieu, of course, the construction of the ‘rural’ as a class image varies considerably and is seen as an important determinant to both class formation and the shaping of the locality.

Murdoch and Marsden effectively deploy this conceptual apparatus on class formation to “discern coherence in the wide range of economic, social and political activities” which punctuate rural areas of middle class domination (as “preserved countryside”) such as Aylesbury Vale. What one misses in all of this, even though its importance is alluded to in the text, is greater historical depth, after the model of Thompson commended by both Newby (1977) and Thrift and Williams (1987) - as well as the extension of the same kind of documentation and comparative analysis into the authors’ other three types of countryside - “contested,” “paternalistic,” and “clientist” - where one might expect class formation to derive as much from relations of production as those

Class, power and soclal construction 107

of consumption. To this extent the book serves rural studies well by suggesting other localities and thematic specificities in urgent need of research attention and the application of the last years’ conceptual developments - particularly in respect of the clarion call to sustain an empirical focus and the inductive logic of moving from the specific to the general.

Theoretical cul-de-sac: subjectivity and the retreat from the general

By comparison, the impact on rural studies made by Cloke et al.’s Writing the rural (1994) is - far from favourable - actually damaging, even though it represents the fruit of an ESRC-funded project designed to cover similar ground to Murdoch and Marsden’s Reconstituting rurality - that is, “the local economic impacts of the middle class in rural areas.”

Indeed, any illusions that this book might mark an advance in the field of rural change and the middle class as its “engine” via the Thrift-Cloke frame- works of 1987-90 (presumably the basis of the original research design) are immediately dispelled in the Preface - where the authors reveal that the ‘rural’ had become “a real sticking point.” It seems that time had stood still and that we were back in 1966 with the problem of the ‘rural’ as a category. The authors note, somewhat redundantly, that it is possible to use the word in different ways and “to signify many different things,” whilst elsewhere in Cloke and Goodwin’s 1993 piece in Terra (cited in the book’s Introduction) it seems that, for them, this ambiguity is of recent origin: since, as they argue bizarrely “rurality has become (sic) a social construct and the ‘rural’ represents a world of social, rural (sic), and cultural values” (Cloke and Goodwin 1993, p. 167 emphases added).

It is extremely hard to grasp what is intended here since it can barely be necessary at this level to point out that ‘rurality’ has always been a social construct, and that it has, as such, provided subject-matter for a multitude of researchers - like Keith Thomas (1983), Raymond Williams (1971) and John Rennie Short (1991). Earlier work by Cloke shows that he is at least aware of this, and yet his Introduction in Writing the mral with Thrift suggests that such a perspective derives from the very recent “postmodern turn in social science,” and that it consequently opens up novel research possibilities: “to accept the rural as a social and cultural construct allows the rural to be rescued as an important research category” (p. 3). The important point of where it needs to be rescuedfrom is unfortunately never developed, but we are left with the impression that these villains are erstwhile progressive political economists like Marsden et al. - not to mention Cloke and Thrift themselves in a previous incarnation.

Indeed, the once favoured and promising “political economy paradigm,” well-honed but still without adequate empirical application, is now summarily dismissed as “dogmatic” and apparently blind to the fact that ”culture matters” (with no caveat made to all those post-1966 advocates who had explicitly ac- commodated the realm of ideas and values) (Cloke and Goodwin 1993, p. 168).

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Further uncomfortable twists follow, for example, so soon after the admittedly deficient “class analysis” of the Gloucestershire case, we are told, seemingly entirely without irony, that “mechanistic statistical descriptions of rurality” are “of relatively little usen (p. 164).

Seldom can a research project have deviated further from its original promising design and intention - and have produced so little of substan~e.’~ The post-Newby agenda of the new rural middle class makes no impression here and instead there are five separate essays tenuously linked by a common “consideration of the social and cultural construction of the rural” and of “the implications of adopting postmodern and/or poststructural approaches to rural studies” (Cloke et al. 1994, p. 3). They are respectively David Matless’ “Doing the English village, 1945-90s: an essay in imaginative geography”; Martin Phil- lips’ “Habermas, rural studies and critical social theory“; Marcus Doel’s “Some- thing resists: reading-deconstruction as ontological infestation (departures from the texts of Jacques Derrida); Paul Cloke’s “(En)culturing political economy: a life in the day of a ‘rural geographer”’; and Nigel Thrift’s “Inhuman geogra- phies: landscapes of speed, light and power.*

To attempt a synthesis of these essays would be a futile and indeed Hercule- an exercise. I was unable to identdy a connecting thread or argument but it is clear from the Introduction, “Refiguring the ‘rural’” by Cloke and Thrift, that their intention was to draw attention to the “differences of meaning and construct associated with the rural,” not least within “academic discourses” (p. 1). This is the signal to retreat from the awkward realm of ‘the rural’ out there back into the monastic seclusion of reflexivity and derivative theorizing. With the exception of Matless’s account of the diverse constructions of the ‘English village’ (ultimately let down by an absence of historical contextdization), the book thus betrays a state of intellectual bankruptcy and total disorientation concealed behind a facade of legitimation of “self-reflexive mode”16 with reference to every available cultural theorist from Williams to Spivak. These essays thus stand as tombstones to the project of producing a representative account of the ascertainable rural world.”

“Meta-narratives” are thus rejected and the responsibility for intellectual summary abandoned. As Cloke plaintively tells us “it seemed that however sensitively the political economy version of rural change was written, taking full account of the effects of locality, history of social composition and the like, the charge of being reductionist always had some validity in the non-compliance of individual places and communities to more general theoretical explanations” (p. 161). The emphasis thus turns on the private (soul-searching autobiography and the agonizing question of “why one speaks at all” [1994, p. I8ID, as against the public, and difference, as opposed to sameness. As the Preface more or less admits, the authors lost confidence in their intended project even as they began it, because once again their instinct was to search for truth in a prwri abstrac- tions or a new theorizing guru. However, they (of course) discovered to their dismay that they “possessed no one theoretical framework” sufficient “to nego-


tiate the ‘rural’ and articulate its diverse nature,” and in addition, they found that their own different preconceptions “could not be easily submerged in one overriding narrative” (1994, p. v).

The hard option of tackling the age-old problem of reducing social multiplic- ity to plausible coherence - in Marsden et al.’s words, “to generalize in class terms’’’’ - was therefore turned to one side, and instead these five authors embraced in relief “a focus on diversity and difference.” There is nothing wrong in principle with such an emphasis, but in the absence of discipline and primary focus in this case it leads to a worthless torrent of subjectivity and rootless verbiage which does serious damage to the credibility of rural studies - and surrenders countless hostages to the ghost of Sir Keith Joseph or any other self-appointed guardian of the public purse.lg

Pages chosen at random consistently reveal the perils of such undisciplined self-indulgence and derivative ‘theorizing,’ with the result that the text often resembles the plains indian Black Elk with a peyote hangover - take Doe1 for instance in full flight on page 136: “Deconstructive writing defies the Spirit of Gravity, the Spirit of Reading. It defies the curvature of a simple, impatient, thrifty, miserly, serious and restricted stride which sees no problem in crossing its limit, its abyss. Preface to a short treatise on the pathos of the would-be reader who is doomed to wander across inhospitable terrain, without shelter or respite, leaving nothing but footprints on indifferent and asignifying ground: without OME, without limit, without face. The world is text: indifferent, hollow surface, signsponge. I abandon this landscape to you.”

The only meaningful resonance here is with the painful and debilitating experience of having to read Writing the rural. The only real function of such a literary catastrophe can only be to act as a siren, a shrill warning to the innocent against the seductions of undisciplined reflexivity and derivative theorizing. But it also serves the purpose of demonstrating conclusively that it is the mix of theory and application which is intellectually exacting (as opposed to monastic metaphysics) - and that Newby was absolutely right to suggest that the purpose of theory is normally heuristic - to provide for the formula- tion of the most productive and challenging questions for empirical research.

It is this which finally registers the fundamental difference between the two books - and indeed between the two Schools that the books represent: a con- structive mix of heuristic proposition and empirical application, successfully secured by Marsden, Murdoch et al. (and indeed Newby before them), but lamentably lacking in the case of Cloke, Thrift et al. The latter’s fatal mistake was to disregard the “methodological deficiencies” which were exposed in the first empirical venture of the Gloucestershire case. This is somewhat surprising since space for revised and improved application had, after all, been recognized by Cloke - both in 1990 with Little, and the year before (1989, pp. 190-191) when he pointed out that “the use of the political economy paradigm by rural researchers is as yet immature and undeveloped” - advising them to learn ‘to walk before attempting to run.’ However these were words that he and his

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colleagues had apparently forgotten by the next empirical venture (despite its beginning at much the same time) and instead they compounded the original deficiencies by the ill-advised adoption of an uncritical severance of ‘theory’ from its empirical moorings - Writing the mral is the inevitable and disastrous result.

Conclusion: rural studies at a cross-roads and the future agenda

However, it might have turned out otherwise. A mere seven years before the publication of Writing the rural (1994), Thrift had collaborated with Peter Williams to produce Clas and pace, a work explicitly committed to “the study of class formation” and subtitled - perhaps in implicit tribute to E.P. Thomp- son - The making of urban society. The book offers a very sound exposition of this critical process, emphasizing that it is not a matter of “geometrical abstraction” but is rather grounded in %onCrete situations of conflict and compromise - in a geographical reality” (1987, p. xiii). It also draws attention to the prob lems posed by the historical arrival of the middle classes for the classical polar model of capitalist society, and duly calls for efforts to be made to document the formation of these classes and their determinants.

Thrift and Williams rightly emphasize in this class analysis the fundamental role of the social relations of production and the conflicts they generate, but also highlight further determinants, such as “property rights,” “the control of the labour process,” and “control of investment” (1987, p. 6). In addition, they cover much the same ground as Bedeferential worker (1977) in highlighting the way in which “there is no unproblematical mapping of class structure onto social and political life” - but that, on the contrary, “other autonomous or relatively autonomous social forces quite clearly act within the limits described by class structure such as race, religion, ethnicity, gender, family and various state apparatuses, not only blurring the basic class divides but also generating their own social divisions” (1987, p. 7). In short, a recognition that “culture matters.”

No doubt such arguments lay behind the framework set up by Thrift and Cloke to tackle the subject of the new rural middle class and its fractions (1987, 1990), and also underpinned their premise that “the service class has been formed in struggle” (1987, p. 326). After all, Thrift and Williams are explicit about the importance of conflict within the processes of class formation, and how in turn such a formation ES histortcally contingent - making documentation and analysis best conducted within “restricted temporal and spatial scales” of some 40-50 years and a specific region (Thompson’s research exemplar in The making of the English working class). As they undertook the ESRC project on middle class impact on the rural just one year later (1988) they would have done better to heed this advice and to listen to Thrift and Williams’ words that “close attention must be paid to the exact mix of institutions that both generate and is generated by shifts in class structure. At this level of resolution, the formation of classes, the detailed to and fro of class conflict all become more apparent” (1987, p. 5).


Guided by this intellectual compass the ‘rural’ would never have become a “sticking point” but rather the first stage in identifying that appropriate scale and level of resolution; it is hard to understand why it was so carelessly dis- pensed with - unless we refer back to the seductions of derivative theorizing, which I mentioned earlier. But at least we can learn from the errors of these ways as rural studies reach this cross-roads - poised to follow either the seductive cul-de-sac of Writing the rural or the more exacting and productive route taken by Reconstituting rurality and Constmcting the countryszde. If the field is to have any intellectual or utilitarian future there can be no doubt that the latter choice must be made.

But at the same time we would do well to heed Thrift’s discarded advice on the essential subject of class formation and its appropriate scale of focus and application. What is currently lacking in rural studies - and urgently required - are bounded cases, monographs (a product maligned in England but esteemed in France) documenting this complex formation of classes in the various categories of ‘countryside,’ whether their driving dynamic lies in rural production (like family farmers) or consumption (like the established service class) or both (like the ‘traditional’ landowner). We should however be under no illusions about the task ahead: such a mix of heuristic proposition and empirical application, a blend of methods from history and sociology (and anthropology), constitutes an exacting project with no promise of quick or easy publications - such monuments to this tradition in history, like Thompson’s (1963) Making of the English working class, Joyce’s (1991) Visions of the people, or Weber’s (1977) Peasants into Frenchmen, stand irrefutably as witnesses to this. Dealing with rural subject-matter that is more contemporary will undoubtedly pose additional problems of data collection and generalization, but for students in the rural field the challenge to follow in such footsteps should be irresistible - as long as they do not succumb to fad or fashion, or to the false edifices of books like Writing the rural.

Notes

1. Symptomatic of this has been the tendency to exaggerate theory’s capacity to ex- plain, as opposed to suggest problems worthy of research, and in turn, to canonize gurus, especially from continental Europe. Thus, for instance, we find Cloke, Phil- lips and Thrift (1995, p. 224) asking the question “If Bourdieu is of limited value for registering the significance of culture and class where should we turn?” - and turning, unfortunately not back to research, but to a newer, still-lustred guru - Klaus Eder.

2. The length of this piece cannot of course accommodate a work-by-work assessment of the period 1966-1996. The point of departure has been recent publications dealing explicitly with the British scene from leading pacemakers in the field, especially Marsden er al. (1993), Murdoch and Marsden (1994), and Cloke et al. (1994). Some other prominent participants in the general British field have therefore been omitted - as, for example, Michael Redclift and David Goodman - on account of the way in which their work has seldom had a national focus. The purpose here is to exam-

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ine what seem to me to constitute the three main schools which have concentrated on the empirical space of rural England (and to a lesser extent, Wales). Their members have since dispersed but we can conveniently think of them in terms of three universities - Essex (Newby, Bell, Saunders and Rose); London (Lowe, Marsden, Murdoch, Whatmore); and Bristol (Cloke, Thrift, Little - somewhat ambiguously, Phillips, Doel, Matless, Goodwin). The argument here is that each schooI has developed a distinctive mix of ‘theory’ and empirical application - and that, given their respective high profiles in the field, an exposure of this kind serves a useful purpose, particularly for uncommitted students on the edge of the rural scene, both inside and outside the UK.

3. This was a surprisingly long reign and needs a study in its own r&t (see below), but it is worth remarking here that a wider and more comparative awareness w i h rural studies (as advocated in 1980 by Newby) would have undermined this basic concept a lot earlier, particularly via an appreciation of its ahistorid nature: Lewis (1949), for example, followed Redfield’s Mexican footsteps to study the same arche- typal rural community, whilst Wolf (1957) showed how such ‘organic’ formations were historically contingent and a function of the (supposedly remote) village’s relations with the world outside.

4. As noted above, this is a story which needs funher comparative treatment, but it is worth noting that again in the same watershed year of 1966 and anticipating Ray- mond Williams’ much-used 7be country and the city (1973), Ruth Glass identified the strength of this ideological immersion - as “a lengthy, thorough course of indoctri- nation, to which a l l of us everywhere, have at some time or other been subjected . . . condition(ing us) to think in terms of a sharp distinction between rural and urban places and ‘ways of life’ . . . (and where) the adjective ‘rural’ has pleasant, reassuring connotations - beauty, order, simplicity, rest, grassroots democracy, peacefulness, Gemeinschafi (whilst) ‘urban’ spells the opposite - ugliness, disorder, confusion, fatigue, compulsion, strife, Gesellscba~(l966, p. 142). Pahl, in his turn, set his critique within the context of the way in which these same cultural im- manences had affected academic rural studies, by reference to “the uncritical glorifi- cation of old-fashioned rural life” (Hofstee 1960) and “the anti-urban mentality” identified in the Chicago school of urban sociology (Benet 1963).

5. Quotations in this paragraph from Newby (1980, p. 9, 30 and 35). 6. It should be noted here that these developments are particularly clear in Newby’s

collaborative venture with Fred Butte1 and appear in their edited collection 7be rural sociology of the advanced societies (1980). An instance of the Grand Theorists’ categorization can be found in Bradley’s (1981) review of this work.

7. Newby et al. (1978) started out on the basis of the assumption that although de- creasing in number as a proportion of the population (even within the ‘rural’ areas) “the influence of farmers and landowners extends far beyond the scope indicated by their numbersn (ibid., p. 16), and yet, at the same time very little was actually known about them (despite a tradition of interest in “family farming’’ from the upland pastoral areas - since all cases, with the solitary exception of Littlejohn (1963), such as Arensberg and Kimball (1949), Rees (1950), Williams (1956, 1964), Nalson (1968), Jenkins (1971), emphasized the “gemeimchaftlicbquahties of the local social structures . . . concentrating upon that section of the farming population which maintains what might be called . . . expressive rather than instrumental ties with the land.” (ibid., p. 16) and goes on to assert that “there are no sociological accounts of farming outside these areas of subsistence agriculture’’ (ibid, p. 17),


thereby neglecting those areas where “farming is big business . . . characterized by much greater economic differentiation, the presence of large numbers of hired workers. . . and a much more class-based and [comparatively] class-conscious social structure . . . (with farmers therefore) much more thoroughgoing capitalists than the subsistence farmers of the upland areas . . . (thus) at its simplest level this will involve an addition to the somewhat meagre sociological knowledge about the English rnzddfe class, . . . and as much a contribution to research on social stratification in modern Britain as a piece of occupational, or even rural, sociology” (ibid., p. 17). My emphasis here draws out the way in which Newby et al. had already brought the rural studies’ focus onto the middle class in the countryside, even though this fraction would be classified as “entrepreneurial” as opposed to “service class” which, as we shall see, becomes the main subject of attention.

8. At the outset of his monograph Pahl made clear that his focus was on “the processes and patterns of metropolitan expansion” and he implicitly located his work more in the area of planning Csocial geography”) than rural studies per se: “it is important,” he argued, “that those concerned with an understanding, at a more theoretical level, of the development of a metropolitan region escape from the mental strait- jackets of nineteenth-century anti-urbanists” (1965, pp. 11-12).

9. It is important to note here that the essentially agrarian focus of the Essex School has survived.

10. See also Keith Halfacree (1993) 11. Cloke and Thrift (1990, p. 167) make some reference to this general area by drawing

a distinction between the ways in which the concept of class takes on “descriptive” and “theoretical” applications - the former providing “statistical classification of occupational categories” (as in Cloke’s Gloucester case covered below), whilst the latter apparently retains its “value because of its essential dynamism and abstraction” (added emphasis). The point is not developed, however, and no analytical consideration is given to the crucialquestions of what lies behind the dynamism of class relationships - and whether such dynamics vary with the essential nature of those relationships.

12. This is to be found where Thrift is working with a different author (Thrift and Wil- liams 1987). The contribution there is well worth our attention since it lays out clearly the terms under which “class formation” might be best examined, including foci on comparative cases, “smaller spatial and temporal scales within a specific community,” and most interestingly - since it coincides with recommendations made by Newby (1977) - the E.P. Thompson model of “restricted temporal and spatial scales . . . of some 40 or 50 years” in a specific region where “close attention must be paid to the exact institutions that both generate and are generated by shifts in class structuren (p. 5). The subtitle of this work even seems to pay tribute to Thompson (“the m k i n g of urban society” my emphasis), but it is hard to match this with the Thrift who takes on the rural scene, especially in the latest research designed in part to “examine the characteristics of different fractions of the middle class in selected case study areas” (ESRC Award 1990) - and published as Cloke et al. (1994), see below.

13. By 1993 (p. 172) Cloke and Goodwin resort baldly to the statement that “there is no doubt that rural places can consist of ‘two nations,’ with existing residents being marginalised by the swift processes of gentrification.”

14. See E.P. Thompson (1965, pp. 349-359). 15. To be fair, it should be noted here that the book is not the only fruit of this pro-

ject; two other thin pieces have seen the light of day - Phillips (1993) and Cloke,

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Philips and Rankin (1991, pp. 38-52). Both of these, however, seem to shy away from the “service class - rural impact” premises of the ESRC Project (at one point it is referred to CLSparagingly as emergent orthodoxy” Phillips, p. 131), and in the absence of any substantial new analysis, both end lamely and apologetically - “Clearly the present work . . . should be seen as marking only a beginning of the process of interpreting gentrification in Gowcr” (Phdlips p. 138), and “this detailed analysis of housing and planning relations is useful only as a starring-point for further research” (Cloke et al., p. 52). This tendency to defer the publication of the substantive body of research f i n d q s is a familiar trait of this School - and so we naturally approach the 1994 book-length work without much expectation that the much-trumpeted role of the service class will be substantively documented and analysed.

16. It is worth pointing out here that an appeal to Carolyn Stecdrmn’s work (1986) as legitimation for autobiographical meanderiags is seriously + l a d * her use of family history is at every stage turned to the purpose of elaborating generalities of class experience and action. She offers no carte blanche for the kind of subjectivity we are exposed to here.

17. It is important here to ensure that this is not mistaken to mean that I only regard the ‘material’ world as worthy of our research attention; social constructs are no less real and deserve our concentrated efforts, not least for the way in which they play a key part in the process of class formation and in the lmkag~!~ between structwe and action. Within this specific context of rural England it is almost impossible to underestimate the importance of image and social construction, as Glass (1966), Williams (1973) and others have made clear; see also my pieces in Rural History (1995) and / o u d of Historical Sociology (1995)

18. On the point of there being other similar s o d axes of identity, orgaaization and agency in the countryside (such as gender and race) I am agnostic. Case studies will hold the key.

19. Keith Joseph was a close associate of Margaret Thatcher and was well known for his sceptical antagonism to the social sciences and its claims for public money.

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