Working Group 4.8

Embeddedness of Rural Enterprises – Developing IntegrativeConceptual Frameworks for Understanding Rural Innovation and Development

Convenors:
Chris Kjeldsen (University of Aarhus), Chris.Kjeldsen@agrsci.dk
Gunnar Svendsen (University of Southern Denmark), glhs@sam.sdu.dk
Egon Noe (University of Aarhus), Egon.Noe@agrsci.dk  

WG website:
http://www.ruralsociology.eu/2009/wg4.8

The general theme which the Working Group aims to investigate, is the link between rural innovation and rural development. How can innovative rural enterprises contribute to rural development? Even though a wide range of empirical investigations offer a wide range of perspectives on the issue, there is still an urgent need for integrating different theoretical perspectives within the rural sciences. Rural innovation can be conceptualised as the individual or collective utilisation of a wide range of material and immaterial resources such as natural capital, physical/man-made capital, financial capital, entrepreneurial tradition, local/regional cultural history, institutional setup, social capital as well as human capital. An important objective for rural research is to deliver the conceptual basis for understanding phenomena which cannot be considered as being either economical or non-economical, but on the contrary should be understood as both social and economic (Terluin 2003). One example of such phenomena is rural innovation. The economic, material, social, spatial, temporal and cultural aspects of rural innovation should thus not be studied in isolation. The interaction between economic, material, social and cultural resources in rural innovation and development should instead be studied in an integrated perspective. One example of such an integrated perspective is recent developments of the embeddedness concept (Hess 2004; Sonnino 2007a; 2007b), which allows for an integration of perspectives from disciplines as anthropology, sociology, human geography, economic geography, economic sociology, management science, actor-network theory, regional science as well as several others. The notion of embeddedness can thus be used as an integrative framework which can guide inquiry into how rural innovation and rural enterprises are integrating themselves into the diverse socio-cultural, territorial and economic contexts which constitute rural spaces. An improved understanding of forms of embeddedness of rural enterprises carries the promise of both facilitating the integration of theoretical knowledge across several of the disciplines involved in rural studies as well as improving the development of rural policy.

Papers/presentations could be on topics such as:
-explorations of the concept of embeddedness
-rural innovation and regional learning systems
-the utility of integrating concepts from emerging research fields such as neo-capital theory    and actor-network theory in rural innovation and development research
-concepts of space, place and spatiality in rural innovation and development research
-rural entrepreneurship
-multifunctionality and diversification of rural economies and its role in rural development

Hess, M. (2004) 'Spatial' relationships? Towards a reconceptualization of embeddedness. Progress in Human Geography 28(2) pp. 165-186
Sonnino, R. (2007a) Embeddedness in action: Saffron and the making of the local in southern Tuscany. Agriculture and Human Values 24(1) pp. 61-74
Sonnino, R. (2007b) The power of place: embeddedness and local food systems in Italy and the UK. Anthropology of Food S2(March 2007) pp. http://aof.revues.org/document454.html
Terluin, I. J. (2003) Differences in economic development in rural regions of advanced countries: an overview and critical analysis of theories. Journal of Rural Studies 19(3) pp. 327-344