This thesis brings together a series of existing and ongoing pieces of research, conductedover a period of some years. There are five primary aims.The first is to construct a coherent empirical picture of the social organisation of spacein rural South Australia by the early 1980s, at the outset of a period of turmoil and rapidchange. The second is to bring together two relevant ...

Australia's rural hospitals face most of the same issues and challenges faced by metropolitan hospitals. However they also face additional challenges around geographic isolation, their iconic status and role as major employers in local communities, and their close relationship with community based health services. Future opportunities include more formal integration with community service throu...

Figure 1: Improved Village Housing in Gaochun, Jiangsu. Photo by Fulong Wu This chapter introduces the practice of rural village improvement in Jiangsu province of China. The program has profound implications for China’s sustainable urbanization and the development of better urban and rural habitats. Jiangsu’s village improvement program is an experiment to transform the built environment in ru...

Information poverty is a new form of poverty in information society. With the growing information-gap between urban and rural areas, information poverty is prevailing in the vast rural areas in China. It is largely restricted the new rural construction and the social harmonious development of villages and towns and must be resolved. The evaluation of rural information poverty is the premise to ...

Using the example of two English villages, this paper examines whether rural crime concern is evidence of an ‘exclusive society’ (Young, 2002) in the countryside. Specific attention is given to concerns expressed by residents as part of a consultation exercise to establish community-based policing partnerships in rural areas of the West Mercia Constabulary. Based on these findings the paper goe...

The paper discusses the status stigma of rural-to-urban migrants in China from the perspective of social representations. Stigma associated with social status is frequently reported in academic community but there is little published information about stigma towards rural-to-urban migrants in China. The data were collected by open-ended individual interviews with 138 participants (60 urban citi...

The rural finance of China is still weak in the Chinese financial system. Without the support of the capital factor, the new rural construction of socialism could not be realized, but the investment of the capital factor and the enhancement of the humanistic morality must be based on the good credit information resource. The rural financial departments should fully support the construction of t...