EVERYDAY SPEECH IN AN EXTRAORDINARY TIME: 
CONSTRUCTING CIVIC AGENCY, IDENTITY, AND INFLUENCE IN 
NARRATIVES OF A SMALL TOWN’S BIG DECISION 
 
ANITA JOSLIN SMITH 
Bachelor of Arts in Social Science, University of Lethbridge, 2001 
 
 
A thesis submitted  
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  
 
MASTERS OF ARTS 
in 
SOCIOLOGY 
 
Department of Sociology 
University of Lethbridge 
LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA, CANADA 
 
 
© Anita Joslin Smith, 2022 
  
 
 
 
 
 
EVERYDAY SPEECH IN AN EXTRAORDINARY TIME: 
CONSTRUCTING CIVIC AGENCY, IDENTITY, AND INFLUENCE IN 
NARRATIVES OF A SMALL-TOWN’S BIG DECISION 
 
ANITA JOSLIN SMITH 
 
 
Date of Defense: June 14, 2022 
 
 
Dr. W. Ramp     Associate Professor   Ph.D. 
Thesis Supervisor      
 
 
Dr. K. Granzow    Associate Professor   Ph.D. 
Thesis Examination Committee Member   
 
 
Dr. M. Mellow     Associate Professor   Ph.D. 
Thesis Examination Committee Member 
 
 
Dr. T. Perks     Associate Professor   Ph.D. 
Chair, Thesis Examination Committee 
 
      
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ABSTRACT 
This research project takes place in rural Southern Alberta whereby the residents of the 
small-town of Fort Macleod and surrounding rural area experienced nine years of civic 
development opportunity regarding a Police Training College that was bid on, won and 
subsequently cancelled. The purpose of my thesis is to contextualize and understand 
speech in every day communicative practices and how these speech acts generate 
discourse that create and re-create social agency in discussions and definitions of 
contentious civic issues. Elements of a qualitative case study approach was used to 
analyze data gathered from semi-structured interviews and text documents such as 
newspaper articles and government documents. Through the application of theory and 
reflection on the process of academic research the results provide a descriptive 
explanation and interpretation of how rural and small-town people actively form and 
define themselves and each other as rural subjects. The researcher is included, not as an 
interviewee, but as a rural resident who also experienced the turmoil of this civic 
development venture. 
  
iii 
 
 
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
I want to thank all those who helped me throughout my academic journey – which 
took a lot longer than anticipated as a result of unexpected shifts, turns, and torrents in 
this river of life. 
I thank Dr. Bibby and Professor Penner for their belief in my academic abilities as 
I began this journey. Many thanks to Dr. William Ramp for his interest in my research 
topic and countless hours of academic guidance. I am grateful to my committee members: 
Dr. Kara Ganzow for her enduring dedication and Dr. Muriel Mellow for her gracious 
presence at a crucial time.  
Thanks to my funders, supervisors and co-workers who patiently offered support, 
encouragement and empathy. I acknowledge the guiding assistance of professors, 
librarians, and administrators who helped me gather research materials, provided me with 
referrals, and directed me through the bureaucratic maze. The small but kind words of 
direction and encouragement pushed me on when the road became rugged. Most of all, I 
thank the interviewees Stacha, Nancy and Dave – for without their conversations I would 
not have had rich and valuable content to work with. 
My thesis would not have been completed without the constant prodding and 
resources from my husband and children. Thank you for understanding that I needed to 
be incognito to write. I cannot forget the steady and unwavering belief my mother had in 
me. Above all, I give great thanks for Creators’ abundant gifts and blessings. 
 
 
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TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv 
TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................... v 
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 
Purpose, Aims, and Objectives of the Project ................................................................. 2 
The Story of Fort Macleod Police College...................................................................... 5 
The Story of the Morphing Thesis Project .................................................................... 11 
Discourse and the Narrative Construction of Ourselves ............................................... 16 
Brief Overview of Chapters .......................................................................................... 21 
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 23 
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................................................... 25 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels .................................................................................... 26 
Ferdinand Tonnies ......................................................................................................... 31 
Georg Simmel ............................................................................................................... 33 
R. Alex Pahl .................................................................................................................. 35 
R. Alexander Sim .......................................................................................................... 37 
Kieran Bonner ............................................................................................................... 41 
Philip Hansen and Alicja Muszynski ............................................................................ 44 
Ching and Gerald W. Creed and Barbara Ching ........................................................... 46 
Roger Epp and David Whitson ..................................................................................... 48 
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 49 
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY .................................................................................... 55 
Research Goals .............................................................................................................. 56 
Qualitative Research ..................................................................................................... 57 
Defining Scope .............................................................................................................. 59 
Research Design ............................................................................................................ 62 
Ethical Review ........................................................................................................... 63 
Focus of Research ...................................................................................................... 64 
Documentary Resources ............................................................................................ 65 
Criteria for Interviewee Selection .............................................................................. 67 
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Interview Tool ........................................................................................................... 68 
In Search of Interviewees .......................................................................................... 69 
The Interview Process ............................................................................................... 71 
Approach to Analysis ................................................................................................ 73 
Self-Critical Appraisal................................................................................................... 77 
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 79 
CHAPTER 4: POWER AND REPRESENTATION IN SMALL-TOWN POLITICS .... 81 
Power Relations in Political Structures ......................................................................... 83 
Networks of Power in Relationships and Subject Formation ....................................... 87 
Hegemonic Discourse and Social Agency .................................................................... 92 
The Proposal Process .................................................................................................... 95 
Small Town, Big Loss ................................................................................................. 100 
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 103 
CHAPTER 5: INTERVIEW FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS ......................................... 106 
Use of Interview Transcripts ....................................................................................... 107 
Who Are the Interviewees? ..................................................................................... 109 
Involvement in the Police Training College Venture .............................................. 112 
Conversations About the Police Training College Bid ........................................... 115 
Reaction to the Cancellation of the Proposed Police Training College .................. 121 
Creating Rural ............................................................................................................. 124 
Inferring From Three Interviews ................................................................................. 128 
Discussions With Theory ............................................................................................ 128 
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 132 
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION ....................................................................................... 136 
The Effectiveness of My Methodology ....................................................................... 139 
Rurality ........................................................................................................................ 141 
Social Construction in Local Identity, Agency, and Community ............................... 148 
Further discussions ...................................................................................................... 153 
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 155 
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 160 
APPENDICES ................................................................................................................ 171 
Appendix A: Consent Form ........................................................................................ 171 
vi 
 
 
 
Appendix B: Interview Guide ..................................................................................... 176 
 
 
 
vii 
 
 
 
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 
The history of place has always intrigued me. I find how rural communities have 
waxed and waned throughout history fascinating. My research project took place within 
this societal ebb and flow. It is a story about one Southern Alberta rural community’s 
civic decision-making experience when a development opportunity was proposed, 
endorsed, and then retracted. 
Small towns and rural areas tend to be under-recognized in the leadership circles of 
the federal and provincial political and economic sectors which are mostly located in 
large urban centres. This structural divide has persisted and intensified in Alberta over 
many decades. Residents of rural places recognize that their communities have taken the 
back seat to political patronage and economic benefits located in urban centres, which has 
influenced the nature of change in rural areas. As rural residents experience such changes 
in their communities, they also experience changes in their own lives which impacts their 
perspective on life.  
When civic changes occur in small towns and rural areas, residents may be consulted 
on certain matters and issues affecting their lives, though the quality of that consultation 
is, at times, a matter of contention. This consultation can become a strain on community 
relations as explored by the contributors to Epp and Whitson, eds. (2008). Rural and 
small-town residents have had to discuss and decide on the best benefit for their 
communities in which pressure is applied, and in which lines of authority and 
communication affecting decision-making are disputed, complicated, or unclear. 
Communication becomes pivotal in coming to terms with proposed civic changes. 
1 
 
 
 
 
Communication is also of crucial importance in clarifying needs and wants, revisiting 
individual and collective identity, and identifying risks to speaking out. 
I situate this inquiry within a framework of the particular cultural configurations of 
rural communities and employ elements of a qualitative case study approach. The context 
in which this research project was situated in is the small town of Fort Macleod, Alberta 
and its surrounding rural community, between 2004 and 2012, during nine years of a 
civic development venture whereby a Police Training College bid was proposed, won, 
ground breaking ceremony was held, and the project was subsequently cancelled. The full 
story is provided later in this chapter. As my research project moved forward, I 
encountered some issues whereby I had to change my focus (detailed later in this chapter) 
to an in-depth exploration of how my interview respondents produced and re-produced 
their social place and identities as they experience, reflect on, and talk about the 
contentious civic development venture. Through this research I came to value the 
participants’ active construction and negotiation of identities, perspectives, and world-
views – of themselves and in relation to others – that incorporated a sense of being rural 
citizens engaged in social agency.  
Purpose, Aims, and Objectives of the Project  
The purpose of this project was two-fold. First: contextualize and understand 
communicative practices such as everyday speech which produces and re-produces social 
agency and relations within a rural community undergoing civic decision-making. 
Second: explore and discover how interpersonal communication practices generate 
discourse that not only shapes social agency but also affects the potential for consensus or 
conflict in the definition of political and economic issues.  
2 
 
 
 
 
This research project is shaped by the following questions: 
 How are civic matters discussed both formally and informally, in rural communities? 
Civic matter refers to any activity/development that affects the population within a 
given area and that has the potential to become a public issue affecting community 
formation and identity. 
 What does it mean to call Fort Macleod and its surrounding area rural? 
 How does speech produce and re-produce social agency? 
 How is power incorporated into everyday discourse? 
 And perhaps the most important question of all: How can I and you apply and expand 
this understanding; me in my work within my own rural community, and you in the 
communities (urban or rural) that you embrace or that enfold you? 
I want to better understand how communication through individual and collective 
discussion produces and reproduces social place, identity, and agency. I am interested in 
interpersonal communication through discussion and in how it both links to social agency 
and reaffirms social place in civic matters. How do we speak and write ourselves into 
being? By interpersonal communication discussions, I mean face-to-face conversations 
that happen between people; in this case between residents of a rural community who are 
immersed in the processes and turmoil of civil decision-making. How do rural people 
within small towns and communities define themselves? What makes them rural? This 
study considers not only how we produced ourselves as civic agents and/or observers, 
and as community members, in response to a specific civic consultative process, but also 
looks at how we then did it again in response to each other, in interviews that became 
conversations.  
3 
 
 
 
 
This project focused on in-depth interviews with three community residents who 
experienced and responded to the announcement and subsequent cancellation of the 
proposal and construction of the Fort Macleod Police Training College. It is about how 
these people who self-identified as rural or small-town residents constructed themselves, 
their communities, the bid process, its promised opportunities and their stake in them, and 
the ins and outs of local leadership and power relations. In other words, we undertook 
shared reality-constructive and identity-constructive work and built something in 
common of a shared situation. It is about the particular forms of interactive agency and 
co-operation by which we constructed meaningful life worlds specific to our identities as 
local small-town or rural residents as new developments concerning the proposal unrolled 
and unravelled.  
I included myself as a member of a local, rural, or small-town community - not as 
an interviewee, but as an individual who lives within the local area tangent to Fort 
Macleod and its surrounding area who was also interested in the Police Training College 
bid, win, and cancellation. Therefore, I incorporated my own process of self-reflection 
into the research, considering how the interviews I undertook, as human encounters in a 
community context, affected my own subject position and world-view. I provide input as 
to how the documents and interviewees affected my interpretation and relationship to 
their responses to not only the Police Training College but also to me in the interviews. 
This does not mean we ended up agreeing on everything, nor that our identities became – 
identical. Nonetheless, we ended up after all demonstrating how mutual communicative 
practices create worlds in which the people who build them feel to some degree “at 
home,” and in which they then act: socially, politically, economically, and symbolically.  
4 
 
 
 
 
I believe that, from a sociological perspective, the processes of civic decision-
making are strongly affected by social place, identity-construction, and communicative 
processes. This becomes important in understanding how issues discussed in private or 
public conversation factor into rural citizens’ agency-creation. How does social agency 
become manifest in or through participation in private or public discussions? Are such 
discussions themselves a form of social agency? How do political and social relations 
provide or deny support to rural residents seeking to participate in a public discussion? 
This thesis is organized around two enfolded stories that impacted and shaped one 
another. One is the story of the Fort Macleod Police Training College bid process, 
approval, and eventual cancellation. The other is the process of having to rework my 
initial focus and approach. In the following pages I briefly summarize the Fort Macleod 
Police Training College story and explain the original goals of my thesis and show how 
they changed as my research project progressed.  
The Story of Fort Macleod Police College  
In the following two sections I weave stories of Fort Macleod, the Fort Macleod 
Police College and the morphing on my thesis project from a chronology of events in 
time. Each story has its own period of time and is extraordinary in its own making and 
ending. The timelines of each provides the framework of my perspective, more 
importantly, provides the reader with conventional tropes and narratives of rurality.  
A snapshot of the history, social structure, lore, and politics of the residents of the 
town and surrounding rural area is helpful to understand the nine years (2004 – 2012) of 
civic relationships and social structures discussed in this thesis, and how theory is being 
applied. I wanted to capture the response of the local citizens to the events of the town of 
5 
 
 
 
 
Fort Macleod’s bid submission, the announcement in 2006 that the town of Fort Macleod 
was chosen for the Police Training College, and the aftermath of the Police Training 
College project cancellation, announced by the Solicitor General of Alberta in 2012.  
The small town of Fort Macleod is situated geographically in Southwest Alberta 
along the Oldman River east of the Rocky Mountains; a magnificent vast savannah of 
plains, foothills, and mountains, home to an equally magnificent and distinctive flora and 
wild life unique to this rich and expansive area, for millennia. This is the territorial land 
of the Blackfoot First Nations people (Piikani, Siksiika, and Kainai) who have existed 
and prospered in this area for centuries.  
The initial settlers came to this area – a place of open lands where First Nations 
people co-existed with and within the natural environment, having no need for permanent 
structures, yet producing and living within their own societal order, ways of life, and 
modes of communication. With the new settlers came radical societal changes. The new 
settlers developed and built their society here, establishing their norms and values. As 
they began to put down roots, they established economic and political structures, values, 
norms, and customs that were novel to the land. This new multi-cultured society that 
resulted was influenced by and tied to the continuing presence of First Nations.  
The area’s history is full of wild-west stories detailing whiskey trading, 
scrimmages, and the North West Mounted Police (NWMP). First Nations people 
experienced a traumatic culture-altering change as settlers moved into the area. Clashes 
happened not only between the new-comers and the Blackfeet people, but also among the 
incoming multi-cultured people arriving from different parts of the world. To help build 
better relationships among the colliding cultures, and to consolidate the control of the 
6 
 
 
 
 
land, the Dominion of Canada formed and deployed the NWMP to settle the west and 
contain the Indigenous peoples. 
The new society continued to evolve; incorporating open spaces, First Nations 
people, and a continuous influx of new settlers, which combined to radically change the 
lives and social arrangements of all who populated Fort Macleod and the surrounding 
rural areas. As it developed, it also generated new tensions, divisions, and contradictions, 
including a new set of disparities between urban and rural. 
Local settler historical narratives are steeped in hardships as they carved out a 
new and different life for themselves and their kin in Southern Alberta. The rural areas of 
the prairies have a well-documented history of farming and ranching and are known for 
their strong political advocacy. Many current residents come from this history and have 
long established farms and ranches in the surrounding rural areas of Fort Macleod (Epp & 
Whitson, 2001; see also Epp, 2008). 
The story of the Fort Macleod Police Training College began in 2004, when the 
Alberta Provincial Government, led by the Progressive Conservative Party with Ed 
Stelmach at the helm, approved a recommendation from a 2002 report of the Policing 
Review Committee – which indicated a need for an Alberta Public Safety and Law 
Enforcement Training Centre (Alberta Hansard, 2005). This training centre would be a 
single training facility to train an estimated 1500 police and peace officers in Alberta 
(McTighe, 2005c). The $100 million facility would include classrooms, a library, 
computers, indoor and outdoor firing ranges, a cafeteria, administrative and instructor 
offices, and on-site accommodations (McTighe, 2006a). It would generate 100 permanent 
jobs in the community that won the bidding process (McTighe, 2005d). A bidding 
7 
 
 
 
 
competition was opened to Alberta municipalities interested in submitting a proposal to 
build this Police and Peace Officer Training Centre in their community. Fort Macleod 
responded to the bid competition.  
When this provincial initiative became available, the leadership in the community 
of Fort Macleod regarded it as an economic opportunity. However, this initiative required 
a civic decision of the small town and surrounding rural area which presented 
fundamental challenges. The community in question was both blended and potentially 
divided – not only in the terms of the decision but also the process by which it would be 
defined and reached. This had the potential for changes to the existing social milieu and 
its political status quo. Fort Macleod’s political leadership touted already established 
tropes like its historical foundation as an outpost of the Northwest Mounted Police; its 
location at the intersection of two major highways; and a set of presuppositions about 
community support phrased in terms of keywords like “progress” and “opportunity.” 
According to its June 2011 Municipal Development Plan, Fort Macleod had a 
population of 3, 072. Its municipal government includes a mayor and five council 
members: Shawn Patience held the Mayoral position for the duration of the project. The 
political riding is Livingstone-Macleod which encompasses the area from the town of 
Nanton south to the United States border; and from the mountainous Crowsnest Pass east 
to the city of Lethbridge (not including the city). At the time that the bid process was 
initiated, the riding was held by a member of the Progressive Conservative Party, which 
was the governing party at the time. Fort Macleod is 30 kilometers north of the Kainai 
First Nation (Blood Tribe) reservation and 32 kilometers east of the Piikani First Nation 
reservation.  
8 
 
 
 
 
On October 24, 2005, a task force was created by town council during their 
council meeting (McTighe, 2005a) to prepare a “comprehensive bid package” (McTighe, 
2005b). An eleven-member task force was established which included Mayor Shawn 
Patience, two town councillors, Mike Bourassa and Christine Trowbridge, Fort 
Macleod’s economic development officer Gordon MacIvor, Macleod Gazette Editor 
Frank McTighe, residents Stasha Donahue, Ronda Reach, Mike Harris, Bernadette and 
Dave McNab, and Piikani Nation member Harley Bastien (McTighe, 2005b). An 
agricultural area of 320 acres in southeast Fort Macleod was rezoned for the Police 
Training College at a Town council meeting on December 12, 2005. On September 6, 
2006, the town of Fort Macleod was chosen as the successful bidder for the Police 
Training College. While many celebrated this success, there were differences in opinion 
about its possible costs and benefits, both locally and provincially. It is also possible that 
some found it the tension of having the future of the town staked on one major project a 
little hard to bear. The Calgary and Edmonton police services were rumoured to have 
indicated some dissatisfaction with the police college bid going to a small town in 
Southern Alberta, as the location was not central within the province. In July, 2010, 
Frank McTighe, editor of the Macleod Gazette, wrote a report on the response of local 
officials to news that the Calgary Police Services were planning to build a training 
facility of their own, reassuring his readers that this did not undermine the validity of the 
Fort Macleod bid (McTighe, 2010).  “At the end of August 2012, CBC news reported on 
the “shock” in Fort Macleod in response to the cancellation of the bid, relying heavily on 
comments by the mayor, which, in the context set by the headline, were set up to be read 
as representative: 
9 
 
 
 
 
Fort Macleod Mayor Shawn Patience says the decision has ruined his faith in the 
political system. "This is a $122 million project in a town of 3,000 people," said 
Patience. “It's just absolutely baffling to me that you could get into the stage 
where you actually have equipment on site and have a town like ours that has 
committed already $3.5 million on signed contracts with the government's 
approval, that this would now not go ahead." Patience said he has called his 
council together for an emergency meeting. "I have asked the solicitor general to 
speak to the premier and cabinet and reverse the decision. I was told that would 
not happen. So, at this point they have literally, I guess for all intents and 
purposes, they've hung us out to dry." (CBC News, 2012) 
However, comments by provincial Solicitor General Jonathan Denis contained in the 
same news report indicated that there may have been something to the rumours.  
Solicitor general Jonathan Denis made the announcement Wednesday, saying 
there is "substantial evidence" that a stand-alone facility wouldn’t be financially 
viable.  . . . "This was a very difficult decision," Denis said. "But it's one I believe 
that is in the best interest of the taxpayers and law enforcement in this province." 
Calgary's and Edmonton's police chiefs and the commissioner of the RCMP do 
not believe the college is required and would not improve the quality of policing, 
Denis said (CBC News, 2012).  
Although this project was not intended to analyze the local political climate, a 
brief description is important for context. In 2006, the Progressive Conservative Party 
(PC) was the elected governing party in Alberta. In that year Ralph Klein stepped down 
as Premier and Ed Stelmach was sworn in as Premier on December 14th. He remained 
10 
 
 
 
 
Premier until Allison Redford took office on October 7, 2011 where she led the Party 
until March 23. 2014. Albertans elected the PC Party in 2004, 2008, and 2012; their seats 
far outnumbered the runner-up party. However, in the 2012 elections, the Wildrose 
Alliance Party (WAP) won a protest vote in a large region in Southern Alberta, including 
the Livingstone-Macleod riding. The solicitor general announced the cancelation of the 
Fort Macleod Police Training Centre on August 29, 2012, three months after the 
provincial elections. It is difficult not to see some political influence at work both in the 
2006 announcement of the winning bid and in the 2012 cancellation after the PC’s lost 
their local seat to the Wildrose Party.  
Finally, what happened to the land set aside for the police training centre? It was 
not simply returned to agricultural use. One or two businesses had relocated to sites 
closer to the proposed police facility, and the site itself has been since been subject to 
some commercial development, though at a slower pace and on a smaller scale.  
The Story of the Morphing Thesis Project 
Originally my interest was on communication mechanisms and networks of power 
structure in a small-town and rural community going through a civic decision-making 
process. In this project mechanisms are defined as those processes and/or structures 
(either natural, authorized or sanctioned) used in speech acts. I set out to better 
understand how decisions are made, communicated, and responded to at a community 
level in small town and rural communities, and how these decisions do or do not 
incorporate informal modes of communication between members and leaders in the 
affected community. I also wondered: by what means do individual or group ideas or 
opinions become marginalized or held in higher esteem than others? This was important 
11 
 
 
 
 
when understanding how issues discussed in private and public conversations facilitate 
social agency in rural citizens. How does social agency manifest in public discussion 
participation? How do political and social relations provide support to rural residents to 
participate in a public discussion? How does a public issue get defined and become 
resolved within formal and informal social processes?  
I also set out to analyze the various manifestations of power in interpersonal 
communications within families and between friends, co-workers, consultants, and 
political leaders. My focus was on the processes of civic decision-making as they related 
to a particular small town and its close surroundings in their anticipation of an economic 
venture and their response to its eventual political retraction. I believed that contentious 
civic issues bring to the forefront the true, underlying beliefs and values of a given 
society, and can reveal how political and policy processes really work. I thought that 
examining such a contentious civic issue would reveal how power and authority influence 
information dispersal and gathering, and consolidation of personal and public opinions.  
More specifically, this study aimed to understand how communicative discourse 
was used to facilitate societal agency in a specific consultative process. In order to look 
closely at this phenomenon, I had ambitions to produce a full community case study 
addressing my topic. That became impossible. My original thought was that the case 
study would consider what is rural, and what the discussion on rurality is. What makes 
them rural? The basis for this research project was to gain knowledge and understanding 
of how communication about public issues in rural communities unfolds so that I could 
apply this to my own work within the rural community in which I live.  
The project was thus originally shaped by the following questions: 
12 
 
 
 
 
 How does communication about civic matters in rural communities happen on formal 
and informal levels? Are all community members equally heard? How does the 
process of communication on civic matters produce and re-produce social situations? 
How do we speak and write ourselves into being?  
 What are the forms and mechanisms of communication in rural communities’ civic 
decision-making that are unique to their culture? What types of communication are 
employed in their social networks? 
 What did the Police Training College venture show about how community action can 
be decided upon in small town and rural settings? 
 In what ways did civic discourse surrounding the Police Training College affect the 
social structure and community identity of a small Southern Alberta rural community 
dealing with significant societal issues that required debate, leadership, and action?  
 What kind of social or power structure is characteristic of Fort Macleod? 
 What kinds of formal and informal communication mechanisms were operative in 
Fort Macleod in relation to the Police Training College venture? 
 How does social agency manifest in public discussion participation? How do political 
and social relations provide support to rural residents to participate in a public 
discussion? 
I did not fully realize at the start of this research project how big and complex these 
questions might become. I assumed I would find in the academic literature search 
definitions of, for example, “rural,” “community,” and “communications mechanisms” 
that would be concise and self-evident. I also assumed these definitions would correlate 
to real, objective, and discoverable features of Fort Macleod and rural area as a place, a 
13 
 
 
 
 
community, and a set of social structures. It was just a matter of getting the definitions 
and identifying the social features that fit these definitions.  
In 2019, I had initially set about to obtain publicly-available textual documents 
such as Town of Fort Macleod minutes of council and committee meetings in which 
discussions of the proposed Police Training College were held; local town hall 
information and publications; public postings about the bid process in Fort Macleod and 
surrounding area; notices of and responses to public meetings, information sessions, 
rallies, and related events; public statements and publications by civic and political 
leaders; public information postings and bulletins by local residents or groups; and public 
social media postings focused or specific to the Police Training College. Although, by 
this year the Police Training College cancellation had occurred seven years prior, I 
believed these documents would provide information on the process by which the Police 
Training College initiative moved through the local political channels. More importantly, 
I anticipated the documents would provide a window through which to understand how 
the political players (e.g., mayor, councillors, town manager, etcetera) perceived the 
Police Training College venture, how it was discussed, and how elected and other town 
officials interacted with each other in assessing it. By this time, I anticipated the venture 
was still recent enough that I would be able to find the information I was seeking. On the 
other hand, I thought that enough time had passed that my research project would not 
have an effect on the aftermath. I did not wish my thesis to become a cause of conflict.  
To access some of these documents and resources, I needed permission or 
assistance from gatekeepers such as personnel in the Fort Macleod Town Office, local 
newspaper offices, and other public offices. I requested documentary records via email 
14 
 
 
 
 
and telephone from the Fort Macleod Town Office administration. Unfortunately, my 
efforts to obtain these records were fruitless: requests went either unanswered or denied. 
The key gatekeepers (personnel at the town office) had a pleasant and cooperative 
manner when I spoke to them, indicating that it would take some time to gather the 
documents. This, I assumed, meant that they would actually prepare a package for me as I 
had asked. This did not occur, and after a second request, I was not inclined to request the 
information for a third time. Therefore, I was unable to know the process by which the 
proposal moved through this small town’s political processes and unable to include such 
documents in my analysis. This also meant that the window I had to understand political 
and other leaders’ perceptions of the Police Training College venture would be knowable 
only through the interviews, newspaper articles, and public documents online.  
My hope was to interview residents who had a wide range of communicative 
experiences relating to perspectives on the Police Training College. I wanted to 
understand how small town and country folk with various socio-economic statuses, 
political opinions, and historical ties to southern Alberta, made sense of the Police 
Training College proposal and its outcome. Unfortunately, I was able to obtain only three 
interviewees. This was extremely disheartening. This meant that I could not reach firm, 
representative, and documented conclusions about how all the varied participants 
influenced the discussion or its terms of legitimacy in the bid process, or how they were 
shaped by these processes. However, with the assistance of my supervisor I was 
encouraged and supported to change my focus. 
On a positive note, in this qualitative exploratory study, the interviewees turned 
out to be a wealth of information and material. The individuals I interviewed are fairly 
15 
 
 
 
 
typical of many Fort Macleod and area residents, reflecting different social positions, and 
all knew about and had thought about the bid. All were thoughtful respondents with a 
range of opinions and perspectives. I can easily add myself to their mix.  
The Police Training College venture, which was active from 2006 to 2012, 
constituted an extraordinary time for Fort Macleod and the surrounding rural area. It was 
a time of anticipation of change; a new development was coming to the town. This would 
mean an economic boost, new industry, new people, and an increase in jobs. The 
residents of this small town and its surrounding rural area, including myself, had 
something to look forward to; something new. 
Subsequent to my rethinking of my research project, its focus continued to be on 
how rural people within small towns and communities define themselves 
communicatively; however, it became more an examination of a very specific set of 
social and communicative interactions. Nonetheless, in this thesis, I treat these, despite 
their very small scale, as informative more generally about how people identify for 
themselves and each other the terms of “rurality” and community that fit their experience, 
and construct for themselves and each other a sense of themselves as in community with 
each other in “rural”ways.  Here, the literature and theory I consulted on rurality became 
very important; especially those parts of it which emphasized the importance of 
understanding how rural and small-town people actively form and define themselves and 
each other as rural subjects, and how they imagine their settings as experientially rural. 
Discourse and the Narrative Construction of Ourselves 
The concept of discourse is challenging to define succinctly. The analysis of 
discourse, according to Sara Mills (1997) considers the structure of spoken language and 
16 
 
 
 
 
written text and how it is used to create our world-views and perceptions. Foucault, 
however, reminds us that language and how it is structured is not a given, but it is itself 
produced through discursive practices, which are both regulated and regulative (Mills, 
1997). The study of discourse is the analysis of contingent, local, and specific utterances 
and statements, as well as a way of seeing them as organized and rule-governed. Mills 
argues that discourse provides a means to categorize, to determine how scientific research 
and findings are given meaning, and to articulate the meanings given to and used in 
building and rebuilding societal and cultural norms and systems. She describes Foucault’s 
concept of power as both productive and repressive in nature. Social power is not simply 
held at various levels of “authority” but is also activated or realized practically in the 
everyday interactions that make up or challenge the authority of the state, the 
municipality, the community, and the individual.  
Hall (1992) takes a broader historical perspective in arguing that European 
discourse was molded and influenced through the very construction of dominant 
European languages. But this can be misinterpreted whereby specific differences with 
broad categories and types are overlooked and/or dismissed. Discourse is not simple and 
does not always “represent an encounter between equals” (Hall, 1992, p. 214). The notion 
that everyone wants to be involved discursively in their community paints everyone with 
the same brush. What if there are “others” who don’t want to or are not allowed to be part 
of the community, and don’t control the terms on which the community is being built? 
Even within European societies, as well as outside them, there is a diversity of cultures, 
classes, interest groups, and ethnic groups. These groups may not have a similar concept 
of community. One way to limit the challenges these contradictory concepts (and the 
17 
 
 
 
 
beliefs they articulate) may pose to a dominant order is to take away the languages in 
which they articulate those concepts, and to take away opportunities for people (who use 
those languages) to engage in discourse.  
However, discourse is not merely about using the politically correct words. 
Naming and storytelling demonstrate how the struggle over language is more than a 
simple imposition of a particular view on powerless people by people in power (Mills, 
1997, p. 40). Foucault (1997) states that what we think we might want to express is not 
simply our own, but that it comes from how we are formed by the social relations, 
languages, and discourses we are taught. These are beyond our individual control even as 
we learn them and learn to use them. Ideas, notions, program models, etcetera are not 
simply constructions owned by those who are credited with creating or inventing them, 
nor even by those who use them. How are communications socially contrived? 
Specifically, how is the communication by which rural people create and reproduce 
themselves as rural socially contrived? Politicians, planners, bureaucrats, newspaper 
editors, and bid committee members think they are creating pieces of work or writing out 
their own thoughts and experiences – both of which is and isn’t the case. These are social 
roles that certain people (at specific) times are given the social license to speak in 
particular ways and with particular levels of authority. When they speak and/or write they 
do so in ways they have learned and been taught to do in accordance to that role. They 
speak about concepts and things from perspectives that not only relate to their social 
locations, but also that they have been taught from childhood on. 
The notion of a Police Training College and all the work that went into making 
this notion a reality was in actuality a product of the social environment of the time. The 
18 
 
 
 
 
social environment is ultimately produced and reproduced by peoples’ everyday actions – 
which are also produced and reproduced themselves. As Marx (1999) said, “men make 
their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-
selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted 
from the past.” For example, those who promoted the Police Training College bid did so 
out of some awareness of their dependency on an urban center of power – Edmonton.  
They had to follow the terms laid down for the bid process. The discursive assumption 
that small-towns need economic development to survive or the community dwindles, and 
that such development requires following rules laid down by urban power, is part of the 
normative matrix of communication practices that shape discussion of development 
proposals in many Alberta small towns.  
In turn, within small town and rural areas, local norms form a matrix of 
communication practices that govern ground-level endemic co-operation and social 
harmony. I witnessed how the interviewees constructed themselves as non-vocal 
observers or active participants to the events surrounding the bid process. Their self-
construction was guided by their social location plus the rural norm that one should not 
cause discord in the community by being too political or speaking out against a 
development that could bring in much needed jobs. To be fair, individuals may or may 
not contribute to their social location, but are not necessarily in control of it. 
Does this mean that the conversations of the residents of Fort Macleod and 
surrounding rural areas are the constructs of their culture and societies? That they are 
creatures of the influence of the social institutions that they attend, such as language, 
family, schools, churches, etcetera? Yes. In taking part we reproduce and reshape those 
19 
 
 
 
 
institutions in turn. We are made by our histories and we make history as well. But in our 
making of history, it could be said that the “solutions” we formulate and apply to 
personal, civic, and other issues may be constructed in terms that also structure the very 
things we are trying to solve. This notion that people speak from and act in terms of the 
discourse in which they have been formed (e.g., families, schools, churches, political 
messaging, social agencies, employment) can be somewhat disconcerting.  
It seems that cultural and institutional forces shape our perceptions deeply. At 
times it is difficult for us to realize that we are part of the “Matrix”. However, in 
understanding that we (our identities, agency, orientations, and perceptions) are part of 
discursive structures and that these structures exist through our actions. In realizing this, 
can we become more astute in our everyday social interactions and our civic 
participation?  And does this knowledge provide us with more power?  
“The object of planning (i.e., future action) is the routinely unique and novel,” 
states John Forester (1982, p. 67). He further notes that planners must be attentive to the 
specific needs of each case. Planners may not have direct control or authority; however, 
they do have a socially-acknowledged expertise which can become power to influence 
circumstances and conditions under which residents of a locality may or may not be 
permitted to speak, or may or may not feel like they can speak, or act or otherwise 
participate in discussions and/or decisions relating to issues that affect their lives and that 
can strain community relations. Community consultation can give rural and small-town 
residents a chance to discuss and decide on what is of greatest benefit for their 
communities. Community consultation can also be used as a means to control and 
disempower local voices in order to serve powerful vested interests, which is often not 
20 
 
 
 
 
clear at the beginning of a civic discussion process. I think it is fair to say that many 
processes of community consultation around development proposals are a mixture of 
these two aims. Further, questions that arise regarding mixed aims will also generate 
reflection, whether communicated in interpersonal discussion or kept to oneself. 
Brief Overview of Chapters 
Chapter 2, Literature Review, is a summary of theories relating to ways of defining 
rurality and of understanding social interaction, identities, and forms of agency 
characteristic of people in small towns and rural areas who have experienced the 
fundamental changes over the years. I have included writers and theorists who have 
informed my focus, such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies, R. Alex Pahl, R. 
Alexander Sim, Kieran Bonner, Phillip Hansen and Alicia Muszynski, Barbara Ching and 
Gerald Creed, and Roger Epp and David Whitson. In this chapter, I explain and deal with 
the assertion that rurality is no longer a useful sociological concept and propose some 
ways in which it still is. I also examine ways in which rural is both framed by 
dependency on forms of urban-centric economy and political power, and resists being 
cancelled-out by that power. 
Chapter 3, Methodology, provides the research processes I undertook along with 
the epistemology, perspective, and approach to my research. I explain my use and 
application of theoretical concepts here. I initially used resources such as Denzin and 
Lincoln, Lynham, Stake, Yin, and Maxwell to develop my understanding of qualitative 
research, but I explain how this led to deeper and more far-reaching shifts in my 
approach.  
21 
 
 
 
 
Chapter 4, Power and Representation in Small-Town Politics, considers 
epistemological, ontological, and perspectival issues raised by this project in terms of 
Kieran Bonner’s (1997), “radical interpretive theory.” Bonner takes into consideration the 
“historical, cultural and community influence” of the researcher and the production of 
knowledge. He brings together scientific perspective, real-world experiences, and sense-
making of those participating or being observed in sociological research (1997, p. 56), 
which seeks to understand how the “truth” of a situation is arrived at through analysis of 
the “life-world” and “everyday understandings” of members of rural communities 
(Bonner, 1997, p. 58). In this chapter, I also examine ways of theorizing power, agency, 
and legitimacy as they relate to social action, discursive practices, and their 
institutionalization. I use these theories to understand how an issue evolves not only 
through official systems but also through the practical sense-making of community 
members experiencing the back-and-forth processes and conversations between local and 
higher-level authorities who often are located in urban centres.  
 Chapter 5, Results and Analysis was the chapter I found most interesting to write. 
This is the chapter in which the heart of my research and my shift in approach came to 
fruition. Here I provide a detailed discussion of the contents of my interviews, along with 
a self-analysis of my own participation in them. I try to present the interview material in a 
way that each interviewee speaks for her/himself, utilizing longer quotes from their 
transcribed interviews to bring out details not only of what they said in response to my 
questions, but of how they said it. Often, they were responding to me – that is to my own 
interaction with them in the interviews, not only as a questioner but also as a dialogue 
ally. In this chapter I also discuss the interviews as social processes in which we co-
22 
 
 
 
 
operated in reality-construction; in the construction of our identities and agency as 
dialogue allies, as fellow local residents, and as rural.   
 In the Conclusion, Chapter 6, I provide a summary of the insights gained through 
the process of this research and its reformulation. I also propose new questions arising 
from this project about the nature of social research, the idea and reality of ruralness; the 
concepts of community, dependency, and power; and how personal identity and social 
world are constructed communicatively. More importantly to me and to others who may 
follow, I provide some reflections of my own on the learning I have achieved through this 
project as a First Nations graduate student. 
Conclusion 
I value understanding the western world view and western ways of being. As a 
First Nations student living in the rural area surrounding Fort Macleod (my project 
location), I set out to understand the social construction of a locality within another 
culture’s society while not only residing in the adjacent rural jurisdiction but also being a 
member of the First Nation whose territory the project takes place on. Kieran Bonner 
(1997) wrote his study in the midst of the stress and angst of moving his young family 
from an urban center to a small-town setting for work, knowing that his children had to 
attend school, day care, etcetera in this new place. In a similar context, as a First Nations 
student, I struggled with providing my own Blackfoot cultural perspective on this project. 
I feel more comfortable stating that my project was undertaken fully acknowledging my 
First Nation background and perspective. Although the primary perspective of this thesis 
is a sociological one, I include a First Nations perspective in areas where I feel a 
comparison would add to the knowledge of the project.  
23 
 
 
 
 
Through the various writers and theorists, I’ve drawn upon in this research, I 
gained insight to a space between individual selves and social institutions where these are 
not objects to be described objectively, but as effects that are produced through social and 
discursive practices. I recognize how these practices own us as much as we own them. 
Thus, as the researcher in this project I cannot simply stand apart from my own reality 
that is presumed to exist independently and observed from outside. From this research I 
began to see how I cannot avoid implicating myself in what I research. I realized that I 
too produce and reproduce myself into an integral part of the complex social webs.  
  
24 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 
I was very challenged in writing the literature review chapter. There were many 
reasons for this, and in this chapter, I describe some of the challenges I faced. To begin, 
the very notion of seeking out information and knowledge relating to my initially very 
broad focus on rurality as it impacts social interaction, interpersonal communication, and 
communication practices within small-towns, was intimidating. Another issue was how to 
hone the material I was reading down to manageable bits that would fit into concise 
paragraphs and together create a chapter worthy of academic review, while still 
honouring the rural experience. I worried that this experience could be lost if I became 
too immersed in the complexity of competing theories. At the same time, I was aware 
that I was standing on the shoulders of giants.  
The first question was: Who are the giants? Experts who have done research and 
writing in social theory and rural sociology for years, yes; but which ones, and which of 
their concepts would be relevant to my topic? Would I agree with them? My initial 
reaction was: Who am I (a lowly student trying to piece together a masters thesis) to 
critique their ideas? 
In looking through a mountain of literature while seeking appropriate resources, I 
became overwhelmed by the enormous amount of information, knowledge, and 
discussion available. After reviewing many books, articles, and videos and going down 
many rabbit holes, I began to see my path through the massive amount of material I had 
gathered. This chapter chronicles what I discovered in my journey through the literature, 
and how I responded to what I discovered. 
25 
 
 
 
 
There is a large body of scholarly writing mapping out different paradigms, 
perspectives, and categories within relevant sub-fields in sociology, such as rural 
sociology, historical sociology, agricultural sociology, and developmental sociology. At 
the beginning of my review, I believed I could find a solid singular definition of rural out 
there in the vast open prairies of writing I consulted – I was wrong. As I read through 
articles and books looking for that definition, I came to the disheartening realization that 
a universally accepted definition of rural does not exist. That realization was like getting 
knocked to the ground and lying in the grass and dirt with the insects staring up at the 
vastness of the sky. Did this mean my research topic was moot? Did I have to start all 
over and choose a different topic? No, it meant that my perception of ‘definition’ and 
‘rural’ had to change. My narrow, linear, and positivist way of looking for that one 
definitive phrase or description needed to change.  
Looking back over what I’ve discovered in my research journey, I realize that I 
have come across some very interesting writing on the social interaction of people in 
small-towns and rural areas. The objective of this literature review is to summarize and 
discuss a chosen few well-known writers within the field of rural sociology, including 
some who have provided helpful descriptions of rural (as opposed to concise or 
authoritative definitions). In a more or less chronological manner, I will begin with the 
early work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose book, The German Ideology, was 
written in 1845-1846, and includes some of the earliest discussion of rurality that today 
we would call sociological.  
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 
26 
 
 
 
 
In The German Ideology (1968), Marx and Engels began to formulate the 
materialist conception of history, and historical materialism was first formulated as 
an integral theory. Engels said later that this theory, describing laws of social 
development, had revolutionised the science of society, and embodied the first of 
Marx’s great discoveries (the second being the theory of surplus value), which played 
the main role in transforming socialism from utopian speculation into a science. 
Marx was one of the earliest to write about the social differences between rurality 
and urbanity from a modern perspective, and he was not complimentary to rural people in 
his comparison (Bonner, 1997, p. 17). According to Marx, as capitalism developed, the 
countryside became subject to urban rule in the sense that the rural economy was 
integrated into capitalist production, and capital was concentrated in cities. This 
development “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life,” 
but Marx added that “[r]ural life is not an Other to the mode of production of capitalism 
but rather an early stage in its development” (Marx in Bonner, 1997, p. 15). In The 
German Ideology (1968), Marx indicates that pre-capitalist rural subservience to nature 
amounted to a primitive mode of production which meant a primitive form of society. He 
goes on to argue that modes of production, whether they involve subsistence labour that 
is subservient to nature, or industrial labour exchanged for money, define and shape 
mental capacity. Marx reasoned that in primitive societies, mental capacities had not yet 
become distinct from physical capacity. This contrasted to the ‘advanced’ society of the 
modern city where capitalism has necessitated higher forms of thinking carried out by 
specialized knowledge workers, managers, and planners, thereby putting in motion a 
transition to complex, technologically civilized nations.  
27 
 
 
 
 
Marx (1859) also discussed how capitalism subjects rural life to exploitation 
within urban-centric economies. Bonner (1997) notes that Marx’s perspective on the 
modern rural-urban divide is framed in terms of production and productivity, meaning 
that Marx understands the development of society (economically, socially, legally) based 
on the development of productive forces and the social relations in terms of which forces 
are activated. For Marx, traditions and old ways of doing things were merely the 
expression of outmoded relations of production (and of exploitation) that capitalism 
would sweep away (Marx & Engels, 1848). Marx treats pre-capitalist agriculture as a 
social state from which modern human social relations evolved and from which modern 
life has now broken free. Marx (1994) states that humans became distinct from animals 
when they began to develop a means of subsistence involving co-operative labour, 
organizing themselves, and developing a relationship of control over their surroundings 
(nature) in order to produce not only a subsistence for themselves, but also a surplus, and 
to reproduce their ways of producing, their social orders, tools, and cultures. 
Marx considered that the “what and how” of production in a given society shaped 
both individual ways of life and social and cultural forms. He wrote “[a]s individuals 
express their life, so they are” (Marx, 1994, p. 108). They do so in terms of social 
relations of production that form a system of exploitation. This a key point in his 
writings. Bonner (1997) follows it up by explaining that, for Marx, both traditional and 
modern rural life have held the rural population back, in different ways, from discovering 
truly fulfilling work. In traditional rural societies, this was because rural people were 
largely still subject to the arbitrary forces of nature (Marx, 1867). In modern rural 
societies, it is because they are subject to the arbitrary forces of capital, which transforms 
28 
 
 
 
 
the countryside into spaces in which raw agricultural, fishery, forestry, and mined 
commodities are grown or extracted for processing by urban industries, and to generate 
profits for urban owners of capital (Marx, 1867). 
Simon (1994) describes the four forms of ownership about which Marx wrote: 
1. Tribal – Division of labour is a natural phenomenon within the family. The latent 
labour of the children and wife is important. Their hard work as hunters, gatherers, 
and labourers in planting and harvesting is led by the father. This is a primitive form 
of production for subsistence.  
2. Ancient communal and state ownership – Division of labour is more developed 
between owners, citizens, and slaves. The social structure is geared towards urbanity 
and production of property – both for communal and private ownership.  
3. Feudal – Based on community; division of labour is between serfs (who are the 
producers on the land) and property-holders (nobles or church). The difference here is 
that the serfs not only produce for the property-holders, they also produce for 
themselves. The serfs’ products are distributed upwards in the form of tribute to the 
property-holders (who did not own property but were granted rights to it by the senior 
nobility and kings, to whom they in turn owe tribute.)   
4. Capitalism – Society is structured around commodities and profit where the means of 
production are owned by a small percentage of the bourgeois population who exploit 
the labour of the proletariat, who form a much larger percentage of the population.  
Different forms of production and social organization are important for this 
review because each demonstrates a “stage in the division of labor [which] also 
determines the relations of individuals to one another so far as the material, instrument, 
29 
 
 
 
 
and product of labor are concerned” (Simon, 1994, p. 108). That is, individual social 
relationships are determined by the type and organization of economic production and 
exchange within each stage. These forms articulate the development of a division of 
labour and its relation to a particular, historical form of exploitation, and over time, to the 
development of different social forms of life. Earlier forms of country subsistence were 
based on relations within the family and to the land. Urban living requires the product of 
the country to feed urban industry and commerce (and the workers who make it happen). 
Marx indicates that the modern form of “the antagonism between town and country and 
later antagonism between states representing urban interests and those representing rural 
interests” grows out of the fact that the flow of goods from country to city is organized on 
a profit-driven basis that benefits urban owners more than rural producers (Simon, 1994, 
p. 109). 
In this same line of thinking, Marx makes a point which is important to my 
project: within each stage, individual ideas, social relationships, and political behaviour 
are formed based on the type of relation they have with nature, other individuals, and 
their own innate characters. Even their innate characters, according to Marx, are not 
fixed, but are the products of their histories (Simon, 1994). Marx describes how social 
relations at every stage take form in terms of a given system of production and exchange. 
For example, in modern capitalism, a farmer produces food not for her/his consumption, 
but instead for exchange and the generation of profit. They are produced as commodities, 
in which commercial value comes to dominate use value. In rural communities, people 
who don’t own farms also come to see their life chances and prospects are dependent on 
30 
 
 
 
 
markets, and on capital investments that might bring more jobs to rural and small-town 
communities. 
Ferdinand Tonnies 
The next writer I discuss is Ferdinand Tonnies, a German sociologist who 
published Gemeinshaft und Gesellschaft in 1888 (Tonnies, 2001). His analysis of the 
contrasts between rural and urban societies generated foundational sociological concepts, 
just as Marx’s work had done a generation earlier. Tonnies’ focus was specifically on two 
dichotomous concepts that he used to describe the different qualities of rural and urban 
social life. According to Bonner (1997), these two concepts are not necessarily based on 
place or land, but instead distinguish “different orientations toward the world and life” (p. 
20); they are opposites on the spectrum of competition versus cooperation. Tonnies used 
the concept of Gemeinschaft to describe small, local communities. Relationships within 
these communities are important. The family is key, and relationships within and between 
families in rural communities are concrete and personal rather than abstract and limited to 
specific and specialized roles. Traditions and history are important, and gemeinschaft 
societies impose obligations on their members to respect these and maintain personal ties 
to each other. On the other hand, in Gesellschaft “society”, relationships are created for 
the specific purpose of modern work. Modern work is different from traditional work; it 
is technical, formally-defined, specialized, organized bureaucratically, and often involves 
abstract legal rules. In such societies, relations between people tend to be governed by the 
specific roles in which they encounter each other, and need not involve an overarching 
sense of community, nor family ties.  
31 
 
 
 
 
In Gemeinschaft, a balance of social and natural factors holds society together. 
The idea (which may or may not be the reality) is that production and exchange is 
governed by common moral principles, for the greater good, creating and nurturing 
community bonds. All social relations are structured around traditional familial ties and 
family kinships and individuality is discouraged. People tend to be “placed” less by level 
of education or occupational specialization than by family or their concrete role in the 
community. By contrast, in Gesellschaft all relationships in public life are for the purpose 
of commerce or rational administration. Social relations are structured around business 
and competition for jobs and contracts are central. This mode of social life undermines 
the centrality of both family orientation and tradition.  
The “original collective forms of Gemeinschaft” develop into the “rational will of 
the Gesellschaft” (Truzzi, 1971, p. 2), meaning that rural and small-town social forms 
eventually developed into or gave way to an urban civilization, economy, and state 
system. In this civilized state, individuals are freed from the chains of customs, mores, 
and religious rules and are increasingly considered to be free persons (Truzzi, 1971). In 
Tonnies’ writings, in both Truzzi (1971) and Bonner (1997), rural is deemed to be an 
initial lower and slower form of life that develops over history into the cultured and busy 
form of modern life. Urban society is imagined as both commercial and cultured; 
however, both culture and commerce tend to benefit those who inhabit the upper rungs of 
the social and economic ladder. Like Marx, Tonnies pointed out that land and buildings 
become commodities for usury purposes in urban centers. On the other hand, in the 
country, land was still where life is grown and houses are where families are grown. 
Tonnies’ description of the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction is interesting. On the one 
32 
 
 
 
 
hand it is a historical and developmental distinction where the past is equated with 
gemeinschaft and the present with gesellschaft; but on the other, Tonnies seems to 
indicate that even in the present there is a spectrum, with a surviving rural gemeinschaft 
on one end and a dominant urban gesellschaft on the other, still in present-day opposition 
and contrast.  
Georg Simmel 
Similar to Tonnies, Georg Simmel (1950) wrote that urban social life by and large 
was differentiated from small towns and rural areas. The metropolis with its streets, 
masses of individualized people desensitized to urban noise, fast pace, and diversity in 
social and economic life, is contrasted to small-town and rural life in regard to “the 
sensory foundations of psychic life” (p.2). In the city, Simmel explains, commerce is 
perpetuated, and multitudes of business relations and transactions thrive, based on 
abstract, formal calculations, which could not have existed in the smallness and 
meagerness and social constriction of rural and small-town exchange. Simmel used the 
phrase “money economy” to describe this multiplicity of modern, formal business 
relations and transactions (p. 2). 
In Simmel’s view, precision in timing and numerical computation is crucial to the 
multiplicity of money transactions, the co-ordinated movement of people and goods and 
the delivery of services in the metropolis, so much so that the whole system could break 
down into chaos without them.  Simmel (1950) also argued that numerical computation 
meant that exactness was required for the money economy. The “modern mind” has 
become more definitive, precise, analytic, and quick so as to keep up with the varied and 
33 
 
 
 
 
complex business and social relationships of the metropolis (p. 3). This is in stark 
contrast to the slowness of the small-town and rural life. 
On the other hand, Simmel explained that this barrage of economic and social 
activity has led to an indifferent and reserved demeanor in individual city folk. This is a 
reaction to and a protective measure against the overwhelming and violent stimulation of 
the physical and emotional human senses in the modern large city. As a result, city folk 
don’t seek to know their neighbours or interact personally with people on the street, and 
don’t tend to show personal concern for the strangers who are their fellow city dwellers. 
Again, this depiction of urban life resembles the contrast Tonnies drew between urban 
and small-town or countryside settings where most people know each other and which 
family and land area they come from, and tend to be concerned about and helpful to each 
other both because of their familiarity and because in rural life an economy of mutual aid 
still operates. If you don’t help your neighbour pull a tractor out of a ditch, that neighbour 
might not be so willing to lend you the use of a combine for a day when yours breaks 
down.  
Being reserved, says Simmel, is a “phenomenon of the metropolis: it grants to the 
individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever 
under other conditions” (p. 6). In other words, a person can be anonymous in a city, and 
anonymity is a cloak that hides what in the city becomes your “private” self; how your 
family and friends see you. In small rural communities, you are known by most people, 
and if not, they can still “locate” you in terms of their knowledge of your parents or 
grandparents. Simmel called this the “constant inner and outer pressure of a de-
individualizing small town” (p. 7). 
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“It is not only the immediate size of the area and the number of persons which, 
because of the universal historical correlation between the enlargement of the circle and 
the personal inner and outer freedom, has made the metropolis the locale of freedom” 
(Simmel, 1950,  p. 8) Another factor is the downside of this metropolitan freedom: one 
type of social interaction (concrete and personal) decreases or is moved to “private” life, 
while another (abstract and impersonal) moves to the centre of public and work life. 
Generally speaking, in the city one does not interact extensively or in depth with the 
many people one sees in a day, and most of one’s daily interactions are short-term 
(buying something or providing/receiving services, for example) or formal (work and 
business relations) even when cordial. On the other hand, in the small-town and country, 
Simmel saw concrete and personal relationships as constituting a major proportion of 
social life (p. 10). 
Although Simmel (1950) drew distinctions between metropolitan and non-
metropolitan life, he did not equate these with a distinction between urban and rural. He 
saw them as relating to other factors: population size and density, or the rise of a money 
economy and modern commerce, for example. Rural society was not a different type of 
society, for Simmel, but the product of different levels and intensities of social relations 
driven by demographic and economic factors. 
R. Alex Pahl  
R.A. Pahl (1968) agreed with Simmel’s idea that a distinction between rural and 
urban place, space, or locale does not give us an adequate way to think of city or country 
in terms of sociology. He was critical of Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft and Gesellshaft 
distinction, even if conceived as a continuum forming a rural-urban spectrum. According 
35 
 
 
 
 
to Hamilton (1950), Pahl found that no sociological definition could be formulated based 
on geography, and he came to doubt the worth of using a concept of a rural-urban as a 
classification system (p. 20). Rather, as stated by Hamilton, Pahl preferred to work with 
the concept of social class and economic status, regardless of locale, in studying social 
differences. Pahl asserted that social class is a key marker of lifestyle. Social class 
determines opportunities and mobility as opposed to place of settlement. Expressed more 
simply, “only the middle class have the means and the leisure to be able to choose 
‘places’ in which to live” (Pahl cited in Hamilton, 1968: 270, p. 21). 
Pahl came to believe that rural sociology could not continue to indulge in 
generating sociological theory or explanations through the lens of rurality (Hamilton, 
1968).  This would seem to debunk the whole field of rural sociology; especially when 
taking into account the decline in agriculture as an economic force or as an occupation 
once engaged in by the majority of the population (Pahl cited in Hamilton, 1968: 270, p. 
22). Bonner (1997) also attests to Pahl’s reasoning that “[a]ny attempt to tie particular 
patterns of social relationships to specific geographical milieu is a singularly fruitless 
exercise” (p. 53). The focus of contemporary sociological work has indeed shifted away 
from or even suppressed the rural-urban dichotomy, though it is still alive in popular 
modern discourse. According to Pahl (Hamilton, 1968), choosing to live in a small-town 
or rural area today replicates an urban pattern; it is a choice based on the same priorities 
that urban dwellers hold (p. 54). Further to this, Hamilton theorizes that the idea of an 
urban-rural continuum makes it difficult to distinguish more specific, actual 
discontinuities, for example between small-town and city (pp. 110 & 125). Differences 
here include the convenience of services and employment, with convenience being an 
36 
 
 
 
 
urban interest that Pahl would say rural and small-town people may also keep in mind, if 
in somewhat different ways. For Pahl there was no fundamental distinction between rural 
and urban life; just specific differences that did not lie in some urban or rural essence (in 
Hamilton, 1968).  
R. Alexander Sim  
Alex Sim (1988) criticized Simmel’s and Pahl’s description and rejection of the 
rural-urban distinction or continuum as sociologically useless, or as being a mindset, or 
being based in the convenience or sentimentality of urbanity. Sim’s epistemic location for 
understanding economic, political, and social life measures came from the space and 
place of the land – for him, one of two key factors in defining the rural. Nonetheless, Sim 
recognized that those who enter a rural area for work or play will “have no difficulty 
recognizing something distinctive about the new countryside” (Sim cited in Bonner, 
1997, p. 56).  But Sim’s foundation for social analysis came from a time when rural 
people knew each other, faced adversities together, were self-reliant, produced their own 
food, and had a measure of control over their social and business lives, forming 
communities. Sim (1989) wrote that the foundational fabric relied on the interdependence 
of physically-distanced farms and small-town occupations. The coming of mechanized 
transportation and electronic communications technology has profoundly changed the 
way work and socialization is practiced in rural communities, but without fully erasing 
their distinctiveness.  
The way in which the name “rural” is now applied and the standardization of 
technological, organizational, and political entities and authorities has contributed to a 
denigration of those living outside of urban centers (Sim, 1989). The myths of rural or 
37 
 
 
 
 
country life (e.g., like a Christmas card illustration of simple, peaceful, wholesome) 
persist but have been debunked; both the myths and the debunking are urban inventions 
and they reinforce each other. The devaluing of rurality as mere nostalgia has long term 
consequences. As Sim indicates; values and beliefs lie behind policies and decisions: 
“Ultimately, values determine behavior, while behavior reproduces and reinforces 
values” (p. 28). 
Against reductive conceptualization, Sim (1993) argued that “[t]here is something 
distinctive about the regions outside of cities that requires a name. The difference goes 
beyond the landscape, for it includes located special arrangement, tradition, folklore, a 
system of governance, economic conditions, technology, and social institutions” (p. 460). 
It is a colonizing act Sim argued, to ignore or minimize the attachment people who live in 
places of low-density populations and extensive spaces have to their location. Societal 
structures such as large administrative capacity, citizen watch groups, or access to legal 
and technical expertise, do not exist (or do not exist in the same ways) in rural areas or 
small towns. Planners, Sim argued, needed to: consider values attached to location in 
place and space; evaluate the located pace and ways of doing business particular to 
places; and allow for local changes and continuities in demographics. 
The stereotypical top-down and confrontational approach of modern urban 
politics is not the kind of interaction to which rural communities have been accustomed. 
Consideration of things like fellowship and consensus were given more weight when 
planning developments. This is not to claim that local politics in rural areas was entirely 
egalitarian and co-operative, but community views on shared spaces were taken into 
account. It is worth noting that as a young man, Sim was part of the last great agrarian 
38 
 
 
 
 
movement to shape Canadian politics: the United Farmers and United Farm Women, who 
explicitly promoted the ideals of local grassroots democracy in terms of what they called 
co-operative commonwealth, and formed governments in three Canadian provinces in the 
1920s. However, in today’s world of technology, convenience, and consumer 
individualism, Sim argued that practices “such as self-help and mutual aid” which once 
were important for social and economic self-sufficiency, are not only romanticized but 
are romanticized nostalgically on one hand but considered undesirable for practical 
purposes now (1993, p. 465). Community erosion is marked by a sense of dislocation in 
which individual consumer priorities take precedence and neighbours become strangers.  
Privatization and centralization of public and business services and centres has 
furthered a disintegration of community. A separation between work and personal or 
social life grows as residents commute to other centres and front-line workers come in to 
administer regionalized services and programs. Most major planning and development 
decisions take place in urban centres and are initiated in terms of centralizing priorities 
without (or with minimal) input from local communities. Sim acknowledges that rural 
people seem to no longer have the political will or leadership to fight for their way of life 
as rural people. 
The disappearance of the word “rural” as a category of social life to be taken 
seriously in policy and planning means that rural spaces and communities become objects 
of urban desire. Urbanites can leave the city on weekends to come to a countryside they 
treat as a place to relax and play. The place where relaxing and playing takes place can 
more readily be disposed of or transformed in pursuit of outside political or commercial 
ends (for example resource extraction or for recreational resorts) when its recreational 
39 
 
 
 
 
users don’t have an existential stake to both its social and natural virtue. As local 
economies in rural areas become more dependent on international markets for 
agricultural, mining, and forestry commodities, and on recreational facilities for 
urbanites, members of rural communities themselves can easily be co-opted to support 
development driven by outside forces in the name of jobs, business opportunities, or 
services, and thereby see themselves primarily as individuals with private interests. 
To Sim (1988), to give something a name (as in “rural”) is to acknowledge and 
give it credence. He argues that the spread of urban-centric media communications, 
transportation networks, political priorities, and economic interests constitutes a form of 
urban imperialism. Within this mode of operation, place, locality, and community are 
disregarded whether in urban neighbourhoods dealing with expressways or in small 
towns dealing with depopulation. Urban imperialism imposes projects and/or policies in a 
colonizing manner. Simmel (1950) and later Pahl (1968) claim that these centralizing and 
de-localizing forces have nothing to do with rural-urban distinction. But Sim (1988) 
argued that they do, because they involve a particular way of relating to land that is 
invasive and ignores the social and human particularities of place, space, and distance. 
These only retain importance as long as they can be given quantitative value within the 
equivocal and global discourse of modern economics. Sim (1988) claims that this 
invasion and quantification is only possible through the power to name, and that naming 
is a central strategy of colonization.  
For Sim (1988), “cultural urban imperialism” took the form of planning and 
politics that named things in terms of urban centralism, top-down policy processes, and 
usury view of the land (p. 27). Here he explains that cultural urban imperialism takes 
40 
 
 
 
 
place when the urban entities (a political or economic dominant culture) use discourse 
such as “periphery, fringe, and hinterland,” to effectively invalidate rural livelihood (p. 
27). This legitimizes administrative power to concentrate into a few hands and cultivates 
dependency. Sim states this type of imposition allows larger centres of power to ignore or 
minimize the needs of rural communities which can effectively quash them.  He shows 
how sociological and planning discourse allows urban centres and urban priorities to 
creep across the countryside, not only disregarding community values, but imposing the 
discursive value of urban centres in the name of development. He states, “Urban life and 
rural life are still urban and rural despite their respective changes” (Bonner, 1997, p. 55). 
 In a subsequent article, The Changing Culture of Rural Ontario, Sim (1993) uses 
the word gestalt in his summary of a method (Sounding) used in facilitating focus group 
conversations which aimed at people of rural communities discussing contentious 
community issues. He states that gestalt is “the whole exceeds the sum of its parts” in this 
case advocating for consensus and closure regarding contentious issues rural people 
experience in their communities (Sim, 1993 p. 26). Sim stated a rural community is in a 
better place to advocate and plan for itself politically, economically, and socially. In other 
words, gestalt is embodied in physical space (which necessarily includes distance), and 
physical presence of land (including sounds, smells, colours etcetera); in the socially 
constructed ways rural people relate to each other and form their communities. 
Kieran Bonner 
In his book, A Great Place to Raise Kids, Bonner (1997) shows his debt to the 
work of Alex Sim, even as he develops a critical response to Sim’s work. Bonner reworks 
Sim’s emphasis on land and place as practical and having structure to a more abstract 
41 
 
 
 
 
way of describing rurality – Bonner discusses how people perceive themselves as rural 
and perceive themselves as members of community. Bonner (1997) notes various 
commonplace descriptors of rurality such as: countryside; as pastoral, agricultural, 
natural, fertile; as lacking in social development; and as other. In popular rural versus 
urban distinctions, the metropolitan comes to be associated with progressiveness and 
modernity while the rural is typecast as regressive and traditional (Bonner, 1997). 
However, there is “an intricate interdependence between rural and urban communities”; 
the urban cities depend on rural resources to meet the needs of their dense populations 
and rural communities have come to rely on urban services and industrial goods (Epp & 
Whitson, 2001, p.325). 
Bonner (1997) uses Sim’s word rurban to define a place that has the best of both 
rural and urban amenities and characteristics. “Prairie Edge”, the community that was the 
focus of his research – big enough to include city amenities and conveniences but small 
enough to be ‘country’, giving social and cultural flavour. Prairie Edge had small-town 
charm, traditional family and social norms, and face-to-face contact, yet it was not 
associated exclusively with farming. Bonner’s informants emphasized a sense of safety 
within this community, especially for raising children, as opposed to the perceived 
dangers of big city life. This is another way of perceiving rural – from the perspective of 
utility as conceived by parents and members of this community. Bonner further develops 
the idea of rurban in relation to this instrumental use of place. In response to Sim, Bonner 
states, “the value of place as an end to itself and does not get to be developed” (p. 166). 
Still, in this discourse of safety, rurality is resurrected and its value compared to urbanity 
42 
 
 
 
 
in terms of particular uses of space, and choices of place. These values are ultimately 
measured against the costs of housing and commuting. 
Bonner (1997) indicates that amongst his respondents there was a belief, widely 
shared by small-town and rural residents and also by many urbanites, that a “perceived 
golden age of old-time values” and “rolling fields” gives a false sense that smaller is 
better in community size, especially for family life (pp. 87-88). Bonner himself 
characterizes rural in terms of small communities comprised of low numbers of residents 
who are likely to know each other (p. 56). These descriptors of rurality have been 
pervasive throughout my readings: a low population density comprised of people who 
know each other and most likely have known each other for many years. Further, Bonner 
proposes that this mutual familiarity benefits the relationships which ensue in rural areas 
and form an important dimension of any established activity, be it social, recreation, or 
business. These connections are established and deepened due to their familiarity with 
each other. This is a key point in his discussions. Yet Bonner is among the authors who 
subscribe to the notion that rurality is socially constructed.  
Bonner (1997) acknowledges that close relationships can and do happen in small 
suburbs and downtown neighbourhoods within cities as well as in rural and small-town 
communities. But his argument is the perception that small towns are safer places in 
which to raise children conveys a pervasive belief of the people he spoke with – is false. 
In his research for A Great Place to Raise Kids, he found that statistical data did not back 
up the assertions of these small-town parents, though many moved to Prairie Edge 
precisely because of that mistaken perception of small-town safety.  The facts form his 
research evidence (which is based in a positivistic perspective) on safety indicators (i.e. 
43 
 
 
 
 
economic, political, and social measures) and the perception of small-town safety was a 
crisis point for him. How is this phenomenon to be understood without contradicting 
people’s decision to move to or stay in Prairie Edge?  
He circled back to Alex Sim. Similar to Sim, who viewed the economic, political, 
and social life measures from a space and place of the land, Bonner takes an anti-
positivistic view to better understand the decision to relocate to or to stay in Prairie Edge 
– a small rural town where advances in transportation and technology allow for greater 
mobility. Like Sim (993), he sees an “instrumental relation to land” at work in these 
movements. People did not move to Prairie Edge from the city to commit themselves to a 
place or community, they decided to invest in a house, situated in a safe place to raise 
their family, from a range of options grounded in their perception of the kind of lifestyle 
and parenting advantages and services available (for a fee). 
Bonner stops short of using Sim’s position of the existence of a rural gestalt, 
rather, he treats rurality as a frame of reference shared by the life-worlds in which people 
construct and arrange the relations between their interests (e.g. safety, peace of mind, 
child rearing) and their value commitments. Despite his suspicion and mistrust of the 
perception of safety of living in small-town and rural areas, Bonner stresses the 
importance of not erasing, but understanding the relations between life-worlds of 
interviewees.  
Philip Hansen and Alicja Muszynski 
Hansen and Muszynski (1990) don’t refer to rural in geographical terms as a kind 
of place, but in terms of one of its predominant industries: agriculture. They write about 
how people living on farms and in small towns develop a concept of rurality through 
44 
 
 
 
 
actions in the social, economic, and political realms “as a complex array of relations 
which people both consciously and unconsciously reproduce in the course of their 
everyday lives” (p. 5). They also note that classical politics accentuates the importance of 
developing a collective life which includes addressing the needs of the citizens, 
institutions, and economy in which they are interested. Keeping this in mind, Hansen and 
Muszynski ask researchers engaging with rural community members to value their lived 
experience, not pass judgement, and “seek to illuminate the assumptions which seem 
implicit in people’s conscious activity and raise them to the level of debate within a 
political forum grounded in the community” (p.8). They propose that any shared political 
action and consciousness rural people develop must be grounded in their shared 
perception of their life-world consciousness. Further to this, a shared life-world does not 
grant political possibility without being raised to explicit consciousness without 
communication. Like Bonner, they assert that communication and discussions on difficult 
or contentious issues must be had, and if need be – boisterously debated. 
Hansen and Muszynski (1990) describe how settlers were provided allocations of 
land under public policy at the expense of Indigenous peoples. This is the story of how 
the family farm came into being, with the establishment of private property, labour of 
family and neighbours, and the ideal of freedom to work hard for independence. The 
notion of interdependence and community was created as farming become a viable way 
of life. At the same time, the ideals of the “self-made man” and individual effort, the 
institution of individual private property, often conflicted with ideals of mutual aid and 
community interdependence (Ramp, 2015). This is not to take away from settlers’ lived 
experience, nor the lived experience of rurality of their descendants who still live in small 
45 
 
 
 
 
towns and on farms (Hansen and Muszynski, 1990, p. 11). It simply suggests that a 
reconsideration of how community is defined and how community is to be connected to 
public policy (and to politics) is a key task in raising “implicit assumptions” to the “level 
of debate.” Like Bonner, however, Hansen and Muszynski see this as a matter of 
dialogue and mutual consciousness-raising on the part of researchers, community 
activists, and rural residents. 
Interestingly, Hansen and Muszynski do not specifically speak to what rural is, 
but rather to how farmers (and small-town people) perceive themselves as being rural – 
an approach very similar to Bonner’s. For the most part, they encourage and advocate for 
researchers to act in terms of an ontological respect for how people on farms and in small 
towns perceive themselves as rural people and understand and value their experience.  
Gerald W. Creed and Barbara Ching 
In their introduction to Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural 
Hierarchy, Gerald Creed and Barbara Ching (1997) locate the problem of defining or 
describing rurality in terms of the way words like “heartland’ are used to evoke images of 
quaint, charming, and bustling farms. Such words, according to Creed and Ching are 
descriptions of rurality versus urbanity, and are meant to ornament space and do not 
change the hierarchy placed upon rural/urban cultural, social, and political distinctions 
(Creed and Ching 1997, p. 17). It only seems to amplify the low status of rural culture, 
social, and political standings, most of which has been created by colonialism. Added to 
this, colonial discourse most often demonstrates the powerful superiority of the urban. 
Even in the face of urban crime, city decay, and business corruption, the city continues to 
be validated, as urban space is “the locus of political, economic and cultural power” 
46 
 
 
 
 
(Creed and Ching, 1997, p. 17). Further to this, values placed on objects such as folk art, 
country fashions, and rural styles are based on the interests of the urban customer who 
uses these items to “signal their class and cultural superiority” (p. 21). 
Creed and Ching (1997) describe how not only words but also material images 
found in art, fashion, and style inform images of rurality and rusticity: either promoting 
nostalgic versions of them or on occasion, satirizing them. Further, Creed and Ching 
suggest that rural people themselves use these words and images to depict their own 
version of rurality. In other words, rural and rusticity are socially constructed notions in 
which urban nostalgia and rural life-worlds mingle. Creed and Ching (1997) note in 
particular Raymond Williams’ (1973) argument that the distinction between rural and 
urban is more than a distinction of space. Choices of clothing, music, and food along with 
the cultivation of “regional accents and hometown origins” shapes identity along 
rural/urban lines and also generates forms of social identification that carry with them the 
potential of political and economic conflict (Creed and Ching, 1997, p. 3). 
Creed and Ching (1997) concur with Roger Epp (2008) in acknowledging that 
rural people: (a) are marginalized and their culture devalued, which links to and affects 
rural/urban political and economic stratification, (b) at times embrace that 
marginalization, and (c) are inappropriately placed in postmodern theory’s model of 
identity by many researchers. Their argument is that, even as the concept of “rural” 
disappears from scholarly discourse, it lives on in complex ways in popular culture: in the 
stubborn resistance of rural people to urban culture; conversely in their adoption of 
certain aspects of urban nostalgia for rurality, and in the urban denigration of the rural 
lifestyle. In the urban consciousness, rural is considered, whether negatively or 
47 
 
 
 
 
positively, as the Other.  To the extent that these perceptions drive decisions and actions, 
Creed and Ching argue that neither demographics nor economic viability should 
outweigh the importance of understanding the complex nature of rural identity in the 
study of rural places and communities. “[W]hile many social scientific studies of rural 
societies and many artistic works take the rural as their theme, the very attempt to 
distinguish identity from themes, rusticity from rurality, exposes not only our limited 
intellectual framework but also the extent to which this element of identity has been 
naturalized” (Creed and Ching, 1997, p. 6). The point here is that while rural and urban 
identities are different, they are not developed in isolation from each other; that they can 
both intertwine and at the same time enhance their differences, but that they have real 
effects nonetheless. This echoes the Thomas Theorem (1928) which states: “things that 
are taken to be real are real in their consequences” (p. 572). 
Roger Epp and David Whitson 
In his chapter, “Overcoming Cultural and Spiritual Obstacles to Rural 
Revitalization”, Cameron Harder (Epp & Whitson 2001) quotes an interviewee speaking 
of his relationship to the land: “Farm families are connected to the land-like a living 
body. […] We have the roots of the land in us” (p. 224). This comment sums up the 
feeling of most rural citizens, especially from those long-established settler families. Bob 
Starling (Epp & Whitson 2001), in his chapter “Work, Knowledge, and the Direction of 
Farm Life” agrees with Harder, stating that rural people were “supported by a community 
network of shared knowledge and practice” (p. 253). This statement resounds with many 
descriptions of past and even present rural communities and small towns; descriptions 
that go all the way back to Tonnies. The concept of “a community network of shared 
48 
 
 
 
 
knowledge and practice” is still central to the way people live in small-towns and rural 
areas. The idea of an historical environment and “common knowledge” shared by people 
with a sense of closeness to each other despite (or perhaps because of) distance and low 
population density is still held in high regard by rural people and is still articulated by 
many authors of rural studies, such as those featured in the Epp and Whitson collection. 
Practices, such as helping neighbours in times of need and bartering services are part of 
this common knowledge that make the rural life seem close-knit. 
Like Alexander Sim, Roger Epp’s own writings (2008) are based in a 
consciousness of rurality that could be described as a gestalt. It is a consciousness based 
not on chosen values but on something before choice: an experiential and ontological 
form of being. His essays illustrate his closeness to the land by describing what it feels 
like to be on the land and to know intimately the nature of the prairies. Narratives of 
sights, smells, textures, and sounds that grass makes on the prairie land instantly bring to 
mind vivid scenes. As I read his words, I immediately get a sense of familiarity, not 
specifically of that particular piece of land, but of the prairie space and terrain. The 
descriptions of the landscape, rivers, animals, hills and knolls are so familiar and 
embedded in my mind and in the minds and more importantly, in the psyches and even 
the bodily responses of people who live in the rural prairies.  
Conclusion 
 Finally, I will add some closing thoughts on how the readings I chose shaped my 
own way of approaching the rural including how they relate to and tie into each other, 
and how they help me develop my perception on rurality and the people who live in this 
space. As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, I was very challenged in writing it, 
49 
 
 
 
 
honing down the mountain of literature, and deciding which authors and theorists helped 
lead towards my own approach to rurality. Marx, as one of the earliest modern writers on 
rurality and urbanity, was helpful in providing a framework in which to understand this 
phenomenon even though his term “rural idiocy” may not have been kind to people living 
a rural life. Marx sensitized me to the fact that human beings, rural and urban, are formed 
by their environments, both natural and social, but that these same human beings also 
actively produce or reproduce those environments. Further, Marx made the important 
point that we are relational beings, and thus to understand rural communities and social 
orders, it is necessary to understand how people are related unequally within them 
through the organization of work, economic exchange and political power.  
Marx also noted that on a larger scale, rural and urban social orders themselves are 
shaped by their often-unequal relations to each other. This point became especially 
important as I realized that “ruling” and “subordinate” classes in rural societies are not 
simply the mirror image of their structural counterparts in urban societies. Small-town 
leadership elites do include members of the small-town business class (that is, owners of 
local businesses) and their activities tend to reflect business interests. But business 
owners as a class play a different role in small towns than their larger-scale urban 
counterparts do nationally or internationally. Along with local professionals, public 
service managers and board members of local organizations, local business owners and 
managers are dependent on decisions made by large, centralized economic and political 
organizations located in urban centres. Thus, as explained later in the thesis, the “rule” of 
local elites in local affairs becomes specialized in terms of a “patron-client” relationship 
with urban-centred political parties, governments, funding agencies, and national or 
50 
 
 
 
 
international businesses. Local community and business leaders “broker” relations 
between urban centres of power and local people, seeking to gain favour from these 
centres of power, and at the same time, to recruit local people into this favour-seeking 
game by encouraging them to maintain enthusiasm and a positive attitude toward 
initiatives worked out between local elites and provincial or national organizations. The 
police college venture was a clear example of this process at work. Arguably, one failure 
of the bid process was not to pay enough attention to the possibility of a local electoral 
upset by the Wildrose Party.  
Ferdinand Tonnies and Georg Simmel described interesting social characteristics 
that differentiated rural and urban life from each other. For example, Tonnies pointed to 
the slower pace of rural life and its stronger emphasis on personal and familial relations, 
while Simmel pointed to the more abstract nature of urban social orders, and the ways in 
which urban life was more individualized, desensitized, and fast-paced. On the other 
hand, Ray Pahl, began his career using the notion of a rural-urban continuum, but 
eventually decided that there was nothing that defined its two poles as essentially 
different. Pahl was the least helpful to me – his argument that rural sociology is no longer 
suitable in generating theoretical thought clashed with my own experience and seemed to 
me to reflect a neglect of the experiential dimension of social life. In a similar manner 
Kieran Bonner diverted attention from perceived rural-urban distinctions toward other 
matters such as how families construct and act upon a sense of safety for their children. 
Bonner’s study provided me with much needed guidance on understanding the 
importance of epistemology, ontology, perspective and world view, as well as the 
importance of qualitative research, but not much on rurality. I would argue that he 
51 
 
 
 
 
brought an urbanite perspective to his analysis, and neglected the manner in which rural 
environments and social relations may contribute to building different ways of knowing 
(epistemology), different ways of being (ontology) and thus also different ways of doing 
social life. The most helpful and insightful writers I found to be Alexander Sim and 
Roger Epp. Although they were unable to provide a definition of rural that met all of 
Pahl’s and Bonner’s reservations, their descriptions of land and people come closest (in 
my mind) to describing a rural perspective and the significance of rural values, as did 
their discussions of the importance of living in close relation to land and weather, and 
Sim’s treatment of rural identity as based in a kind of gestalt formed by that relation. 
I came to realize there is no definite definition of rural in an objective sense, but instead a 
a division in the ways rurality is understood and lived. On one side there seems to be the 
perception that rural society and culture have no essential core: they are simply the 
effects of social, economic, and cultural forces that have nothing substantial to do with 
rurality. Thus, Ray Pahl, for example, takes class differences to be important to the 
formation of both rural and urban social settings, and thereby discounts the 
distinctiveness of the rural. Even Bonner discounts his interviewees’ perceptions of the 
safety of small-town society. On the other hand, through my extensive readings in other 
literature on rural life, I came to know rurality as a way of perceiving and acting on a 
particular relationship with the land; as a space for being; and as a way of relating to 
other people and other animate beings (e.g. animals, plants, water, wind, sky, etcetera). I 
gained affirmation from writers such as R. Alexander Sim, Roger Epp, Barbara Ching 
and Gerald Creed, that the rural is felt as a shared quality of experience, and that it exists 
actively in particular working relationships to land and community in the context of two 
52 
 
 
 
 
kinds of shared vulnerability. One is a shared vulnerability to the realities of geography 
and the natural environment – distance, weather, the capacity of the land. The other is a 
shared vulnerability to political and economic decisions, and to perceptions of the rural, 
that are held in urban centres. That is, the centralization of capital that Marx talked about 
has led to the treatment of rural areas as locations for particular kinds of economic 
development and capital accumulation. For example, the urbanization of modern life 
(forecast in very different ways, by Simmel, Sim and Pahl) has led to the development of 
a kind of nostalgia for the rural in urban culture. This nostalgia lends itself to cultural 
tropes that Creed and Ching call “rusticity,” and to an urban-driven commercial 
development of certain rural settings as “decorative” or “open-air” tourist destinations. 
Fort Macleod itself, because it has undergone little urban growth, has preserved a late 
nineteenth-century streetscape which is now a movie-maker’s mecca. But this nostalgia 
occludes the fact that the shared knowledges and practices that Epp refers to as the shared 
heritage of rural people do not stay in the past.  
Thus, I came to understand how, according to some of the authors I read, rural 
landscapes, places, societies, and communities are changing, suffering from contradictory 
pressures, and no longer considered by much of the urban public (and government) as a 
force to be reckoned with, as they once were in the not-so-long-ago past. Yet at the same 
time, rural people are more than passive recipients of this change. They actively adapt to 
it, and in doing so, they selectively incorporate elements of urban culture, especially 
through mass and social media, despite the costs and distance barriers that make high-
speed wireless a distant dream for many in rural areas. The very fact that rural people are 
disproportionately affected by decisions taken in urban centres of power continues to 
53 
 
 
 
 
reproduce rural people’s sense of the difference between their lives and those of their 
urban counterparts.  
In reading this literature, I have also recognized and reflected on my own First 
Nation people who have undergone huge cultural, social, economic, and political 
changes. Changes continue to take place in an environment where old traditions and ways 
of thinking are often regarded as backward and inefficient, or romanticized and viewed 
nostalgically as decorative, yet at times are still fought for on principle and as an 
expression of a continuing life-world. It is apparent from the literature I reviewed that 
these attitudes and contradictions between them are part of the complex changes in rural 
life. Rural people, including myself as a First Nations’ person, live and experience these 
changes (and whatever positives and negatives, real or perceived come along with such 
changes) whilst trying to make sense of them as best as possible. Some rural people 
(whether First Nations or settler, though in different ways) are for the most part 
complacent. Others are ambivalent or conflicted. Some rural residents and community 
leaders fight for scarce opportunities decided elsewhere, while others fight against the 
imposition of developments that threaten a particular way of life. All of them face global 
challenges.  
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CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 
This chapter discusses the process and development of my research project. I set 
out to understand the socially constructed modes of communication at work in a 
community as they related to a particularly challenging moment in that community’s 
history. I explain my practical use of some key theoretical concepts and provide some 
context for that use, highlighting how they shaped my understanding of knowledge and 
communication as it relates to participants’ agency and social location. In my basic 
orientation, I draw on Denzin & Lincoln (1994) who point out that “[t]he gendered multi-
culturally situated researcher approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework 
(theory, ontology) that specifies a set of questions (epistemology) that are then examined 
(methodology, analysis) in specific ways” (p. 11). They note that no matter how well-
thought-out a research plan might be in terms of traditional standards of objectivity, both 
participants and researchers enter the research process with their own perspectives – their 
social location. They further argue that paradigms with ontologies, epistemologies, and 
methodologies “represent belief systems that attach the user to a particular worldview (p. 
2). According to Wilson (2008), paradigms are the sets of “beliefs or assumptions” we 
have as researchers that guide our academic actions, regardless if we are aware of them or 
not (p. 32).  My own experience is also that these ways of seeing and understanding can 
and often do change through the research process.  
Epistemology is concerned with the study of knowledge and asks questions such 
as: “What is the relationship between the inquirer and the known?” (Denzin & Lincoln, 
1994, p. 13), and “[h]ow do we know the world?” (Smith, 1994, p. 99). According to 
Wilson (2008), ontology asks “How do [we] know what is real?” (p.33). In other words, 
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what do we take to be the ground of our existence and of the existence of the world? 
Methodology, by contrast, asks “How do we know the world, or gain knowledge of it?” 
(Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 13; Smith, 1994, p. 99). The questions we pose, if they 
balance careful theorization and experiential openness, can create valuable opportunities 
to develop a deeper understanding of how knowledge is created, communicated, valued, 
and devalued, and how it is impacted by our interactions with each other and the world 
around us. Theoretical paradigms within sociology, according to Lincoln et al. (2011), 
strive to account for the richness of “individuals’ and social groups’ ability to create and 
co-create their world and world views” (p. 119).  They suggest that such paradigms, if 
carefully and reflexively developed, can favour the researcher who engages with rural 
participants and aspires to acknowledge how their world-views are grounded in the local 
social environment and within the particular time period and events in which they live. 
They also propose that such paradigms involve paying attention to the marginalization 
and injustice endured by disadvantaged groups within such locales.  
Research Goals 
I focus on how public communications in a rural community constructed a 
particular vision of that community and the bid process its leaders engaged in, and how 
my interviewees constructed and reconstructed their own perspectives on the bid as 
community members and in response to both public messaging and their own located 
subject-positions and worldviews. I have incorporated my own process of self-reflection 
into the research, considering how the interviews I undertook, as human encounters in a 
community context, affected my own subject position and world-view. As a First Nation 
woman residing on a neighbouring First Nation community, I initially wanted to keep 
56 
 
 
 
 
myself outside of the project; providing as much objectivity as possible as had been my 
academic experience. Therefore, it was extremely challenging to write myself into the 
research paper (Adams, 2012) even though I met the criteria of an interview participant, a 
rural resident in the area of Fort Macleod and a participant in the Fort Macleod and 
surrounding area economic and social life.  I reiterate that this project is based in 
Sociology; therefore, I am limiting the Indigenous perspective to my own lived 
experience.  
Qualitative Research 
I chose to use a qualitative case study because I am interested in characteristics of 
interpersonal communication and located identity-formation within a rural community 
engaged in civic-decision making. This project involves a critical analysis of transcribed 
interviews and is informed by the theoretical resources discussed in Chapter Four. As a 
researcher, I wanted to be situated in a real-life world connecting me directly to the 
people with whom I would engage, their geographical and social situation, and the 
“institutions, and bodies of relevant interpretive material, including documents and 
archives” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 14) to which they responded. Consistent with a 
qualitative study, this research design describes “a flexible set of guidelines that connects 
theoretical paradigms of inquiry and methods” to collecting, analysing and also reflecting 
on data that researcher and participants co-produce (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 14). 
Reading about and coming to better understand a qualitative research perspective 
helped me understand situations and happenings through a subjective lens and understand 
how paying attention to the subjective dimension of social and personal life yields valid 
sociological insight by revealing “how something works” in social life from the point of 
57 
 
 
 
 
view of participants, including myself. Subjective does not mean that my perspective has 
become purely individual, nor that I can make up what I want without reference to any 
reality, but rather, it means including in my research a critical self-reflection on my own 
social placement and my social formation as an inquiring subject, taking into account 
how it impacts my own sense-making and how my interviewees respond to me. Stories 
told to researchers and dialogue between researchers and other participants can help us 
“understand the history or the problem or [how to seek] to change the policy” (Stake, 
2010, p. 25). In order to identify and understand these, we must understand the social 
location from which we and others we encounter do the identifying and understanding. 
This is the mechanism through which I, as the qualitative researcher, can honour the 
experiential dimension of the stories I hear from rural community members involved in 
or responding to an important civic-decision making process, and to take into account 
reflexively my own implication in that process. Researchers must be cognizant of how 
their own social actions and those of others occur within the socially constructed context 
of everyday life, and be mindful, in applying theory and analyzing within theory, that we 
too are its co-constructors (Stake, 2010, p.49). 
Qualitative inquiry should also consider both the socio-economic and the cultural 
situations of participants (Lincoln et al., 2011).  It should be oriented to challenging 
“ignorance and misapprehension” (including the researcher’s own) to open up the 
possibility of transforming both researchers’ and participants’ taken-for-granted ways of 
making sense (Guba & Lincoln, 2004, p. 33). Guba and Lincoln (2004) remind us that 
values are to be taken seriously in qualitative research, and emphasize respect for them as 
one engages in dialogue with participants – the values of the participants will shape 
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outcomes of the research, and to disregard them would be harmful to those who are 
vulnerable, or less powerful, in the research situation. At the same time, researchers 
should not simply apply values acquired from their own socialization and social contexts 
but should be prepared to question their values in mutual but critical and self-critical 
dialogue with other participants. Researchers cannot exempt themselves from the fact that 
both social reality and ethics are actively and practically (if not always equally) 
constructed by all who participate in the research.  
Dorothy Smith (1974) provides a practical way to critically understand lived and 
socially-located experience that does not treat it simply as raw material from which to 
extract and refine a picture of a “sociologically constructed world” from the outside (p. 
423). She advocates for attention to “the actualities of how things come about in people’s 
direct experience, including our own [and that] offer a knowledge of the social 
organization and determinations of the properties and events of our directly experienced 
world” (pg. 424). She treats the direct experience of everyday living, including the 
socially-located experience of the researcher, as a starting point for engagement and 
analysis. Start from where you are, whether you are a citizen of a small town or living in 
a rural area, or a member of a different kind of rural or urban community, or what you do 
and do not have power over or impact on, your gender, class, or race. From this starting 
point, which may already be quite complex, you map out the practices and relationships 
in which power is produced around, in, and through you and others, and in which your 
identity and positionality are produced, shaped, and restricted. 
Defining Scope 
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I have come to realize that formulating a thesis and producing an academic 
research project involves seeking and using a vast array of academic resources. In sorting 
through the range of choices suggested by a plethora of literature written by academic 
professionals, and the practical issues I faced in developing my own path, I resolved to do 
a micro-study within a case rather than a survey or a full case study. According to 
Gillham (2000), a case study is meant to look at a phenomenon with a specific focus and 
time frame that will answer or explain research questions (p. 2). The case study model 
provides a way to contextualize the theories used to shape research and its findings, and 
to test and modify the research questions posed.  
Although this research did not involve a full case study, it contains elements of 
that model. For example, I contextualize my interviews and self-reflections by discussing 
the organization of social power in small-towns in terms of patron-client relations to 
larger centres of power and the dynamics of modern capitalism as they impact rural areas 
and societies. But where case studies are typically meant to be generalizable to a larger 
population, this study is not meant to be generalized. My sample of three interviews 
(ranging from 18 to 24 minutes) is too small to count as “representative” in any statistical 
manner, therefore, I have chosen to delve deeper into the communication practices and 
agency of my interviewees and myself. My argument is that looking closely at the 
process by which particular individuals construct an issue, position themselves in relation 
to it, and develop or modify their senses of individual and collective identity in response 
to it, can show us commonalities as well as particularities, and that we can learn from 
both.  
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I believe that contentious issues or crises can bring to the foreground the shared 
and taken for-granted perceptions, beliefs, values, and modes of social being that 
circulate via particular communicative practices within a given community. Thus, they 
can also reveal how political and policy processes within or affecting that community 
really work. Forms of power and authority impact information dispersal and the gathering 
of opinions about challenging issues. The proposed development of the Fort Macleod 
Police Training College presented all the facets of communication, knowledge-formation, 
and identity-formation that I wanted to explore: modes of political involvement, a 
democratic but also bureaucratic political and informational system, a vision that has 
lured many rural and small-town community in many forms, and an opportunity for 
economic development. I did not set out to look specifically at Fort Macleod and 
surrounding area or at a college, however, this location and the circumstances of the 
Police Training College were a means for my research.  
I aim to deepen my understanding of the way in which residents of Fort Macleod 
and its surrounding rural area conceptualized the process and politics of civic decisions, 
and how that process of understanding might have both drawn on and affected (created 
and re-created) their social identity. I wanted to focus my research lens on a few basic, 
everyday communicative practices at work in a local community engaged in collective 
discussion and decision making – types of communicative action engaged in by people 
responding to established, institutionalized communication processes and communicative 
power. This power was embedded in the definition of normative terms of discussion, and 
in the construction and dissemination of official news and opinion concerning civic 
decision-making processes.  
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My intention here is to test theories and practices of knowledge-production and 
subjective identity-formation in a specific context. The broader context is the 
communicative and decision-making processes that made up a complex set of events 
labeled as the Police Training College bid process. My study looks at the bid proposal 
process and subsequent decisions through the lens of interpersonal communicative and 
reality-construction practices that increasingly struck me as important, despite their 
seemingly minor place and impact within the overall process.  In this case, fewer in-depth 
interviews meant gaining richer descriptions of these small practices and their 
consequences. Nonetheless, some wider lessons may be taken from the specific events 
and processes studied here.  
Research Design 
In this section, I set out the general approach and specific research methods used 
during this project to explain how the process of data gathering and analysis (Lynn 
Butler-Kisber, 2010) can work within non-positivist parameters, where “data” are no 
longer seen as objectively-existing or universal, but as co-constructed and local. I indicate 
what I initially wanted to learn from the materials I gathered, and how the research 
process itself came to shape my questions. Specifically, I outline (1) the research ethics 
that informed my work, (2) the focus of the research (3) my choices of and process of 
finding documentary material and interviewees, (4) what criteria I used to select 
interviewees, (5) the kinds of questions I used in interviews and the objectives that 
shaped them, (6) my successes and failures in my search for interviewees (7) how the 
interview process affected my orientation to the project; and (8) how I analyzed and 
interpreted the interview transcripts and other documents in terms of my dialogue with 
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interviewees and my developing awareness of my own subject-position and social 
location as a researcher and a local neighbour. The outcomes of these processes and my 
own responses to them will inform the analysis in Chapter Five.  
Ethical Review 
 An Application for Ethical Review of Human Subject Research, along with a 
copy of a consent form (see Appendix A), an Interview Guide which includes a short 
chronicle of the events that I focus on and a list of questions for the interviewees (see 
Appendix B), and an introduction to the project, was submitted to and approved by the 
University of Lethbridge Human Subject Research Committee. All interviewees were 
sent a copy of the consent form prior to the interview; however, I also read the consent 
form to them before they signed it. They were made aware of their right to informed 
consent with respect to participation in the project and my use of interview material, and 
were provided with a list of agencies/organizations that could provide free counselling in 
case they were inadvertently traumatized or disturbed by any questions or conversation in 
the interview. The short chronicle of the events began in 2004 when the Alberta 
Provincial Government announced construction of an Alberta Safety and Law 
Enforcement Training Center and ending with the cancellation of the Fort Macleod Police 
College construction in 2012. This was provided to assist interviewees in refreshing their 
memories of the events we would be discussing. 
Prior to each interview, I asked participants for permission to audio record the 
interview and to take notes during the interview. They were also given the choice to use 
their name or choose a pseudonym. Two chose to use a pseudonym and one used her real 
63 
 
 
 
 
name. The interviews were held in public spaces; two at the Fort Macleod Public Library 
and one at my place of employment. 
These are all now standard procedures in the conduct of research with human 
subjects as defined by the Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct of Research 
involving humans (TCPS2, 2014). However, the description of this research project in the 
ethics application reflected an earlier stage in my work, and the way in which I used 
interview materials raised new ethical issues. I no longer saw the interviews in a 
positivistic light as sources of informational data on “communication mechanisms” but as 
a dialogical process of mutual identification and meaning-creation, and as parts of an 
ongoing process of subject-formation. This meant focusing in the analysis more on the 
construction of self and identity and the discursive practices by which interviewee and 
interviewer addressed this. In the end, I decided that this did not entail revealing or 
divulging more “personal information” than would have been the case had I stuck strictly 
to the purposes of the original ethics application, and interviewees still had full rights to 
review any use I made of interview material relating to them. Nonetheless, I raised this 
potential issue with my supervisor.   
Focus of Research 
This research project focuses on three interviews, their interview transcripts, and 
electronic public news articles and government documents. I was specifically aiming to 
understand the production and reproduction of interpersonal communication practices 
and discursive meaning-making that surfaced in the interviews, and how these issues 
related to civic discussion of the bid process and perceptions of what it meant to be a 
member of a rural or local community going through such a process. I was the only 
64 
 
 
 
 
interviewer and transcriber and therefore was able to capture statements that really stood 
out for me. The methods I employed to capture these and other items of interest are 
detailed in another section of this chapter.  
The following are examples of topics that, while significant to a project focusing 
on interpersonal communication in rural communities, already have an extensive 
literature and do not form part of my central focus: 
 The development and use of new communications technologies 
 The historical relationship between First Nations and Northwest Mounted Police 
in Fort Macleod 
 The establishment of powerful agricultural and women’s political movements  
 The establishment of a strong and vibrant religious community in rural southern 
Alberta. 
These were useful for me to explore for context, but I refer to them only where they are 
directly relevant to my own specific focus. 
Documentary Resources 
From publicly available online records, I gathered relevant secondary text 
documents from Hansard, the electronic record of Legislative Assembly of Alberta, 
focusing on discussions relating to the Alberta Public Safety and Law Enforcement 
Training Center, Alberta Police and Peace Officer Training Centre, and the Fort Macleod 
Police College. These three are all names used by Alberta Government at various stages 
in their endeavor to build a one-shop police training facility in Alberta as described in 
Chapter One. These electronic records were used to provide context, chronological time 
lines and verification of dates, places, story lines, and decisions regarding the Police 
Training College.  
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I also accessed newspapers electronically, surveying relevant news articles from 
the local newspaper, the Macleod Gazette, and other area newspapers such as the Pincher 
Creek Echo, Crowsnest Pass Herald, and the Lethbridge Herald. I also looked at 
newspaper articles from the two major Alberta city newspapers, the Calgary Herald and 
the Edmonton Journal. I ended up selecting most of my news coverage from the Macleod 
Gazette because there was a significant overlap in news coverage concerning the Police 
Training College venture in all of these newspapers. The exceptions were four news 
articles: two from the Calgary Herald (Fekete, 2010; Williamson, 2006),  one  from CBC 
News, and one from CTV News Edmonton (Hoang, 2012) as these stories were different 
from the others in representing the perspective of the Calgary Police Service and the 
Calgary and Edmonton Police Associations who were not in favour of a centralized 
Police College in Alberta and not in favour of a Police Training College to be built in 
Fort Macleod. The Macleod Gazette conducted an extraordinary chronological coverage 
of all key events and decisions made in relation to the Fort Macleod Police Training 
College venture. The newspaper articles provided information that I used to cross-
reference for time, dates, decision makers, and pertinent events. They also provided some 
descriptions of the experiences of individuals who were involved in the Police College 
proposal bid process and subsequent cancellation. Importantly, the Macleod Gazette 
articles also reflected the anticipation, by the bid leadership, of an economic boom for the 
town and local area. These articles thus also provided examples of rhetorical features and 
narrative tropes used to construct and defend a pro-bid discourse. 
I used text transcribed from interviews as a basis for discussion of a first-person, 
experiential dimension to this study: how these community members actively made sense 
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of and constructed not only a sense of the bid process up to and including the 
cancellation, but also of their own orientation to it, and their agency and identity in 
relation to it. As well, interviewees were also participating in a social process – the 
interviewing itself. These transcripts were used to supplement the documentary record, 
test questions I brought forward, and probe some of the more informal and interactive 
communication practices that local people might have used to discuss and clarify the 
topic for themselves. The interview transcripts provided me with insight into the richness 
of detail presenting interviewees’ perspectives and sense-making processes, and the 
values they placed on living as individuals and community members in a small-town and 
rural area.  
Criteria for Interviewee Selection 
I originally decided that interview recruits must be residents of the town of Fort 
Macleod or of rural areas surrounding it during the time of the Police College proposal 
and its cancellation (specifically, 2004 to 2012) I did not identify the rural areas in terms 
of a mileage range, but instead in terms of what I might call a “view-shed” or “concern-
shed” (drawing on the analogy of a watershed), an area in which attention to public issues 
could be said to flow toward the town as a kind of symbolic or practical centre, even if 
those paying attention were not Fort Macleod ratepayers. Interview recruits also must 
have participated in some way in relevant municipal discussions or consultations and/or 
the information sessions. Potential recruits included citizens of the town; members of the 
Town Council; those opposed to and those advocating for the Police Training College; 
owners and/or employees of local businesses; students of Lethbridge College who took 
classes at the local campus during the time the proposal for the Police Training College 
67 
 
 
 
 
was active; and individuals who lived on farms/ranches outside but near to the town at 
the time. My goal was also to interview at least one First Nations person who fit the 
above criteria. I did not rank these criteria in any particular order; in other words: I did 
not give preference to any of the potential recruit categories indicated above.  
The categories that I developed were intended primarily to obtain a reasonable 
cross-section of residents with an interest in and knowledge of the Police College venture 
and living in the town of Fort Macleod or surrounding rural area. My hope was to 
interview residents who had a range of communicative experiences relating to and 
perspectives on the Police Training College. I wanted to understand how small-town and 
country folk with various socio-economic statuses, political opinions, and historical ties 
to southern Alberta made sense of the Police Training College proposal and its outcome.  
Interview Tool 
I used a semi-structured qualitative interview format, and created an interview 
guide consisting of eight main questions with some sub-questions having prompts or 
comments. The objective of the questions and prompts was to probe for a sense, in the 
interviewee’s own words, of how the events of the bid proposal process were discussed; 
and to get an idea of the discussions and decision-making processes in which they 
participated and how they participated in them. As I undertook the interviews, I 
considered their experiential perspective on the proposal process or communication 
relating to it; the way they constructed a meaningful sense of knowledgeability or truth 
concerning it; how they constructed a meaningful narrative of its events and 
development; and how they constructed and interpreted their life worlds and identities in 
relation to it.  
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The interviews provided me with insight into individual citizens’ communicative 
practices as social practices, and the definitions, assumptions, knowledge, and values 
concerning the values and interests they associated with rurality, locality, and community 
and that they brought to their experience and involvement. Their construction of events 
helped me understand both their participation in communication and decision-making 
concerning the community issue in question and also my own, and how they constructed 
themselves as agents or observers, engaged or detached, in relation to that issue.   
In Search of Interviewees  
Kvale and Brinkman (2009) state that the number of interviews in a qualitative 
research project depends on the purpose of the research project. They advise to interview 
to the point of saturation where no new information is likely to be gained by further 
interviews. I believed initially that a number between nine and 15 interviewees might be 
a good range to reach a saturation point and gain a reasonable understanding of 
communicative practices at work within a small rural community among those actively 
involved in civic decision-making. Originally, I envisioned interviewing at least 12 
individuals. I also imagined a that variety of opinions, perspectives, and world-views 
would surface in that number of interviews.  
Unfortunately, I was naïve about the practicalities of finding willing interviewees 
and having them commit to interviews. I found the task of recruiting interviewees and the 
experience of being refused, actively or passively, to be quite daunting, dejecting, and 
somewhat unnerving. Again, I wondered if this barrier, like the passive refusal by town 
officials to supply me with documents, was also an opportunity for reflection and 
analysis. My self-reflection questions became: How was I conceiving of my “task”? Did 
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it appear to me as “difficult” not only because of the lack of response I met, but also 
because I might have perceived my requests as intrusive? If so, were my perceptions, and 
the lack of response I received, possibly both indicative of a particular quality of reserve 
in rural or small-town sociality? If so, why might that be? My search for participants 
began with searching newspaper articles for names of people who had been involved in 
the Police Training College proposal. I searched and followed up names occurring in 
social media posts and the town and county of Fort Macleod websites, starting from the 
names of individuals mentioned in news outlets and eventually also including people 
involved in relevant public social media groups.  
In the end, however, I succeeded in recruiting and interviewing only three people. 
This small interview sample generated a shift in my thinking regarding not only the focus 
of my research but also my position as a researcher. Rather than focusing on the 
mechanisms and characteristics of interpersonal communication within a rural 
community engaged in civic-decision making, I shifted my focus to the practices of 
interpersonal communication and of identity-formation as employed by the individual 
interviewees to construct a meaningful perspective, a sense of agency, and a world view, 
as well as particular interpretations of the civic-decision making process they experienced 
with the Fort Macleod Police Training College venture. My supervisor encouraged me to 
consider my own positioning in relation both to my interviewees and to the police college 
bid process as (1) an Indigenous person, (2) a resident of the surrounding rural area of 
Fort Macleod, and (3) someone aware of the bid process and the debates and decisions 
surrounding it. In short, he suggested that I treat this project not simply as a process of 
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gaining information about others’ attitudes, communicative practices, and sense-making, 
but also as a process of socially-located self and mutual understanding.  
Furthermore, the whole interviewing procedure triggered unanticipated thought 
processes/deliberation/reflection for me. As I read, listened, and discussed the events of 
the Fort Macleod venture, I became aware of how I compared and contrasted the 
information coming to me; of what I was learning, including my own participation in 
discourse; my own process of reality-construction, and my own subject-formation as an 
individual citizen, rural resident, and community member. In other words, I began to see 
myself as if I were an interviewee and as a participant in dialogue. It was during this 
process that I became more aware of how my own thoughts, values, beliefs, my own prior 
formation as an individual of a rural community, and my own social location, had 
‘filtered’ my perception of the interviewees, their responses to my questions and to the 
Fort Macleod police college venture.  
I came to reconsider this project as one in which I would gain further insight into 
my own life-world and location in relation to local civic issues. This also impacted my 
approach to the public documentation of the issue. Instead of mining that documentation 
for information or simply using it to cross-reference dates and events, I began to explore 
how it contributed to the discursive formation of a topic, a set of issues, and a process of 
legitimation. I also began to consider my own response to the Police College venture: 
how I as a First Nations member, an academic, a researcher, and a local rural resident, 
engaged in processes of communication, self-making, and community-making. 
The Interview Process 
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On the positive side, for this new purpose, the interviewees turned out to be an 
excellent source of insight. They provided indispensable and diverse perspectives and 
communicative styles. Their transcripts were by far the most interesting text documents I 
used. I found myself deeply reflecting on their perspectives and world-views which in 
some instances I though were quite profound (I elaborate on these in Chapters Five and 
Six). The interviews changed the manner in which I approached the analysis of their 
“speech” as they responded to me in the social process of an interview. I began to see 
how communicative practices entrenched perceptions as the interviewees recreated their 
lives and their relationships within and to the small-town and rural area of Fort Macleod. 
This entrenchment and these practices were specific, located, and interactive. 
Nonetheless, they were part of a repertoire of practices, used selectively but part of a 
shared, common set of communicative resources, commitments, and grounds of speech.   
I listened for narratives about how events unfolded from the perspective of the 
interview participants, to hear and understand the participants’ ways of constructing 
reality; making events part of a meaningful sequence. I listened in particular for the 
communicative dimension of this work; how participants communicated (or refrained 
from communicating) about issues related to civic decision-making; how in the process 
they constructed a sense of location, agency, and identity as rural or small-town residents, 
and how they made sense of the issue and of their own communicative participation in it. 
The kind of communication I was interested in included not just their consumption of 
news or other public documentation, or their participation in public meetings, but also 
their participation in informal and inter-personal talk among residents, in back-and-forth 
discussions regarding the initiative and its eventual cancellation, how they perceived 
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what was happening in the discussions, how they framed themselves in relation to the 
civic-decision making process, and how they constructed and reconstructed its realities. 
This entailed finding out what documentation was available to them, how they saw 
information and opinion being conveyed to them, how and with whom they interpreted 
and critiqued that information and opinion, and from what perspective they did so. 
Engaging in dialogue directly with resident interviewees helped me to gain a 
sense of how they, and I, and potentially others living in small-towns and rural areas 
communicate in relation to official decision-making, and how they make sense not only 
of the statements presented to them but also of their own position and agency in relation 
to a particular civic issue. Interviewees described their own perceptions of the decision-
making and informational processes surrounding the Police Training College initiative.  
Approach to Analysis 
In this section I describe the process of analysis I developed with respect to the 
documentation gathered and the interview material. The outcomes and results of that 
analysis are presented in the Chapter Five, which also includes my self-reflections 
concerning my own participation in the interviews and my engagement with the issues 
raised by the Police Training College bid. To begin, I employed relevant categories from 
the communications and social theory discussed in the following chapter (e.g., power, 
control, legitimation, who gets to speak and how speakers were defined, what forms of 
communication were used by the bid leadership: the town mayor and councillors, the 
economic development coordinator, the newspaper editor, etcetera). As my project 
evolved, I began to discover my own perspectives arising from engaging with interview 
and documentary material, and from my own status and lived experience as an 
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Indigenous person and as a member of a neighbouring rural community who was aware 
of the Police Training College venture. This means that the theories discussed in this 
thesis were not simply applied to the research process but were also questioned in relation 
to that application. With respect to the interviews, my intention came to be a better 
understanding both of the interviewees’ life worlds and of my own; to better understand 
through my questions and their responses how interpersonal communication in a small-
town and surrounding rural area works for them – and for me – in constructing our 
perspectives in relation to issues that concern us. 
My strategy was to re-visit the three interviews, which ranged from 18 to 24 
minutes, by re-listening to the recordings and re-reading the transcript texts, interview 
notes, and other documents I had gathered through the lens of these revised research 
imperatives, applying the approach developed in the first section of this chapter with a 
particular emphasis on reflexivity. My observations and analyses reflect my own use, 
synthesis, and modification of the theories laid out in this chapter, drawing on readings 
discussed in Chapters Two and Four, my interaction with interviewees, and my own 
situation as a rural resident living in close proximity to the small-town of Fort Macleod. 
 The general questions I asked of the texts, documents, and transcribed interviews 
specifically in relation to the Fort Macleod Police Training College initiative included the 
following: 
What are some ways in which the organization of communication about public 
issues in rural communities, as indicated in this case, might be related to features 
of the social structure and the terms of life in common in a small Southern Alberta 
74 
 
 
 
 
rural community as it dealt with civic decision-making that required debate, 
leadership, and action? 
How might communication about and reflection on such issues not only reflect 
features of social structure and terms of community but also help reproduce or 
modify them?  
How and in what ways did such communication construct particular models of 
community or of civic agency? 
Was there evidence of equal or unequal dissemination of information, or of 
people feeling that they were equally or unequally heard? Was there any evidence 
of ways in which the ideas of some individuals or groups might have been 
delegitimized – marginalized or held in lower esteem than those of others? How 
was the potential of de-legitimation responded to? 
What appeared (and to whom) from the public documents, and/or to the interview 
participants, to be the driving forces at work in the creation of a public discussion 
and decision-making process?  
During the interview process, I formed first impressions about which I made notes 
following the interview. This initial work already involved interpretation (why something 
“stood out” for me; how I judged speech to be “negative” or “positive”), and thus 
generated immediately a need to be reflexive in my analysis. In preparing to analyze the 
interview transcripts, I did a first run-through of the audio recordings and of the 
reviewing notes written at the end of each interview. The audio recordings captured tone 
of voice and emphasis which added to the meaning of the words said, especially given 
that they were said in an interactional setting. The notes recorded my initial impressions 
75 
 
 
 
 
and observations of interviewee actions and perceived attitudes. Statements made during 
interviews that referred to particular events were cross-referenced with publicly-available 
dates (when available) for the purposes of clarity and of historical context – and also to 
note if and where an interviewee’s experience of time might have differed from the 
“official time” of public communications. 
Re-reading textual documents, interview notes, theoretical writing, and other 
resource materials, along with listening and re-listening to interview recordings in the 
process of categorizing and re-categorizing allowed me to clarify my thoughts, re-
examine my application of theory, generate new ideas, or disagree with my initial 
categorizations. I monitored how the text and interview recordings resonated with me, 
and questioned myself as to why or how they resonated with me.  
I sought to contextualize the communicative practices, looking at how 
interviewees picked up on and used narrative and rhetorical forms available in the wider 
political discourse, as represented in news and other public documents and speech. In 
analyzing the interview transcripts as examples of discourse, I looked for emphases and 
word choices in utterances; links between and organization of statements (affirmations, 
denials, expressions of hesitancy or uncertainty), and other evidence that showed how the 
interviewees produced and reproduced meaningful narratives of the bid process and its 
aftermath, and of themselves as agents. I also focused more on how the interviewees 
constructed statements that furnished them with a meaningful life-world: a life-world 
composed of meaningful objects and a meaningful sense of civic selfhood and agency; a 
life-world that also carried emotional weight. Subsequently, I listened to the interviewee 
audio recordings and reread the transcripts at least half a dozen times searching to 
76 
 
 
 
 
identify words, statements, or ways of speaking that were prominent or occluded, unique 
or common, expected or anomalous. 
Campbell et al. (2013) argue that the main focus in interviews is to look for 
overarching or general patterns and themes deriving directly from the interviewee’s 
reality, and thus I was also mindful of how interviewee responses might indicate or draw 
on discourses that helped in interpreting and understanding the particular construction of 
a meaningful community of concern in Fort Macleod and its surrounding rural view-shed 
during the Police Training College venture – and to what extent that community of 
concern drew on wider discourses of community or rurality.   
Self-Critical Appraisal 
Stake (2010) states that qualitative researchers seek to understand and explain 
how things work and how people experience phenomena (p. 20).  In other words, they 
seek to understand situations and happenings through a personal, subjective lens; 
understanding the participants’ worldviews and perspectives. However, the personal and 
subjective is not easily separable from the social and interactional – or structural. In this 
research, I aimed to understand the personal and interpersonal dimensions of human life 
to be real not only phenomenological but socially, to see them not as a discoverable 
essence “inside” human individuals or groups, but as effects of the discursive practices 
by which we make sense together and as having consequences for our actions in relation 
to each other. Research findings or stories told to a researcher help us (researcher and 
participants both) to “understand the history or the problem or seeking to change the 
policy” (Stake, 2010, p. 25).  
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Stake (2010) reminds us that simply analyzing the information or data worked up 
from the research guarantees neither a solution to the problems nor a resolution to the 
issues, nor can it give an objective picture of them. The documentation I analyzed, and 
the interview transcripts contain “the issue” only as it was constructed in particular 
communicative practices, by particular agents, and in particular settings. Stake (2010) 
goes on to assert that it is also the researcher’s interpretation of the data and information 
that persuades and prioritizes one meaning over another. Thus, I do not stand outside the 
meaning-making process I describe; I am part of it. In this case study of the Fort Macleod 
Police Training College venture, it is my task as a researcher to understand both how 
interview participants and document creators produced knowledge and opinions, and also 
how I myself did so; how the participants as witnesses to the events of the Police 
Training College venture produced a sense of themselves as agents who might have or 
could have affected the process, and how I produced a sense of myself as at once a 
dialogue partner and co-resident, an Indigenous local resident (thereby both on the inside 
and the outside of the debate), and as a researcher, through an active process of 
reorganization and interpretation of the materials I studied.  
Arlene Stein (2010) provides a narrative that serves to remind us of how the best-
intentioned research can be undermined and go astray. She warns that small-town (and 
rural) communities can react negatively to research done in their territory. Therefore, 
researchers must tread carefully, respect those they write about, and reflect carefully on 
what their research does and does not allow them to say. As a researcher, I am limited by 
my own world-view; however, listening intently to understand the perspective of the 
78 
 
 
 
 
participant in the process of making meaning can help me both understand and respect 
the others I encounter in my research. 
As a somewhat-failed recruiter of interviewees and disappointed non-receiver of 
documents, I must also ask if these “failures” reflected something about how information 
is managed by small-town agencies, and if it reflected also something about how small-
town residents maintain control of their words and exercise caution when speaking about 
the fabric of the local community and their standing within it. Further, I must also 
consider if this reflected something uniquely rural about the definition and handling of 
controversy. These are questions that I examine more closely in later chapters. 
Conclusion 
As mentioned earlier, I originally thought this research project would be a 
relatively positivistic straightforward journey. The study and application of academic 
methods turned out to be contextualizing my experience as an academic researcher: what 
stood out for me, where my decisions came from, and how I understood the process of 
applying a social science research method.  
The perspective from which I view research is founded on my social location as a 
First Nation woman living in Fort Macleod’s neighbouring rural area, which is not my 
own community but where I frequently shop and do business. My worldview is how I see 
and act as a social agent in the research process, which includes how I formulate my 
reality of the project, what I consider to be valuable information, and what I consider to 
be knowledge. Further to this is the realization that interviewees and I come from 
multiple ways of thinking about the Police Training College and how we created and 
recreated our agency in the interviewing process.  
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The critical questions raised through the journey of defining my research 
direction, the application of academic methods, and attention to the interviewees’ lived 
experience have all helped me to better understand how knowledge is constructed and 
reported. It has opened a new window from which to view and act within society. It has 
provided a new opportunity from which to perceive and participate in society. Next n 
Chapter Four I explore ways of viewing power, agency, and legitimacy as they relate to 
civic action, discursive practices, and their institutionalization in relation to small-town 
and rural communities. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER 4: POWER AND REPRESENTATION IN SMALL-TOWN POLITICS 
In this chapter, I situate the specific focus of this thesis in a broader context: how 
to understand the social structure of power, politics, and discourse practices in the small-
town setting of Fort Macleod and surrounding rural area governed by relations of 
dependency between local, provincial, and national organizations. One focal point for this 
thesis is the intersection of knowledge construction subject-formation and power in the 
ordinary communication practices of town and rural residents as they were re-deployed in 
an extraordinary time. Here is where the townspeople exhibit but also produce their 
nature as individuals and as members of a particular community. The time period I focus 
on is between 2004 and 2012 during a civic development venture whereby a Police 
Training College was promised, counted on, and then revoked.  
This thesis draws upon a variety of theoretical resources, including Marxist and 
Weberian theory, the institutional ethnography of Dorothy Smith, and Foucault’s 
understanding of power and control. My approach was also shaped by the communication 
theory of Stuart Hall. Throughout the chapter I indicate by what means these theoretical 
approaches assisted me in understanding how an issue evolves through the practical 
sense-making of community members, back and forth from public announcements to 
private conversations, to public discussions and eventually to civic decisions and 
dissensions.  
This opportunity came at a time when Fort Macleod and the surrounding rural 
area was experiencing an economic low. Chamber of commerce president, Emily 
McTighe, was quoted as saying, “This is exactly the economic boost Fort Macleod needs 
right now. The development of this college is going to “bring economic spinoff to the 
81 
 
 
 
 
town,” attract an “influx of businesses in the service industry” and “build huge investor 
confidence in Fort Macleod and southern Alberta” (Gazette Contributor, 2006a). Fort 
Macleod could expect 1,500 trainees per year creating 75 – 100 jobs in the community 
(McTighe, 2006c). These comments link the Police Training College to economic 
aspirations: the fact that a law enforcement training facility was being proposed was 
secondary; both promotion of the project and much of the public sentiment toward it was 
focused on possible economic benefits. On the other hand, the Fort Macleod Police 
Training College proposal also created rumblings of dissension in this small-town and its 
surrounding rural area that related to the proposal itself, to established modes of 
communication and civic decision-making, to the structures supporting them, and to 
taken-for-granted notions of community as collectives and as part of personal identity.  
Here I explain “community”. What makes a community a community is framed 
by Tönnies (Bonner, 1997) and Sim (1988): a community must share some mixture of 
shared interests and/or values, shared experiences, shared social and/or geographical 
location, shared feeling, and a shared identity. However, these don't need to all be shared 
all the time. But I would argue that with today’s technology allowing increased mobility, 
a community need not be total, all-enveloping, unchanging, continuous or permanent: 
each of us today can belong to, join or leave several communities of varying personal 
importance, in person or virtually. The interviewees who were all residents of Fort 
Macleod or its surrounding rural catchment area, had varying degrees of commitment to 
the local community. Their definitions and perceptions of what a community is and of 
their own places in it, also varied. To be “rural” is not to be identical. 
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The bid was promoted as something undertaken for the good not only of the town 
of Fort Macleod itself but also the surrounding rural area, and people outside the town 
(including me) took an interest in it. People outside the town proper shared both values 
and interests with town residents and understood their relation to provincial centres of 
power which also positioned them in a manner similar to town residents. These people 
did not all agree with how the bid process was conducted and whether its intended 
outcome would be good for the community. However, I would argue that another 
definition of community applies here; one developed by C. James Mackenzie in response 
to complex and clashing identities in the communities he studied (2016): community 
involves a shared sense of what to fight about (with each other). That is, people can also 
be bound together by their differences over issues they face in common. 
Power Relations in Political Structures 
In the tradition of historical-materialist analysis developed by Karl Marx 
(1932/1845), it is proposed that societies are organized institutionally, politically, and 
culturally in terms of a particular mode of production, accumulation, and exchange. In the 
Preface of his 1859 writings, Marx stated: 
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are 
indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which 
correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. 
The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure 
of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure 
and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. 
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However, Marx also argued that economic production itself is shaped by 
particular social relations of ownership and work which in turn affect other social 
relations such as family, community networks, class sectors, etcetera. The particular 
practical organization of economic activities in and around Fort Macleod at the time of 
the Police College announcement framed the political and social life of the town and the 
consciousness of its residents. Further to this, Dorothy E. Smith (2004) and Michel 
Foucault (Ramp, 1999, pp. 74-76) have emphasized an often-forgotten but key point 
made by Marx: that economic power, like other forms of power, is practically produced 
in everyday speech and action.  
If, according to Marx (1845), social structure is the practical relationships that 
make up the course of production and exchange in a given era, then the social structure of 
the small-town of Fort Macleod and its neighbouring rural area is produced through the 
everyday practices and relationships of town and country people. These define, affect, 
and continually re-establish the communication networks and power mechanisms 
currently in place. In turn, they are shaped by relations and practices extending beyond 
the local to and from larger centres of economic and political power in what could be 
called a form of urban imperialism.  
As noted in the previous chapter, Marx characterized capitalism as predominantly 
urban-centric; its history is one of growing economic concentration which leads to 
centralization of political power and administration. This means that the autonomy of 
rural and small-town municipal governments has been limited in relation to provincial 
and national jurisdictions. Similarly, economic activity in rural areas is often dependent 
on national and international markets. Further, rural residents no longer depend solely on 
84 
 
 
 
 
a small-town newspaper or local connections for information. While electronic access in 
rural areas still leaves much to be desired, residents are generally familiar with broader 
news, public affairs, and cultural discourses, mostly relayed through mass and social 
media outlets controlled by large public or private corporations.  
These developments mean that rural and small-town people, such as the 
individuals I’ve interviewed for this research project, are aware of their marginalization 
in relation to urban centres; their responses even to local issues are coloured by this 
awareness. Max Weber (1905) argued that to be maintained over time, social and cultural 
power must involve domination by individuals, organizations, or institutions. This is 
aided by authority: an expectation of acquiescence, acceptance, and obedience. Weber 
argued that lasting authority entails legitimation: legitimate authority is seen to exist by 
right.  If, as Marx said, power is increasingly concentrated in large-scale organizations, 
one might expect that local, small-scale organizations would be de-legitimated. But this is 
not the case. On one hand, local agencies act as contact points for larger institutions: the 
local clinic to the health care system; the local school to the provincial educational 
system, the First Nation reserve to the Federal government, and so on. Local people 
develop client relations with these agencies; thereby re-establishing that the power of 
large-scale urban-centric organizations and institutions is both exercised by and mediated 
by these local agencies. 
Mediation, power, and politics flow two ways, even if the flow is unequal. 
Municipal governments and local organizations serve as vehicles through which rural 
residents can exert limited influence over larger organizations. Weber (1947) argues that 
social life in complex societies always involves struggles for power, influence, and the 
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terms of legitimation. Power struggles, he says, may be motivated by economic, cultural, 
or political interest such as motivation to gain some advantage, or to resist some 
disadvantage. However, they may also be motivated by a clash of values; by a shared 
ethical orientation; a sense of non-negotiable principles (Weber, 1905).  
Typically, relations between rural communities and urban centres of power are 
managed by specific organizations which mediate between local and provincial, national, 
or international levels of political or economic organization. Those who manage or 
govern such organizations locally can use the knowledge they gain from such mediating 
activities to an advantage. For example, a local store, business manager, or bank manager 
may not only have a certain limited amount of local economic influence, but also 
valuable knowledge. They may come to know a large number of local people while at the 
same time connected to people in higher levels in nearby urban centres. This may also 
give them local social prestige that they can leverage in local clubs, churches, or 
municipal politics. Individuals with social prestige and economic or political advantage 
can use both to influence local affairs. In this case the 11 people, including Mayor Shawn 
Patience, who were part of the “task force struck by town council” commissioned to 
“finalize the comprehensive bid package that will accompany its response to the 
provincial government’s request for proposals” might be considered to be in these 
controlling positions (McTighe, 2005b).  
Local “mediating” organizations can become sites of power struggles or tensions 
between those in local centres and in surrounding areas. The local residents who claim 
the positions of authority in local organizations often play a double role in seeking 
opportunities for their communities or communicating local grievances while 
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legitimating forms of authority governing rural communities. They often become 
“boosters” publicly involved in a sense of collective identity and local pride, by hosting, 
funding, or participating in local events. Through their links to larger organizations, they 
also legitimize institutions. The local Member of Parliament will tour schools to promote 
the importance of voting. A local mayor will stress that the municipality’s economic 
requests fit a provincial government’s funding policies. Local business owners will shape 
an area’s economic future to align with large corporations. They legitimate a discourse in 
which the well-being of the local community is tied to its ability to attract attention and 
funding from large-scale economic and political organizations and initiatives. To do this, 
they must find a way to make the local community’s dependency on such organizations 
appear natural and non-controversial.  
This is not always easy. First, rural Alberta supports a widespread suspicion of 
government, urban institutions, and bureaucracy, and an equally widespread embrace of 
self-reliance and local resilience. Second, many rural communities have bitter 
experiences of large corporations, especially in the resource sector, and provincial and 
national governments. Thus, “legitimate authority” cannot simply be imposed by the 
locally-powerful or prominent. It must constantly be managed, protected, and re-phrased 
to fit the circumstances and critics of the moment.      
Networks of Power in Relationships and Subject Formation  
As noted above, Weber (1947) viewed modern society as composed of different 
groups and interests competing for power and resources, arguing that various aspects of 
our social world can be explained by looking at how particular individuals or groups 
benefit from a particular social arrangement of power, or use bureaucratic or party power 
87 
 
 
 
 
to advance particular sets of interests. Residents of Fort Macleod and its surrounding 
rural areas were, at varying times, invited to participate in discussion surrounding the 
Police Training College proposal, although, some felt themselves to be excluded from the 
discussions. Their ability to influence that discussion or its terms of legitimacy also 
differed.  
According to Mills (2004), Foucault argues that power clearly “circulates through 
a society” as opposed to being held by one group; it “is not easily contained” but “is more 
a form of action or relation between people which is negotiated in each interaction and is 
never fixed and stable” (pg. 34). Marx (Simon, 1949), on the other hand, would locate 
power in the class that owns and controls the means of production. This form of power is 
a means to “curtail the rights and liberties” of those in less powerful positions. Power is 
commonly seen as exercised by state agents.  
Thus, power has a double operation and is integrated into and dispersed through 
all levels of social life (Mills, 2004, pg. 34). According to both Foucault and Marx, 
despite their differences, power is both practical and relational, and beyond control of 
material things, persons, or groups. Power is also the ability to define terms of reference, 
problems, and solutions, as well as implementation. This often has the effect of 
reproducing or encouraging particular social practices, while restricting others (Mills, 
2004, p. 67), and also reproducing particular kinds of subjectivity. The discourse analysis 
that Foucault pioneered focused on how such practices produce discursive formations 
that appear to be solid and structural and to “have power” in their own right, as 
legitimating and enabling manifestations of large-scale power relations, while shaping 
consciousness and agency at the most intimate levels of social life. He wanted to show 
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how images of power were produced in quite specific ways. Similarly, Foucault (2013) 
argued that power is created and operates within networks of practices that actively form 
and reproduce institutions and discursive formations, but that those practices are shaped 
by the past history and present organization of those institutions and discourses. But as 
Dorothy Smith (2004) points out, Marx (1859) also conceived of power as implemented 
through everyday social relations and the practices that activate and reproduce those 
relations, and in turn are shaped and defined by them. Hence, those practices reproduce 
the relations.  
As Marx (1858) himself pointed out, there is economic disparity between 
hinterland and metropolis. The small-town is not a miniature version of global capitalism; 
it is an effect of capitalist relations which tend to centralize economic power. Further, the 
people or groups dominating small-town politics are not necessarily “owners of capital” 
in the Marxist sense. Marx’s “ruling class / ruling ideas” formulation can help make 
sense of how people and groups with influence in small-town affairs shaped the bid 
process. While Marx is often quoted as saying “the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling 
class,” he also stated that “[t]he ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of 
the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; 
hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of 
its dominance” (Simon, 1992, p. 129). Instead of seeing the ruling class as the source of 
dominant ideas, Marx argues that those ideas in some sense make the ruling class what it 
is, and also make or reinforce the status of the subordinate class. In the German Ideology 
(1968), he placed an emphasis on practice which is similar to Foucault’s notion that 
ideology requires certain socially usable discursive formulas and practices to be 
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omnipresent, through which forms of domination are defined, made manifest, and 
operationalized. This is the way in which Dorothy Smith (2004) reads Marx. We could 
think of “ideology” as a crystallization of particular discourse into a set of linked 
formulas. In turn, these formulas shape and justify, in other words “legitimate” a mode of 
domination by giving meaning to the social relations and practices which produce, 
activate, and reproduce it.  
To come back to the small town, the idea of employment was pervasive in the 
proposal, as were assumptions that jobs would enhance and boost Fort Macleod’s 
economy, that the jobs would go to Fort Macleod residents, and that jobs, business 
spinoffs, and growth of the municipal tax base were priorities for all citizens. Hence, we 
can argue that the people of influence in the bid process were not simply a “ruling class” 
imposing “ruling ideas” that reflected their economic ownership interests on a 
subordinate class. Instead, they were using their relative power as local members of a 
“patron-client” system of awarding contracts and benefits (from centres of power to the 
periphery) to leverage that system. Their “rule” involved steering the bid process in what 
they saw as the right direction, populating it with the right people, and promoting their 
sense of the town and its prospects as representative of the common sense of the town as 
a whole. 
 The specific way in which the employment relation forces its way into the 
consciousness of small-town and rural residents is that diverse job opportunities are 
limited, and employing organizations are often controlled by corporations or 
governments in larger centres. For example, small-town automobile or agricultural-
implements dealerships may be owned by local residents. But the company that makes 
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the cars or implements that the dealership sells is often an international corporation, and 
its decisions about which dealerships to keep or declare redundant are made in company 
headquarters far away from the dealer’s locality. Similarly, ultimate control of the 
outcome of the police college bid process resided in Edmonton with the Provincial 
Cabinet. This means that in rural or small town communities, economic leverage is 
limited and dependent. Those who exercise power in small towns manage the local levers 
of dependency; and a key lever for the past century has been jobs. In addition to jobs, the 
town will grow in population and economic activity, and growth is a good thing by 
capitalist standards. Fort Macleod also has a larger urban neighbour, the city of 
Lethbridge, which provides a wider if more centralized range of goods and services. 
Consequently, the argument that the Police Training College would generate a positive 
economic spinoff for local business struck a chord, especially for those involved in 
promoting those businesses.   
Thus, we can think of the Fort Macleod “ruling class” as composed of people 
positioned socially, and by virtue of their knowledge and economic interests, to represent 
the town as a whole, in a particular way. Local elites play a brokerage role between large 
and remote organizations that act politically as “patrons.” Thus, local elites are the 
“clients” of these large-scale organizations, expected to organize support for initiatives or 
opportunities those organizations may choose to offer (Lemieux and Noël, 2006). The 
political space in which they act is squeezed between the wants, needs and perceptions of 
ordinary local residents and the wider forces that affect the viability of local 
municipalities.  We can see how they may take it as self-evident that representing town 
interests means attracting attention from centres of political and economic power, using 
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forms of solicitation that are defined in those centres (application, criteria, bid process). 
We can also see them as people who consider a primary need of the town and 
surrounding area to be job creation. They would likely see the town through the eyes of 
urban centres of power, and position themselves to represent the town to those centres. 
However, this narrative produced by the local “ruling class” was not shared by all 
residents of Fort Macleod. There were some who held the perspective that the Police 
Training College would not provide a positive culture in the community. Community 
culture was more important for some residents who were outside the local leadership 
class – and also for some within it. 
In representing their town to provincial officials in charge of the bid process, and 
in representing the terms of that process to their fellow citizens, those interested and 
influential on the local side of the bid process (e.g. in choosing members of the bid 
committee and guiding their deliberations) would come to see themselves as 
representative of the town. This “ruling class,” if we can call it that, would also tend to 
represent the town’s interests in terms of jobs and growth, and be interested in increasing 
employment regardless of the specific effect of the police college on social relationships 
defining their small town. On a micro-level this representation can be observed in the 
interviewee responses. The local newspaper contributed greatly to this idea of prioritizing 
jobs and the prospect of increased spinoff economic activity made the idea of bringing in 
the Police Training College seem an even more natural fit. 
Hegemonic Discourse and Social Agency 
Discourse (Mills, 2004) is a conglomeration of speech and writing practices that 
serves to form and produce the subjectivity of its users. Mills (2004) contends that as we 
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practice, produce, and interpret particular forms of speech and written texts, we 
constantly become who we are as we speak and write ourselves into being. She explains 
that the process of producing meaningful statements is so rooted and fixed in our day-to-
day lives that it is difficult to notice or realize that this process of subject-formation is 
happening – it becomes almost unnoticeable.  
Further, Stuart Hall (1992, p. 275) defined discourse as a system of representation 
with embedded rules for speech practices, producing meaningful statements and 
regulating what can be said in a given historical period. For Hall, discourse takes shape as 
“related statements that work together to provide a ‘language’ as a way of representing a 
particular kind of knowledge about a topic” (2007, p. 201). In other words, discourse is 
the activity of producing and grouping statements that provide a way of talking about – a 
way of representing knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular time: discourse 
involves the production of knowledge through the practical employment of language. All 
social practices entail meaning, and meanings shape and influence our conduct. All 
practices have a discursive aspect; language and practice are intertwined. In his 
description of rules that serve to regulate discourse, Hall (1992) indicates that because 
discursive rules are inherent and emergent, they are also constantly subject to 
reinforcement or change. If it seems that only certain people within a particular structure 
are allowed to speak on a specific subject or topic, it is because their position and status 
as speakers is produced by complex discursive and institutional practices within which 
they are defined and from which they speak (p. 224; see also Foucault, 1980).  
Hall (1992) relates this approach to discourse to the historical construction of the 
“West;” how western discourse categorizes non-western societies and cultures in a 
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particular way as Othered and different. Typically, the category of Others is not internally 
differentiated: all are classified with the same brush; for example, in the way settler 
discourse erases distinctions between Indigenous nations. This is similar to a point made 
by Elizabeth Povinelli (Povinelli, 2005; DiFruscia and Povinelli, 2012) about “liberal 
subjectivity” as a way of framing settler identity in terms of the “universal human” in a 
way that renders Others (for example, rural communities and Indigenous people) as 
particular, traditional, and pre-modern. The official declarations of support for the Police 
Training College bid employed similar constructions to generalize about “the town” as a 
whole and its “people,” treating dissent as outside the norms of rational reasoning and a 
progressive outlook.  
In the process, that dissent could itself be generalized as a kind of chronic 
negativity which – like “tradition” – never changes. The interviewees who considered 
themselves “dissenters” recognized their social place and the potential for being defined 
as chronic nay-sayers, and made decisions to engage or not engage in public discussions 
accordingly. The political, legal and personal culture that Povinelli (2005) calls settler 
liberalism treats law as something generally or ideally objective and reliable, and policing 
as a trustworthy institution; a “service.” In the face of this liberal discourse, those 
suspicious of policing or of the attitudes of police, can easily be Othered. Further to this 
Goffman (1967) states that as an “aspect of the social code of any social circle” 
individuals must be cognizant and be in line with a particular “expressive order” to 
maintain a level of self-respect in events large or small (p. 9). In our conversations, the 
interviewees and I expressed mutual care not to offend each other and took care to avoid 
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conflict. Although this is a feature of interaction particularly evident between rural 
people, Goffman treats it as also a general feature of everyday social interaction.  
The Proposal Process 
Typically, in civic planning and development, the local political officials and 
municipal administration begin with an idea and produce a formal written document – 
usually a proposal which is submitted to a government or corporation. Power relations are 
built into local political (municipal) politics and economies, reflecting both local 
divisions and dependent relations with larger centres of power. Such realities typically 
entail efforts by municipal and local government staff and politicians to research, discus, 
gather input, and seek buy-in from various stakeholders including local businesses, 
citizens, and interest groups such as local chambers of commerce, business improvement 
associations, and surrounding communities. The term “buy-in” has clear economic 
associations, but also clearly ties to what Weber (1905) would call the process of 
establishing legitimation: generating support for the bid and ensuring that what underlies 
a bid process (structures and processes of local power and influence, and the composition 
of the bid committee), were not seen as objectionable. Each step of developing such a 
proposal involves the careful fostering and adjustment of a discourse of needs, wants, 
opportunities, and constraints which require discourse for motivational statements about 
opportunity while reinforcing structures of authority governing consultation, and public 
participation.  
When the Mayor and council of Fort Macleod decided to bid for the Alberta 
Public Security and Law Enforcement Training Centre, they entered a client relationship 
with the provincial government, which would decide the winning bid and largely fund the 
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project. Despite being regulated by provincial and federal authorities, the Police Training 
College held the prospect of employment, local economic (business) spinoffs, and an 
increased population with the accompanying expanded municipal tax base. The resulting 
carefully-crafted proposal took into account existing discourses at work in local and 
regional/provincial government, news outlets, civic organizations, and among interested 
citizens and groups. Those who developed and promoted the bid were involved in a 
complex power game governing who got to lead the process; what could and should be 
said or emphasized; what individuals or groups were to be designated (or not) as 
stakeholders, who should be recruited to participate, who should be consulted, and how 
consultation should (be seen to) take place.  
But in promoting the bid, both local boosters and provincial officials referred to 
the social fabric comprised of its social relations, political will, and especially its values 
and lore, as providing a strong foundation for the ensuing social changes. Solicitor 
General Harvey Cenaiko is quoted in the Fort Macleod Gazette online news article as 
saying: “[t]he people of Fort Macleod should be extremely proud of their efforts to put 
together a tremendous proposal. The community’s proud policing history provides a 
strong foundation for a training centre that will serve the needs of Alberta’s law 
enforcement community for years to come” (Gazette Contributor, 2006a, para. 2). Here 
we see one way to legitimate a major development proposed to a local community at 
work: linking it flatteringly to the legitimacy of small-town work ethic and values. 
In the context of the community civic discussions, this organized discourse of 
power and the social practices which convey and reinforce it may be applied within group 
or individual discussions, but may also be resisted there or transformed in unexpected 
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ways. The discursive organization of power and resistance, in the context of civic-
decision making, may apply formally or informally between or within groups, between 
individuals, or in individual reflection.  
As word of the bid spread and formal consultations were organized, it eventually 
became apparent that two opposing views were forming. One was that those jobs, 
regardless of social impact, were essential for the benefit of the town; a position 
conveyed by the mayor and council and the local newspaper. The assumption was made 
that employment is positive and a benefit for those in need of an income, and that this 
project would provide good jobs without any major economic, social, or environmental 
drawbacks. However, a second current of opinion questioned if bringing in a police 
training college might also draw in a police mentality that might not sit well with some 
townspeople. There was concern that such a police mentality might change the social 
environment for the worse.  
With plans in place, the bid leadership sought local community representation to 
sit on a task force to oversee the proposal development. Frank McTighe, Macleod 
Gazette Editor commented confidently in the Macleod Gazette, “Fort Macleod’s bid for 
the new police college, which drew on resources and people from every corner of the 
community, and which has the support of southwestern Alberta, is in the hands of the 
provincial government,” (McTighe, 2005d). This task force consisted of influential 
community-minded residents, the mayor, town council members, and the economic 
development officer.  “Power, according to Weber, is the ability of an individual to carry 
out their will in a given situation, despite resistance” (Morrison, 2006, p. 363). He “was 
referring to the extent to which officials, groups and individuals actively acknowledge the 
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validity of the ruler in an established order, and the right of the ruler to issue commands” 
(Morrison, 2006, p. 363). In this case, the mayor, economic development officer, town 
council, and the Police Training College task force constituted the collective leadership of 
the planning process for the proposed Fort Macleod Police Training College. However, 
they did not exercise leadership through “commands” but by setting the terms of 
discussion, and also by setting the terms of participation.  
The Police Training College proposal seemed to be inclusive of community 
members, holding the values and beliefs common to most or all citizens. By ‘seemed to 
be inclusive’ I mean that the communications announcing the proposal and the 
consultation process around it were produced in a particular way, as a particular set of 
statements, to have a particular effect. In other words, these announcements, news 
reports, and other official documents were produced through intentional discursive 
practices which represented the bid in particular ways, and indicated that support for it as 
representative of the whole community. These discursive practices drew on wider 
discourses of democracy, individual equality, and civic participation. These discourses in 
turn called on those who heard or read them to respond in terms of liberal subjectivity 
(Povinelli, 2005) that injects settler culture and politics into social situations as 
normative; a subjectivity that is rational, progressive, individualistic, and not negativistic.  
All three of these terms (rationality, progress, positivity) were defined in 
particular ways, in response to particular interests and constraints. These interests and 
constraints, however, had to be represented as not particular. The bid discourse implied 
that all community members were included in and supportive of the bid process; that all 
community members were equal as individuals, equally included in the 
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proposal/consultation process, and the actions and recommendations stemming from it. 
But that discourse also attempted to de-legitimize and to other dissent; to acknowledge 
but then to negate it as if it didn’t really exist. In the aftermath of the cancellation, those 
attempts began to come apart.  
As I mentioned in Chapter 3, I accessed the local newspaper, the Macleod 
Gazette, to cross-reference time and dates, and to provide contextual information on 
pertinent events. The local newspaper provided an extraordinary amount of news 
coverage over the course of the Police Training College venture. This source of 
information that I and community members read and surveyed is also a form of 
discourse. The Editor of the newspaper, Frank McTighe, was selected to sit on the 
eleven-member bid task force in 2005 which was established by town council to prepare 
a winning proposal. Obviously, he was on board with the narratives presented such as job 
opportunities, community support, and citizen support in the surrounding rural area. In 
turn, the newspaper articles shaped the way the Police Training College was presented to 
the public and also provided a template for evaluating its importance with titles such as 
“Police college is Fort Macleod’s destiny” (McTighe, 2006d) and narrative statements 
like the one McTighe developed to argue that the Calgary Police Service’s commitment 
to building their own training centre did not contradict the Fort Macleod initiative 
(McTighe, 2010). This effort to shape the narrative continued after the project was 
cancelled, with McTighe eventually developing an interpretation that clashed with his 
earlier claim but arguably gestured toward local solidarity in the face of big-city 
rejection: “Justice Minister and Solicitor General Jonathan Denis in a news release 
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cancelled the project after learning Calgary and Edmonton police forces and the RCMP 
would not use the training centre in Fort Macleod” (McTighe, 2012). 
Small Town, Big Loss 
In 2006, it looked as if the small-town of Fort Macleod was going to have a police 
college. A flurry of speculation reflecting social and economic interests engulfed the 
community. On September 6, 2006, the MacLeod Gazette announced: “Fort Macleod had 
been chosen as the preferred site of the Alberta Police and Peace Officer Training 
Centre.” (Gazette Contributor, 2006a). The mayor also chimed in: “I think at the end of 
the day it was the people’s desire to have the facility located here that won the day for 
us,” Patience said. “All 3,000 people in this town need to be congratulated for the effort 
they put forward” The words and phrases used by the Mayor and Solicitor General form 
and produce them as political leaders, their speech serves to reproduces their subjectivity. 
Here, too, McTighe’s reference to a generalized “excitement” is reinforced by Patience’s 
invocation of “the people.” In a sense, with these words, two of the bid leaders 
constructed themselves as not leaders, by representing and generalizing the specific work 
and interests that produced and shaped the proposal as “the people’s desire.” In other 
words, they constructed themselves as merely representatives of the people’s unified will, 
thereby negating the significance of an Othered dissent.   
On September 13, 2006, Fort Macleod Mayor Shawn Patience was quoted in the 
Macleod Gazette as saying, “It didn’t matter who won this, there is going to be some of 
that [grumbling]. Development in the province doesn’t need to be in a corridor eight 
miles wide between Calgary and Edmonton. Building the college in southern Alberta will 
give this part of the province an economic boost. This is for everybody” (McTighe, 
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2006b) In this instance, Patience is distinguishing himself and his colleagues from 
opposition to the proposal by characterizing such opposition as typical; in other words, as 
a particular type of speech that is motive-less except to oppose for the sake of opposing. 
Patience uses language that speaks to what Hall (1992) indicated earlier regarding the 
way that grumbling and building invokes a way of thinking about opposition as a kind of 
negative subjectivity and positions it as “other.” 
The local newspaper gave no evidence of an outward show of dissidence or 
protest; however, one can discern that there were rumblings from the residents. There 
were those who touted economic growth and much needed employment for the local 
people. Other residents, though, were skeptical of the newcomers who might blow into 
town with the new development, and the attitudes they might bring. As this came to the 
awareness of the bid boosters and planners, their discourse shifted to “Other” such dissent 
as mere grumbling, always present, always narrow – as narrow as the corridor between 
Calgary and Edmonton.  
Following this announcement, a lengthy silence from provincial authorities 
created doubt that this police college would ever become reality. Finally, after five years, 
a sod-turning ceremony took place. “Alberta Infrastructure Minister Ray Danyluk 
operated a trackhoe Monday to turn the sod to mark the start of construction of the $122-
million Alberta Public Security and Law Enforcement Training Centre in Fort Macleod” 
(McTighe, 2011, photo insert). This meant the building of the police college could 
actually begin. Fort Macleod Mayor Shawn Patience is quoted as saying, “I think it 
means a great deal to Albertans that their government keeps their promises and displays 
that kind of integrity” (McTighe, 2011). In making this statement, Patience made a veiled 
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reference to the patron-client relationship between the provincial government and the 
town in the bid process; a relationship in which the province held most of the cards. 
Patience was almost (though not quite) saying, “don’t back out on us now,” holding the 
government to the terms of a moral contract. 
The cancellation of the Police Training College on August 29, 2012 was reported 
as “unexpected news [that] sent shock waves through Fort Macleod.” The Town of Fort 
Macleod economic development officer Gordon MacIvor, who was intensely involved in 
the town’s successful bid, was quoted, “It’s like a death in the family,” (McTighe, 
2012b). There was a swift reply from Rob Anderson, Wildrose Finance Critic, on that 
same day, stating that “Fort Macleod is now paying the price for the Progressive 
Conservative government’s ongoing fiscal incompetence and mismanagement” 
(McTighe, 2012a). In the same article, he “slammed the government for scrapping the 
project despite having spent millions in planning and preparation, breaking ground on it 
more that a year ago and hiring a construction company to build it last month.”  
Thus was a small town and its rural hinterland left to deal with the social fallout 
of a lengthy and costly gamble on a lost economic expansion. “Alberta Municipal Affairs 
Minister Doug Griffiths said that there would be a consolation prize: the town would get 
$10.26-million in compensation from the province. ‘We’re dealing with a situation where 
a commitment was made eight years ago now and a lot of people were very excited about 
it. [] The community and council members and the mayor have put a lot of heart and soul 
toward this project. I know it was a disappointment’” (McTighe, 2013). As I drive along 
the southeastern limits of Fort Macleod where the plot of land reserved for the police 
training facility was to be located, I see it is now home to a Tim Hortons coffee shop and 
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a Dairy Queen. Fort Macleod is obviously capitalizing on the infrastructure meant for the 
Police Training College and is moving on to support more modest portfolio of economic 
developments. In the 2013 municipal elections a new mayor was elected and only one 
councillor from the bid era, Wolstenholme, remained in office (McTighe, 2013). 
Conclusion 
My focus here is to utilize the theoretical approaches I familiarized myself with to 
help me understand how social structures of power, politics, and discourse in a small 
town governed, like so many small towns, by relations of dependency, have shaped 
identity and social agency. This discussion is not about nor meant to be about any 
individuals as persons or members of groups who participated in or made observations 
about the venture in question. It is about how political and economic structures and the 
discourses around them provided the foundation from which the winning proposal was 
built; but which also provided the basis for social discord.  
A bidding process was created by provincial government authority whereby 
towns/cities were invited to develop and submit proposals for the Alberta Public Security 
and Law Enforcement Training Centre. Interested towns/cities, in turn, created a process 
to develop proposals that would meet (and hopefully surpass) the provincial bid 
requirements and government funding requirements. As contenders for the bid, the Fort 
Macleod Mayor, Council, and Town put together a task force comprised of local town 
folks who were deemed to be articulate, open minded and “forward thinking.” During the 
nine years of this project’s focus (2004 to 2012), from the bid announcement for the 
Police Training College to its cancellation, the discourse of the task force (which can also 
be seen as representative of the town’s leadership classes, economically and politically) 
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was that concrete long-term economic benefits could be anticipated for the town and its 
economic catchment area as well as for its neighboring communities. The cancellation 
came as a shock to this discursive commitment. The loss of the anticipated economic 
opportunity revealed other perspectives that had gone untold. Not all residents had been 
on board with the bid proposal for reasons that had not been exhaustively addressed in 
the process of the bid development. 
The task force in this sense can be looked at as a dominant group influencing the 
affairs that shaped the bid processes. They legitimated a discourse in which local jobs, 
police history, and economic needs of the local community were tied together in 
representing not only the town’s needs but also its ability to attract attention and funding 
from a provincial government centred in Edmonton and focused on large-scale economic 
and political initiatives, and attentive to large-scale, urban-centric organizations. In doing 
so, they illustrated how the local community’s dependency on such organizations can 
appear and be represented as natural and non-controversial; as simply a “reality” that 
structured and limited municipal options. 
Communicative practices that we use in everyday speech to produce and 
reproduce ourselves and our social agency, are virtually unnoticeable; normally, we take 
them to represent transparently the way things are. The intertwined subjects of jobs and 
economic benefit were primary talking-points in the proposal and prevalent in discourse 
on economic opportunity and on the historical construction of law enforcement as 
trustworthy, providing a service to keep ‘Others’ in line. These discourses were 
naturalized, and the anticipated benefits they articulated were touted as central to the 
town’s future. On the other hand, voices of dissention or objection to the venture were 
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sidelined as just grumbling. Concerns about matters such as the impact of urban police 
culture on a small (though conservative) Southern Alberta town were minimized and 
discounted.  
Every day speech practices can be influenced and shaped by private and public 
conversations as well as print materials – in this case, the contents of the Macleod 
Gazette. Narratives and discourse set out in the newspaper seem naturalized; we need to 
create permanent jobs and economic boost (McTighe, 2005c & 2006b); our local history 
fits the initiative (McTighe, 2005a & 2006b), and rural community support is important 
(McTighe, 2005d & 2011). The issues framed here fuelled the narratives concerning a 
decline in the population in small-town and rural areas with a corresponding hollowing-
out of their economic base and government services. The interviewees articulate this 
issue and how they know what is best for their community. They also provide shared 
local and experiential knowledge about a decline in the economic and social viability of 
rural areas in general, telling stories of how events of the past have unfolded to bring Fort 
Macleod and the surrounding region to its present economic situation. 
 In the next chapter I provide examples of everyday speech and action and how 
they produce and reproduce social agency and structure. If the social structure of a 
community during a period of time is a function of the practical relationships that make 
up the course of production and exchange (in that time period), then the social structure 
of Fort Macleod and surrounding local rural area is produced by the everyday practices 
and relationships of its residents. This phenomenon is described in more detail in Chapter 
Five. 
 
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CHAPTER 5: INTERVIEW FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 
This chapter describes and analyzes findings from interviewees and my response 
and interest in them. I describe how I approached the interviews and how I used the 
transcripts and other textual material I gathered. I provide a selective transcript of each 
interviewee’s responses to demonstrate how they discursively constructed themselves and 
their life-worlds as rural or small-town residents and as citizens going through and 
making sense of a civic decision-making process; and how they continued to create 
themselves in relation to their experiences and to me during the interview. I incorporate 
my own responses to the interview material, providing a sense of how I, too, construct 
myself as a fellow rural resident, a sociology student researcher, and a First Nation 
woman. This exercise in self-inclusion is based on Bonner’s (1997) discussion of the 
importance of understanding, and not erasing, the relations between the life-worlds of 
interviewer and interviewees. 
The goal of this chapter is not only to analyse the stories told and stances adopted 
by the interviewees, but also to provide space for their individual narratives to unfold and 
be heard while acknowledging their contexts as discussed in Chapters Two and Three. 
Their reflections and discussions were produced in response to my initiative to undertake 
a project that I defined as I researched my particular concerns and interests. Each 
interview constituted a social and communicative interaction. Now I will engage in 
interpretation and comparison of those interactions: the narratives as recorded and 
recalled. I reflect on them not in a vacuum but in my respective identities indicated 
above. My task as an analyst is an ongoing process of becoming clear about both their 
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situated understanding and my own concerning the topic of this thesis; and what it means 
to be critically aware of the grounds of these understandings. 
I intend to explore how we actively form and re-form communicative practices, 
selves, ruling relations, and life-worlds in that process. It is the verbal gestures and in-
the-moment-speech-acts that creates the insight-making, self-making, life-world-making 
as it actually gets done; the work that gives a voice or construct a voice in particular 
ways in the process. I hope to illustrate how ordinary folks with good intentions acted 
discursively to positively affect their world as the potential for a colossal change to their 
town was proposed, promised, and canceled. In the conclusion I include myself by 
providing my responses to how I interpreted their answers to my questions and how I 
gained insight to their world view. 
Use of Interview Transcripts 
I have chosen to use partially-verbatim transcriptions to focus on the substance of 
what they said, as opposed to verbatim transcripts which capture all speech utterances, 
tics, and speech habits such as ums, ahs, repeated words or phrases, and random or minor 
starting and stopping of speech. My decision to treat the interview transcripts in this way 
keeps focus on the discourse and avoids placing the interviewees’ (or the interviewer’s) 
natural conversation under a microscope. During the process of reading, re-reading, and 
choosing passages that were relevant to my thesis, I became familiar with each 
interviewees’ characteristic words or phrases; for example, the following speech words 
and phrases were: and; I don’t know; so; um; and you know. As individuals, we all have 
our own distinctive words and phrases; sometimes we are unaware of our use (or over 
use) of them. I point this out to further explain how I decided on what I thought were 
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relevant portions of their conversation. Their distinctive speech habits may be endearing, 
but, in this research project, I deemed them not always necessary to include. My focus 
was to capture their discourse on the civic matter. 
Nonetheless, I realize that I take a risk in being selective. I am conscious of the 
process by which I decide that certain words or phrases are ‘relevant’ or ‘not.’ Discursive 
self-construction happens not only through what we say, but also how we say things. 
Therefore, I have included several instances in which interviewees backtrack, second-
guess themselves, use self-depreciating phrases like “I don’t know…” or “never mind”, 
or got halfway through a thought and then re-started. If I thought that such practices were 
something more than habit, indicating something about an interviewee’s response in the 
moment toward an idea, a memory, or to me, I included them. In short, I have made 
judgments about when an utterance appears to be habit rather than significant to self-
construction or when it is specifically responsive to the interpersonal moment or what’s 
being said in that moment.  
I have selected three questions from my Interview Guide (Appendix B) to focus 
on in this chapter: (a) What was their involvement in the police college venture? (b) What 
private and public conversations did they have or did they hear of? and (c) What was 
their opinion on the cancellation? These questions provide a simple framework of the 
interviewees’ articulation and expression of how they and other residents of Fort Macleod 
and rural area make themselves part of the social fabric (Bonner, 1997). I hope to 
demonstrate how each interviewee makes sense of their social location and establishes 
themselves communicatively, not only in discussions within their social networks but 
also in the interviews. Quotes in the following sections capture the words and phrases 
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that emulate discourse – everyday speech, power in speech, defining their identity as a 
rural person, discourse around community, and comparing each interviewee's response. 
In the following four sub-sections I give only the relevant results of the interviewees’ 
answers. The results I have chosen to describe here are those responses that are directly 
related to the question in each section, streamlining where interviewees may have 
squirrelled-off into an interesting but not relevant topic. Further down, I provide my 
analysis of the process, my interpretation to their answers, and some discussion back to 
Chapters 2 and 4. 
Who Are the Interviewees? 
Each of the three interviewees were friendly and open, which helped ease my 
interviewer anxiety and prepare me for an interesting and enjoyable conversation. They 
were given the opportunity to articulate their connection to the community and their 
residency of Fort Macleod or surrounding area during the events of the Police Training 
College proposal which confirmed the eligibility criteria. They provided information on 
their employment and education qualifications, hinted at their particular stance in the 
community, and established their longevity in the town and surrounding area identifying 
themselves as residents.  Of the three, one is male, and two are females, including one is 
a First Nations individual. I have decided not to indicate which interviewee is First 
Nation for the sake of anonymity. Although I did not ask for their ages, two offered this 
information; hence, I can state that interviewees’ ages ranged from mid-forties to mid-
sixties. All had lived in the area throughout their lives; in the small-town of Fort 
Macleod, in close proximity to the town, and/or in the surrounding rural area.  
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All three individuals have been employed in the town of Fort Macleod and 
surrounding communities in areas such as public health, Fort Macleod hospital when it 
was fully operational, labour jobs, modern arts facility operations, and in jobs working 
with families. One had previously been a business owner, one had once managed an 
historical establishment in Fort Macleod, one currently owns an acreage outside of town; 
two are currently employed by human service agencies. Two interviewees indicated their 
spouses had employment here as well and one spouse is a business owner in town. One 
indicated her children attended school in Fort Macleod. All interviewees indicated they 
attended school (which I assumed meant primary and secondary education) in Fort 
Macleod and surrounding community schools, and two had formal education in the 
Health Sciences or Nursing programs. One person was pro-police-college, one was anti-
police-college, and the other took a middle road. One was clearly still engaged with the 
aftermath of the issue and saw herself in that light as a participative citizen; another 
distanced himself and took the role (and identity) of thoughtful observer.  
I take the time here to bring attention to how they and I mutually worked to 
establish them as rural people, and understand their social agency in the community. For 
instance, in Stacha’s (real name as per her choice) interview, we helped each other come 
to an understanding that she’s lived there a long time when she spoke about where she 
and her husband live and work. She says, “He owns a business, so yeah.”  Her use of the 
phrase “so yeah” can be a way of saying something without directly saying it and not 
being too ‘forward’. I respond with “Very established in the town”, which makes it easy 
for her to respond, “yeah.” By providing that clarification, I am in a sense contributing to 
her meaning – so the agreement that results (Stacha’s yeah) is the mutual work of both of 
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us. The work we engaged in can also help to construct her family as part of a cohort of 
long-time resident families who have gained economic success locally. In retrospect, it 
seemed important to both of us that as rural people, we establish how long she had lived 
in the area or been part of the community. This ties with the notions of rurality as having 
deep roots, both literally in the land, but also in years (and sometimes generations) spent 
in a community which adds legitimacy to an inhabitant’s right to be there, and have 
opinions. 
I was very interested in Dave’s (pseudonym) answer to my question, “what has 
been your experience of living and working in a rural small-town?” His response was:  
Well for me it’s been a bit of a challenge, ’cause I have, different tastes; 
inquisitive culturally. I don’t like the idea of urban places. I have a connection to 
earth, somehow, in a way I don’t understand completely. I articulate it as my 
mother’s. The hills ring for me too, when I look at them. You know, if you’re not 
driving a car all the time you notice the world in a different way, and that kind of 
puts me at odds with a lot of people, cause they’re moving fast. They’re, I want to 
say idolize, but they are very connected to their machines and I never really went 
there in a big way.  
This is his testament for being rural. His response was like a tenet for being rural. As he 
provided this explanation, I found myself seeing in my mind how the “hills” formed a 
fortress to the west and how, as you come to the crest of a hill, you can see the vastness 
of the prairie lands. I also sensed the familiarity of the natural terrain, sounds, and smells 
known to those of us who work and engage with the land. It was surprisingly refreshing 
to hear someone articulate the experience. 
The third interviewee, Nancy (pseudonym), although not a life-time resident of 
any location, earned her livelihood in the small-towns between Lethbridge and Pincher 
Creek, establishing her residency of the larger region for quite some time, and then 
became closely connected to Fort Macleod. She spoke of her education endeavors and 
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how she became employed in her current position. As a person who also lives in the rural 
area, I understood intimately her descriptions of the local land and surrounding small-
towns.  
As a resident in the surrounding area, I am familiar with many of the people and 
previously knew two of the interviewees. Together, through our talks, we (interviewees 
and I) helped each other determine our rural-residency. When we met for the interview, 
Stacha and I recognized each other. However, we could not pinpoint where we had met 
before, but we came to the conclusion that we had attended the same work-related 
meetings for discussions around assisting our respective target populations in the area of 
human services, mental health, and income support. Nancy is another interviewee with 
whom I am acquainted both on a personal and professional basis. My intention, when I 
approached her regarding my research project, was to ask her for referrals – did she know 
anyone who fit the criteria I had outlined to her. She indicated that she fit the criteria and 
would agree to schedule a day for an interview. I was surprised that she lived in Fort 
Macleod during the time period of my research and I gladly scheduled her for an 
interview. Dave, on the other hand, is someone whom I have never met before the 
interview.  
Involvement in the Police Training College Venture  
Here I asked the question, “What was your involvement with the process with the 
Police Training College in Fort Macleod?” I wanted to learn how these residents had 
been involved in the Police Training College bid, the winning of the bid, waiting for the 
construction of the building, and the cancellation. I want to know how the interviewees 
saw themselves in relation to the events of the Police Training College. Also, I want to 
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know how they created themselves as residents involved, engaged, or not engaged in 
civic decision-making.   
Stacha’s response was “Well, I was a volunteer of the committee … that put forth 
the proposal.” She further elaborated by stating “Um, and a member of the – I guess we 
were the steering committee with the town. You know, for the most part I think the town 
was really sort of the driving force but we had a committee established to move the work 
forward.” I was surprised to hear her say she was on a committee for the Police Training 
College with the Town. As the interviewer, once I recovered from my surprise, I felt that 
this interviewee would provide me with a view from the front row seating of the bid 
proceeding. She was at the table of the driving force of the bid along with eleven other 
members, including the mayor.  
In this section Stacha humbly downplays the role of the committee by using 
words “um” and “I guess”, and by indicating the town had the power or authority while 
the committee of which she was part was taking directions and carrying out tasks. 
Stacha’s viewpoint potentially allowed her to experience the inner workings of 
developing the proposal: knowing, administratively, how the Government of Alberta 
processes public bids; involvement in the foundational creation of this project; being 
privy to the information gathered for each step of the proposal such as opinions of the 
local public and town leadership; and providing input into all aspects of the Police 
Training College.   
On the opposite side, Dave “followed the story with interest.” As a private 
resident, he purposefully chose not to attend the public meetings but, rather “just 
followed it in the Gazette, the Macleod Gazette.” Adding further, “and you know, you’d 
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hear people talking in passing for the most part, but I didn’t participate directly in those 
conversations.” Dave’s vantage point was more reserved, “We [he and his wife], ah, kept 
our thoughts to ourselves for the most part, we listened.” His viewpoint allowed him to 
listen and hear conversations regarding the Police Training College bid. He actively and 
thoughtfully followed local newspaper articles written primarily by an editor who was 
also involved in the task force committee and a prominent supporter of the bid (McTighe, 
2005a).  In this section Dave establishes himself, for me, as an observant person and, 
interestingly, hints at not wanting disagreement. 
Nancy’s position was “as a community member, being a part of, like, interagency 
meetings around community members – I more just heard the conversations about the 
police college.” She adds, “they [her circle of co-workers] were very involved with 
decision making or the meetings. So, I never attended any of the meetings. Just by 
hearing the conversations. I always just listened.” She indicates her position right away as 
a community member which I interpret as removing herself from any potential conflict 
because of her job position in the community, downplaying her role in the decision-
making process. Nancy’s perspective came from her role as a public service provider to 
families. Although she was not a business owner herself, she was exposed to and heard 
business owners talk at the interagency and community board meetings she attended as 
part of her job. From my experience working in the human services field, the interagency 
meetings are face-to-face meetings with various local and regional agencies and 
organizations who come together to discuss, plan, and/or collaborate on social programs, 
services, and issues for both the public and individuals.  
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Like Dave, Nancy did not actively participate in meetings or discussions, but 
listened with interest. However, unlike Dave, she was part of a work group where folks 
who attended meetings openly discussed the matter. She heard from folks sitting at tables 
of organizations mandated to provide public family/health services and programs to 
residents of Fort Macleod and area. Her focus was on what she heard and saw, but she 
did not form or express her own opinion – which is an interesting point that I speak to 
later in the chapter.  
Conversations About the Police Training College Bid 
Next, I asked them to “tell me about the individual or the private conversations 
you had regarding the police training college.” In this section, interviewees talked about 
the discourse they heard privately and, in the community, surrounding the Police Training 
College bid and resulting winning of the bid process. The response of interviewees to my 
questions provides a better understanding of which features of social structure and world 
views (as individual interviewees and as shared collectively) are produced, reproduced, 
and/or modified –– which relates to discourse and everyday speech. These included 
accounts of conversations that interviewees had participated in, listened to, and/or heard 
second-hand. 
Sacha spoke first about her private conversations, indicating “well, I probably 
would have talked to my husband about it when approached by the town.” She further 
adds “you know, sort of talking about what would the pros and cons would be if this 
[Police Training College] were here, you know, just to kind of bounce” ideas off each 
other. She continues to say “and, um, my friend [A] who was also on the committee, we 
would have talked about it.”  
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The public conversations Stacha speaks to are from her involvement with the 
committee. She recalls that “You know there were some people who were opposed in that 
they thought, um, having a lot of police around and police trainees, ah, around might be a 
negative thing.” Adding, “this was the perspective of a few people. I didn’t necessarily 
agree with that.” She explains that “they felt that that sort of thing, I’m trying to think of 
the word [paused to think] Well to use their words - cocky young fellows – kinda around 
the community wouldn’t be a good thing.” Again, she indicates her disagreement by 
saying “now, I’m not certain about that.” Her hesitancy in repeating the phrase ‘cocky 
young fellows’ that someone said is perhaps being polite and searching for words without 
the profanity. 
By disclosing her aversion to the characterization of police recruits as cocky 
young fellows she illustrates a positive attitude and by discounting the phrase, she is 
aligning herself with the rational, objective, and unbiased steering committee group. 
Later in her interview, Stacha indicated that the individual who made the characterization 
is a “‘friend of ours’” who had “‘grudgingly went along’” with the proposal. This could 
be to further indicate openness by demonstrating how she can have an opposing opinion 
and still be friends.  
I had asked, “during the town meetings did you find that there were a lot of times 
for individuals to voice their opinions? She thought back and didn’t “recall a lot of 
dissent about it. Really.”  She went on to explain that “for the most part, I think people 
thought of it as an opportunity and saw it as an economic, saw it as potential economic 
benefits outweighing the other.” Stacha provides this general recollection, which is 
notably similar to her own opinion. She conveys here that she engaged in civic 
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discussions regarding the Police Training College in private with her spouse, friends, and 
steering committee members. 
A major focus of Stacha’s interview surrounded what she “saw was an  
opportunity for access to employment” locally. She indicated three times in her interview 
that her opinion was based on the “opportunity for employment” which she relates back 
to her work in health care and knowledge about the rural and small-town population in 
this area of Southern Alberta. Through Stacha’s speech, the words and phrases she uses, 
she constructs herself as a particular kind of person by using a form of language that 
produces a picture and positions her in relation to a certain demographic.  
On a private level, Dave indicated that “our perspective, myself and my wife, we 
were not [pause].” Dave discontinued this line of speech, not being upfront with what his 
true thoughts were possibly to avoid confrontation. He switched his focus and instead 
said, “when they announced this was something they were going after, something that 
could happen. When it was announced I was a little bit shocked.” He went back to his 
initial thought process, “the whole time we were not convinced that it was a good idea” 
and that “they were interested in and it didn’t matter what the ramifications were” (they 
being the municipal leadership). Dave’s use of the word “they” provides insight to how 
he places himself (and his wife) in opposition to the leadership who are “going after” the 
Police Training College development. 
Dave’s conversations with folks with whom he was “on a friendship level” 
indicated that they “were people who were excited about it, that were supportive, and I 
think the reason they were supportive was – there was something that was going to 
happen here that was going to benefit the communities all. Meaning this venture would 
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benefit the small-town and surrounding rural areas economically. That was, at least, the 
people I was talking to.” In this segment, Dave establishes in very general terms a 
network of people with whom he is engaged, and the way they form opinions. He speaks 
in a way that conveys both disagreement with, but also an understanding of, their 
perception. He clearly points to the social position his (and his wife’s) opinion puts them 
in. He acknowledges that his thinking is different from others’, who saw the economic 
possibilities for Fort Macleod and surrounding area.  
This almost seems guarded to me. Dave chose not to engage in public discussion 
because he “didn’t’ want to be that person” who gets up “to say, well I think it’s a bad 
idea.” In his own words, he shares his thought on that kind of action: “I think that’s crazy 
and then you start down that track, you know – being negative, generally speaking about 
police cause you need ‘em, too. So, I’m not sure about 100 of them at once [laughs] you 
know? I honestly don’t know.” His frequent use of phrases like ‘I don’t know’ and ‘you 
know?’ signals that he and his wife were uncomfortable with the Police Training College 
bid and he is uncomfortable with making their discomfort into a public disagreement. He 
indicated that as a young person, his experiences with police were at times negative. 
While he acknowledged the benefits of policing, he also made a clear reference to a fear 
that the local culture would be negatively affected by having so many police officers and 
cadets in the small-town. Today, as a private resident from the local arts community, he 
felt that he had a different perspective from other local people who he perceived as too 
attached to their machines and electronics. 
Dave clearly understands how economies work and what is required for a small-
town to become more vibrant, stating “you could see, I don’t know, property values 
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increase perhaps. I don’t know, just more vibrancy because there would be more people. 
You know, I don’t know, there would be more shops because there would be a need for 
them, you know, that kind of thing. So, there’d be some development.” Nevertheless, his 
discomfort with the Police Training College bid has more to do with “how much damage 
that kind of culture’s done.” He stated that “we were more interested in fostering 
community that was culturally inclusive, and not dominated by this energy that a police 
culture represents.” He indicates that he is not against enhancing or improving local 
economic conditions, but his focus is on what is being proposed for that economic gain. 
Despite his sensitivity to the police culture, voicing his discomfort might lead to social 
consequences for him and his wife. His perception implies that his opinion is a minority 
one, and in some sense a vulnerable one.  
Like Dave, Nancy acted in the capacity of an observer and chose not to engage in 
public conversations or attend public meetings, with her own reasons: “So, I never 
attended any of the meetings, so just by hearing the conversation, I always just listened, I 
never really put in my two cents because I was trying to understand what was going on – 
even at that, I was kind of too busy to get involved because I was sitting on other boards 
as well.” She did not provide any comments around private conversations she may have 
had regarding the Police Training College. However, her conversation was focused 
mainly on the interagency meetings to which she was privy. “There were times that I 
really wanted to make it [to the community meetings] - because of the tension I heard 
was happening. I was like, I should’ve went to that meeting! [laughs].” She comments, 
“You know, just to listen, be a fly on the wall kind of.”  
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She indicated that she heard there was “conflict between the business owners and 
council – I do remember there was some conflict.” She went on to add, “I heard there was 
some meetings did not go quite well with Shawn. And so, there was some tension 
between the business owners and the mayor and council because they’ve been there for a 
long time – these business owners. So, if the highway did go through, then they would 
lose their business.” I found it interesting that Nancy, while attending these service 
provider meetings, could hear fear in the conversations. She went on to say that “There 
was even rumor they were going to relocate the main highway to go past the town. There 
was fear that or fear conversations that all the businesses were going to lose and they 
were going to eventually close down.”   
In her interview, she refers to two “projects” that were being talked about 
simultaneously at these meetings: (a) the Police Training College bid and (b) the 
possibility that Highway 2, which now runs through the town of Fort Macleod, could be 
relocated through the construction of a bypass closer to the Police Training College 
proposed site, endangering the future viability of downtown businesses. While I could 
find not documents to substantiate the fears around the highway relocation, a similar 
situation occurred in Monarch (discussions further below) which may have fuelled the 
rumours. Regardless, the fear conversation seems to have taken on a life of its own.  
Nancy also commented that “one of the reasons that a lot of the people, that I 
heard in conversation, why Fort Macleod did not want to change is because of the movie 
productions that were coming in. It’s got quite a history because of the building structure. 
So, that’s why they didn’t want to change Fort Macleod. They wanted to keep it as 
original as they possibly could.” I provide comments on this aspect later in the chapter. 
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The three interviewees demonstrate their world view of community and how they 
discursively constructed themselves as citizens experiencing civic discussions. Stacha as 
a member of the steering committee that developed and advocated (in the local 
community and surrounding area, and to the provincial government) the proposal for the 
Police Training College for the jobs that would come from this venture. Dave, who 
understood that jobs are important but that the local culture would be negatively affected 
by having so many police officers and cadets in the small-town. Nancy’s responses bring 
to light her focus on her colleagues’ fear of the potential changes to the economic fabric 
of the town that might affect their livelihoods – real or perceived.  In their speech acts, 
they each not only framed their perceptions of fostering community but also formed, to 
me as the interviewer, their social agency. 
Reaction to the Cancellation of the Proposed Police Training College 
This next topic of discussion is around the reaction of each interviewee to the 
cancellation of the Police Training College venture that was promised to Fort Macleod 
and where a sod-turning ceremony was held (McTighe, 2011). Interviewees’ reactions to 
the cancellation can provide insight in regard to their perception of: (a) the social 
structure of their community and (b) their community’s relationship with local, regional, 
provincial, and national governments. Their responses also provide insight on how 
discourse creates and recreates the social structure and their social agency as individual 
citizens. 
Stacha poured out a number of interesting discursive points in her initial response: 
 
A very strategic political move now, wasn’t it? You know, of course it was 
disappointment. Having the rationale being, ‘Well, we already have that’ in – 
what was it, Calgary or Edmonton, one of the big two – ‘why would we need 
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that?’ It was very political, about that. And I felt like, once again rural loses out, 
you know? Like, this would have been a great opportunity. It’s really too bad.  
  
I responded to her vent with an understanding and sad, “Yeah.” 
She reiterated a point that was central to her world view of a person rooted and 
committed to rural community, “Aside from the economic benefit, but, it’s really too bad.” 
Adding another interesting spin to that, “You know, and especially since politics of place 
is a big thing. Right? And the politicians want to please the powerful levers. I guess we 
don’t have any in Fort Macleod. So, they thought [laughs].” 
Stacha was quite bitterly disappointed in the cancellation. As a life time resident, 
who works to help and support the health of the community, and the wife of a local 
business owner, she experienced the cancellation from a number of perspectives: the 
clients to whom she provides services; the organization with which she works; the 
business that could have grown. Stacha spoke directly to the urban-centric nature of the 
decision to cancel by drawing attention to whose interests were more likely to be 
satisfied. In her responses of “again, once again, we are disappointed right?”, and her 
interrogative use of “wasn’t’ it?” and “you know?” and “right?” are also very important 
markers of an expressed fatalism about politics. She understood the precarious and 
uncertain power and autonomy of rural and small-town economic and political 
relationships in the context of provincial (and national) markets and politics, and she 
noted specifically the corresponding marginalization of this small-town’s interests. She 
also specifically identified the failure of the venture as “very political,” in the sense of 
being skewed by the weakness of small-town influence and power in provincial political 
affairs.  
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Dave’s response was very different. I was thrown off guard when he replied, 
“What a surprise when they pulled it a month after they announced it was going ahead, or 
after they say there is a shovel in the ground. An absolute shock. Even for me. It’s like 
‘What happened there?’” My response signified my own surprise, “Oh really? You were 
very shocked?” To which he replied “Yeah. Yeah” in quick succession. He added, “They 
were stopped in their tracks.”  Despite his opposition to the Police Training College, 
Dave remained empathetic by stating, “I can’t imagine how council felt. Especially the 
mayor, Shawn, because he worked so hard on it. … And he stuck his neck out at times 
and he got some bits of flack over it.” 
Further to this, Dave indicated he had read an article that, “because it wasn’t 
central to the province and because the existing police culture didn’t agree with its 
placement. Right? Whoever, Calgary Police Force and whoever else, Edmonton, I guess, 
so, I think that did factor in there.” Like Stacha, Dave verbalized a wariness of urban-
centric economic and political relationships in which local people perceive themselves to 
have limited power and little insider knowledge. On the opposite end, he did not share 
her bitterness at the cancellation:  
[A local service professional] was very pro. But I think she was pro for reasons 
that were very civic and didn’t involve money and it had to do with improving 
programming, you know. I couldn’t quite see it myself, but you know, that was 
one of the reasons I wasn’t ‘that guy’, because she had an idea that it was a good 
thing.  
 
Dave spoke of her ideals for the people and community and how that relates to her 
positive evaluation of the establishment of a Police Training College respecting her effort 
and intentions, even as she came from a very different experience than his own.  
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I was challenged to understand Nancy’s perspective.  Her initial response was that 
she could “see pros and cons to it. You know the things about the pros, I see, that it 
would’ve attracted, brought more business. You don’t have to travel so far for shopping” 
and “the population would’ve definitely went up.” But, “You see because they already 
won it. And honestly, I think it might have been with the Town, itself. Is the way I feel 
about it.” She further adds “Honestly, I think, what I think is it’s really political.” The 
explanation she provides is that the Town of Fort Macleod’s leadership have “experience 
with politics” and “you really see, like, who the people are, who really do have 
[experience] - when it comes to decisions and stuff like that.” In other words, from the 
discourse she heard at the interagency meetings, Nancy’s perspective is that the Town of 
Fort Macleod leadership had the political knowledge and authority to move the project 
forward. But because of the local political disconnect, they lost the Police Training 
College. Whether or not this is true, this is the perspective that is true for her. Similar to 
Stacha and Dave, she understood that the college could potentially create an increase in 
the population which in turn would increase the current businesses and establish others 
while decreasing the need to travel to larger centres for shopping. I further discuss the 
links to the literature on political and institutional centralization, and the privileging of 
urban centres later in this chapter. 
Creating Rural 
I want to bring attention to discussions that are at the opposite end of the political-
economy scenario in the above discussion. Stacha and Nancy both refer to a common 
occurrence; a common fear of many small-towns, villages, and hamlets – the economic 
death of a small-downtown or main street, especially with respect to businesses that are 
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not easily relocatable. Stacha reminded me, “And, you know, we had the hospital 
closure.” Nancy stated, when talking about “reconstructing the highway – then I think 
that’s when they were like, ‘Hey wait a second.’ We are going to lose business and they 
are going to forget that we are [h]ere.” She goes on to say “for an example like Monarch. 
Remember when the highway went through there?” I remembered, and added that 
rerouting the highway “killed the town.” She recalled that the Monarch “hotel, town, and 
gas station” benefitted economically from the traffic that flowed through the town and 
motorists would make impromptu stops at the local businesses. 
As a resident in the region of this project, I witnessed the changes to Fort Macleod 
and surrounding rural area about which the interviewees speak. The re-routing of 
Highway 3, which originally passed through the small-town of Monarch, was detrimental 
to the businesses that relied on the traffic flowing through the town. Also, I experienced 
the down-sizing of the Fort Macleod Hospital, and the removal of a service that was once 
vital for Fort Macleod and surrounding communities. I have experienced their fear 
discourse first-hand, and understand it is very real for them. 
The social viability of this small-town as a local entity depends on the viability of 
its local forms of production, exchange, and accumulation. But these, as Marx argued, are 
increasingly subsumed within larger, more centralized, and urban-centric webs of 
exchange, ownership, and regulation (1968). However, the survival of small businesses 
continues to be an important topic in small-towns, especially with respect to the retail 
goods and services sector: downtown stores and agencies, local car and agricultural-
equipment dealerships, restaurants and eateries, arts and crafts galleries, museums, 
motels, entertainment venues, fuel stations, repair shops, and so on. Some of these same 
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businesses are particularly important to the tourist trade, on which Fort Macleod also 
relies. Thus, fear conversations could easily fasten on to any possibility of their being 
sidelined, especially as the bypassing of nearby Monarch by a newly-twinned Highway 3, 
was still recent at the time. The fear that drove conversation and disagreement about the 
potential relocation of the highway which fed these small businesses was very real.  
It seemed to me there was a sort of a balancing act between two necessities: one 
being the decreased resources due to the low population of the small-town and the other 
being a small enough population to enjoy community engagement along with open 
spaces. In his testament for being rural, Dave touched on the latter situation. I interpret 
this as being his epistemic location for understanding and dealing with civic (political and 
economic) and social life – it comes from the space and place of the land. His description 
is something Alex Sim (1989) affirmed, that the foundational fabric of rural life relied on 
the interdependence of physically-distanced farms and small-town occupations, and that 
electronic communications technology has profoundly changed the way work and 
socialization is practiced in rural communities. This, however, does not erase the 
distinctiveness of rural communities. 
An important aspect of the interviews was that we were practicing such rural 
socialization as we interviewed; the interviewees and I repeatedly recreated our 
relationships as rural people throughout the conversation. In retrospect, it seemed it was 
important to all of us that we make a point of establishing this in our discussions. For 
example, we actively established a sense of how long they lived in the area or had been 
part of the community, whereas that might be less of a concern in an urban environment. 
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The interviewees brought with them a sense of their rurality. Stacha indicated that she 
was blessed to have the opportunity to live in a rural area and spoke of how nature 
provides a great deal of mental health wellness. Dave stated in his interview that “I don’t 
like the idea of urban places. I have a connection to earth, somehow, in a way I don’t 
understand completely … and the hills ring for me too, when I look at them.” Although 
Nancy did not articulate specifically her rural attachment, she and I knew that she grew 
up in a rural community and for most of her adult life (except when she attended a 
postsecondary program) lived in one of the small towns in southwestern Alberta. It 
seemed at the time that no explanation or articulation was needed between two rural 
residents familiar with living in rural South West Alberta. This is a good example of the 
kind of tacit knowledge that reinforces what Hansen and Muszynski (1990) call “the 
assumptions which seem implicit in people’s conscious activity,” but at the time I did not 
“raise them to the level of debate.”  Together, we recreated memories of the local lands, 
towns, and surrounding area from a knowledge based in a shared familiarity of being 
local residents for a long period of time. In doing so, we discursively reproduced a sense 
of a shared social identity. 
Some of the interactional and communicative characteristics that we demonstrated 
in these conversations seem to be common among rural people (including myself), such 
as avoiding confrontation. As rural people, we continue interacting with and most likely 
will need to rely on co-operation with a limited population within our geographical area, 
many of whom we’ve known for years and have had inter-generational relations. For 
example, Dave didn’t want to be “that” negative person and bring attention on himself 
neither at the time of Police Training College bid, nor at an interview speaking about the 
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event. Stacha didn’t want to put herself on a pedestal in her description of being on the 
steering committee. Nancy wanted to be “a fly on the wall”, careful not to state her 
opinion on the matter. My hesitancy to interject prompts to get more out of the 
interviewees would be an example of this. Essentially, we all discussed this civic matter, 
providing information and opinion while being careful not to offend in case we may need 
to rescue or be rescued by one another in the future. Or, more likely, so when we meet 
again, we can be cordial. 
Inferring From Three Interviews 
Though these three individuals’ responses and perspectives collectively span 
many categories, they cannot be inferred, either individually or collectively, to represent 
the range of opinions to be found in the town or surrounding areas – though their 
statements likely fit quite well within that range. My interview guide was developed long 
before I actually sat down with microphone and a participant. At the time I was 
developing my semi-structured interview guide, my thoughts were to move the interview 
discussions from the interviewee’s private conversations regarding the Police Training 
College to public conversations in which they participated. The interviewees’ first- and 
second-hand information comes from their own particular social locations: each spoke 
from the vantage point they occupied in the Fort Macleod community during the time that 
the Police Training College bid was being developed and promoted. Whether or not the 
results answered the research questions is not a primary focus at this point. What is 
significant is the process of discovery – how each interviewee created their social selves.  
Discussions With Theory 
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Ching & Creed (1997) and Epp (2008) speak to how rural people continue to be 
marginalized by the centralization and urbanization of political and economic power. 
Further, their culture is devalued and cultural agency weakened by the urban-centric 
perspective of mass media. This is in relation to Alberta’s two largest and most 
influential cities, Calgary and Edmonton, and the booming economies between the two 
cities along Queen Elizabeth Highway 2. Historically, Alberta’s rural roots have been 
relied on to project an image that contrasts the supposedly urbanized eastern half of 
Canada. But this image today tends to be that of a generic and decorative western rurality 
that feed an urban nostalgia. In the realms of economic and political influence, from the 
standpoint of rural residents, urban wins. According to Stacha, “once again rural loses 
out”; and Dave echoes this with “because it wasn’t central to the province and because 
the existing police culture didn’t agree with its placement.”  
Further, Ching & Creed (1977) and Epp (2008) indicate that rural people 
themselves at times embrace the marginalization as part of an identity that is both 
aggrieved (in relation to centres of power) and self-critical. All three interviewees spoke 
to this, but it was Nancy who emphasized the latter in a rueful observation of what could 
have been: “There were other franchises that were trying to come in, that they were 
rumored because of where Fort Macleod is located, two major highways going in, … it’s 
the ideal spot where business could grow.” 
Nancy’s statements regarding the building architecture of Fort Macleod providing 
an old-town look popular in film productions resonates with Ching & Creed’s (1997) 
references to an urban gaze, at once both modern and nostalgic, which represents rural 
spaces as decorative and/or ornamental. Through her own observations, however, Nancy 
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aligned Fort Macleod’s ‘historical’ look with economic benefit. She also indicated that 
the conversations at the service-provider meetings she attended included an awareness by 
at least some folks sitting around the table of how the ornamental aspect of Fort Macleod 
as a ‘small-town’ space conveyed an economic benefit.  
Nancy’s responses, as I mentioned earlier, were different from the other two 
interviewees. She is younger than they are, she still had school-aged children in her home 
and she and her spouse were both employed. Nancy portrays a busy person in a 
professional role who does not want to stand out, providing reasons she could not be 
involved with the bid process which included public meetings. Bonner (1997) wrote how 
younger couples relocating to the small-town of Prairie Edge found it difficult to find 
social opportunities as the established groups of long-time residents were difficult to 
become a part of. A more in-depth discussion lays in a different research project, but 
nonetheless is important to note here. 
Dave recognized what Foucault (Mills, 2004) would state: that the speaker who 
opposes (especially publicly) the predominant terms of local discourse risks having not 
only their words but also their discursive and social agency minimized and negated. 
Being at a table or on a board can provide influence, leverage, and access to resources – 
this is particularly significant in small-town and rural areas where government funding 
and community and family programs and services are scarce. This aligns with Weber’s 
(1947) view of modern societies in which various organizations and groups compete for 
power and resources. To oppose or question a civic venture that could give the small-
town and surrounding area a shot-in-the-arm against economic stagnation is potentially to 
be painted as a negative agent and a discursive threat.  
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Dave was also sensitive to what Hall (1992) defined as othering. Hall (1992) and 
Foucault (Mills, 2004) both emphasized that everyday speech is inherently embedded in 
social practices. Discursive practices produce forms of meaning, agency, and identity, 
which affect conduct and are subject to reinforcement or change. Each interviewee’s 
reactions (speaking to work colleagues, friends, neighbours; reading and listening to 
news; observing how others act and speak) has constructed and reconstructed who they 
are as small-town and rural citizens. Each of them performed small acts of power and 
influence. Even in Dave’s case, refraining from overt public speech and action was his 
way of preserving his communicative credibility.  Stacha’s statements such as 
“employment of our people” (which she states twice), and “child poverty”, and “working 
poor” discursively construct her as someone who holds a specific kind of knowledge 
about the rural and small-town population in this area of Southern Alberta. Through our 
speech we construct ourselves as a particular kind of person by using a form of language 
that produces a picture of and positions us in relation to a certain demographic. This 
includes Stacha in the words and phrases she uses. All three interviewees, to the best of 
their ability, sought ways to influence (or to avoid negatively influencing) what they 
perceive as the best for their community.  
When Dorothy Smith and Michel Foucault refer to the organization of social, 
political, and economic activities and how the consciousness of their participants are 
practically produced in everyday speech and action. We need to bear in mind that such 
practical, discursive work is not simply cognitive and driven by interests, but also has an 
emotional dimension – as Nancy noted in her interview. Despite my having only three 
interviewees, the interviews turned out to be a rich source of data, and it became apparent 
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that I could not possibly utilize all the information they contained. I made a decision to 
focus on three questions in my interview guide. I decided not to use some questions 
because the responses could not be cross-referenced as I was unable to obtain detailed 
documentary information from public town meetings. Eliminating one particular question 
in my discussion was a challenging decision: “How do you think the handling of the 
consultation around the Police Training College affected the relationships or friendships 
among the townspeople or the rural people?” The responses to this question were just as 
rich as those to the questions used for this thesis. An analysis of this additional question 
would have provided more insight to the interviewees’ construction and reconstruction of 
their identity and social agency. However, I chose to keep my focus narrow due to space 
and time considerations.  
Conclusion 
This project’s goal, as stated previously, is to generate a better understanding of 
the manner in which discourse, power, and speech used by three rural or small-town 
residents can create a particular sense of individual and collective self, agency, and 
understanding as rural people making sense of the policy and political process of a 
developmental proposal and its subsequent outcome. In conclusion, each of the three 
interviewees provided evidence of how they are vested in their community.  
Their speech acts and mannerisms provided the evidence in ways that the 
interview transcripts alone cannot capture. At times they were uncomfortable making 
statements, other times they were confident, at times they said things forthrightly, and at 
times vaguely, coming across as unsure and seeking my validation. Each came with some 
knowledge, a particular perspective, and a sense of how they were at once citizens and 
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individuals. They had a sense of how to recreate these selves to me in my dual role as 
research interviewer and local resident known to them. Each recognized how they as 
individuals must live with their works and actions in a small-town and its surrounding 
rural area where people are known by name – not simply by role – and where personal 
reputation may have real social consequences. I found myself becoming fascinated with 
how individuals create and recreate themselves in these contexts. How many residents 
have lives like Nancy – too busy with the demands of work and family to be actively 
involved in civic matters, but still sensing important issues that they are cautious about 
articulating? How can you be included in the conversation when, like Dave said, you 
“know how things work around here” but you know it differently than others do? When 
you know that your opinion, openly and directly stated, would be deemed as negative and 
ultimately diminished by people you know and with whom you must interact or co-
operate in the future? How can you work as a service provider knowing that long-term 
sustainable employment is part of the solution for a demographic that faces poverty, and 
fearing that once again, an opportunity will pass the small-town and surrounding rural 
area?  
Dorothy Smith (1974), following Marx, emphasizes that economic structures are 
practically produced in everyday speech and action, and further indicates that power is 
implemented through everyday social relations and the practices that those relations 
shape and define. Throughout the interviews, employment and increased population 
emerged as primary topics. An increase in population would increase the tax base, as 
Dave stated. An increase in jobs for the local and surrounding Southern Alberta 
population was recognized as a highly anticipated benefit. Both, it was hoped, would 
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bring about stabilization for town’s ability to finance its infrastructure, and would 
enhance the diversity of local businesses. 
As I sat and listened carefully to each interviewee’s story, I found it difficult at 
times to remain silent, remember questions, jot down quick words or phrases, and hear 
what they were saying. I found that, as a researcher, listening was central to allowing 
speakers to reminisce and recount what was important to them regarding the Police 
Training College venture. At the same time, I have come to recognize not only how much 
I emphasized listening as an interviewer, but also how often I did not ask specific follow-
up questions. I wonder now if I refrained from doing so in part because I was a fellow 
rural resident along with my interviewees, and aware of how rural and small-town 
community members - like Dave - often refrain from communicative actions that might 
cause offense. Could it be that I was uncomfortable with probing questions or follow-ups, 
not wanting to place these fellow-rural-residents in an awkward position?  Are some of 
these communicative practices such as: being sensitive to their thoughts and concerns, 
seeking to avoid or soften conflict, and being particularly sensitive to implicit knowledge, 
not only rural characteristics, but, to some degree, gendered and racialized practices?  
I was very nervous about interviewing non-native people, especially non-native 
males. I went to great lengths to find a public place with enough seclusion for a private 
conversation. This stems from a cultural position. As a First Nation’s woman, it is a 
cultural taboo to be alone with a non-native man; additionally, as a local Indigenous 
woman who is committed to a long-term, well-known relationship this was quite tricky. I 
am particularly nervous for my safety in this time with awareness of murdered and 
missing Indigenous women. My anxiousness was greatly reduced as I was fortunate to 
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find three friendly, interesting, warm, and respectful rural interviewees. Perhaps my relief 
was expressed in part in my taking care with them in the interviews; giving unobtrusive 
encouragement or small affirmations rather than taking opportunities to interrogate them, 
even if it meant that I did not gain the specific details that a more persistently probing 
approach might have revealed.  
The selection of results and analyses I provided from the interviews gave me 
insight into how we mutually (including me as the interviewer and neighbouring rural 
resident) discursively construct and reconstruct ourselves in their interviews – how we 
construct ourselves as rural people. The next chapter provides concluding comments on 
my interpretation of the project and how the findings can be applied in my work, but 
more importantly, how it affects my worldview. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION 
The purpose of this research project was two-fold. First, to contextualize and 
understand everyday speech and action which produces and re-produces social agency 
and relations within a rural community undergoing civic decision-making. Second, to 
explore and discover how interpersonal communication practices generate discourse that 
not only shapes social agency and identity but also affects the potential for consensus or 
conflict in the definition of political and economic issues in a small-town and its 
surrounding rural community. I carried out a qualitative research project focusing on 
three interviews with residents who experienced the civic consultative process of the 
Police Training College which was to be constructed in Fort Macleod, Alberta. These 
three interviews did not simply provide me with information about the Fort Macleod 
Police College, they helped me to look in depth at how participants constructed 
themselves, their communities, the bid process, its promised opportunities and their stake 
in them, and the ins and outs of local leadership and power relations as they responded to 
the announcement and subsequent cancellation of the proposal and construction of the 
Police Training College. 
My research came to focus on investigating and interpreting how my interview 
respondents actively sought to understand and represent themselves and their social 
circles in response to (a) both proposed and unforeseen changes and (b) civic discussions 
– those held in the public domain and in private conversations. It is about how these 
people who self-identified as rural or small-town residents collaborated in building a 
shared sense of identity on a common stock of social codes and cultural perceptions, and 
a shared subjective sense of who we were as members of a local, rural, or small-town 
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community. In this thesis I took multiple perspectives: (a) I wrote from an academic 
sociological position in which my aim was to write through my knowledge of theoretical 
literature, (b) I am a rural resident of a neighbouring community to Fort Macleod, and (c) 
my perspective as a First Nation woman plays a part in how I interpret and respond to the 
texts I’ve read and the interviews I’ve heard. The knowledge and insight I’ve gained 
results not only from what I read, but from the documentary records of the Police 
Training College venture, from my interpretations of the interviewees’ responses, 
answers, and discussion of my interview questions, and from my reflections on my own 
implication in the social circumstances discussed by my interviewees. 
I focused on how I interpreted these rural citizens’ production and re-production 
of their social place and identities as they experienced, reflected on, and spoke about their 
community. In this study, I reflected on how we produced ourselves as civic agents 
and/or observers, and as community members, in response to a specific but in some ways 
typical civic consultative process. I also considered how we then did it again in response 
to each other, in interviews that became conversations. In other words, we undertook 
shared reality-constructive and identity-constructive work and built something in 
common out of our different positions in a shared situation.  
I included myself as a co-participant engaged in conversations with the 
interviewees. As someone who lives tangential to Fort Macleod and its surrounding area, 
I too, was interested in the Police Training College bid, win, and cancellation. Therefore, 
I engaged in reflection to how the documentary record and my interviewees’ discussions 
affected how I related to their responses – not only regarding the Police Training College 
but also to me in the interviews. It became important to me to try to understand my own 
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responses to how they framed their answers, and how my relationship to them and their 
answers was produced and reproduced in terms of my own worldview. 
 This thesis drew upon writers such as Marx, Foucault, Smith, Hall, and Mills who 
discuss how discourse is imbedded in everyday speech and behaviours, and how 
institutional structures are reproduced through relations of ruling that extend into 
everyday life. These theoretical resources assisted me in understanding the social 
organization of power, politics, and discursive practices in a small-town setting governed 
by relations of dependency between local and provincial organizations set in a wider 
national and international context. My interviewees and I not only engaged in an 
exchange of information, but we also engaged in mutual sense-making – producing and 
reproducing a discourse about social agency and power. I came into the research project 
with my own set of perspectives and worldviews. Through the research process, I 
progressively discovered how my own perceptions of the local rural community, the 
interview material, the documentary record, and even the decisions I made in the course 
of this research came from my First Nation background, my position in the rural history 
of this area, and my particular path through an academic education. 
At the beginning I was adamant that I would work from an objective sociological 
perspective and not from a First Nations perspective. My goal was to take this 
opportunity to observe and learn through an academic lens about a small part of the 
Western settler world through an academic lens. In this chapter, I provide my reflections 
on how my initial and subsequent approach and the methodologies I employed worked or 
didn’t work as this project developed. I have discussed how I came to relate my findings 
to a new set of evolving research questions. I will provide a sense of the potential 
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implications of my research and its possible application to my community work. And 
finally, I speak to the contributions this project could provide to academia, the matrix 
from which I began. 
The Effectiveness of My Methodology 
Qualitative interviewing is a mutual social interaction that may involve mutual 
social construction of identity and reality. Incorporating this kind of awareness into 
research doesn’t simplistically or necessarily lead to the replacement of “facts” by 
“opinion.” However, as my initial intent was to be sociological about this research 
project, I tried to maintain an unbiased stance to the document materials and interviewees 
as much as possible. As friendly and interesting as my interviewees were, in the back of 
my mind I had an agenda to keep – move through the interview questions as efficiently as 
possible; keeping as close to the questions as possible to maintain a consistent setting for 
each interview so as not to compromise the objectivity of the results. My intention was to 
remain as passive as possible, providing only the necessary prompts to guide the 
interviewee back to the questions and topics at hand. I was very conscious of their time 
and did not want to go over the forty minutes I had indicated that the interview would 
take. I wanted to respect their time, allowing them to return to whatever they had planned 
to do for the remainder of the day. However, the consequence was that there were 
moments when I got hooked on their stories and did not ask for clarification or probe 
with other questions.  
Adherence to scientific writing rules that reflect the epistemological and 
ontological claims of positivism isn’t the only way to do good, rigorous research. The 
notion that social reality really exists “out there” and can be discovered and accurately 
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described using accepted concepts that simply mirror such realities is not the only method 
of valuable research. Not all research must involve the identification and study of a 
representative sample. However, at the beginning of my research I felt I must write my 
own voice and presence out of my work to “be objective.” My main task, as I initially 
thought, was to obediently accept and accurately repeat what academic authorities 
claimed in theory and methods, and then to simply apply what they said, rather than 
comparing them critically and using them to synthesize and develop my own approach.  
Science is one of many ways of telling the story of interviewees and data. Despite an 
evolution in my approach to an evaluation of so-called objective research methods 
throughout the project, I found it difficult to shake the authority and perceived 
correctness of science, especially as a person who was educated with a Eurocentric world 
view.  
Perakyla & Ruusuvuori (2011) indicate that qualitative researchers can reach 
areas of reality that would otherwise remain inaccessible, such as people’s subjective 
experiences and attitudes (2011, p. 529). The researcher can analyse interview transcripts, 
noting ways in which an interviewee uses language and social resources to construct their 
relations to rural discourses. Bear in mind that the researcher comes with her own bundle 
of life experiences, perceptions, perspectives, social location, and academic aspirations. 
As the researcher, my research and interpretive practices and my worldview touched all 
aspects of the processes in the research project. By “all aspects” I mean the manner by 
which I handled the recruitment of my interviewees, the setting up of the interview 
including how I greeted and placed my recording devices; how I perceived and responded 
to the physical and speech actions and mannerisms of my interviewees; what elements of 
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these that I thought were important enough to jot down as observations; how I transcribed 
the audio recordings; what I thought was important in their speech; and how I analyzed 
and interpreted their information and experiences.  
As Bonner (1997) says, I had to include self-reflections on my own perspective, 
epistemology, ontology, and worldview, and an awareness of my own judgments and 
their sources.  Further, I needed to keep in mind that these were and are shaped by my 
background, social location, and training, but are not fixed in stone by these factors. They 
can become flexible; changing and expanding my self-awareness as I respond to other 
people (such as my interviewees) in the course of my research. As I write, I realize that I 
am totally framing the reality of my interpretation of my interviewees’ responses to my 
research questions. Did I construct rurality from the triggers that their stories kindled in 
my memory and knowledge of the land in this southwest rural region? Their descriptions 
of the land (the rolling hills, the places the interviewers lived) related to locations I could 
see in my mind’s eye.  
Rurality 
Tönnies (2001, see also Bonner, 1997) is not alone in emphasizing that 
interpersonal relations in rural communities tend to be concrete and personal, rather than 
formal and abstract. It is important to recognize that communities such as established city 
neighbourhoods where there is a collective identity of neighbourhood-membership, and 
in which facilities and resources are available within the neighbourhood, encourage 
regular engagement between its members. People in such communities often make it their 
business to know about their neighbours in a multidimensional and often 
intergenerational way. But this is not the whole story. Rural people exercise a different 
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kind of manners when face-to-face. They avoid open disagreements – as Dave stated 
about himself. They avoid leading with direct questions or requests. They dodge 
controversial topics. They tend to respect an injunction not to pry. Faced with argument 
or conflict, they may seek to change the topic, or quietly remove themselves from a 
contentious situation. They are conscious of not being able to lose themselves in a mass; 
of the fact that someone with whom they dispute one day may be their rescuer from a 
snowdrift or their assistant with stuck farm machinery the next, or may be the business 
owner on whose goods and services they rely. In her interview, Nancy demonstrated this 
characteristic by downplaying her role, as if she didn’t want to appear as “standing out”. 
Again, is this a rural trait? Could it also be a gendered one? Dave also demonstrated this 
characteristic when he stated how he kept quiet and didn’t want to be pointed at and 
regarded as, “that guy that doesn’t like the police college.” This could reflect a common 
reluctance to be confrontational among members of rural communities, although it might 
also reflect his personality, or his place in the community. 
Similarly, could it be that I myself displayed this feature of rurality in that I was 
uncomfortable with probing questions or follow-ups, not wanting to make these fellow-
residents uncomfortable?  Further, there may be another dimension to my sparing use of 
follow-ups. To understand what my interviewees were saying, I relied heavily (as rural 
people often do) on a sense of shared, implicit knowledge. However, such sensitivity to 
shared, implicit knowledge, along with behaviours such as smoothing out interactional 
situations, caring for another’s sensitivities, seeking ways to avoid or soften conflict, and 
trying not to offend, are not only rural traits. Are these not also, to some degree, common 
to gendered communicative practices? 
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One of the reasons I embarked on this research journey was to have a better 
understanding of rurality form a sociological perspective. My reading led me to the 
realization that there are various descriptions and perceptions of rural, and divisions over 
the ways in which rurality is to be understood; there is no definitive definition. I didn’t 
find a definitive definition of rural or rurality within the academic research, in the 
positive sense that “research reveals” the thing that the concept names. Even so, my 
interviewees did indicate in their own way how they perceived rurality in ways important 
to them, through their descriptions of where they lived, their senses of the land and how 
they “get along” and associate with other folks in the small-town and surrounding rural 
areas. Dave’s connection to earth and the hills is an example of how rurality can be 
described and its importance to someone who self-identifies as local or rural without 
feeling the need to provide a comprehensive theoretical or empirical explanation. Yet, as 
Sim (1989) argues, rurality is not only a matter of an interviewee’s perception – it is 
experientially real – for the rural resident (like Dave) it is tangible, despite lacking a 
definitive positivistic definition. This tangible gestalt (as Sim calls it) is not fixed or 
immutable. 
Nonetheless, through this research I came to observe and value my participants’ 
active construction and negotiation of identities, perspectives, and world-views – their 
own and in relation to others. They incorporated a sense of being rural citizens engaged 
in social agency that they developed and continued to develop in response to their social 
contexts. In their speech, the interviewees demonstrated an ability not only to express a 
rural sensibility but also to assess their circumstances critically: how the town of Fort 
Macleod and its surrounding rural area might or might not benefit as a community from 
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the civic venture. Even Dave, who was not sold on the idea of a Police Training College, 
acknowledged how it addressed the economic disadvantages of a rural community with 
few job opportunities to offer.  
My interviewees also constructed in their discourse a shared sense that residents 
of Fort Macleod and rural area had little power or control, individually or collectively, 
over major economic and political decisions affecting them. For example, Stacha 
specifically pointed out that they lost out on the Police Training College, not only for the 
town but also for the surrounding rural area, and Dave reported shock at the cancellation 
after the ground breaking ceremony. His response of, “It was a done deal” indicates his 
recognition that small-towns can easily be subject to arbitrary treatment by a higher 
political authority, one swayed by the political and economic interest of two major 
provincial cities (Calgary and Edmonton).  
Stacha, Dave, and I discursively recognized and reproduced the mutual perception 
that the Police Training College cancellation was another example of how the small-town 
of Fort Macleod, its local surrounding rural areas and rural Southern Alberta in general, 
no longer contain a political and social force to be reckoned with as they did a century 
ago, in the historical glory days of the United Farmers and United Farm Women of 
Alberta. The rural communities in which we reside are, in our experience, undervalued 
and passed over for economic opportunities and development, which in turn diminishes 
the possibility of their gathering or accumulating any political or social capital. In other 
words, Stacha, Dave, and I mutually constructed ourselves as rural residents in passive 
roles, as supporters not influencers. We were to accept and show support to a bid 
proposal process, to wait in anticipation for the authorities to make their decision, and 
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after an undetermined length of time happily receive the news that they won the bid (or 
not). Within the larger patron-client framework that tends to govern relations between 
rural municipalities and provincial governments, these roles are classical examples of 
“boosterism,” the response that is expected of local citizen by local elites and the local 
client power-brokers. 
Within the local political scene, the power to act and to make decisions on behalf 
of the town and its economic catchment area unfolded in a different manner. The Mayor 
and Council of Fort Macleod had the authority to decide whether or not to participate in 
the bidding process for the Alberta Public Safety and Law Enforcement Training Centre. 
The MLA representative for the Livingstone-Macleod region was a primary broker 
between the town and the Alberta Government, and the editor and publisher of the town’s 
newspaper (Macleod Gazette) served as a leading narrative instrument in boosting and 
encouraging support for the bid. The declaration that was proposed and disseminated to 
ground local actions was that Fort Macleod had what it took to put forth the best proposal 
of all the bids in Alberta. One of the primary narrative tropes included Fort Macleod’s 
pride in the history of the North West Mounted Police hegemony in the region. In 
anticipation of securing the bid for the Police Training College, infrastructure resources 
and land were designated for a construction-ready site. The Mayor, Council, and key 
Town officials had the authority to determine who was actively involved by recruiting 
people to sit on the Steering Committee which was used as the mechanism of power to 
determine how the bid proposal was prepared and presented, how community 
engagement was to take place, and how to garner support from the town residents and 
from the surrounding Southern Alberta communities.  
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This picture of a small-town and its surrounding rural catchment or watershed 
area captures what Weber (1947) indicated: that power and politics flow two ways but 
not always equally. As well, this picture shows how the Southern Alberta municipal 
governments and local organizations served as bureaus through which rural residents 
were able exert very limited influence or control over the larger organizations such as 
those in Edmonton and Calgary. This contrasts with the well-documented history of 
farmers and ranchers who were known for their strong political advocacy. Sim (1989) 
wrote about how rural folk historically formed communities to contend with – a 
significant political and economic force at the provincial and even national levels. Many 
of the current residents, like Dave and Stacha, very well may have come from this history 
of established farmers and ranchers in the surrounding rural areas of Fort Macleod. As 
long-time residents I would say that they might be experiencing a nostalgia for their 
settler history, which is in contrast to their present experience and political circumstances. 
Similarly, I, as a First Nations person, have witnessed and experienced the unequal 
political, social, and economic flow of power in the local, provincial, and national levels. 
My personal history as a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy tells of how we were one 
of the most powerful forces to be reckoned with right up to a few decades before the 
settler golden age.  
However, it must be noted that the citizens of Fort Macleod did display some 
forms of agency in this civic venture. For example, one of my interviewees sat on the 
steering committee, and a local business, Scougalls, made the decision to move to a 
location closer to and in view of the site where the Police College was to be constructed. 
The dissentient discourse about the potential impact of police trainees and police culture 
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on their community was voiced by residents, such as Dave, Stacha’s friend John, and 
commenters on Macleod Gazette newspaper articles, letters, and editorials (McTighe, 
2006b, 2006d). In the interviews, Stacha stated that her friend John was not excited about 
having recruits running around town, and Dave voiced his personal opinion on the 
negative effects of a police mentality on the local social environment. Although these and 
similar opinions were often voiced in private, or were largely minimized and/or 
dismissed, it is important to note their existence. Through these discursive acts, the 
residents displayed and reproduced their power of speech. They voiced and acted within 
their power to influence the outcome (however limited) which could also be construed as 
rural or small-town actions. These discursive acts circulated among the residents and are 
not “contained” by a particular group as Foucault (Mills 2004, p. 24) described. Here 
residents create forms of relations which formulate how they act towards one another in 
each interaction, which in a social setting is fluid and unpredictable. However, it is 
important to remember that residents must continue to be a neighbour in this small-town 
and rural area where some families have lived for decades.  
As an individual who comes from a rural community, I recognize how making 
comments or responding to comments about community and area issues can be risky. I 
had ethical concerns about critically analyzing the interviewee responses to the interview 
questions, which I now understand as, at least in part, expressing fears of offending 
members of a nearby local community; a local community in which I “know people.”  
Just like Dave, I don’t want to be “that” person; one who causes friction or who criticizes 
others in some public or outward way that might be viewed negatively or taken out of 
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context. I don’t want people in the community to be less likely to want to engage with me 
in relation to future issues regarding our common “watershed” area. 
Social Construction in Local Identity, Agency, and Community 
My interviewees and I constructed ourselves in response not only to my interview 
questions but to each other. I supported their self-construction in the interviews. They 
each discursively produced themselves not only as particular kinds of individuals but as 
members of a community and civic agents. They all presented themselves as non-
confrontational in a way that can be construed as common to many rural residents’ 
conscious of their locality. In this same manner, I as the interviewer from a neighboring 
community, was also non-confrontational. We must all continue to interact with, and at 
times rely on co-operation with, a limited surrounding population.  
I assisted each interviewee to become comfortable by providing supportive and 
encouraging statements and assisting them in clarifying the meaning of their statements. 
By doing this, it is conceivable that I also contributed to their meaning. It is also 
conceivable that the resulting agreements or statements are the mutual work of both of us, 
not simply the interviewee’s “pure” or “uncontaminated” meaning extracted by the 
researcher (which is the goal of a positivist researcher). We helped each other come to 
and reinforce an understanding that we all lived in the wider rural area a long time, which 
was an important consideration to both of us in each interview. This permitted us not only 
to rely on shared and taken-for-granted knowledge but also respect one another as co-
resident in a wider but local rural setting contingent on the ethical and social constraints 
instituted by that locality.  In other words, this mutual respect was of some importance to 
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us as rural people – local people of longer standing. We wanted to get a sense of how 
long we had lived in the area or been part of the community. 
The distinctions made between public/private conversations by my interviewees 
touched on these ethical and social constraints. A public/private distinction was most 
prominent in Dave’s interview. It is possible that he had a smaller circle of like-minded 
people with whom to discuss his thoughts, but it is clear he didn’t want to discuss them in 
a wider circle of private conversations and especially not in a public forum. Clearly, Dave 
understood this social constraint. On the other hand, the two women I interviewed had a 
wider circle of co-workers who seemed to be more active in their discussions and in their 
support of the Police College. In one case, the interviewee’s own support of the civic 
venture was active and clearly evident. This appears to speak to the existence of a 
differential social placement and a divergence of interests, even in small community. It 
seemed that these interviewees oriented themselves (at least in the interviews) toward an 
association with a wider circle of folks on the pro side of this civic issue who were 
touting a discourse of development and employment that spoke to their own economic 
and social location. It is possible that the public discourse of jobs and community 
development trumped other messages such as community culture. I think that is could 
also be possible for some residents that associating with supporters could involve a 
certain degree of prudence – to avoid being seen as “that” person who is confrontational 
or negative. Is it possible that some of the so-called supporters kept their true opinion 
under cover?  
I want to dispel any notion as to the intention of my thesis project – originally, I 
had set out to gather evidence – data – that would prove (or a least indicate) what rural 
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actually is, and to clearly make evident the forms of communication that actually take 
place in rural communities, and what forms of power are actually at work in rural 
communities. I wanted to find, conclusively, evidence that rurality actually existed in 
some incontrovertible, objective way and the communicative practices that define the 
uniqueness of rural communities. 
However, I’m not so sure that was what I accomplished. The interviewees did not 
articulate specifically what “being rural” is to them, and it is possible that, in my 
interpretation of their responses, I may have created that myself. It is evident, though, that 
I assisted my interviewees in a mutual recreation of a time when they lived through a 
civic decision-making process in which their lived reality, social place, and identities 
came into question.  
I believed then and still believe now that they trusted me with their private 
thoughts and sense of reality to continue to sort through the political, social, and 
economic aftermath of the small-town civic pandemonium they experienced. By private 
thought, I mean thoughts they may have kept to themselves or shared only with trusted 
others – even several years after the cancellation of the Police Training College. 
Ultimately, I do not know in any objective sense if they trusted me enough to share their 
true thoughts. However, I have evidence of the way we cooperated in building a sense of 
who we were to and with each other in our mutual conversation which is the interview. 
Scope and Limitations of This Project 
Throughout this academic journey many descriptions of interesting and important 
social phenomena crossed my hands and computer screen as I read, thought, and wrote 
about the concepts of rurality, communication processes, and social agency. Many of the 
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books and articles I read were tangential to my thesis but not specific, therefore, I have 
pulled away from those readings in manner much like pulling burdock from my hair. 
Some were very interesting, but necessary to let go of, because they led me into dead 
ends; others were compelling but not central to my thesis topic as it ultimately took 
shape. I eventually admitted that I didn’t need to read and do everything here. 
Although matters of community and municipal development are clearly integral 
to my topic, this thesis is not about municipal planning or planning processes. It is more 
about power and the ways we (interviewees and I) responded to the manner in which 
power affects our identities and our sense of agency. I believe that those with the official 
status and power to move development proposals forward need to be sensitive to and 
respectful of the informal discussion and reflection that often escapes formal 
consultation. I also believe that they, and we all, need to acknowledge in meaningful 
ways how power is given shape in a dialectic between the local, provincial, and national 
patron-client relations. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge the brokerage of power 
in reference to that dialectic that takes place at the local level. 
There are ways academic researchers can unwittingly broker power or influence 
the outcome of the research. I tried to maintain sensitivity and care in conducting the 
interviews with two primary reasons in mind. One being the positivistic western scientific 
methods, which are explained in the next paragraph; the other is my sensitivity to the real 
occurrence of violence (subtly and forthright) to Indigenous people – specifically the 
awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women. This is a concern that I carry 
with me everyday as I go about my business and academic dealings in Western society. 
While not a central theme of this research, this important phenomenon is essential to my 
151 
 
 
 
 
theses. The lack of police response to murdered and missing Indigenous women is 
important because the contention I have with the authority of positivistic knowledge is 
the same authority through which police have claimed the right to police, disregard, 
and/or neglect Indigenous people. It is the same basic authority – colonial.  
In the course of my self-reflection on the changing focus of this thesis, I came to 
recognized how some dominant Western scientific and academic processes that I learned 
in my primary, secondary, and postsecondary education were instilled in my mind as 
authorities that worked to invalidate rather than facilitate my own writer’s voice. I 
recognized how the world view I had come to accept as I embarked on my Master’s 
program came from a system that disregarded and devalued my indigenous perspective 
(and other perspectives). My initial attachment to a positivist perspective was formed by 
a long process in which the colonizing discourse of a particular kind of science was 
imposed in terms of a colonizing language.  
To come back to the small-town setting of my project, there is a specific way in 
which the employment relation described by Marx as central to modern economic life, 
forces its way into the consciousness of small-town and rural residents. In such settings, 
job opportunities are increasingly perceived as precarious and scarce. The availability of 
diverse employment is limited, and control over these opportunities typically lies in head 
offices hundreds of miles away. This means that in rural or small-town communities, 
economic leverage is limited and dependent. Those who exercise power in small-towns 
manage the local levers of patron-client dependency: and the key lever for the past 
century has been jobs. Jobs would keep young people home, provide a better tax base, 
and make applications for more government funding credible. 
152 
 
 
 
 
Further discussions 
My interest in rural studies continues to deepen. This exploratory qualitative study 
has raised a number of questions potentially applicable to other situations. I return to two 
of my initial questions: (a) how does social agency manifest in public discussion-
participation, and (b) how do political and social relations provide or withdraw support to 
rural residents to participate in a civic discussion and agency? Further and wider 
exploration of these questions could provide means for community and broader 
discussions on crucial issues today such as our responses to climate change and ways of 
sustaining local water bodies, mountains, and lands, and also of sustaining the socio-
political, cultural, and economical aspects of small-towns and the rural communities that 
inhabit them. As a First Nations person, I continue to be drawn to understanding how 
residents of small-towns and rural districts perceive themselves as rural; how would they 
define rural for themselves? I am also interested in knowing how First Nations people 
tend to define and value the idea of rurality. 
I ultimately came to acknowledge the need to change how I thought of my place 
and my agency as an Indigenous woman in my research project. In doing so, I realized 
that the rural traits I identified in describing the interviewees are not simply rural traits. 
To smooth out interactional situations; to take care for another’s sensitivities; to seek 
ways to avoid or to soften conflict; to try not to offend; to be particularly sensitive to 
implicit knowledge – these can all, to some degree, describe my gendered communicative 
practices and speech acts. They also describe to some degree practices and acts that were 
passed down through my own people. Due to time and scope constraints, I am unable to 
153 
 
 
 
 
address these fully here, but there is rich potential for another academic study that could 
make and discuss these linkages. 
The issue of employment and jobs came up in what my interviewees said and in 
the content of newspaper articles covering the Fort Macleod Police College civic venture, 
over and over again. Employment and lack of political and economic control over their 
destinies are fundamentally important issues for small-town and rural residents. These 
topics are tangential to, but not the focus of my research, and are areas in which further 
study could certainly be pursued in regards to how they are made sense of in terms of 
local identity and agency. 
Among the most interesting facets I derived from this research project is how the 
interviewees and I moved back and forth, to and from subscribing to view our lives from 
an urban perspective. All of us, including Dave, who used technology to a minimum, 
require products and services that can not be obtained in Fort Macleod. Our home lives, 
recreation, work, and interests have brought and still bring us to places (in person or 
virtually) where we can find goods and services and take part in activities not available in 
Fort Macleod or the surrounding small-towns. Our lives are not exclusively rural. How 
do we reconcile that with our deep experience of and advocacy for rurality? 
Gender is also a legacy intertwined with urban/rural divisions and inequities. One 
of my interviewees indicated that she had been too busy to get involved in the civic 
discussions surrounding the Police Training College. I assumed her after-work hours 
were taken up with domestic responsibilities in her role as mom and wife. Some of my 
own concerns also brought to light gendered issues for me, both as an interviewer and as 
a First Nations woman. I had previously mentioned above that I began to reflect on the 
154 
 
 
 
 
extent to which my non-confrontational approach to interviewing was perhaps not only a 
characteristic of my rural background, but to some degree also gendered communicative 
practices. It would be interesting to take a deeper look at gendered and other varieties of 
communicative practices in rural communities. How might such practices support or 
facilitate civic agency and different forms of leadership in their respective social 
locations and communities? On a more general note, rural areas now receive urban-
centric mass communications by broadcast and via the internet. So, in a sense, their 
collective self-consciousness as being rural is likely being influenced by this access. They 
have gained the ability to see themselves through urban eyes; for example, in comparing 
the perceived diversity of urban society with a perceived lack of diversity locally. This 
doesn’t necessarily mean they will lose agency; however, it may mean that the new rural 
will comprise of new forms of collection self-construction and civic agency. 
Conceivably, the most important question brought about by this thesis is how we 
(both writer and small-town/rural readers) can apply and expand an understanding of how 
our social and discursive practices produce and reproduce forms of social agency in our 
communities when we face civic development issues - me in my work within my own 
rural community, and you in other rural and even urban communities. It is now a 
common occurrence in Southern Alberta (and other rural areas) to be confronted with the 
possibility of civic endeavours and projects that have the potential to grow or strengthen 
the local economy or to skew it towards progressive dependency on urban priorities and 
international markets, or have irreversible and disruptive effect on local environments 
and ways of life.   
Conclusion 
155 
 
 
 
 
This project proposes that diverse, informal, and ordinary voices - like those of 
my interviewees - are part of a distinctive communicative environment that is built in 
ordinary as well as extraordinary times through practices that construct relations, 
communities, and possibilities. As Bonner (1997) suggests, these voices can advance 
serious community engagement through thoughtful and critical dialogue. They should not 
be de-legitimated as merely individual or as uninformed. They are ongoing factors of an 
everyday social fabric in the ongoing process of being actively produced and reproduced.  
My learning through this project included unlearning the idea that only one model 
of social science is possible, or is the only one that counts. Qualitative and reflective 
research is non-linear and messy; and it imposes unique challenges of an interviewer and 
writer, such as locating oneself in the thesis, ethically and truthfully. Self reflection is 
hard work – and is especially so in a complex social context given that our selves and 
subjectivities are socially formed. I struggled to value my own work; to decolonize my 
mind and to write from where I am (as Dorothy Smith would advocate). This research 
began from events in a time frame that became stories of how three people and I 
interwove our social agency and identity through our experience of the events covered by 
this research project. We all began from a place in time set by a community experience of 
and response to a decision-making venture and we reproduced ourselves as community 
members as we revisited that venture. In the end I learned the importance of academic 
self-reflection combined with social reflection on academia as a place in which, as 
Foucault pointed out, truth mixes with power. 
 I recognized how western scientific and academic principles and procedures that 
I learned in my primary, secondary, and postsecondary education were instilled in my 
156 
 
 
 
 
mind, but also how they shaped my mind. I came to recognize how my world view on 
entering my masters program came from a system that disregarded and devalued my 
Indigenous perspective (and other perspectives). I acknowledged a need to change how I 
thought of my place as an Indigenous woman in my research project. I had to both 
acknowledge and struggle to disengage my thinking from this indoctrination. Hence, in 
refocusing my perspective, I moved to a more descriptive but also more reflective 
explanation and interpretation of the interviews, my transcripts, and the documentary 
resources I worked with in this research project. As expected, I experienced a huge 
amount of learning through this process. However, perhaps the unlearning – specifically 
to unlearn my devaluation of my own knowledge – was the most significant education. 
I’m not suggesting that my interpretations are definitive or authoritative; in fact, 
this project has led me to apply and question authority, control, and power. My 
interpretations reflect my perspective throughout this project, so too, my interpretations 
reflect on changes in my perspective and who I have become in that context. This is my 
reading of a journey undertaken in relation to three residents of a rural area and small-
town who experienced a specific series of events. 
My interviewees knew they were being interviewed by a fellow rural and local 
resident, and assumed that such a resident would know what they know. Together we 
created a sense of rurality and history of place. Together we sought to understand, 
through our experience of our economic, political, and social circumstances, a proposed 
development that had the potential to bring about substantial change to the local area. In 
the end, though, it did provide for all of us (in different ways) a political experience along 
with unanswered questions. In the interviews I listened to them think aloud about their 
157 
 
 
 
 
positions, identities, and agency within the community and how these affected their voice 
in the civic decision-making process. I was more than a listener; I was an encourager of, 
and in some ways an empathizer with their reflections. Each interviewee and I co-created 
a sense of community based on our shared locality as I prompted them (and myself) to 
remember the events and timelines of the Fort Macleod Police College venture. In doing 
so we, as neighbours, remembered and re-situated the waxing and waning of the dream of 
our rural watershed in the recent past. 
The three interviewees expressed, at times indirectly, what they saw as the 
existence of an inequality of political power and of knowledge between an insider 
network and the general populace within the small-town. For example, there was an 
implication that the local power network close to the mayor who were “in the know” 
should have known what was coming, and that “the way you move forward with 
anything” in a small-town is by forming a circle of power networks. On the other hand, I 
noted an ambiguous sympathy for the mayor; that whatever his local power base and 
knowledge network, he tried to do good things for the town, but it was not sufficient to 
keep him in the know or give him leverage provincially. This sympathy, however 
reserved, seemed to indicate a common thread in informal rural civic discourse – that we 
(rural people) are together against them, who inhabit places of power in urban centres. 
My interviewees provided me with a window through which I could experience civic 
decision-making and local social agency, through their worldview or even their 
experiential gestalt and compare it to my own. 
Voicing or acting on an opposing opinion on a civic issue may lead to social 
consequences for those standing behind their words. In a small-town where residents are 
158 
 
 
 
 
likely to be reliant on each other or have common community connections, voicing such 
a position publicly can be uncomfortable and awkward at the least. As noted by two of 
my interviewees, this situation can be a vulnerable one. Stating dissent can be interpreted 
as you are “one of those negative” people who are to be found in the community (or 
perhaps any community). It can also threaten one’s support networks. Not wanting to 
bring trouble means following a “non-confrontational” line. This is common to rural 
residents, who must continue to interact with, cooperate with, and at times rely on a 
limited surrounding population.  
In conclusion, there may be a First Nations parallel here. First Nations people 
have had to learn to live in, accommodate to, work with, and engage in activities within 
settler places and spaces. How do we manage or reconstruct the issues that come with 
that – like my struggle with an imposed academic Eurocentrism that I also internalized? 
Pulling burdocks out on one’s hair is nothing compared to pulling Eurocentrism and other 
colonial legacies out of our minds and souls. I hope I have demonstrated in this thesis that 
an ethic of non-confrontation does not mean that rural people (and marginalized people) 
simply or passively give up agency and become blundering conformists. Privately and/or 
through networks of like-minded trusted relatives, friends, and colleagues, thinking and 
discussion takes place, and the possibility for individual and collective agency remains 
vibrantly alive. 
 
 
  
159 
 
 
 
 
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APPENDICES 
Appendix A: Consent Form 
 
Information Letter for Interview  
Joslin Smith 
University of Lethbridge 
403-627-5318 
smitaj00@uleth.ca 
Dear: _____________________________________ Date:     
This letter is an invitation to participate in my University of Lethbridge Masters of 
Sociology Thesis titled “Examining Power Structures and Networks of Communication 
in Rural Communities: A Case of the Proposed Police Training College in Fort 
Macleod.” My program supervisor is Dr. Ramp from the Department of Sociology. This 
letter explains my project and what your involvement would entail if you decide to 
participate. 
The focus of this project is to gain information on communication in civic-decision 
making in small town and rural areas. In particular, I am interested in the communication 
styles and characteristics employed by town and rural area residents who experienced and 
responded to the announcement and subsequent cancellation of the proposal and 
construction of the Police Training College in Fort Macleod. The project will help me 
learn more about the communication of public issues and develop skills in research 
design, collection and analysis of information, and academic writing. 
Participation in this study is voluntary. A number of potential interviewees are being 
recruited. Although your input will be valuable, do not feel obligated to participate 
merely for the sake of assisting me personally. I am seeking interviewees who are willing 
and able to volunteer free of duty or any sense of compulsion stemming from any prior 
relationship we might have or any authority I might hold. 
The interview will take approximately 30 - 70 minutes to complete and take place in a 
mutually agreed upon location and time. With your permission, the interview will be 
audio-recorded to facilitate collection of information, and later transcribed for analysis. 
You may decline to answer any of the interview questions if you so wish. Further, you 
may decide to withdraw from this study at any time during or after the interview. If you 
decide to withdraw after the interview you may inform me through email or telephone up 
171 
 
 
 
 
to the time of my thesis defense. If you choose to withdraw – all recordings and notes 
made of your interview will be returned to you if you withdraw while speaking in person 
with me, otherwise, your information will be destroyed. 
There are no anticipated risks related to this research. However, you may feel some 
discomfort discussing the issues as it may bring up strong emotions when you recollect 
your involvement with the proposed Police Training College. To assist you in dealing 
with emotions that may cause you stress, I have compiled a list of names and telephone 
numbers of counseling and/or mental health services, if you wish this information. 
You may also find the interview to be very enjoyable and rewarding. There is no known 
direct benefit to for you to be involved in this study and no financial compensation, 
however, I can provide a small contribution towards your transportation costs to attend 
the interview. 
Your personal information may be used or kept anonymous as per your request. If you 
decide to keep your personal information anonymous your name or any other personal 
identifying information will not appear in the Master’s Thesis resulting from this study; 
however, with your permission anonymous quotations may be used. Your comments and 
statements may be released in whole or in part in an academic public domain but you will 
be contacted to verify the content of your quotations before they are used. Keep in mind 
as you consider participating that the town of Fort Macleod is small and true anonymity 
cannot be fully guaranteed.  
My MA Supervisor and Committee Members will be reviewing my writings with respect 
to work on my Master’s Thesis paper. You will not have the opportunity to read the final 
paper before it is submitted to my supervisory committee. The results from this study will 
be presented in a Master’s thesis defense as a requirement of the University of Lethbridge 
Master’s program. The final approved copy of the written thesis will be in the public 
domain and available to read from the University of Lethbridge library and may appear in 
other scholarly presentations and publications. At no time, however, will your name be 
used or any identifying information revealed without your permission.  
Notes and/or recordings collected during this study will be retained up to five (5) years 
after completion and approval of the thesis, in a secure location, and will then be 
destroyed. I will be the only person with access to the data. All computers and laptops 
(and any other technical equipment) used in transcribing will be password protected. All 
information and data collected from interviews will be stored and kept in a secure locked 
cabinet or on a password-protected computer in my home. 
 
A copy of this consent form will be given to you to keep for your records and reference.  
172 
 
 
 
 
This project has been reviewed and received ethics approval through the University of 
Lethbridge Human Subject Research Committee. Questions regarding your rights as a 
participant in this study may be directed to research.services@uleth.ca.  
For questions or additional information to assist you in reaching a decision about 
participation, please contact me at the above cell number or email address. You can also 
contact my course instructor, Dr. Ramp, at 403-329-2551 or email at ramp@uleth.ca.   
I very much look forward to speaking with you and thank you in advance for your 
assistance in this project. 
 
Joslin Smith BA 
  
173 
 
 
 
 
CONSENT FORM 
I have read the information presented in the information letter about a study being 
conducted by Joslin Smith for a Master’s thesis project at the University of Lethbridge.   
The thesis supervisor is Dr. Ramp.  I have had the opportunity to ask any questions 
related to this study, to receive satisfactory answers to my questions, and any additional 
details I wanted. 
I am aware that I have the option of allowing my interview to be audio recorded to ensure 
an accurate recording of my responses.  I am also aware that excerpts from the interview 
may be included in the course project paper or thesis to come from this research. I 
understand that my approval will be sought before any of my quotes are used. 
I was informed that I may withdraw my consent at any time until the completion of the 
project by advising the student researcher in writing or in person. If I choose to withdraw 
during the interview, all recordings and notes from my interview will be returned to me, 
otherwise, the interview recordings and notes will be destroyed. 
This study has been reviewed and received ethics approval through the University of 
Lethbridge Human Subject Research Committee. Questions about my rights as a 
participant in this study may be directed to the Office of Research Ethics at 403-329-2747 
or research.services@uleth.ca.  
For all other questions Joslin Smith can be contacted using the contact information 
provided on the previous page. 
With full knowledge of all information previously mentioned, I am competent to agree 
and of my own free will, to participate in this study. 
YES   NO   
I agree to have my interview audio recorded. 
YES   NO   
I agree to the use of a pseudonym and general description of my occupation and/or status. 
YES   NO 
I agree to disclosure of my name and occupation status in the final report on this research 
and other publications stemming from it. 
YES   NO 
 
174 
 
 
 
 
Participant Name:       Signature:     
      (Please Print Clearly) 
Researcher Name: __________________________ Signature: _____________________ 
   (Please Print Clearly) 
Date: ____________________________ 
  
175 
 
 
 
 
Appendix B: Interview Guide 
The Story Line 
 
In 2004 the Alberta Provincial Government announced the construction of an Alberta 
Public Safety and Law Enforcement Training Center and put out a call for proposals. A 
bidding competition was opened to Alberta communities who were interested in 
submitting a proposal to host this Police and Peace Officer Training Centre in their 
community. Fort Macleod residents, under the leadership of Mayor Shawn Patience, and 
council members worked diligently to put together a winning proposal.  
In September 2006, the town of Fort Macleod was chosen as the site for the Police 
Training College. After years of waiting for the government to move on the project, 
Premier Ed Stelmack, in 2011, announced construction of the proposed building and a 
ground breaking ceremony took place in Fort Macleod that same year. In July of 2012 
Bird Design – Build Construction was awarded the bid to build the facility. A month later 
the provincial government cancelled the police college.  
Fort Macleod was compensated for the funds used in preparing for the facility. In the 
2013 local municipal elections, the residents of Fort Macleod elected a new mayor and 
voted to replace all but 1 councillor. 
 
 
 
 
 
176 
 
 
 
 
Interview Guide 
1. How long have you been a resident of Fort Macleod or the surrounding area? 
a. What is your involvement in this community? 
2. What has been your experience of living (and/or working) in the rural area and 
small town? 
3. What was your involvement in the process of the Police Training College proposal? 
4. Tell me about the individual/private conversations you had (or heard) regarding the 
Police Training College?  
a. Where did these conversations take place? 
b. Who attended (not names but friends or family)? 
 
5. Tell me about your experience with the public meetings. 
a. How did you find out about the meeting?  
b. Who set up the agenda? 
c. Who was facilitating, presenting, answering questions? 
d. What are your thoughts on how the issues were defined? (framed or 
formulated?) 
e. Where there other ways of framing the issues? 
f. Where there other issues that did not get “air” time – and what were they? 
6. How do you think the handling of the consultation around the Police Training 
College affected the relationships or friendships among the townspeople or the rural 
people? 
7. In retrospect, how well was the community consultation handled by the town or by 
the provincial government? 
8. What are your thoughts on the cancellation of the Police Training College? 
a. Do you think the cancellation had anything to do with the location in a rural 
area? Or the political stance of Southern Alberta? 
177