Crisis, transformation, and agency: Why are people going back-to-the-land in Greece?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transformations are fundamentally about agency: human intention, motivation, and power to influence and to resist. Most studies focus on deliberate system-level transformations, usually guided by a set of influential actors. However, system-level transformations may also occur as the result of the cascading effects of multiple individual transformations in response or in anticipation to various crises. Little is known about how crises foster these individual transformations, and how these may relate to different types of system-level change. This article fills this gap by looking at how crisis fosters two different types of agencies-internal and external-and how these link to individual transformations in the case of Greece's back-to-the-land movement whereby urbanites sought to reconnect with land-based livelihoods during the economic crisis (2008 onwards). The article draws on the qualitative analysis of 76 interviews of back-to-the-landers to further understand why people are going back-to-the-land (their motivations), how these relate to the concept of agency and individual transformation, and what implications might there be for system-level social-ecological transformations. This article makes three key points. First, crises create different opportunity contexts that may lead to rapid changes in what is valued in the broader social discourse. While social values and discourses are usually considered to be "deep levers" and slow to change, we found that they can rapidly shift in times of crises, challenging notions of the role of fast vs. slow variables in system transformations. Second, agency is needed to respond to crises but is also further catalyzed and enhanced through crisis; activating one's internal agency leads to personal transformations as well as collective transformations (linked to external agency), which are mutually co-constitutive. And third, systemic-level transformation emerges through multiple pathways including through the aggregation of multiple individual transformations that may lead to emergent system-level changes. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-01043-5.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".