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This chapter will examine the response of a rural community in Ireland to the imposition of a gas pipeline on their farms, in the western coastal county of Mayo. This analysis will include a discussion of the concept of ‘rural community sentiment’ (Leonard, 2006, 2008a, 2008b) as a factor in the mobilisation of community campaigns against infrastructural projects which are perceived as a threat to existing ways of life in regional areas. The chapter will also explore key theoretical concepts for this community-based responses to environmental degradation in rural areas, including critical criminology and rural criminology, resource curse theory and ask whether the campaign was ecopopulist, with issues of social and environmental justice at its core. This will be achieved through a case study approach. In so doing, the chapter will highlight the basis for rural community’s campaigns of opposition to development projects imposed by corporate or state bodies in the Irish case.

Ireland’s economic development not only provided many benefits but also caused difficulties locally and nationally. The economic crash and bailout, which occurred from 2008, have mired the country with huge debts. In addition, development created many environmental challenges in rural, suburban and urban areas. This chapter will examine community responses to those environmental challenges, discussing the mobilisation of the environmental campaigns that shaped the emergence of the Irish environmental movement.

This chapter will present an analysis of mobilisation, framing processes and outcomes of environmental conservation campaigns in Ireland. By locating contemporary disputes about the public space in Ireland within an understanding of this transition from a traditional rural and agrarian society into that of a modern industrialised and urbanised European state, a wider understanding of the circumstances surrounding such contests emerges. ¹ This form of analysis goes beyond a social narrative, and facilitates a fuller understanding of the consequences emanating from the framing and reframing of heritage within a context of a society where an obsession with history has been displaced by a zealous predilection for economic development.

This chapter explores social representative groups as a medium to study “rural” meaning in Ireland. In research terms, the concept of “rurality” is increasingly debated, its existence questioned, and approaches to establish conceptual and methodological boundaries continuously challenged. By studying the language of social representative group leaders, it is argued in this chapter that the “rural” can be fluidly explored through its expression. Through a theme-based deconstruction of interviews with group leaders, I explore the expression of loss in Irish dialogue and its implication on “rural” meaning.

This study aims to explore the social networks and network interactions of bed-and-breakfast (B&B) entrepreneurs in rural China. In addition, it evaluates how such network interactions relate to rural resilience.

In-depth interviews were performed in two locations: Ningbo and Dujiangyan, China. Purposive sampling was combined with snowball sampling to select interviewees. The 154 interviews involved 29 B&B owners and relevant social actors. All codes and data were analyzed using the discourse analysis framework.

The B&B owners’ social networks were identified based on strategic goals, revealing a business operation network, business development network and business citizenship network. Challenges in seeking financial support for rural B&Bs during the pandemic were specified along with network interactions. The institutional adaptation approach was used to evaluate network interaction in rural B&B business. It was argued that other networks would react based on primary network members’ goal compatibility and the effectiveness of the primary network in addressing obstacles.

This study indicates that the rural B&B entrepreneurs’ interactions with various networks could influence on business resilience, community resilience as well as rural resilience.

By combining the institutional adaptation typology with social network theory, this study generates a new typology of network interactions for rural B&Bs. The typology helps to explain how and why B&B entrepreneurs make decisions and provides a broader scope of social networks involved in these business operations.

This study aims to focus on local food consumption and specifically seeks to explore how consumers construct the meaning of local food and the nature of relationships between key influences on the local food purchase intention.

A two-stage qualitative methodology was adopted consisting of five focus group discussions and 25 semi-structured interviews with consumers in Northern Ireland. Focus groups explored consumer meanings of local food. Semi-structured interviews sought to explore in more depth the inter-relationships between the influences on the purchase intention and the role of moral norms.

Five key influences on the purchase intention are identified (quality attributes, experience and familiarity, emotional attributes, the setting, support for the local economy). These influences are connected with a range of self-interest, altruistic and moral factors.

This study was undertaken in a specific geographical setting and thus the generalisation of the findings is limited. Future research should ascertain the views of stakeholders (producers and retailers) to provide multi-actor constructions and understandings of local food.

There are a number of practical implications for marketers from this study that provide considerable scope to differentiate local food products. A more nuanced understanding of consumer motivations and their understanding of local food will help marketers to develop brand image linked to the themes identified here such as product familiarity and rural connections. Furthermore, the local food servicescape or setting should be managed carefully to construct an emotional attachment and positive consumer experience, whilst promoting trust and perceptions of quality.

Previous studies on local food consumer behaviour have considered the influences on local food consumer behaviour in quite binary terms (self-interest and altruistic factors). This study unpicks the key influences on the purchase intention, based on a thematic analysis, and proposes a new categorisation and set of interrelationships around five key themes.

Librarians can look back over 1920 with a certain amount of satisfaction. The year was fruitful in hope, in effort, and in useful achievements. It was also marked by restraints which we believe to have been wholesome. They entered the year with the almost bewildering knowledge that the main problem of nearly seventy years—the problem of existence—has assumed another and simpler aspect. The library, so far as local government was concerned, had become something that could be developed to any extent that the local governing body might determine; and the public librarian was not without hope that the promised quickening of his special form of libraries would extend to other forms. He was fain to believe that any good which might come to any branch of the profession must in time be beneficial to other branches. There has not been time yet to test the matter. Meanwhile he obtained almost immediate relief from the vexatious debts and difficulties which beset his work.

This chapter examines the ecotopian activist tradition through an exploration of existing literature, within a context of the processes of activism, identity and place which arise from the communitarian impulse. The initial part of the chapter sets out utopian communitarianism into separate phases. Each phase is examined for the exogenous and internalised motivations that compel people in different eras to participate in intentional living projects be they religious, autonomous, or environmental. The chapter develops these themes further by applying Sargisson's study of intentional communities to the discussion. The chapter attempts to ground this discussion within the context of the wider understandings of green utopian practice, such as Barry's ‘Concrete Utopian’ realism or de Geus's ‘utopia of sufficiency’.

The anti-toxics movement's origins can be traced back to Rachel Carson's A Silent Spring in 1962. The book highlighted the impact of pesticides such as DDT on plant and wildlife in America in the years following the introduction of scientific methods of agriculture in the United States. In the aftermath of a wider public concern and scientific debate about Carson's work, President John F. Kennedy called on the Science Advisory Committee to investigate issues surrounding the use of pesticides. This inquiry confirmed Carson's position, and led to the regulation of the use of chemical pesticides in the United States. Carson has been subject to a number of subsequent criticisms from scientists working for the chemical industry.