Search results

This article subjects rural community safety to critical scrutiny. It reviews the background to this rural governmental infrastructure, considers how well it is working and identifies the barriers to the effective development of rural community safety. It concludes with an agenda for rural community safety.

In Trinidad and Tobago, there is significant reliance on the traditional and centralized police service to engage in crime response and suppression in urban and rural areas. In this regard, policing scholarship has largely focused on the impact of policing within urban areas, producing a gap in knowledge on what policing rural spaces entails. Despite this, there is some understanding that policing rural spaces can engender diverse challenges and calls for variability in policing strategies. The current study examines the lived experiences of police officers stationed in rural communities in Trinidad and Tobago.

Using the descriptive phenomenological approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven police officers stationed in rural communities throughout the country.

Interviewees narrated the importance of community dynamics and community-specific needs in shaping their roles and functions when operating in and serving these communities. Three major themes were identified: (1) network activity in policing; (2) engagement in localistic and service-oriented approaches and (3) community-specific challenges.

The findings suggest that while there is an emphasis on traditional law enforcement responsibilities, in the rural context, police responsibilities and duties are constantly being redefined, reframed and broadened to meet the contextual community and geographic-specific diversities and demands.

This study aims to address decision-making processes of Christian entrepreneurs living and working in rural areas. The authors draw on the institutional logics perspective and stewardship perspective to demonstrate how religion influences rationality and entrepreneurial decision-making processes in a rural context.

This study adopts a qualitative interpretive approach supported by ethnographic fieldwork. Qualitative and interpretative analyses are used to access deeper insights into the decision-making processes of Christian entrepreneurs in a rural environment. Data include short-term immersive events, observations and interviews as COVID-19 pandemic restrictions lifted in the region.

This study reveals that normative (religious) commitments – a sense of moral duty and action influenced by religion – and a high-religiosity context – where religion permeates diverse aspects of life – lead to behaviors that are perceived as rational and normative. In this context, the normative relationship between a market and a community logic, alongside a logic of religion, are all linked through a stewardship perspective. A broad focus on the development of community and place also safeguards business and community interests.

Since the findings are based on one rural area and one religion, future studies should address a broader range of geographical areas and religions. In this study, uncertainty arising from COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and the resumption of business exchanges also influence the decision-making processes of the entrepreneurial participants. While the findings reflect the normative dispositions and the decision-making processes that are inherent in this context, an even broader examination of rural entrepreneurship will benefit our understanding of entrepreneurial decisions in terms of rationality and place.

The findings reveal that entrepreneurs who relocate to a rural, high-religiosity context should first assess how the community affiliated through a set of beliefs – expects actors to behave. Additionally, applicability to other religions requires further consideration.

This study answers the call to examine entrepreneurship and the underpinnings of rationality that challenge mainstream debates on entrepreneurial decision-making and religion. The findings answer this call by advancing the knowledge of the decision-making process of religious entrepreneurs. In this respect, the findings present a context where rational business behaviors, influenced by a market logic, are transformed through exchanges with a community informed by a logic of religion. A conceptual model illustrates the nature of this context and associated processes.

The objective of this research was to identify organizational strategies used by rural retailers to balance conflicting demands of social norms and business performance standards to achieve success.

In‐depth interviews with 12 community leaders and nine locally owned retailers in eight resilient rural communities in six different US states were conducted.

The data suggest that operational strategies of local retailers in rural communities follow internal and external scripts and specific scripts are associated with decoupling and/or recoupling strategies and business survival. Decoupling occurs with internal scripts relating to business strategy and external scripts relating to community involvement and customer value. Recoupling was evident with internal scripts related to business strategy, attitude toward future business growth and attitude toward planning and survival; it was also evident with external scripts relating to community change and the local economy.

Future research should include the development of an instrument to assess a larger sample of rural retailers to determine if the findings of this study are consistent with other retailers. This would lead to the need to develop education materials to help rural retailers improve their survival and continuance.

Rural retailers need to improve their survival and continuance by building reciprocal relationships with the community and consumers, and can do so by seeking training to improve these marketing strategies.

The current research uniquely examines rural retailer ability to balance conflicting norms of the social and task environments and the impact it has on retailer success.

A partnership of the federal government and the states implement rural community development policy today, yet researchers rarely examine the nature and efficacy of this extensive intergovernmental collaboration. The authors collected data on Community Development Block Grant awards made by one state to small and rural communities for a variety of development projects over a period of more than ten years, and using a modified rural classification system detected patterns and trends in allocation. This study seeks to determine if a federally funded program assists states address the development needs of a diverse mix of rural communities. Do federal block grant programs help states meet rural community development policy objectives? This information should be helpful to local, state, and national government policy makers as they ponder proposals to reorganize dramatically the funding and implementation of community and economic development resources. Perhaps most importantly, this study will also help policy makers understand the complexity of the federal-state-local partnership for rural community development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how shopping behavior of rural consumers is affected by perceptions of local retailers' social norm‐based activities and task‐oriented actions, and social capital within the community.

A mail survey is distributed using a modification of Dillman's method; 524 usable surveys are collected. Multi‐group analysis in structural equation modeling is employed for the data analysis.

The findings of the paper reveal significant relationships between institutional action and legitimacy, legitimacy and support, and value and support. The moderating effect of social capital on the relationships between institutional action and legitimacy, legitimacy and support, and value and support are significant.

This paper extends previous research by including both social environmental factors (social capital), and retailers' social actions in explaining consumer support. Limitations of the research design are discussed and directions for future research are suggested.

This research provides rural retailers with ideas for marketing solutions that use socio‐norm related (i.e. institutional action) and task‐oriented (i.e. performative action) factors to attract local shoppers.

This research adds to the current stream of rural research by integrating institutional theory and social capital theory to propose a conceptual framework. This research is significant as the study results provide implications to rural retailers and further to the community, as the sustainability of the rural sector is closely related to the well‐being of the entire community.

In this paper, the authors present a case study of successful school leadership at County Line Middle School. The purpose of the paper is to identify how particular leadership practices and beliefs were adapted to increase student achievement in this rural, high-poverty school in the southeastern USA.

After purposefully selecting this school, the authors adapted interview protocols, questionnaires, and analysis frameworks from the International Successful School Principalship Project to develop a multi-perspective case study of principal leadership practices at the school.

The findings illustrate the practices which led to students at this school, previously the lowest-performing in the district, achieving significantly higher on state standardized tests, getting along “like a family,” and regularly participating in service learning activities and charity events. A particularly interesting finding was how the principal confronted the school's negative self-image and adapted common leadership practices to implement a school-wide reform that suited its unique context.

While the findings of the study explicate the specific ways the principal adapted leadership strategies to enhance student learning, this study also highlights the need to understand how principals become familiar with their community's needs, cultures, norms, and values, and exercise leadership in accordance with them.

The case offers an example of the need for context-responsive leadership in schools. In particular, it illustrates how this principal enacted leadership strategies that successfully negotiated what Woods (2006) referred to as the changing politics of the rural. To realize this success, the principal utilized his understanding of this low income, rural community to guide his leadership practices. Critically, part of this understanding included the ways the community was connected to and isolated from dominant sub-urban and urban societies, and how to build enthusiasm and capacity through appeals to local values.

While it is widely acknowledged that school leaders need to consider their school and community contexts when making leadership decisions, less research has focussed on understanding how this can be achieved. This case provides rich examples of how this was accomplished in a rural, high-poverty middle school.

The key purpose of the paper is to consider the challenges facing local authorities in supporting sustainable rural settlements in their efforts to be enterprising and sustainable in confronted with increasingly severe downward pressure on local authority finances due to the recession; the long-term trend of increased adult social care costs linked to a challenging demographic profile across rural England; and increasing expectations around service delivery arising from more discerning “e-enabled” users of public services.

This paper offers a structured reflection on the responses of a qualitative study of village sustainability, based on case studies of the inhabitants of three villages in Lincolnshire, England. The paper draws on responses by 70 voices to a series of workshops held in village halls and pubs.

Significant work needs to be done at the local level, to support the transition from long-standing, organic practice within communities to the creation of an infrastructure which can support the delivery of more services by communities themselves.

Workshop-based approaches to gathering responses can allow for biased responses, and this study is limited to the views of self-selecting actors in three villages.

The paper examines the barriers and opportunities facing local communities and introduces the concept of community to community learning.

The purpose of this study is to determine factors influencing rural consumers' inshopping behaviours and to examine rural retailers' perceptions of the current rural retailing environment.

This study was comprised of two phases. In Phase 1, consumer surveys were conducted in three rural US communities. In Phase 2, in‐depth interviews with retailers selected from the same communities were conducted.

The findings of the consumer surveys supported all hypothesised relationships, except the direct effect of community attachment on inshopping intention. The findings of the retailer interviews provided useful insights as to the challenges rural retailers are currently facing.

The findings have implications for both retailers and community leaders in rural places who wish to improve their understanding of the challenges and opportunities rural retailers face and subsequently develop strategies to promote inshopping behaviours.

This study examined both consumers and retailers in the context of rural retailing. Thus, the findings provide a more complete picture of the current retail industry in rural communities.

A partnership of the federal government and the states implement rural community development policy today, yet researchers rarely examine the nature and efficacy of this extensive intergovernmental collaboration. The authors collected data on Community Development Block Grant awards made by one state to small and rural communities for a variety of development projects over a period of more than ten years, and using a modified rural classification system detected patterns and trends in allocation. This study seeks to determine if a federally funded program assists states address the development needs of a diverse mix of rural communities. Do federal block grant programs help states meet rural community development policy objectives? This information should be helpful to local, state, and national government policy makers as they ponder proposals to reorganize dramatically the funding and implementation of community and economic development resources. But maybe most importantly, this study will also help policy makers understand the complexity of the federal-state-local partnership for rural community development.