growing would stay in the countryside whilst the business is emerging, but once you get to 10, 12, 15 employees you start to build an organisational infra- structure, you need bigger premises, broadband technology, and the right image.’
‘Are you saying then that you are thinking you might transfer your business soon to a town location like Newark?’
‘Well, I am thinking about it. Eddie thinks he gave me the idea for this but I had always planned to start up the business here at home and if things took off, which I am pleased to say they have, I would move to Nottingham or Newark.
Newark makes sense for my business because it is only 1 hour and 30 minutes on the train to London. It is really an up and coming town, quite cosmopolitan with lots of bistros and leisure activities. Property prices have really gone up and it has really cultivated its image as interesting historical country/market town – where part of the English civil war was fought. It has waterside prop- erties, warehouse apartments and many large retail outlets are setting up there.
So I am looking at re-locating there for the next phase of growth for my busi- ness.’
‘And what about Eddie’s construction business – do you see that moving out of the Kerston district also?’
‘Well, I can’t see that happening. Eddie is too attached to his farm and horses.
And anyway I love living in Kerston. It is just that for my business to really take off I need to be in a town location now. His business is not really going to grow any further. He employs about 4 people full time and has a workforce of 10 sub-contractors. He has plenty of new projects underway. But there is just not the scope within the construction industry to make a lot of money. And that whole building sector is just so chaotic – no systems in place – everything working on an informal basis – no organisation, strategy or vision for the future. But then I shouldn’t really complain because he is helping me find the right sort of place to move to in Newark.’
to generalise empirically from these case studies, suggesting for example that all rural property developers are like Eddie Newhall and that every urban–rural shifting family is like the Fords. However, as pointed our earlier, many villages in the UK are experiencing an influx of urban–rural shifters and our ethnographic study illustrates some of the processes facilitating such migration patterns and their effects when entrepreneurial opportunities are then enacted by people with their changing life orientations as a result of the interaction with the local environment/resources.
In particular, we are keen to generalise theoretically about the types of process (Yin, 1994; Watson, 2001) that occur at the level of the fine grained detail of social change. By using an ethnographic style of analysis, whereby our conversations and interviews are embedded in a close and intimate appre- ciation of the social context in which accounts are given to us as researchers, we are able to link the changes in life orientations of particular people to broader social and structural changes in rural communities. The basic shape of those changes was established early in the chapter by our use of broader survey-based evidence presented by researchers operating in a more conven- tional social science research mode. We have shown how, at the level of the meaning-making and life-shaping of individuals and families, these social changes are both brought into being by the actions of members of society – in our case, entrepreneurs and their clients – and how, at the same time, the actions of those social actors are influenced by those social changes.
The lives of the small number of people we have focused upon illustrate this broad theoretical insight. And, within this, we utilise two novel conceptual devices. First, we develop the notion of life orientation – with its emphasis on the ways in which human actions occur in the context of how people’s ‘whole lives’ are shaped through meaning-making processes. And, second, we make use of a concept of entrepreneurship which relates entrepreneurial actions to the life orientation of both the entrepreneur and the clients. We show the inter- linked ways in which the entrepreneurial couple, on the one had, and the client couple on the other, ‘become other’ in the course of transacting with each other. This relationality is represented on the left hand side of figure 7.1. This relationality, however, has to be understood within the broader processes of social change.
In this chapter we have shown social change occurring, in part, through opportunity enactment processes which are an important dynamic component of the figure 7.1 scheme. In particular, we drew attention to opportunity enact- ment processes in Eddie’s migration to a rural location and his realisation of property development potential. We have also considered how opportunity enactment is both shaped by and contributes to the social change or embour- geoisement of rural communities. In focusing our analysis on the Kerston district of the East Midlands, we have given an account of three families that
have moved into this location from urban situations. At the centre of these families is entrepreneur-developer, Eddie Newhall, who in his life orientation to ‘become other’ has created and grown a construction business out of prop- erty development and conversion of old agricultural buildings. This business, and his role in it, has had a relational effect on the community in which it is located in that these properties have created opportunities for other families (such as Jane and Tom) to make the urban–rural shift themselves. Central to his life and business is Sylvie, who has also started a new business on the farm in relation to her husband’s business. Both businesses have had a relational effect on the locality by creating wealth and jobs for the local community (office work, cleaning, gardening as well as professional jobs such as journal- ism and accountancy). They have also had an effect on the development of the physical infrastructure of the rural village (new tarmac roads and the intro- duction of broadband technology). And, as Sylvie’s business grows further, this will have a ‘spillover’ effect onto the nearest town.
Our emphasis, throughout, has been on processes and on social, personal and family emergence. In utilising an ethnographic style of research we have highlighted the ‘actual’ real-life and detailed processes through which entre- preneurial practices facilitate social change at the same time as social change also facilitates entrepreneurial practices. The stories reported here show how the entrepreneur and the client simultaneously shape the process of counter- urbanisation and are shaped by them. We hope that we have made a contribu- tion to the understanding of the particular aspect of modern social life in rural locations with which we have been concerned. And, at the same time, we hope to inspire and encourage others to apply this style of analysis to other aspects of the ways in which processes of entrepreneurship and social change interact and influence each other.