As the first book in the Restructuring Rural Areas series, Constructing the countryside presents a new methodological approach to the analysis of rural change. The authors seek to link wider developments in the global political economy to the behaviour of local actors and, in so doing, they place research into rural studies much more firmly than hitherto in the mainstream of social science enquiry. The outcome is a book that promotes a truly interdisciplinary approach through which the constant reconstruction of the countryside can be properly understood. This holistic perspective, sustained...