The challenges faced by inland villages illustrate the techno-social relationship by which information systems can be means of agency in addressing societal challenges. This paper follows the progression and effects of a relocation project using a marketplace platform over the sixteen-year period from its induction to the present day through a longitudinal process study. By analysing the narrative with the help of the push-pull-mooring framework, as well as structure and agency theory, actor-based barriers to adoption can be identified. Our research highlights the importance of considering mooring factors to optimise adoption of information systems. It was further found that the co-evolving of technological and social systems led to the marketplace platform becoming a driver of agency. The findings expand the understanding of data literacy and agency in social-technology interaction, especially regarding exploring how information systems and technology can be used to address societal challenges. This study further contributes to the emerging concept of rural living labs (RLL).
Data was gathered over the span of ten out of the sixteen years between the induction of the process and the present day, with the bulk of interviews taking place in 2015, as well as secondary source analysis spanning the whole period and repeat interviews in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
This paper contributes to the emerging literature on the potential of platforms as drivers of
addressing societal challenges. It uses the push-pull-mooring framework in combination with
structure and agency theory to uncover factors that are conducive for analytical-critical
thinking and the skills related the bottom-up use of existing information systems and
technology
In the field of IS agency is mostly discussed in the context of the conflict of agency between
technology and human
How can marketplace platforms enable agency to address societal challenges? What are the consequences, short and long-term, of using marketplace platforms as an enabler of agency to address societal challenges?
The push-pull-mooring (PPM) framework has its roots in migration theory, it was conceived to
explain the migration of people from one place to another. According to PPM the decision to
migrate is based on a combination of attractive (pull) factors in the target location, as well as
repellent (push) factors in the source location
Like PPM, structure and agency theory can be used to understand decision-making in the
context of IS. In structure and agency theory the focus is put on the power dynamics between
operand and operant parts of a network
Structure, in this context, is what is pre-defined and provided by both internal and external
forces, or in other words: Structure consists of schemes and resources
Agency, on the other hand, describes actors taking charge and shaping their own
environment, i.e. operant resources
Agency is a complex phenomenon that is dependent on structure to support it, thus the
possibilities of agency in a system that lacks structural support or even has counter-active
structure is limited. A lack of understanding of this dependence on structure for effective use
of agency can lead to what has been described as ‘neo-liberal victim blaming’
PPM has in the last decades increasingly been used to explain migratory beyond the
migration of population
Within IS structure and agency theory is utilized in structuration, as well as
actor-networktheory (ANT)
More recently, agency in the context of IS has been discussed in the context of resistance
and individual’s rights within society.
Research on agency in rural and remote villages understood through the capabilities approach
To understand the RRP from a systems perspective the methodology of a longitudinal field
study in the form of a process study following the
For this article only one of to the cases is analysed, as a standalone observation, instead of
using it as a data point in a multi-case study
The main type of data gathered for this study consists of semi-structured interviews.
In May 2015 the village was visited for several weeks and a total of 15 interviews with residents were performed, focusing on key persons within the villages’ civic society to understand the drivers behind innovative projects in the village, of which the relocation project was the most prominent but not the only one. Out of the fifteen original interviewees ten mentioned the RRP. An additional interviewee the municipality was interviewed about the RRP in 2024.
During 2015-2022 the village’s progress was followed via social media, in specific via the village’s Facebook group and later the RRP’s own Facebook group, as well as Facebook posts made by key stakeholders on their personal Facebook profiles. Facebook was the only social media channel used for outreach by the RRP.
In January 2022 as well as April 2024 we followed up with two of the key stakeholders of the relocation project, as well as with an additional stakeholder at the municipality, also in April 2024.
While the 2015 interviews were based on a shared interview guide with pre-defined main
questions, supplemented by follow-up questions depending on each interviewee’s area of
expertise the later interviews were opportunistically driven
For all interviews a note-taking strategy was chosen after we found early in the research process how notetaking facilitated the data gathering process by giving interviewees instant feedback on the relevance of their answers, as well as providing for natural spaces of silence. Most of the conversation was recorded in the form of direct quotes.
Interview data was supplemented with secondary data, namely publications about the village in mainstream media and a 2013 photo exhibition featuring the relocation project.
Following a multi-stage process as suggested by
To quantify the effectiveness of the RRP the qualitative data were supplemented with a quantitative analysis following Eisenhardt’s (1989) advice on the use of multi-method designs in case studies. To do so I analysed secondary data, namely open data from Statistic Sweden. The smallest available measurement area in the dataset is the demographic statistical area (DeSO) where one DeSO (imperfectly) describes the area in question was chosen. To get a context to understand the village’s demographic development against, the population development of four other DeSOs from the same area but not bordering on the village’s DeSO, or including towns, was compared with the village studied. The five DeSOs were analysed regarding the total population size, as well as the total and percentage of families with children. Data was available for the years 2011-2023.
Given the duration of this study changes surrounding the researcher’s circumstances can
have an impact on data gathering and analysis: While I started my research as an outside
researcher according to Walsham’s (2006), as time went by, I moved more towards becoming
an involved researcher by getting involved in a national village relocation project myself. This
poses both opportunities through access and rich immersion in the data, and the potential for
bias
Further, when data gathering was commenced in 2015, I did not live in Sweden, nor did I speak the Swedish language fluently. By the time of the follow-up interviews in 2022 this had changed, which, again comes with the associated opportunities and potential biases. While the language barrier forcing me to perform interviews in not just my own but also the interviewees’ second language can have had a negative impact on data quality, my 2015 situation did endow me with an outside perspective and “fresh pair of eyes” that I had lost in 2022.
In 2008 the municipality flagged for a potential closing of the elementary school in the researched village due to dwindling numbers of children in the vicinity. For the village population this was an existential threat. Losing the school was perceived as a point of no return that would not only lead to more families leaving the village and its surroundings, but also effectively prevent any more young families from moving in.
With the school threat looming residents, led by some of the remaining families with schoolage children, started organizing themselves and considered their options. This led to the formation of an informal “relocation group” (inflyttningsgrupp) within the village that had as its mission to get new families to get to move into the village.
(Interviewee A, 2015)
After the end of the formal interview two of the founding parts of the relocation group mentioned how in 2011 “one of the senior residents that were the driving forces behind keeping the village as it is” left. Both described this as a moment of opportunity that opened possibilities for changes within the village to be made, and thus for renewal. Without these individuals leaving, both interviewees hinted, the relocation project as it unfolded might not have been possible:
The relocation group could now take more drastic action. Interviewees described a process of iterative analysis taking the acute problem, the pending school closure, as a starting point:
The relocation group concluded that more people needed to move in, then continued to analyse how people could be made to move. The group reasoned that what was needed was more people knowing about the village’s existence and building on this conclusion they set out to find ways to “put the village on the map”:
Initially considering advertising in the Stockholm metro the idea was soon dropped because of the cost associated. Instead, the group turned its attention to the Swedish marketplace platform blocket. The group listed the village as a whole as “for sale” in the platform’s real estate section. As this was against blocket’s rules and they were asked to take down the advertisement, they subsequently changed the advertisement into an offering of guided tours of the village for a symbolic 20 SEK:
Blocket, started as a local second-hand market in 1997, has developed into a marketplace for
everything from household items to cars, real estate and jobs. According to its own website,
blocket is one of the largest buy-and-sale platforms in Sweden with five million visitors every
week and nine of ten Swedes having bought or sold something on blocket
The advertisement triggered interest in the village with “many families” getting in contact for the guided tours. The tours were organised by the relocation group who showed the village and its infrastructure, answered any question the interested families might have, but also pointed out houses for sale and in many cases helped interested families in getting in contact with potential sellers.
Between 2013 - 2019 the relocation group has also had a stall at an alternative music festival
in a neighbouring village, as well as designed an information brochure about their village
(
It is unclear how many relocations were triggered by the project. In 2015 interviewee B
reports on 16 people (ten adults and six children) having moved in as a direct result of the
project, while a 2013 TV broadcast quotes another resident as claiming twenty-five young
families having moved to the village during the preceding six years (
By 2015 the relocation group reports that the most sought-after houses had been sold. Interviewees voiced that there is continued interest in moving to the village so its population theoretically could grow further, but this interest is impeded by lack of housing. There was a clear sense of frustration over houses that don’t conform with the “little Swedish dream” not being sold:
country dream with a red house. But the house they want also can’t need maintainance and it has to be cheap. (Interviewee A)
Another area of frustration was second-home owners that refuse to sell what is seen to be potential family homes:
should be more expensive to own a vacation home that could also be used as a full-time home. [For instance] there is a white home [in the vilalge that is used as a vacation home] that you could do so much with. It also has two smaller summer houses. It really annoys me that it is owned by a family in Stockholm who rarely come up here. (Interviewee A, 2015) By 2015 cracks were also starting to appear within the relocation group. Especially people outside of the innermost circle voiced concern about the too-small number of active people “burning themselves out”:
Others articulated how the movement was dominated by some individuals who kept out others that wanted to become active. One term in particular that was being used was the term “eldstjäl” [fire stealer], a wordplay on the Swedish “eldsjäl” [fire soul], i.e. a person that is very involved in civic society. In this case the expression was used to indicate a person that “steals” the “fire” from others in the community by having monopoly on it:
More interviewees, however reported on an overall improvement to the “village spirit” and a rise in civic initiative, in particular among the younger people engaged in the relocation group:
After the advertisement and the attention around it the group continued their work, though on a slowly decreasing scale. Their focus progressively changed from reaching out to interested families to finding new ways to provide housing. One technique employed was trying to facilitate relocation chains. In one example a more central flat was found for an elderly inhabitant which in turn made available a family home to a new family. Also, the group worked on getting second-home owners to sell.
In 2022 the prevailing opinion was that all sellable houses had been sold:
One project was the zoning of new residential land in cooperation with the municipality. However, as of 2022 none of the zoned land was bought. One interviewee who, as a public employee and directly involved in the zoning project as well as the village’s relocation project has expert knowledge, attributes this to difficulties in obtaining bank loans for housing construction in rural areas:
What is more, the relocation group was hit hard by the Covid 19 pandemic. They could no longer provide their hallmark village tours, nor could they reach out via their music festival stall. During the pandemic the group moved most of their efforts online and are, as of 2024 mostly using Facebook to advertise houses for sale. Facebook messenger has become their main means of contact for interested families.
Through visually mapping the RRP (see Figure 1) three distinct phases could be identified:
The crisis phase marks the beginning of the process, induced by the possibility of school closure, an externally imposed threat. While the perceived threat triggers the formation of a volunteer group it does not lead to immediate action.
It is first a second event that is outside of the group’s own control, the relocation of a person that were perceived to be a major stopping block to change in the village, that triggered a more proactive approach. This is what is referred to as the active phase of the project.
During this active phase activities happened in quick succession in what can be described as a situation of flow. What is more, the members of the relocation group saw near immediate positive effects of their activism, thus being provided prompt positive reinforcement.
After a few months of heavy activity, the active phase soon started to taper out into the more measured pace of what is referred to as the maintenance phase.
During the maintenance phase relocation group members initially focused their effort on continuing with the tried-and-tested activities of the active phase. As time progressed, the initial optimism of the active phase was accompanied and somewhat dampened by an increasing awareness of issues that appeared to put a limit to what was achievable. Earlier concerns about group member resources were eventually met by the Covid 19 pandemic that forced a stop of many of the main activities that were initiated during the active phase of the project.
Though it is too early to tell it appears following the caesura point marked by the pandemic the relocation group entered a fourth face, that of a mature organisation. This phase is marked by a sustainable level of activity, matured communication channels and relationships, as well as dampened realistic expectations for the project.
Surprisingly, no effect of the project could be clearly seen in the publicly available datasets from Statistics Sweden when comparing the village with four other demographic statistic areas in the vicinity.
While the village outperformed the control areas regarding total loss of population between 2011 and 2023, as can be seen in Figure 2, Figure 3 shows that the village performed worse than the control areas regarding the development of the number of families with children, which after all was the target of the relocation project.
No clear deviation from the control group, nor any “spike” in the data during the core years of the project could be seen either when analysing total population and number of families with children on a year-by-year basis.
The statistical analysis showed a disconnection between interviewees’ narrative of the relocation project’s success with statistical demographic data. Interviewees describe a tremendous success ultimately leading to a de facto halt of the project due to the lack of available housing. Self-reported numbers of new population for the core years of the project are between 16 individuals and 25 families. That is a significant number given the total population of 614 people in the corresponding demographic statistical area in 2011.
Statistical data, however, shows no clear deviations from population development in the control group. In fact, the RRP area seems to be losing more families with children, the target group of the relocation project, than the control group.
One potential explanation lies in the small size of the dataset, where annual population changes usually are in the single-digit range. In such a small dataset statistical changes become chaotic and hard to interpret. However, the general image persists even when regarding the whole twelve-year period for which data was available. This points to the explanation being found beyond the problem of small datasets in statistics.
It is unlikely for the relocation numbers reported by project members to be entirely nonfactual. One possibility is that the relocation project has led to a replacement of population, in “blind spots” of sorts to the interviewee’s perception, rather than a population increase. For example, given the size of the demographic statistic area that includes both the core settlement and less settled areas, areas further from the central area could have seen increased depopulation where the relocation group was not as active or involved. However, with the data available for this study the above are pure speculations.
However, the narrative and visual mapping analysis enabled a look beyond the pure
population numbers: Interviewees consistently reported a generally increased “village spirit”,
and an increase in volunteering activity and initiatives within the village. Interestingly, this
increased activity was reported as being especially strong during the maintenance phase of the
project, as engagement in the core project started to taper off. In addition, the Heterotopia study
It can be argued that, while the quantitative success of the RRP might be up to discussion
the rejuvenating and activating effect of the RRP are the true legacy of the project, as predicted
by
The circumstances and challenges faced by the village in this study are by no means unique.
Most of the Swedish inland is faced with disappearing structures and de-population in much
the same way this village was
The emergence of the RRP can be understood in the context of the push-pull-mooring
framework
The push factor in this case was a looming dystopic future where the village lost its school
and after passing this perceived point of no return seemed doomed to perpetual decline. In
opposition to this dystopic future, residents’ early discussions within the relocation group
uncovered a contesting utopic narrative of a renewed village that acted as a strong pull factor
towards a desired outcome. For this a strong sense of place
However, even though the push and pull factors were in favour of promoting activism, no such activism occurred for almost four years. Even though the pull factor in form of the school threat was present as early as 2008 and the relocation group was founded shortly after it was only in 2011-12 that the RRP really kicked off. Understanding this missing ingredient can help us understand what might facilitate the adaption of existing IS and platforms in other social challenge situations and beyond.
According to interviewees it was the relocation of one single person that was perceived as a
major obstacle to change within the village that ultimately triggered the active phase of the RRP.
It thus appears that this individual provided strong mooring to the non-active old state, and
only once this obstacle was removed could profound change take place.
The transition from the active phase into the maintenance phase gives a hint that the same might be true for the remaining two factors in the PPM-framework: As villagers and municipality officials perceived heavily increased migration into the village, the perceived threat to the village was reduced. Thus, the original pull-factor lost its strength. This may well have been one contributing factors behind the tapering-off of activism within the project.
These results also go in line with what earlier research
By applying the push-pull-mooring framework to analyse drivers of change from one phase
of the RRP to another, including the process of choosing and utilizing the marketplace platform,
we were able to confirm the observations of
What is more the evolving of design and rules the marketplace platform and the social media
platforms used later on in the RRP heavily influenced the development of the RRP beyond its
pure technical aspects. This is in accordance with the growing body of evidence highlighting
the role of technology not as static or operand structure, but as an active actor
In this paper, by studying a village relocation project (RRP) I contributed to the emerging
literature on the potential of platforms as drivers of addressing societal challenges by examining
the progression of the RRP through the lens of the push-pull-mooring framework. In doing so
factors important for the extension of digital literacy with concepts of analytical-critical
thinking and skills facilitating the bottom-up use of existing technology and information
systems
By analysing the RRP through the lens of the push-pull-mooring (PPM) framework it could be shown how migration from an inactive to active state occurs only when push, pull and mooring factors are conducive for the migration.
It is not sufficient for the opportunities generated by IS and IT, such as the marketplace platform of this study, to exist, neither for the need to use them to be strong. For such platforms to be able to facilitate agency for societal challenges, mooring factors also need to be considered. These mooring factors do not need to be directly connected to the technical aspect; they can just as well be found in the power dynamics surrounding local agents. When looking at the concise example of remote villages or other small systems, it is important to consider that even small factors can have a large influence.
This study identified three phases for the RRP between 2008 and 2024. The threat of school closure led to a crisis phase that saw early activism through organization of an internal working group. However, it was first when mooring factors were removed that the group gained the agency needed to move into an active phase. During this active phase actions happened in quick succession and positive reinforcement of the group’s activism was near-immediate. Once the pull factor, by means of the immediate threat, lost its strength activism was reduced and the project led over in a maintenance phase where expectations where dampened and critical voices appeared through the optimism of the active phase. The Covid-19 pandemic, as an externally imposed caesura, further facilitated the transition into a sustainable, stable state of increased agency.
Due to the disagreement between qualitative and quantitative secondary data it cannot be concluded whether the RRP was successful in its core aim, the increase of the number of families with children in the area. However, the RRP has acted as a catalysator of change through its near-immediate positive feedback on the activity of relocation group members. This can be seen in the uptick of civil engagement within the village that was observed strongest not during the active phase of the project, but during the maintenance phase where engagement in the relocation project itself started to slow down.
In places as dynamic and sensitive to change as remote villages
As this study is inductive in its nature it strives to contribute to a growing understanding
and the new notion of rural living labs, a field that as both myself