Rural Development and Embeddedness: The Importance of Human Relations for Industrial Restructuring in Rural Areas

Abstract This article offers a critical reading of theories on embeddedness emphasised in discussions on restructuring and other changes in rural areas. Despite expanding globalisation, embeddedness is considered a local or regional phenomenon that generally promotes the socioeconomic development of rural areas. We argue that the ways in which different forms of embeddedness affect industrial restructuring in a rural place, and how strongly they do so are not given a priori. In addition, embeddedness may differ in geographical scale. This makes us introduce a social field approach that we argue can handle the challenge of mapping multi‐scale and multicultural forms of embeddedness and its significance for economic performance and local economic development. The empirical part of the article starts by analysing changes in the geographical embeddedness of the industrial environment in the municipality of Stryn, Norway. This is followed by a discussion of the cultural embeddedness of the environment, focusing on untraded assets in the present social field system of the industry. The case study demonstrates that industrial environments in peripheral areas should balance social fields of different untraded assets and scope to promote viable communities.