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Rural development refers to diverse attempts being made to address the problems of rural communities. In Finland, rural development leans heavily on entrepreneurship and small business development. Rural development processes have a strong social psychological component that entails that psychological knowledge is crucial for rural development agents. Nevertheless, psychological knowledge has also been criticised for simplifying highly complex development processes and overstating the role of internal psychological factors. In this paper, we argue that, regarding the relevance and utility of psychological knowledge, the question is not only how extensively different factors are taken into account but also how knowledge about psychological factors is read and interpreted. In this paper, we focus on Finnish rural business owners' values and demonstrate that value survey data can be read from two different social psychological perspectives: those of substantialism and relationalism. Although data and the conducted analyses are kept constant, the two readings produce differing types of knowledge of rural business owners' values; one reveals what business owners 'truly' are like and the other informs how to best communicate with business owners. Both readings are potentially useful for rural development work. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a frame analytic approach to the popular peasant-entrepreneur typology and focuses on the much-studied topic of farmers' values. Peasantry is often thought to represent traditional or 'indigenous' style of farming, while entrepreneurship is associated with values injected and promoted by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In this article, peasantry and entrepreneurship are approached as frames for farming, i.e., social constructions that can be used to make sense of farming. The aim is to study whether farmers themselves frame farming in line with the peasant ethos and whether one can detect the impact of the policy discourses in farmers' framings. The study utilises value survey data from Finland and concludes that even though Finnish farmers' framings do not straightforwardly reflect the peasant-entrepreneur typology, they are highly compatible with the multifunctionality policy discourse. The results call for further attention to the novel framings new peasantry and ecological entrepreneurship that are compatible with the multifunctionality discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss recent developments in services for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the Nordic countries. They note that all of the countries saw important reforms during the 1990s, regarding both deinstitutionalization and decentralization. However, they posit that the litmus test of the reforms is not what happens during reform years, but after the reform energy decreases and political attention fades. Thus, developments after 2000 are of particular interest. The comparative analysis is based on research reviews in the five Nordic countries. The analysis observed a trend toward larger group homes and congregations, inequality across municipalities, marketization, and new public management, but also an increasing emphasis on consumer rights and the use of the personal assistance scheme in services for people with ID. The authors conclude that diverging trends coexist, with improvements going together with significant setbacks. They explore the trends from a political science perspective and, in particular, note how they relate to recent shifts in public management and changing drivers of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]