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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]

Purpose - Deinstitutionalization has impacts also on direct care workers and their work. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the attitudes of direct care workers towards the closure of the institution, and these attitudes' relation to workers' occupational identity. Design/methodology/approach - Data were collected by postal questionnaire before the closure of the institution. The respondents consisted of two groups: direct care workers of the institution (n = 93) and direct care workers of community-based residential units run by the same organization (n = 117). Findings - The results clearly show that direct care workers in the institution, as a group, were against the closure of the institution. This is quite understandable, because the closure will irrevocably affect their work and also private life. Although this opposing is evident, there was also variance in the attitudes within this group: some were more willing to accept the change, some were more against it. Those opposing the closure seemed to be more reluctant in adopting the new kind of identity as supporters of the self-determination o f their clients and also they felt more insecure about their own competence. Originality/value - In deinstitutionalization research a staff perspective has not been very common. To successfully accomplish the change process it is important to take into account also the staff and how they experience the change. It would be far more beneficial to have staff promoting change than resisting it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]