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Re-imagining the Good Life
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2017) 1e5
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Editorial
Re-imagining the Good Life 1. Introduction Across the globe and throughout history, people have striven for whatever vision of a Good Life held meaning for them. The many different schools of philosophy in ancient Athens e while sharing the conviction that the central goal for humans was to achieve the Good Life e attest to many divergent understandings of what constitutes a Good Life, who was entitled to it, and how society should be organised to deliver it. The possibility of consensus is no closer after two millennia. So, we offer no definition in foregrounding this collection of papers on ‘Re-imagining The Good Life’ for The Journal of Rural Studies e ideas on this subject are inevitably diverse e yet we acknowledge that all visions of the Good Life, explicitly or implicitly, are political as well as personal. Concepts and framings of the Good Life have power to legitimise or undermine certain opinions, to encourage or censure certain behaviours, to make visible or obscure certain aspects of life, and to include or exclude certain people. Long-standing, dominant framings of happiness can be mobilised to maintain political economies and power relations, and to undermine those who struggle for alternative possibilities (Ahmed, 2010). However, in contemporary liberal democracies, enduring and taken-for-granted notions of the Good Life1e those centred on individual wealth, job security, personal status and success, health, and happiness e are now under pressure. The present context of economic instability and crisis, environmental change, shifts in welfare state imaginaries, and growing social inequality has fuelled debates that are now disrupting the legitimacy of growth-centric economic strategies as the principal route to wellbeing. Understandings of the Good Life in many cultures are beginning to change and will likely need to change significantly in the future. In addition to the general, but abstract, awareness that current modes of living are unsustainable, a deeply personal, yet widely resonant, response to late capitalism is clear. A slow-burn existential crisis has emerged, as many individuals feel less and less able to fulfil their expectations of life and concentrate, not on reaching for their dreams, but getting through each day, with the result that life feels increasingly ‘truncated’ (Berlant, 2007: 27). What does living a Good Life mean in the 21st century? How can and should it be re-imagined? This profound questioning has opened opportunities for alternative visions of development to find greater political legitimacy.
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We have not sought to explicitly define this idea but try to highlight dominant understandings linked to particular contexts. These terms, ‘a good life’ or ‘’the good life, relate to an intuitively understood but difficult to articulate idea of living well. It is individually, culturally and societally diverse and therefore any definition risks the imposition of cultural norms. The papers here are focussed on four very different geographical, political and historical contexts and so we do not define what a good life means here, rather let the papers speak.
Many governments across the globe, and supra-national organisations such as the EU, OECD, and UN, have responded by seeking to measure ‘national wellbeing’ or ‘national happiness’ (Bache and Scott, 2017). In the search for evidence to inform policies to tackle rising levels of mental health issues, perceived societal breakdown, and growing inequalities, in many countries there has been an increased focus on developing subjective wellbeing indicators which measure, for example, happiness, anxiety and fulfilment, in addition to more longstanding objective indicators of quality of life.2 This is welcome, because it makes more visible, and provokes political discussion about, the intangible, yet fundamental, aspects of what makes life more or less worth living. Yet, at the same time, attendant narratives of ‘flourishing’ and ‘thriving’ linked to an emphasis on self-responsibility (rather than structural determinants of wellbeing), can increase feelings of pressure for those who already experience a lack of control over their lives, or worse still be used as a discriminatory and disciplinary tool (Friedli and Stearn 2015; Scott and Masselot 2017). While many nations have been influenced by Western-centric notions of the Good Life, promulgated by European values that focus on individual rights and freedoms, this renewed questioning of life has allowed other philosophies to gain more traction. For example, an emerging literature on buen vivir (or Sumak kawsay3) translated as ‘living well’ has highlighted how traditional indigenous notions of wellbeing, based on the interrelatedness of all life, have gained new political legitimacy across several countries in South America. Indeed, Buen vivir was constitutionalized in Bolivia (2009) and Ecuador (2008), partly in response to powerful lobbying from indigenous people to respect their cosmology in a plurinational state,4 but also in the attempt to mainstream alternative visions of development associated with a growing ‘pink tide’ of left wing activism which rejected the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s, in favour of Twenty-First Century Socialism (see for example Bressa Florentin 2017; Calisto Friant and Langmore, 2015; Radcliffe, 2012). This work highlights the political and environmental contestations and compromises inherent in implementing these visions across diverse peoples in one nation. The emergence of a recent shift to the right in many countries in Latin America may mean these ideas fall into abeyance again, but it is clear that contestation will continue.
2 For example the UK Office of National Statistics introduced four new questions in their national wellbeing survey asking about happiness, anxiety, life satisfaction and life meaning. 3 Sumak Kawsay is the equivalent term in Quechua, an indigenous language family spoken by over 10 million people across Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. 4 ‘Plurinational’ is an idea embedded in the indigenous lobbying for political recognition and representation of the many and diverse peoples in one nation state.
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In New Zealand, new political narratives of wellbeing have emerged in close dialogue with those agendas in Europe, however, they have also been necessarily cognizant of the contemporary requirement to include Maori philosophies in a bicultural nation. A national Maori wellbeing survey, Te Kupenga, now exists alongside Pakeha wellbeing measurements and is an indication of the recent political settlement through the Waitangi Tribunal process, which attempted financial and political reparation for the atrocities white settlers inflicted on Maori people. In this settlement the transfer of land, or gaining resources to buy and protect land, has been paramount in recognising rangatiratanga - the authority and self-determination of a Maori tribe. Whilst acknowledging the diversity of Maori experiences and without wishing to essentialise or romantisize ‘the Maori culture’, the ability to live in relation to a specific place in specific ways according to cultural and spiritual commitments is central to Maori cosmology and therefore notions of a Good Life (Panelli and Tipa, 2007). As is the case in indigenous cosmologies in Ecuador, human and non-human life are entirely interconnected with each other and with the environment - the Maori word for land (whenua) also means placenta. In imagining what constitutes a Good Life, from earliest recorded times to the present day, narratives of land, nature and the tensions between the city and the countryside have been important, if sometimes underlying themes (Williams, 1973). In classical Athens, for example, while Aristotle taught (to elite male citizens) that the best possible life could be achieved through dutiful engagement in civic life, Epicurus urged retreat to a walled garden outside the city to live a life of simple pleasures. While one idea of the Good Life can certainly be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald's cosmopolitan images of American Wall Street fuelled excesses during the Roaring Twenties, another reverberates in Flora Thompson's evocation of the quiet English rural idyll on the brink of modern transformation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both these influential literary explorations of different ideas of the Good Life each build on the writers' lived experiences of engaged participation in that life, their capacities for creative observation and transposition, as well as their critiques of the dramatic social and economic changes of their time. The varied and often contradictory renderings of the Good Life in literature and art have been further explored in social history, social research and commentary. On one hand, 20th century urban and suburban development provided settings where a growing American middle class could amass and consolidate the material goods and status markers of the modern successful Good Life (Baritz, 1989). But on the other hand, rural and agrarian communities have long been seen as repositories of simpler living, traditions of hard, honest work and therefore higher virtue and fulfillment in American culture (Shi, 1985). These spatialized views of the Good Life may be somewhat specific to the American context. They arose unmarked by some of the more turbulent recent shifts and disruptures of the early 21st century and they certainly now seem limited in their engagement with issues of power. Living a Good Life in the US suburbs in the 1960s was a predominantly white affair, facilitated by housing legislation which promoted racial segregation (Smith, 2016). Even so, they underscore some basis for broader interest in and ongoing questions about the rural and rurality as either conducive to or inhibiting a Good Life. Indeed a plethora of studies have focussed on contemporary constructions and deconstructions of the rural idyll in Britain and elsewhere, on rural lifestyles and amenity migration in Europe and North America, on the wellbeing of certain groups such as young people or the elderly in rural areas, and on how quality of life has been affected by restructuring of rural areas and changes in policy (see Bailey et al., 2014 and Shucksmith et al., 2012 for examples of attention to some of these areas for the US and the UK; see Gilbert et al., 2016 for a recent illustrative example of research
on rural subjective well-being). However, Rural Studies as an interdisciplinary field has so far engaged relatively little with the articulation of large cultural shifts in ideas of the Good Life e the existential as well as the empirical, and the link between them as possibilities for further research. This lack of attention is notable since threats to material and consumption-based definitions of the Good Life are glaring and consequential in many rural locales, and many emerging alternatives to these definitions are, perhaps not coincidentally, being developed and enacted in the countryside. Re-imagining the Good Life therefore necessitates consideration of the rural and rurality. While rooted in ancient and/or indigenous philosophical traditions and debates, concerns about the Good Life have acquired renewed relevance today amidst the present context of rapid political, economic, and environmental upheaval, both ongoing and new cultural contentions and rising social inequalities. But what exactly is the Good Life in the early 21st century? Who decides? How is it best approached? Does it need to be defended? Who can and cannot achieve it? Here a philosophically invigorated notion of the Good Life could deepen longstanding related social science research constructs of “quality of life.” It could potentially challenge and enhance ascendant policy goals of “well-being.” At the same, however, the notion of the Good Life has been vulnerable to appropriation and trivialization by advertising and marketing in consumer capitalist economies (consider Good Life-themed tee shirts, beer, and luxury cars). Across scholarship, policy debates, popular culture and everyday life, notions of the Good Life today range broadly, yet remain unsettled, malleable and contested. Reimagining the Good Life thus fits within a wider stream of inquiry about the changing conditions, potentialities, and consequences of human societies, as well as the challenges with which they must engage in the 21st century. 2. Paper summaries In interrogating this idea of the good life, we include theoretical, empirical, and policy lenses on the rural e from discussions interrelating rural idyll, utopia and social justice (Shucksmith) to large scale surveys of lives failing to make the American Dream (Thiede et al.); individual searching for the Good Life from the “Disneyfication” of the Taiwanese countryside (Chueh and Lu) to the intentional rural communities of Colombia (Chavez et al.); from rural culture policy agendas in the UK (Scott et al.) to the fuller scope of rural social impacts associated with resource extraction and development in the US and Canada (Evensen and Stedman). The papers assembled in this collection all engage broadly with questions about the shifting nature, importance and availability of the Good Life in rural places and communities experiencing forces of change. These changes include demographic shifts, political and economic restructuring, growing social inequalities, new technologies of resource extraction and competing claims on landscape and environment. The papers draw on different philosophical ideas, cultural constructs, data sources, policy framings and individual narratives from across the contemporary rural world to explore central notions of what a Good Life means, why this may matter, for whom and how. Enfolding the Good Life within imaginaries of rural places, the paper by Shucksmith provides a provocative conceptual recasting of the rural for the 21st century e one that engages more explicitly and deliberately with the moral and political dimensions of rural. Shucksmith begins by recognizing the long scholarly legacy of the rural idyll in Britain, but proceeds to challenge its backwardlooking aspirations and its glossing of power. As an alternative, he lays out the value of more anticipatory, deliberative and participatory approaches to envisioning rural futures that support a Good
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Life for the disadvantaged as well as the advantaged. Drawing on Levitas' (2012) formulation of utopia as method, he develops the conceptual and practical contours of “the good countryside,” echoing Amin's (2006) notion of the “good city.” He examines Amin's (2006) four registers of repair, relatedness, rights and reenchantment with examples from rural Scotland and northern England, to convey the moral underpinnings, solidarity commitments and unsettled character of the Good Countryside. Shucksmith concludes by addressing how to work towards a Good Countryside, including who defines its features and exercises power, whether and how networks advance place-shaping and what roles academics can play in this process. Many in the global north cling to the worldview that steady employment all but guarantees some measure of the Good Life. However, as northern economies have evolved and the forces of globalization, neo-liberalism, economic restructuring and automation have placed northern workers in greater direct competition with global labor, mere employment has become less dependable as a source of economic security. Rural workers are often found to be particularly vulnerable, a fact that has been perennially ignored in the U.S., at least until the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The paper by Thiede, Lichter and Slack confronts the erosion of employment in the United States head-on through an analysis of data from the 2001e2014 Current Population Surveys (CPS). This span of years straddles the so-called Great Recession of 2008e2009. Their paper documents an increase over this period in poverty rates among workers, with post-recession rates never recovering to their pre-recession levels. Thiede et al. also confirm the greater prevalence of poverty among rural workers. At the same time, they report that increases in working poverty were observed across sociodemographic groups and industrial sectors, suggesting a generalized decline in the ability of work to guarantee the material comforts of the Good Life. These same economic forces have affected rural areas in many Asian countries, such as China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Rapid industrial and social transformation has included adverse impacts on work/life balance (Lu, 2011), a particular problem in Pan-Confucian societies with South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan having the longest working hours in the world (Cooper, 2015). The paper by Chueh and Lu outlines how, set against a growing awareness of the costs of economic growth and the need for better quality of life, rural restructuring has facilitated new visions of the Good Life in Taiwan. During its participation in GATT in the 1990s, the Taiwanese government were required to decrease financial support for agriculture. Around the same time, various new acts were introduced to repurpose rural land for tourism and leisure. Chueh and Lu argue that it was only from this time that a Taiwanese rural idyll concept was formed. It quickly changed perceptions of rural areas and stimulated inmigration by city dwellers. To explore how this phenomenon relates to modern ideas of the Good Life, they analyse the discursive power of a popular Taiwanese lifestyle programme “Taiker Etude” focused on recent rural in-migrants and their search for a release from the stresses and strains of modern life. Interestingly, a peculiarly Western notion of the Good Life is being created through the building of ‘dream-houses’ in the style of, for example, European grand manors and through the “Disneyfication” of the countryside. The authors argue that this new cultural phenomenon is closely tied to rural restructuring and that rural Taiwan has become “a colonial field of Western influence.” They also argue that, in contrast to stereotypical images of (western) rural communities based on class divisions, new rural communities in Taiwan are being formed and mediated through a collective aesthetic aim of ”transforming life into a work of art.” Here lifestyle programmes and social media help to produce the new rural idyll.
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The paper by Chaves, Macintyre, Verschoor and Wals also concerns intentional rural communities in search of a Good Life, through an analysis of a network of sustainable settlements in Colombia bound together by their common pursuit of buen vivir. Chaves et al. use participatory qualitative methods (including participatory photography), to document the lived experiences of ten rural communities seeking to act out their vision of buen vivir. Slowly but surely, the world is acknowledging the spectre of climate change. As it becomes increasingly clear that the cause is the burning of fossil fuels that has, paradoxically, allowed material conceptions of the Good Life to flourish, many people have scrambled to seek sustainable alternatives. For some, the Good Life is not to be found in orthodox and individualistic notions of economic prosperity. Rather, the Good Life is embodied in the principles of buen vivir, or living in harmony with nature and community in such a way as to not threaten the ability of subsequent generations to achieve it. In addition to the workings of these communities, their findings draw out the challenges facing people seeking to build sustainable communities. In the end, the paper views buen vivir as emerging e a work in progress. For many indigenous concepts of living well, such as buen vivir, protection of the biosphere is central and often articulated in spiritual terms. Oil and gas extraction are generally seen as antithetical to a Good Life under this philosophy. For example, the government of Rafael Correa in Ecuador had to make difficult compromises between being faithful to the indigenous understanding of buen vivir and achieving reductions in poverty by exploiting oil reserves and minerals in the Yasuni National Park. This highlights the temporal and scalar issues of balancing notions of immediate need with longer-term sustainable visions of a Good Life. The paper by Evensen and Stedman offers a very different angle on the Good Life in a different cultural context. However, it is investigating similar issues, by considering how rural residents in the northeast United States and Canada have responded to the prospect of unconventional gas extraction (hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”) in their communities. Using an Aristotelian conceptualization of the Good Life as flourishing and stressing the role of perfectionism in how people pursue such flourishing, the authors find that individual and often discrepant ideas of the Good Life can motivate people within communities to either support or oppose the same type of energy development. This underlying contestation in views about what conditions constitute flourishing for rural communities exposes the challenges for decision-makers assessing the “social impacts” of new energy development. It also highlights the policy opportunities for more attention to how perceived impacts on beauty, peace and quiet from unconventional gas extraction may interfere with rural residents’ ability to flourish. While many of the papers address central substantive Rural Studies topics such as rural economies, natural resources or rural community change, the paper by Scott, Rowe and Pollock examines the Good Life through questions about cultural value and the arts in rural places. Drawing on both material experiences and subjective responses, the authors note the rise in the UK of cultural policies for art and creative expression that effectively privilege narrow rural economic development value more than the inherent and more expansive public good of the arts. The latter, the authors assert, is better aligned with a Good Life perspective. Developing a social justice framework, the authors probe resulting tensions through a process of critical reflections about the authors' actual engagement in their knowledge exchange project with two rural arts organizations in Northumberland, England. Arguing against instrumentalizing culture as mere delivery mechanism for other policy agendas, the paper draws on Nussbaum's (2000) list of ten central human capabilities to rethink the place of well-being in formulations of the “creative countryside” and to reclaim the intrinsic value of culture
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in rural development. It concludes by stressing that shifting the focus from “having impact” to “providing access” may turn needed attention to the importance of capabilities like play and emotions in crafting a good, fully human life. 3. Looking forward Discussions of the Good Life e how it should be theorized, defined and evaluated, how it is manifest and displayed, how it is achieved or not achieved and by whom e are as old as human existence. The crises facing the world today have unsettled prevailing ideas about the Good Life, and the corresponding discourse has been necessarily deep and broad. We argue that recent economic, political and environmental challenges to the Good Life and the emergence of alternative approaches have been much in evidence in rural places around the world, an assertion that, if true, requires deeper scholarly attention. However, simply starting with the relevance of “the rural” for discussions of the Good Life has allowed us to bring together the very diverse set of papers for this collection. Synthesizing from these papers, we conclude by highlighting some directions for future scholarship in this area. Our interest in Rural Studies necessarily foregrounds a concern with context. Natural resource endowments, the form and density of social networks, work and employment opportunities, educational resources and more vary across socio-spatial contexts and necessarily structure the possibilities people have for sufficiency and flourishing in their lives. This point underscores the importance of investigating people's changing strategies and practices for living a Good Life in different national and socio-spatial settings. How do emerging discourses and new metrics of well-being interact with national policy priorities, as well as patterns and possibilities for social and environmental governance affecting individual and social well-being in different rural places and regions experiencing change? How do government policies and programs e from the national to the local level e shape opportunity structures, and how do opportunity structures shape the way people define, construct, contest and accept the Good Life? These questions gain motivation from the fact that in many countries in recent years (including both the US and the UK with which we are most familiar), the social contract has come under increasing strain. Individual life chances, themselves operating within systems of power and privilege, strongly affect how people define and whether they can realize a Good Life that matters to them. Within and across different rural places, different social groups (by gender, generation, race/ethnicity, class, etc.) may be more or less constrained or empowered in organizing their livelihoods and lifestyles to align with their preferred understandings of the Good Life. Importantly, different definitions of the Good Life will sometimes conflict and these normative disjunctures between competing versions of the Good Life e in their content, framing, enactment and distribution of associated benefits and harms e should be empirically examined. Social disjunctures and convergences surrounding the Good Life are important for understanding contemporary discourses and dynamics of rural transformation. Future scholarship on the Good Life could also deploy a rural lens to connect to current and growing streams of research in at least two areas. First, research (and action) on sustainable consumption has arisen in response to the failures of sustainable development and the continuing primacy of economic growth, the mounting urgency of global climate and environmental change, and the material excesses, pressures and injustices of consumer society (Reisch et al., 2016), but it has often assumed an urban point of reference. The “double dividend” (Jackson, 2005) e both environmental improvement through reduced consumption and enhanced well-being through the pleasures, meaning and social connections
in less materialist, resource-intensive lifestyles e has been a compelling, if also contested concept in sustainable consumption (see Wingate et al., 2014). The broadly accepted Easterlin paradox finds that over the long term in various types of economies, citizens’ life satisfaction flattens against rising economic growth (Easterlin et al., 2010). What is insufficiently understood, however, is how sustainable consumption aligns or conflicts with both longstanding and emerging notions of the rural Good Life. In light of the changing class politics and economic strains in many rural areas, new discourses, practices and policies for different or reduced consumption may intersect with the rural Good Life in complicated ways. How do different rural people and places situate seasonal, local food, energy-efficient housing, second-hand goods, or selfpowered bicycles within the wider picture and possibilities of the rural Good Life? How do different permutations of the rural Good Life inspire or depart from the possibilities for sustainable consumption in suburban or urban places and how does this matter? Second, scholarship on the Good Life could also activate a rural lens to connect more to important research on mobilities and migration. While there is a well-established tradition of research on lifestyle migration, including to rural areas (Benson and O'Reilly, 2009; Kordel, 2016), current international patterns of economic migration, displacement and refugee resettlement have introduced new pressures, as well as new possibilities for many rural areas. In the U.S., for example, immigrant groups have increasingly moved away from gateway cities, or bypassed them altogether, to settle in decidedly non-metropolitan locales (Jensen, 2006). Drawn by employment opportunities in industries such as meatpacking, construction, and furniture manufacturing, inflows of new immigrant groups have often been quite large relative to native populations. This has created stresses on local infrastructures, strains on cultural fabrics, but also new possibilities. To date, however, the so-called “new rural destinations” literature has not considered the possible existence and implications of contrasting visions of the Good Life between natives and newcomers, nor how the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and citizenship shape to pursuit of the Good Life. These dynamics are apt to be even sharper in places when new arrivals are refugees, an issue that will only grow in salience in the years ahead. In conclusion, questions about the Good Life have begun to captivate popular and scholarly attention in recent years. The articles in this collection are an invitation to think about how “the rural” and how “the Good Life” intersect. We hope this is the beginning of a new dialogue. Acknowledgements This special edition emerged from ideas discussed at an annual meeting of the Trans-Atlantic Rural Research Network (TARRN) https://tarrn.wordpress.com/in Newcastle Upon Tyne (2014). Many thanks to all our friends and colleagues in this network who continue to provide the intellectually rigorous forum within which to critically debate these issues, and in a most collegial way. References Ahmed, S., 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Amin, A., 2006. The good city. Urban Stud. 43 (5/6), 1009e1023. Bache, Scott (Eds.), 2017. The Politics of Wellbeing: Theory, Policy and Practice. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke. Bailey, C., Jensen, L., Ransom, E., 2014. Rural America in a Globalizing World: Problems and Prospects for the 2010s. University Press, Morgantown, WV: West Virginia. Baritz, L., 1989. The Good Life: the Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class. Knopf, New York. Benson, M., O'Reilly, K., 2009. Migration and the search for a better way of life: a critical exploration of lifestyle migration. Sociol. Rev. 57 (4), 608e625.
Please cite this article in press as: Scott, K., et al., Re-imagining the Good Life, Journal of Rural Studies (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jrurstud.2017.08.014
Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2017) 1e5 Berlant, L., 2007. Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency). Crit. Inq. 33 (4), 754e780. Bressa Florentin, D., 2017. Between policies and life: the political process of buen vivir in Ecuador. In: Bache, I., Scott, K. (Eds.), The Politics of Wellbeing: Theory, Policy and Practice. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke. Calisto Friant, M., Langmore, L., 2015. The buen vivir: a policy to survive the anthropocene? Glob. Policy 6 (1). Cooper, C., 2015. Introduction. In: Lu, L., Cooper, C. (Eds.), A Handbook of Research on Work-life Balance in Asia. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Easterlin, R.A., McVey, L.A., Switek, M., Sawangfa, O., Zweig, J.S., 2010. The happiness-income paradox revisited. PNAS 107 (152), 22463e22468. Friedli, L., Stearn, R., 2015. Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes. Med. Humanit. 41, 40e47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2014-010622. Gilbert, A., Colley, K., Roberts, D., 2016. Are rural residents happier? A quantitative analysis of subjective wellbeing in Scotland. J. Rural Stud. 44, 37e45. Jackson, T., 2005. Live better by consuming less? Is there a “double dividend” in sustainable consumption. J. Industrial Ecol. 9 (1e2), 19e36. Jensen, L., 2006. New Immigrant Settlements in Rural America: Problems Prospects and Policies. Reports on Rural America, vol. 1. The Carsey School of Public Policy, The University of New Hampshire, pp. 1e32. Kordel, S., 2016. The production of spaces of the ‘good life’: the case of lifestyle migrants in Spain. Leis. Stud. 35 (2), 129e140. Levitas, R., 2012. Utopia as Method: the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Palgrave Macmillan. Lu, L., 2011. Working hours and personal preference among Taiwanese employees. Int. J. Workplace Health Manag. 4 (3), 244e256. Nussbaum, M.C., 2000. Women and Human Development: the Capabilities Approach. Cambridge University Press, New York. Panelli, R., Tipa, G., 2007. Placing well-being: a Maori case study of cultural and environmental specificity. EcoHealth 4 (4), 445e460. Radcliffe, S., 2012. Development for a postneoliberal era? Sumak kawsay, living well and the limits to decolonisation in Ecuador. Geoforum 43, 240e249. Reisch, L.A., Cohen, M.J., Thogerson, J.B., Tukker, A., 2016. Frontiers in sustainable consumption research. GAIA- Ecol. Perspect. Sci. Soc. 25 (4), 234e240.
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Scott, K., Masselot, A., 2017. Skivers, Strivers and Thrivers: the shift from welfare to wellbeing in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In: Bache, I., Scott, K. (Eds.), The Politics of Wellbeing: Theory, Policy and Practice. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke. Shi, D.E., 1985. The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford. Shucksmith, M., Brown, D., Shortall, S., Vergunst, J., Warner, M., 2012. Rural Transformations and Rural Policies in the UK and US. Routledge, New York. Smith, B., 2016. Life liberty and home ownership. In: Paper presented at Understanding Wellbeing: Representations, Discourse and Policy Conference, at 18 and 19 November. University of Paris Sorbonne, CERVEPAS/CREW. Williams, R., 1973. The Country and the City. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Wingate, D., Middlemiss, L., Wesselink, A., 2014. The ‘Double Dividend” Discourse in Sustainable Consumption: Happiness, Human Nature and the Reproduction of Economic Doctrine. University of Leeds, Sustainability Research Institute. SRI Paper #60 (April).
Karen Scott* University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom Clare Hinrichs Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA Leif Jensen Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (K. Scott).
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Editorial
Re-imagining the Good Life 1. Introduction Across the globe and throughout history, people have striven for whatever vision of a Good Life held meaning for them. The many different schools of philosophy in ancient Athens e while sharing the conviction that the central goal for humans was to achieve the Good Life e attest to many divergent understandings of what constitutes a Good Life, who was entitled to it, and how society should be organised to deliver it. The possibility of consensus is no closer after two millennia. So, we offer no definition in foregrounding this collection of papers on ‘Re-imagining The Good Life’ for The Journal of Rural Studies e ideas on this subject are inevitably diverse e yet we acknowledge that all visions of the Good Life, explicitly or implicitly, are political as well as personal. Concepts and framings of the Good Life have power to legitimise or undermine certain opinions, to encourage or censure certain behaviours, to make visible or obscure certain aspects of life, and to include or exclude certain people. Long-standing, dominant framings of happiness can be mobilised to maintain political economies and power relations, and to undermine those who struggle for alternative possibilities (Ahmed, 2010). However, in contemporary liberal democracies, enduring and taken-for-granted notions of the Good Life1e those centred on individual wealth, job security, personal status and success, health, and happiness e are now under pressure. The present context of economic instability and crisis, environmental change, shifts in welfare state imaginaries, and growing social inequality has fuelled debates that are now disrupting the legitimacy of growth-centric economic strategies as the principal route to wellbeing. Understandings of the Good Life in many cultures are beginning to change and will likely need to change significantly in the future. In addition to the general, but abstract, awareness that current modes of living are unsustainable, a deeply personal, yet widely resonant, response to late capitalism is clear. A slow-burn existential crisis has emerged, as many individuals feel less and less able to fulfil their expectations of life and concentrate, not on reaching for their dreams, but getting through each day, with the result that life feels increasingly ‘truncated’ (Berlant, 2007: 27). What does living a Good Life mean in the 21st century? How can and should it be re-imagined? This profound questioning has opened opportunities for alternative visions of development to find greater political legitimacy.
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We have not sought to explicitly define this idea but try to highlight dominant understandings linked to particular contexts. These terms, ‘a good life’ or ‘’the good life, relate to an intuitively understood but difficult to articulate idea of living well. It is individually, culturally and societally diverse and therefore any definition risks the imposition of cultural norms. The papers here are focussed on four very different geographical, political and historical contexts and so we do not define what a good life means here, rather let the papers speak.
Many governments across the globe, and supra-national organisations such as the EU, OECD, and UN, have responded by seeking to measure ‘national wellbeing’ or ‘national happiness’ (Bache and Scott, 2017). In the search for evidence to inform policies to tackle rising levels of mental health issues, perceived societal breakdown, and growing inequalities, in many countries there has been an increased focus on developing subjective wellbeing indicators which measure, for example, happiness, anxiety and fulfilment, in addition to more longstanding objective indicators of quality of life.2 This is welcome, because it makes more visible, and provokes political discussion about, the intangible, yet fundamental, aspects of what makes life more or less worth living. Yet, at the same time, attendant narratives of ‘flourishing’ and ‘thriving’ linked to an emphasis on self-responsibility (rather than structural determinants of wellbeing), can increase feelings of pressure for those who already experience a lack of control over their lives, or worse still be used as a discriminatory and disciplinary tool (Friedli and Stearn 2015; Scott and Masselot 2017). While many nations have been influenced by Western-centric notions of the Good Life, promulgated by European values that focus on individual rights and freedoms, this renewed questioning of life has allowed other philosophies to gain more traction. For example, an emerging literature on buen vivir (or Sumak kawsay3) translated as ‘living well’ has highlighted how traditional indigenous notions of wellbeing, based on the interrelatedness of all life, have gained new political legitimacy across several countries in South America. Indeed, Buen vivir was constitutionalized in Bolivia (2009) and Ecuador (2008), partly in response to powerful lobbying from indigenous people to respect their cosmology in a plurinational state,4 but also in the attempt to mainstream alternative visions of development associated with a growing ‘pink tide’ of left wing activism which rejected the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s, in favour of Twenty-First Century Socialism (see for example Bressa Florentin 2017; Calisto Friant and Langmore, 2015; Radcliffe, 2012). This work highlights the political and environmental contestations and compromises inherent in implementing these visions across diverse peoples in one nation. The emergence of a recent shift to the right in many countries in Latin America may mean these ideas fall into abeyance again, but it is clear that contestation will continue.
2 For example the UK Office of National Statistics introduced four new questions in their national wellbeing survey asking about happiness, anxiety, life satisfaction and life meaning. 3 Sumak Kawsay is the equivalent term in Quechua, an indigenous language family spoken by over 10 million people across Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. 4 ‘Plurinational’ is an idea embedded in the indigenous lobbying for political recognition and representation of the many and diverse peoples in one nation state.
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In New Zealand, new political narratives of wellbeing have emerged in close dialogue with those agendas in Europe, however, they have also been necessarily cognizant of the contemporary requirement to include Maori philosophies in a bicultural nation. A national Maori wellbeing survey, Te Kupenga, now exists alongside Pakeha wellbeing measurements and is an indication of the recent political settlement through the Waitangi Tribunal process, which attempted financial and political reparation for the atrocities white settlers inflicted on Maori people. In this settlement the transfer of land, or gaining resources to buy and protect land, has been paramount in recognising rangatiratanga - the authority and self-determination of a Maori tribe. Whilst acknowledging the diversity of Maori experiences and without wishing to essentialise or romantisize ‘the Maori culture’, the ability to live in relation to a specific place in specific ways according to cultural and spiritual commitments is central to Maori cosmology and therefore notions of a Good Life (Panelli and Tipa, 2007). As is the case in indigenous cosmologies in Ecuador, human and non-human life are entirely interconnected with each other and with the environment - the Maori word for land (whenua) also means placenta. In imagining what constitutes a Good Life, from earliest recorded times to the present day, narratives of land, nature and the tensions between the city and the countryside have been important, if sometimes underlying themes (Williams, 1973). In classical Athens, for example, while Aristotle taught (to elite male citizens) that the best possible life could be achieved through dutiful engagement in civic life, Epicurus urged retreat to a walled garden outside the city to live a life of simple pleasures. While one idea of the Good Life can certainly be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald's cosmopolitan images of American Wall Street fuelled excesses during the Roaring Twenties, another reverberates in Flora Thompson's evocation of the quiet English rural idyll on the brink of modern transformation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both these influential literary explorations of different ideas of the Good Life each build on the writers' lived experiences of engaged participation in that life, their capacities for creative observation and transposition, as well as their critiques of the dramatic social and economic changes of their time. The varied and often contradictory renderings of the Good Life in literature and art have been further explored in social history, social research and commentary. On one hand, 20th century urban and suburban development provided settings where a growing American middle class could amass and consolidate the material goods and status markers of the modern successful Good Life (Baritz, 1989). But on the other hand, rural and agrarian communities have long been seen as repositories of simpler living, traditions of hard, honest work and therefore higher virtue and fulfillment in American culture (Shi, 1985). These spatialized views of the Good Life may be somewhat specific to the American context. They arose unmarked by some of the more turbulent recent shifts and disruptures of the early 21st century and they certainly now seem limited in their engagement with issues of power. Living a Good Life in the US suburbs in the 1960s was a predominantly white affair, facilitated by housing legislation which promoted racial segregation (Smith, 2016). Even so, they underscore some basis for broader interest in and ongoing questions about the rural and rurality as either conducive to or inhibiting a Good Life. Indeed a plethora of studies have focussed on contemporary constructions and deconstructions of the rural idyll in Britain and elsewhere, on rural lifestyles and amenity migration in Europe and North America, on the wellbeing of certain groups such as young people or the elderly in rural areas, and on how quality of life has been affected by restructuring of rural areas and changes in policy (see Bailey et al., 2014 and Shucksmith et al., 2012 for examples of attention to some of these areas for the US and the UK; see Gilbert et al., 2016 for a recent illustrative example of research
on rural subjective well-being). However, Rural Studies as an interdisciplinary field has so far engaged relatively little with the articulation of large cultural shifts in ideas of the Good Life e the existential as well as the empirical, and the link between them as possibilities for further research. This lack of attention is notable since threats to material and consumption-based definitions of the Good Life are glaring and consequential in many rural locales, and many emerging alternatives to these definitions are, perhaps not coincidentally, being developed and enacted in the countryside. Re-imagining the Good Life therefore necessitates consideration of the rural and rurality. While rooted in ancient and/or indigenous philosophical traditions and debates, concerns about the Good Life have acquired renewed relevance today amidst the present context of rapid political, economic, and environmental upheaval, both ongoing and new cultural contentions and rising social inequalities. But what exactly is the Good Life in the early 21st century? Who decides? How is it best approached? Does it need to be defended? Who can and cannot achieve it? Here a philosophically invigorated notion of the Good Life could deepen longstanding related social science research constructs of “quality of life.” It could potentially challenge and enhance ascendant policy goals of “well-being.” At the same, however, the notion of the Good Life has been vulnerable to appropriation and trivialization by advertising and marketing in consumer capitalist economies (consider Good Life-themed tee shirts, beer, and luxury cars). Across scholarship, policy debates, popular culture and everyday life, notions of the Good Life today range broadly, yet remain unsettled, malleable and contested. Reimagining the Good Life thus fits within a wider stream of inquiry about the changing conditions, potentialities, and consequences of human societies, as well as the challenges with which they must engage in the 21st century. 2. Paper summaries In interrogating this idea of the good life, we include theoretical, empirical, and policy lenses on the rural e from discussions interrelating rural idyll, utopia and social justice (Shucksmith) to large scale surveys of lives failing to make the American Dream (Thiede et al.); individual searching for the Good Life from the “Disneyfication” of the Taiwanese countryside (Chueh and Lu) to the intentional rural communities of Colombia (Chavez et al.); from rural culture policy agendas in the UK (Scott et al.) to the fuller scope of rural social impacts associated with resource extraction and development in the US and Canada (Evensen and Stedman). The papers assembled in this collection all engage broadly with questions about the shifting nature, importance and availability of the Good Life in rural places and communities experiencing forces of change. These changes include demographic shifts, political and economic restructuring, growing social inequalities, new technologies of resource extraction and competing claims on landscape and environment. The papers draw on different philosophical ideas, cultural constructs, data sources, policy framings and individual narratives from across the contemporary rural world to explore central notions of what a Good Life means, why this may matter, for whom and how. Enfolding the Good Life within imaginaries of rural places, the paper by Shucksmith provides a provocative conceptual recasting of the rural for the 21st century e one that engages more explicitly and deliberately with the moral and political dimensions of rural. Shucksmith begins by recognizing the long scholarly legacy of the rural idyll in Britain, but proceeds to challenge its backwardlooking aspirations and its glossing of power. As an alternative, he lays out the value of more anticipatory, deliberative and participatory approaches to envisioning rural futures that support a Good
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Life for the disadvantaged as well as the advantaged. Drawing on Levitas' (2012) formulation of utopia as method, he develops the conceptual and practical contours of “the good countryside,” echoing Amin's (2006) notion of the “good city.” He examines Amin's (2006) four registers of repair, relatedness, rights and reenchantment with examples from rural Scotland and northern England, to convey the moral underpinnings, solidarity commitments and unsettled character of the Good Countryside. Shucksmith concludes by addressing how to work towards a Good Countryside, including who defines its features and exercises power, whether and how networks advance place-shaping and what roles academics can play in this process. Many in the global north cling to the worldview that steady employment all but guarantees some measure of the Good Life. However, as northern economies have evolved and the forces of globalization, neo-liberalism, economic restructuring and automation have placed northern workers in greater direct competition with global labor, mere employment has become less dependable as a source of economic security. Rural workers are often found to be particularly vulnerable, a fact that has been perennially ignored in the U.S., at least until the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The paper by Thiede, Lichter and Slack confronts the erosion of employment in the United States head-on through an analysis of data from the 2001e2014 Current Population Surveys (CPS). This span of years straddles the so-called Great Recession of 2008e2009. Their paper documents an increase over this period in poverty rates among workers, with post-recession rates never recovering to their pre-recession levels. Thiede et al. also confirm the greater prevalence of poverty among rural workers. At the same time, they report that increases in working poverty were observed across sociodemographic groups and industrial sectors, suggesting a generalized decline in the ability of work to guarantee the material comforts of the Good Life. These same economic forces have affected rural areas in many Asian countries, such as China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Rapid industrial and social transformation has included adverse impacts on work/life balance (Lu, 2011), a particular problem in Pan-Confucian societies with South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan having the longest working hours in the world (Cooper, 2015). The paper by Chueh and Lu outlines how, set against a growing awareness of the costs of economic growth and the need for better quality of life, rural restructuring has facilitated new visions of the Good Life in Taiwan. During its participation in GATT in the 1990s, the Taiwanese government were required to decrease financial support for agriculture. Around the same time, various new acts were introduced to repurpose rural land for tourism and leisure. Chueh and Lu argue that it was only from this time that a Taiwanese rural idyll concept was formed. It quickly changed perceptions of rural areas and stimulated inmigration by city dwellers. To explore how this phenomenon relates to modern ideas of the Good Life, they analyse the discursive power of a popular Taiwanese lifestyle programme “Taiker Etude” focused on recent rural in-migrants and their search for a release from the stresses and strains of modern life. Interestingly, a peculiarly Western notion of the Good Life is being created through the building of ‘dream-houses’ in the style of, for example, European grand manors and through the “Disneyfication” of the countryside. The authors argue that this new cultural phenomenon is closely tied to rural restructuring and that rural Taiwan has become “a colonial field of Western influence.” They also argue that, in contrast to stereotypical images of (western) rural communities based on class divisions, new rural communities in Taiwan are being formed and mediated through a collective aesthetic aim of ”transforming life into a work of art.” Here lifestyle programmes and social media help to produce the new rural idyll.
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The paper by Chaves, Macintyre, Verschoor and Wals also concerns intentional rural communities in search of a Good Life, through an analysis of a network of sustainable settlements in Colombia bound together by their common pursuit of buen vivir. Chaves et al. use participatory qualitative methods (including participatory photography), to document the lived experiences of ten rural communities seeking to act out their vision of buen vivir. Slowly but surely, the world is acknowledging the spectre of climate change. As it becomes increasingly clear that the cause is the burning of fossil fuels that has, paradoxically, allowed material conceptions of the Good Life to flourish, many people have scrambled to seek sustainable alternatives. For some, the Good Life is not to be found in orthodox and individualistic notions of economic prosperity. Rather, the Good Life is embodied in the principles of buen vivir, or living in harmony with nature and community in such a way as to not threaten the ability of subsequent generations to achieve it. In addition to the workings of these communities, their findings draw out the challenges facing people seeking to build sustainable communities. In the end, the paper views buen vivir as emerging e a work in progress. For many indigenous concepts of living well, such as buen vivir, protection of the biosphere is central and often articulated in spiritual terms. Oil and gas extraction are generally seen as antithetical to a Good Life under this philosophy. For example, the government of Rafael Correa in Ecuador had to make difficult compromises between being faithful to the indigenous understanding of buen vivir and achieving reductions in poverty by exploiting oil reserves and minerals in the Yasuni National Park. This highlights the temporal and scalar issues of balancing notions of immediate need with longer-term sustainable visions of a Good Life. The paper by Evensen and Stedman offers a very different angle on the Good Life in a different cultural context. However, it is investigating similar issues, by considering how rural residents in the northeast United States and Canada have responded to the prospect of unconventional gas extraction (hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”) in their communities. Using an Aristotelian conceptualization of the Good Life as flourishing and stressing the role of perfectionism in how people pursue such flourishing, the authors find that individual and often discrepant ideas of the Good Life can motivate people within communities to either support or oppose the same type of energy development. This underlying contestation in views about what conditions constitute flourishing for rural communities exposes the challenges for decision-makers assessing the “social impacts” of new energy development. It also highlights the policy opportunities for more attention to how perceived impacts on beauty, peace and quiet from unconventional gas extraction may interfere with rural residents’ ability to flourish. While many of the papers address central substantive Rural Studies topics such as rural economies, natural resources or rural community change, the paper by Scott, Rowe and Pollock examines the Good Life through questions about cultural value and the arts in rural places. Drawing on both material experiences and subjective responses, the authors note the rise in the UK of cultural policies for art and creative expression that effectively privilege narrow rural economic development value more than the inherent and more expansive public good of the arts. The latter, the authors assert, is better aligned with a Good Life perspective. Developing a social justice framework, the authors probe resulting tensions through a process of critical reflections about the authors' actual engagement in their knowledge exchange project with two rural arts organizations in Northumberland, England. Arguing against instrumentalizing culture as mere delivery mechanism for other policy agendas, the paper draws on Nussbaum's (2000) list of ten central human capabilities to rethink the place of well-being in formulations of the “creative countryside” and to reclaim the intrinsic value of culture
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in rural development. It concludes by stressing that shifting the focus from “having impact” to “providing access” may turn needed attention to the importance of capabilities like play and emotions in crafting a good, fully human life. 3. Looking forward Discussions of the Good Life e how it should be theorized, defined and evaluated, how it is manifest and displayed, how it is achieved or not achieved and by whom e are as old as human existence. The crises facing the world today have unsettled prevailing ideas about the Good Life, and the corresponding discourse has been necessarily deep and broad. We argue that recent economic, political and environmental challenges to the Good Life and the emergence of alternative approaches have been much in evidence in rural places around the world, an assertion that, if true, requires deeper scholarly attention. However, simply starting with the relevance of “the rural” for discussions of the Good Life has allowed us to bring together the very diverse set of papers for this collection. Synthesizing from these papers, we conclude by highlighting some directions for future scholarship in this area. Our interest in Rural Studies necessarily foregrounds a concern with context. Natural resource endowments, the form and density of social networks, work and employment opportunities, educational resources and more vary across socio-spatial contexts and necessarily structure the possibilities people have for sufficiency and flourishing in their lives. This point underscores the importance of investigating people's changing strategies and practices for living a Good Life in different national and socio-spatial settings. How do emerging discourses and new metrics of well-being interact with national policy priorities, as well as patterns and possibilities for social and environmental governance affecting individual and social well-being in different rural places and regions experiencing change? How do government policies and programs e from the national to the local level e shape opportunity structures, and how do opportunity structures shape the way people define, construct, contest and accept the Good Life? These questions gain motivation from the fact that in many countries in recent years (including both the US and the UK with which we are most familiar), the social contract has come under increasing strain. Individual life chances, themselves operating within systems of power and privilege, strongly affect how people define and whether they can realize a Good Life that matters to them. Within and across different rural places, different social groups (by gender, generation, race/ethnicity, class, etc.) may be more or less constrained or empowered in organizing their livelihoods and lifestyles to align with their preferred understandings of the Good Life. Importantly, different definitions of the Good Life will sometimes conflict and these normative disjunctures between competing versions of the Good Life e in their content, framing, enactment and distribution of associated benefits and harms e should be empirically examined. Social disjunctures and convergences surrounding the Good Life are important for understanding contemporary discourses and dynamics of rural transformation. Future scholarship on the Good Life could also deploy a rural lens to connect to current and growing streams of research in at least two areas. First, research (and action) on sustainable consumption has arisen in response to the failures of sustainable development and the continuing primacy of economic growth, the mounting urgency of global climate and environmental change, and the material excesses, pressures and injustices of consumer society (Reisch et al., 2016), but it has often assumed an urban point of reference. The “double dividend” (Jackson, 2005) e both environmental improvement through reduced consumption and enhanced well-being through the pleasures, meaning and social connections
in less materialist, resource-intensive lifestyles e has been a compelling, if also contested concept in sustainable consumption (see Wingate et al., 2014). The broadly accepted Easterlin paradox finds that over the long term in various types of economies, citizens’ life satisfaction flattens against rising economic growth (Easterlin et al., 2010). What is insufficiently understood, however, is how sustainable consumption aligns or conflicts with both longstanding and emerging notions of the rural Good Life. In light of the changing class politics and economic strains in many rural areas, new discourses, practices and policies for different or reduced consumption may intersect with the rural Good Life in complicated ways. How do different rural people and places situate seasonal, local food, energy-efficient housing, second-hand goods, or selfpowered bicycles within the wider picture and possibilities of the rural Good Life? How do different permutations of the rural Good Life inspire or depart from the possibilities for sustainable consumption in suburban or urban places and how does this matter? Second, scholarship on the Good Life could also activate a rural lens to connect more to important research on mobilities and migration. While there is a well-established tradition of research on lifestyle migration, including to rural areas (Benson and O'Reilly, 2009; Kordel, 2016), current international patterns of economic migration, displacement and refugee resettlement have introduced new pressures, as well as new possibilities for many rural areas. In the U.S., for example, immigrant groups have increasingly moved away from gateway cities, or bypassed them altogether, to settle in decidedly non-metropolitan locales (Jensen, 2006). Drawn by employment opportunities in industries such as meatpacking, construction, and furniture manufacturing, inflows of new immigrant groups have often been quite large relative to native populations. This has created stresses on local infrastructures, strains on cultural fabrics, but also new possibilities. To date, however, the so-called “new rural destinations” literature has not considered the possible existence and implications of contrasting visions of the Good Life between natives and newcomers, nor how the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and citizenship shape to pursuit of the Good Life. These dynamics are apt to be even sharper in places when new arrivals are refugees, an issue that will only grow in salience in the years ahead. In conclusion, questions about the Good Life have begun to captivate popular and scholarly attention in recent years. The articles in this collection are an invitation to think about how “the rural” and how “the Good Life” intersect. We hope this is the beginning of a new dialogue. Acknowledgements This special edition emerged from ideas discussed at an annual meeting of the Trans-Atlantic Rural Research Network (TARRN) https://tarrn.wordpress.com/in Newcastle Upon Tyne (2014). Many thanks to all our friends and colleagues in this network who continue to provide the intellectually rigorous forum within which to critically debate these issues, and in a most collegial way. References Ahmed, S., 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Amin, A., 2006. The good city. Urban Stud. 43 (5/6), 1009e1023. Bache, Scott (Eds.), 2017. The Politics of Wellbeing: Theory, Policy and Practice. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke. Bailey, C., Jensen, L., Ransom, E., 2014. Rural America in a Globalizing World: Problems and Prospects for the 2010s. University Press, Morgantown, WV: West Virginia. Baritz, L., 1989. The Good Life: the Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class. Knopf, New York. Benson, M., O'Reilly, K., 2009. Migration and the search for a better way of life: a critical exploration of lifestyle migration. Sociol. Rev. 57 (4), 608e625.
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Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2017) 1e5 Berlant, L., 2007. Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency). Crit. Inq. 33 (4), 754e780. Bressa Florentin, D., 2017. Between policies and life: the political process of buen vivir in Ecuador. In: Bache, I., Scott, K. (Eds.), The Politics of Wellbeing: Theory, Policy and Practice. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke. Calisto Friant, M., Langmore, L., 2015. The buen vivir: a policy to survive the anthropocene? Glob. Policy 6 (1). Cooper, C., 2015. Introduction. In: Lu, L., Cooper, C. (Eds.), A Handbook of Research on Work-life Balance in Asia. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Easterlin, R.A., McVey, L.A., Switek, M., Sawangfa, O., Zweig, J.S., 2010. The happiness-income paradox revisited. PNAS 107 (152), 22463e22468. Friedli, L., Stearn, R., 2015. Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes. Med. Humanit. 41, 40e47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2014-010622. Gilbert, A., Colley, K., Roberts, D., 2016. Are rural residents happier? A quantitative analysis of subjective wellbeing in Scotland. J. Rural Stud. 44, 37e45. Jackson, T., 2005. Live better by consuming less? Is there a “double dividend” in sustainable consumption. J. Industrial Ecol. 9 (1e2), 19e36. Jensen, L., 2006. New Immigrant Settlements in Rural America: Problems Prospects and Policies. Reports on Rural America, vol. 1. The Carsey School of Public Policy, The University of New Hampshire, pp. 1e32. Kordel, S., 2016. The production of spaces of the ‘good life’: the case of lifestyle migrants in Spain. Leis. Stud. 35 (2), 129e140. Levitas, R., 2012. Utopia as Method: the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Palgrave Macmillan. Lu, L., 2011. Working hours and personal preference among Taiwanese employees. Int. J. Workplace Health Manag. 4 (3), 244e256. Nussbaum, M.C., 2000. Women and Human Development: the Capabilities Approach. Cambridge University Press, New York. Panelli, R., Tipa, G., 2007. Placing well-being: a Maori case study of cultural and environmental specificity. EcoHealth 4 (4), 445e460. Radcliffe, S., 2012. Development for a postneoliberal era? Sumak kawsay, living well and the limits to decolonisation in Ecuador. Geoforum 43, 240e249. Reisch, L.A., Cohen, M.J., Thogerson, J.B., Tukker, A., 2016. Frontiers in sustainable consumption research. GAIA- Ecol. Perspect. Sci. Soc. 25 (4), 234e240.
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Scott, K., Masselot, A., 2017. Skivers, Strivers and Thrivers: the shift from welfare to wellbeing in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In: Bache, I., Scott, K. (Eds.), The Politics of Wellbeing: Theory, Policy and Practice. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke. Shi, D.E., 1985. The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford. Shucksmith, M., Brown, D., Shortall, S., Vergunst, J., Warner, M., 2012. Rural Transformations and Rural Policies in the UK and US. Routledge, New York. Smith, B., 2016. Life liberty and home ownership. In: Paper presented at Understanding Wellbeing: Representations, Discourse and Policy Conference, at 18 and 19 November. University of Paris Sorbonne, CERVEPAS/CREW. Williams, R., 1973. The Country and the City. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Wingate, D., Middlemiss, L., Wesselink, A., 2014. The ‘Double Dividend” Discourse in Sustainable Consumption: Happiness, Human Nature and the Reproduction of Economic Doctrine. University of Leeds, Sustainability Research Institute. SRI Paper #60 (April).
Karen Scott* University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom Clare Hinrichs Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA Leif Jensen Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (K. Scott).
Available online xxx
Please cite this article in press as: Scott, K., et al., Re-imagining the Good Life, Journal of Rural Studies (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jrurstud.2017.08.014