The British rural community: an overview of perspectives: Fid-Bau Portal

The British rural community: an overview of perspectives

Harper, Sarah

AbstractThere has recently been revived interest in the British rural community, both as a focus for analysis and as a method of examining structure and organisation in rural zones. The importance of these recent studies is assessed through examining the contributions of the multi-various approaches to the rural community undertaken since the Second World War. Several broad themes are apparent. The early structural-functionalist studies, with their emphasis on the rural community as a focus in itself, and on the dichotomous relationship of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, have recently been added to by new rural ethnographies which attempt to discover the ‘essence’ of the rural community through analysis of process and change. The debate over the rural-urban continuum shifts the analysis from community to area, supported by research into suburbanization, both of rural zones and of individual settlements. More recently the rural community has been adopted as a focus of approach, a method of analysing structure and organisation, and examining wider societal processes. The review concludes with a call for greater analysis of aspects at present peripheral to the subject — employment restructuring, planning and social structure, and the relationship of society and space.