Romance and resilience: The assets and ambition of Scottish ‘remote rural’ enterprise contexts

Abstract

Assets and enterprise ambitions of rural and island communities are dependent on their context at the margins, “on the edge” where they face greater challenges. Such communities are sites imbued with narratives of place as ‘Romance’ and of people as ‘Resilience’. The sustained, resilient, and emerging enterprise and innovation activity within their commons are indicative of deeper aspects of the contextual foundations of enterprise in social and cultural narratives and the materiality and lived experience of community itself. Case studies exemplify the necessary adaptability of the often ‘romanticised’ geography, environment, and historical economies by the small yet resilient entrepreneurial communities of Scotland's remote rural places, revealing how romance and resilience are experienced by entrepreneurs and their markets. Community empowerment through land reform and animateurs applying forms of social capital are key in the overall framing of entrepreneurial ambition contexts. The narratives of enterprise in these remote rural historical places yet culturally defined spaces speak to a realignment of periphery, the margin, or edge as enterprise arenas of the commons: embedded social foundations of place and people, their expanding ambitions for community assets and the commons. They promise a generative, international and entrepreneurial ‘growth mindset’ of social, economic and symbolic capital ambitions.