Changing places: the generative effects of community embeddedness in place

ABSTRACT

How social structures and relations influence entrepreneurship is an enduring puzzle. The history of land ownership in Scotland is marked by tensions between the institutional legacy of private landlordism and community embeddedness in place. In this paper, I examine the development of a community venture that was established to buy and commit land that was formerly privately owned into community ownership, and then manage the land in perpetuity for community benefit. The methodology employs archival, interview and observation data to investigate how institutional legacy social structures and relations motivated and shaped community entrepreneurship. The Scottish historical context elaborates the influence of institutional legacy on the embeddedness in place perspective, and the effects of transcending institutional legacy on entrepreneurial flourishing and institutional change.

KEYWORDS:

• Embeddedness
• place
• institutional legacy
• community entrepreneurship

1. Introduction

How social structures and relations influence entrepreneurship is an enduring puzzle. The history of land ownership in Scotland is one of struggle between the commercial interests of private landlords, and the autonomy of individuals and communities that live on and work such land (Cameron 1996, 2020; Devine 1994; Mackenzie et al. 2004; McInnes 2007). The first Scottish estate to be taken into community ownership was at Stornoway (Isle of Lewis) (1925), when 58,000 acres were gifted to the community by the then proprietor, Lord Leverhulme. In 1992, the Assynt Crofters Trust purchased the North Lochinver estate (MacPhail 2002) and in 1997 the Island of Eigg was bought by the community. By owning an area of land in a community trust, the responsibility for sustainable land management is vested to the community residing on, or associated with, that land. In this paper, I examine why and how the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust (IEHT) was established to buy and commit land that was formerly privately owned into community ownership, and then manage the land sustainably for community benefit.

Embeddedness describes how social actors can be understood and interpreted only within their relational and cultural contexts (Anderson 1998, 2015a, 2015b; Granovetter 1985; McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015). Communities are the essential ‘building blocks of society’ (McKeever, Anderson, and Jack 2014, 454) in which economic and social action are situated and organizational outcomes produced (Anderson, Dana, and Dana 2006; Daskalaki, Hjorth, and Mair 2015). The inseparability of the interests of individuals, communities and organizations means that community wellbeing and flourishing, and environmental sustainability, are mutually constitutive.

Bringing communities to the fore in entrepreneurship research has long been overdue (Anderson and Gaddefors 2016; Daskalaki, Hjorth, and Mair 2015), and especially in their historical context where few community organizations have been investigated (Dorado 2021; Stott and Fava 2020). Yet communities vary in the ways that they influence economic activity, and such variation has historical origins (Greve and Rao 2014). Embodied in regulatory, cultural and normative institutions, each community context is unique because it reflects distinct historical and cultural influences. Hence, community entrepreneurship cannot be fully understood without reference to the past. In this article, I examine why and how the legacy of private landlordism motivated a community to establish a community venture.

A qualitative methodology was adopted to investigate why the IEHT was established and how it manages the island sustainably for community benefit. IEHT was established prior to the supportive community ownership legislative environment ushered in by the Scottish Parliament, namely the Community Land Unit (Scottish Government 1997), Scottish Land Fund (Scottish Government 2001) and Land Reform (Scotland) Act (Scottish Government 2003) (Scottish Government 2003). Archives, supplemented by narrative interviews, and observation are the principal data sources to examine how the community’s embeddedness in place motivated and shaped the establishment and policies of IEHT.

By situating community entrepreneurship in the Scottish historical context, the research makes two contributions. First, grounded in the perspective of entrepreneurship as a relational and social practice (Anderson 1998, 2015a, 2015b; McKeever, Anderson, and Jack 2014), an institutional legacy-informed explanation of community entrepreneurship is developed. The analysis presented elaborates the influence of place (Anderson and Gaddefors 2016; McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015), specifically an historical legacy embedded in place, on community entrepreneurship. Second, I explain how institutional legacy can be transcended by supplanting new governance structures and social relations that differ substantively from long institutionalized structures and relations.

The paper is presented as follows. To begin, embeddedness in place, institutional legacy in place, and community entrepreneurship are employed to frame the research. The methodology follows. The findings explain how institutional legacy motivated and shaped community entrepreneurship, and the ensuing entrepreneurial and institutional effects. The discussion explains the processes of institutional legacy perpetuation, breaking, making and institutionalization, and elaborates how the findings advance knowledge on the embeddedness perspective, and legacy transcending. The conclusion comments on implications for practice and suggests future research opportunities.

2. Conceptual framework

2.1. Entrepreneurship and embeddedness in place

While initially grounded in economic theory, Anderson (1998) firmly established that entrepreneurship is anchored in local societies and influenced by the interplay between actors, processes and socio-economic context. Labelling such connections embeddedness (Granovetter 1985; Jack and Anderson 2002), scholarship has increasingly accepted that entrepreneurship is influenced by, and inseparable from, context (McKeever, Anderson, and Jack 2014; Welter 2011; Welter, Baker, and Wersching 2019). Inherently anchored in local structures, entrepreneurial values and actions may either help or hinder entrepreneurship (Hindle 2010) and appear, in practice, somewhat ‘incomprehensible to outsiders’ (Jack and Anderson 2002, 484).

While often used interchangeably, space and place have distinct meanings. Space describes a physical location in which meaning has yet to be inscribed, and is associated with economic and materialist functions (Cresswell 2015; Korsgaard, Ferguson, and Gaddefors 2015). Place, however, describes a space that is imbued with meaning, emotions and values (Cresswell 2015; Gieryn 2000; Korsgaard, Ferguson, and Gaddefors 2015; McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015) that create the social and cultural ties that connect entrepreneurs to place, and therein the embeddedness associated with attachment to place. On this view, place is not static but continuously recreated – allowing the possibility of place change. Place is important as cultural values affect which meanings are accessed and inform decision-making (Baker and Welter 2018), and suggests ways in which they may be filtered to meet the pragmatic goals of individuals and groups (Patterson 2014). Place thus describes emplacement in a geographical location and within the social fabric of a community (Korsgaard, Ferguson, and Gaddefors 2015; Withers 2009). Moreover, place has been construed as an agentic force (Gieryn 2000), capable of motivating actors (Anderson and Gaddefors 2016), and in so doing becomes influential with ‘detectable’ effects on social life (Gieryn 2000, 466).

Primarily considered to be place-based in a geographically bound area, such as a village or locality (Haugh and Pardy 1999), community describes an intrinsic connection between members and a collective sense of difference to others not from the community (Gibson, Gibson, and Webster 2021; Hindle 2010; Lyons et al. 2012). Communities tend to be self-defining in place (Lyons et al. 2012), which then impacts on and becomes fundamental to the entrepreneurial process (Hindle 2010; McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015). As reflected in the distinction between communities of place and communities of interest, place boundaries however, may be more psychological and spiritual than physical (Wellman and Wortley 1990).

2.2. Institutional legacy in place

Embracing Anderson’s perspective that all entrepreneurship is embedded in a social context (Anderson 1998), institutions describe the regulatory, cognitive and normative pillars that structure and influence economic and social behaviour in context (Bruton, Ahlstrom, and Li 2010; Jennings et al. 2013). Institutions shape ‘what is entrepreneurially possible’ (Anderson 2015b, 147) in which all actions, economic, social and political, are conditioned by and exist ‘in continuity with the past’ (Jack and Anderson 2002, 471; see also Korsgaard and Anderson 2011). Comprising the array of formal and informal ‘constraints, incentives and resources’ (Stephan, Uhlaner, and Stride 2015, 309), institutions shape and are shaped by individual, organizational and system behaviour (North 1990). Institutions thus provide the context in which action, in our case community entrepreneurship, is situated (Su, Zhai, and Karlsson 2017; Welter 2011; Welter and Smallbone 2011). Depending on contextual conditions, institutions may motivate entrepreneurship through supportive regulatory, cultural and normative institutions (Stephan, Uhlaner, and Stride 2015), but in some contexts they are likely to impede entrepreneurial action (Lamine et al. 2021; Sud, VanSandt, and Baugous 2009; Welter 2011; Welter and Smallbone 2011). Moreover, such effects differ in relation to agency, e.g. individual, community and organizational action, and incentives, e.g. commercial and prosocial purpose (Santos 2012; Scott 2013). Being socially constructed, institutions notably are rarely static – actors and institutions perpetually interact to create, maintain and transform institutions (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006; Scott 2013).

Institutional legacies are defined as ‘institutions that affect communities over time’ (Greve and Rao 2014, 5) – they may have long duration and persist over decades, sometimes hundreds of years (Greve and Rao 2014). Institutional legacy endurance is attributed to the ways that formal organizations, networks and cultural elements create rolling inertia (Molotch, Freudenburg, and Paulsen 2000). The cultural values and beliefs embedded in legacies are unevenly distributed and thus capable of both enabling and constraining human activities (Patterson 2014).

Prior research has investigated three carriers of institutional legacies (Dobbin 1994; Greve and Rao 2014). First, perpetuation by formal legal structures and policies. Dobbin (1994) elucidated how the emergence of government policies to regulate railroads in the US, France, and Great Britain varied as a result of distinctly different historically embedded assumptions of how economic activity should be organized. Dobbin examined the different political processes surrounding the state to explain why these countries had such different understandings of railway markets in the 19th century. The institutions were in the background, and in the foreground were the ways in which institutions made certain ways of thinking and enacting policy appear natural. The outcome was that it was extraordinarily difficult to escape a country’s natural style of policy making. Turning to land tenure regimes, Banerjee and Iyer (2005) examined colonial influences on landlord, individual cultivator, and village-based tenure on economic outcomes, i.e. inequality and agricultural productivity, and found that landlord-based systems underperformed non-landlord-based systems. Banfield (1958) also alludes to the influence on communities of historical land tenure and the shift from feudalism to rentier landlords. Second, voluntary organizations carry institutional legacies. Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti (1993) found that an institutional legacy of civic cooperation explained the greater number of mutual organizations in northern compared to southern Italy. And third, intra-community relations sustain institutional legacies. Banfield (1958, 30–31) looked inwards to how family constrains local action and identified ‘amoral familism’, namely the inability to transcend the interests of the nuclear family. Coleman (1961) further suggests that it is the emotional and cultural residue of action that is the progenitor of an institutional legacy (in Greve and Rao 2014). Collectively, strongly embedded cultural institutions shape people’s understandings of themselves, others and relationships between them.

While prior research has shed light on the carriers, contexts, and constraining effects of institutional legacies, they fall short of illuminating how legacies can be circumvented. In the research presented, I examine how place-based community entrepreneurship supplanted the legacy of private landlordism and demonstrated to other communities how they might also secure such change.

2.3. Community entrepreneurship

Community entrepreneurship describes the process of establishing a community-based, entrepreneurial, non-profit distributing venture that aims to create economic, social and environmental impacts for the communities in which it is based (Haugh 2007; Montgomery, Dacin, and Dacin 2012; Peredo and Chrisman 2006; Ratten and Welpe 2011). The process of community entrepreneurship may also stimulate social and cultural life and strengthen community identity and resilience (Daskalaki, Hjorth, and Mair 2015; Vestrum and Rasmussen 2013; Vestrum, Rasmussen, and Carter 2017). Together then, community entrepreneurship is a ‘socialised practice’ that ‘sustains community values’ and ‘contributes to economic sustainability’ (Nordstrom, McKeever, and Anderson 2020, 784).

Prior research has noted how community ventures are economically important for creating employment (Lotz 1989), stimulating entrepreneurship and development (Giovannini 2016) and tackling poverty (Peredo and Chrisman 2006). Community venture social impacts include empowering communities (Kalantaridis and Bika 2011; Markusen 2010), women (Torri and Martinez 2011), and producers (Handy et al. 2011). In addition, environmental impacts range from providing sustainable energy (Cieslek 2016) to ecological protection (Garcia-López 2013). In rural regions, community ventures may also strive to compensate for the loss of community assets (Haugh 2007), stem population decline (Somerville and McElwee 2011) and revitalize weakened local economies (Johnstone and Lionais 2004; Valchovska and Watts 2016). Not all communities that are equally likely to form a community venture actually do so as founding a non-profit distributing organization requires resources that are lacking in depleted places (McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015). Moreover, in the absence of other community ventures to learn from, founders undertake organization-building on their own and need to be confident that enough people will support the effort (North 1990). However, while prior research has noted how collective entrepreneurship enables the maintenance a community’s ‘traditional way of life’ (Nordstrom, McKeever, and Anderson 2020), we know less about how such action seeks to respond to an institutional legacy that had suppressed community autonomy.

Entrepreneurship and venture sustainability rest on the control and acquisition of resources (Vestrum and Rasmussen 2013). Land is important in two respects – first, traditional land is the ‘place’ of a nation and inseparable from its people, culture and identity, and second, land is the foundation upon which communities intend to rebuild the economies and so ‘improve the socioeconomic circumstances of their people’ (Anderson, Dana, and Dana 2006, 46; see also Vestrum and Rasmussen 2013). Historically, indigenous communities have struggled to have their rights to land and resources recognized (Anderson, Dana, and Dana 2006) and concentrating asset ownership in the private property regime has been found to disadvantage communities (Anderson, Dana, and Dana 2006). Finance is also fundamental to entrepreneurship and in resource-poor communities, such as rural regions, access to finance may be limited (Creaney and Niewiadomski 2016). Finally, demography influences access to human and social capital and rural out-migration reduces access to human and social capital (Putnam 1995; Spina 2017).

The case study allows us to investigate how an institutional legacy embedded in place-based social structures and relations motivated community entrepreneurship prior to land reform legislation that created a more resource munificent environment. The research is guided by the question How does community embeddedness in place history motivate and influence community entrepreneurship?

3. Methods

A case study is useful for exploring complex and less well-known phenomena (Korsgaard and Anderson 2011; Yin 2017). The research site was purposively selected (Patton 2002) to yield insights into place-based community entrepreneurship and the case study investigated is revelatory (Yin 2017) and provides explanatory insights as a literature search did not yield any prior studies of place, legacy, and community entrepreneurship. The Isle of Eigg lies off the West Coast of Scotland and is approximately 30 square km (7 500 acres). Peripheral locations are characterized by distance from the centre (Anderson 2000), rurality and economic fragility (Farmer, Steinerowski, and Jack 2008), and while visually stunning and seemingly an attractive place to live, remoteness is associated with limited access to human, financial, natural and infrastructure resources that restricts its ‘developmental potential’ (Creaney and Niewiadomski 2016, 213).

3.1. Data sources

The community buyout of Eigg has been extensively analysed (Dressler 1998; Morgan 1998) and has been frequently employed to demonstrate community action (Hunter 2012) in a classic David and Goliath story (McIntosh 2004). The research follows prior historical research (e.g. Murphy et al. 2018; Stott and Fava 2020) and uses data drawn directly from archives to explain the context-laden issues that motivated and shaped community entrepreneurship. Archival research. Data was collected from: Scottish Parliament; Scottish National Records (SNR); Factiva; and film and radio archives. Interviews. This paper is part of a larger study of community asset ownership and employs interviews conducted with people deeply involved with and knowledgeable about the Eigg community buyout (Camille, Maggie, Ariadne, and Daniel), public and third sector community buyout support organizations (Euan, Gordon and Heather), other islands that had visited Eigg when contemplating their own community buyout (Angus and Robert), and an academic community land ownership expert (Finlay). (With the exception of Camille and Maggie, pseudonyms are employed). All informants were engaged in and knowledgeable about the processes and events being investigated (Morse 2010). Indeed, Maggie had been asked to tell ‘the story of Eigg’ so many times that in our second meeting, after a long discussion of the buyout, I was given a pre-written text of what we had been discussing. This text, and extracts from interviews and informal conversations, are employed in the analysis. Although the informant narratives may have been influenced by capacity to remember events some time ago, and the issues the interviewees wanted to promote (Jones et al. 2008), data source triangulation was employed to manage this methodological limitation (Table 1). Observational data was gathered during a visit to Eigg and attendance at a community land conference.

Table 1. Case study profile and data sources

	IEHT
Community organizing	1983 Isle of Eigg Residents Association (ERA) 1991 Isle of Eigg Trust (IET) 1996 ERA and IET becomes Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust (IEHT)
Isle of Eigg	1997 Eigg community buyout by IEHT £1.5 million (£1.5 million private donations and £17 000 grant Highland and Islands Enterprise) Tripartite body comprising of Eigg Residents Association, Scottish Wildlife Trust and Highland Council
Area of land	30.49 square kilometres (7 500 acres) Farms (3), crofts (22)
Population	65 (1997), 83 (2011), 97 (2012), 110 (2020)
	Data sources
Scottish Parliament, Official Record	240 articles (1997–2021)
Scottish National Records	DD15/2/20; AF45/873; AF45/874; HH41/3414; HH41/3431; SEP12/665; SEP12/679.
Factiva	417 articles (1982–2021)
Film	283 minutes. Including: Eigg Electric. 21.07.09. 9 minutes 54 seconds. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3n-6YHquno CBS. 60 minutes. 8.09.19. 30 minutes. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzIguTRN7Rk ITN. 28.11.96. 6 minutes 49 seconds. Available at: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/video/isle-of-eigg-up-for-sale-scotland-off-hebrides-st-news-footage/804132166
Radio	Radio Scotland. Speaking Out. On Eigg and Gigha. 1992. 56 minutes 42 seconds. Radio Scotland. Speaking Out. On Eigg. 1994. 58 minutes, 35 seconds. Available at: http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/2007-land-reform-audio-archives-1990s.htm
Interviews	Camille (Eigg resident and former Trustee of IEHT) Daniel (Eigg resident) Maggie (Eigg resident and founding director of IEHT) Ariadne (Eigg resident and entrepreneur) Euan (Development Trusts Association Scotland) Gordon (Development Trusts Association Scotland) Heather (Islander and Highlands and Islands Enterprise) Robert (Islander) Angus (Islander) Finlay (Scottish Rural Agricultural College)
Observation	Residence on Eigg (7 days) Attendance at Community Land Conference (3 days)

Acknowledging that people’s memories of events may comprise less than perfect recall, archival data that had been produced in real time provided information about events as experienced by those present (Lubinski 2018) – namely as the residents sought to take Eigg into community ownership. The Parliamentary archives report discussions between politicians, and consultations with communities, about land ownership and reform (1997–2021) in which opposing views concerning land ownership are expressed. The newspaper articles include extracts from interviews with islanders, politicians, and land reform activists (1982–2021), and radio (1992 and 1994) and television broadcasts (1996, 2009, 2019) present audio and visual recordings of interviews, discussions and debates between islanders and other stakeholders. In addition, data source triangulation was achieved by analysing documents held by the Scottish National Records (SNR) (1938–2021) that relate to Eigg and other community buyouts. The SNR is the repository for government documents and includes ministerial correspondence, letters between parliamentary and civil service employees, and between Members of Parliament and their constituents. Correspondence that supports the community buyout and against community land ownership provide some insights into opposing views concerning land ownership.

3.2. Data analysis

The data were analysed inductively to understand the different perspectives of the people involved (Strauss and Corbin 1990) that was documented in the archives and narrated in the interviews. The analysis was conducted manually to stay close to the data (Howorth, Smith, and Parkinson 2012), and data stored in Nvivo. Following Langley (1999), a timeline was constructed that listed the events prior to and after the community buyout. The prior analyses of Eigg (Dressler 1998; Morgan 1998; Hunter 2012), and data from Factiva and SNR were especially helpful in constructing the timeline (Figure 1). This was followed by close scrutiny of the archival data and interview transcripts, specifically focusing on how a community’s history motivated community entrepreneurship. The frequent references to landlord control of employment opportunities, and acrimonious landlord island-resident relations on Eigg prior to the community buyout suggested that institutional legacy would be a productive analytical frame. For example, in a policy report ‘my impression is that the situation in Eigg could now be near open conflict’ and ‘among the very few people … . Reluctant to express deep concern about the situation … . Are (job titles) … Both depend largely on the estate for their livelihood’ (SNR 1974a).

Figure 1. Timeline of principal events.

The data was coded using an open coding approach (Strauss and Corbin 1990). Codes were developed to describe conditions on the island before the buyout, actions to wrest land and control from landlords, and subsequent community ownership and management of Eigg. With the institutional legacy literature to hand, these processes were linked to subsequent community land ownership legislation, policy, and networks. The constant comparative method was used to explore themes and linkages between the codes (Strauss and Corbin 1990) and continued until a coherent and plausible explanation had been achieved (Anderson and Jack 2015). The narrative interviews and archive data were employed together to develop a process account (Pentland 1999) of how institutional legacy can be transcended.

The Parliamentary archives document verbatim the exchanges in government debates. These exchanges are likely to be influenced by the personal and constituency interests of participants. While newspaper articles can provide insights into contemporary political, economic and social issues, they inherently combine events with opinion (Vella 2008). In addition, and in common with the content of radio and television broadcasts, newspaper content is influenced by stakeholder and audience interests. Moreover, although government records are extensive, access to some documents is prohibited and hence their content silenced. Acknowledging that data sources are not neutral and subject to a plurality of readings and interpretations of the ‘past in the present’ (Wadhwani et al. 2020, 4; see also Barton 2005; Müller 2008,; Williams 2020) by the reader and the analyst, the narrative presented in this paper is an inescapably subjective interpretation of the empirical data gathered.

3.3. Context. feudalism, feus and feuds

The institution of private landlordism describes the structure of land ownership and use between private estate ownership and tenantry and has historically been associated with oppressive and unjust social relations (Sandwith 1873). Land ownership in Scotland is highly concentrated – reputedly the most concentrated in Europe – approximately 83.1% is privately owned, of this 963 own 60% (Wightman 2013). In Scotland, private landlordism is associated with landlord expropriation of resources and tenant exploitation, and thus casts a long shadow over individual and community autonomy (Wightman 2013).

Feudal land tenure was established in Scotland in the 14th century – later than other countries – and survived until abolition in 2000 – also later than in other countries (Scottish Government 2000). In feudal tenure, land ownership is derived from an ultimate authority (in practice the Crown), and all other landowners are vassals of the Crown. Land can be either sold outright or ‘feud’, namely sold to vassals but with the feudal superiors ‘retaining some rights and imposing certain obligations on those to whom they sell land’ (Wightman 2000, 6). The pattern of feudal land ownership between superior (landlord) and vassal (tenant) can be repeated without limit. In practice, referring to the relationship between landlord and tenants: ‘Scotland’s feudal landlord system granted the laird power over virtually every aspect of their lives’ (Drysdale 2019). Notably, land ownership is distinct from land occupation (Mackenzie et al. 2004). Under feudal tenure, the landlord’s professional estate manager (the Factor) ‘took control of managing the estate and tenantry’ (Mackenzie et al. 2004, 164). This pattern of estate management established tenant ‘lack of control of and outside exploitation of local resources’ (Mackenzie et al. 2004, 167). After the Highland potato famine (1847), many, but not all, landlords sought to clear tenants from their estates and use the land for more profitable sheep farming, and later forestry for hunting. The Clearances (1853–1858) describe the eviction, or dispossession, of tenants from lands during the 18th and 19th centuries (Devine 1994; Hunter 1976) during which crofters were cleared from the interior to the coast. Describing the legacy of landlordism:

There is a scandal about land ownership in Scotland, which goes back to when land was first enclosed and treated as though it belonged to an individual, rather than to communities. The ownership of great tracts of land by individuals is a concept that ordinary Scots have never accepted. (Scottish Parliament, Official Report 2002a)

The legacy of landlordism is manifest in local resistance to the feudal power of landlords over tenants (Mackenzie and Mackenzie 2006) and demonstrated in civil protest, such as 19th and 20th century land raiding (Buxton 2011; Cameron 1997; McIntosh 2004), and persists in song and poetry (Meek 1995), stories and drama (McGrath 1973), and sculpture and monuments (Withers 1996). Community land ownership and control is unequivocally seen as essential to addressing the inequality in land ownership in Scotland:

I remember the early debates about land distribution in the Scottish Parliament where, under a Labour and Liberal Democrat administration, plans were laid that led to the Land Reform Act 2003, updated in 2016. It was probably the most radical and most passionately argued issue to be brought in after devolution and sought to right ancient wrongs not least in Sutherland, where the worst of the Clearances had happened. The aim was to reverse a position where most rural areas of land were owned by very few people. (Byrne and Malone 1994)

Land reform is a ‘significant state-led activity’ that aims to improve ‘economic efficiency and social equity through a redistribution of property rights’ (Glass et al. 2013, 20) and in Scotland did not progress unchallenged. Land reform was ‘portrayed as Marxist in inspiration’ and condemned by the Conservative Party (Hunter 2012, 38), and resisted by Scottish Land & Estates (formerly Scottish Landowners Federation) and some landlords for undermining the interests of private landowners (SNR 1996a). Debating the Land Reform Bill in 2002, a Conservative MP declared:

Let us be clear: the Bill is not so much about land reform as about a crusade by those who are fighting 200-year-old battles. Those class warriors are like prehistoric dinosaurs, occupying the “Jurassic Park” of Scottish politics. Rather than seeking to avenge the highland Clearances, they are creating the Clearances of the 21st century. This war of attrition against the countryside must stop and the Bill should progress no further. (Scottish Parliament, Official Report 2002b)

The context thus portrays how the acrimonious relations between landowners and tenantry are historically embedded in differences in worldviews of how land should be owned and managed. While acrimonious relations are neither inevitable nor universal, this legacy on Eigg constrained islander freedoms and frames the establishment of IEHT. Further, as an island community the constraints imposed by a landlord were felt more strongly than in other mainland communities: ‘Eigg has been giving us concern for some little time. A landlord on an island is a much more influential person for good or evil than a landlord on the mainland because of the relative inability of the tenants to escape, in the event of mishandling’. (SNR 1974b).

4. Findings

After a long period of ownership by one family, between 1966 and 1997 the history of the island of Eigg is characterized by frequent changes of ownership, economic fragility, infrastructure neglect, declining population, and lack of secure occupancy rights. The spiral of economic decline is characteristic of many rural places (McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015), and on Eigg, was exacerbated by being an island (SNR 1974b). The findings present Eigg’s history in phases in which each phase is illustrated with empirical data. Supplementary data is presented in Table 2. The phases represent principal place changes that advance from compliance with institutionalized structures and social relations to the institutionalization of new social structures and relations.

Table 2. Supplementary empirical data

Legacy perpetuation: compliance with institutionalized social structures and relations
Landlord estate management
Economic development In the early years, there was a feeling of optimism with a large proportion of the community being employed by the estate either on the farm, renovating old buildings for tourist accommodation or in the newly established craft centre. However, that feeling soon began to disappear to be replaced by a general air of insecurity- no one had a contract of employment. (Maggie) One of the big issues was people did not have security. That’s the root of it. You are not going to invest your money into something that you have not really got security of. And grant giving bodies would not entertain giving you a development grant unless you had security. (Camille) Physical infrastructure Is Eigg a Victorian idyll or a Hebridean slum? Do islanders feel secure or do they want more control? … The island has around 80 residents, one shop, no hotel, no mains electricity, no vessel ferry, a rather poor pier for the passenger ferry, no pub and only two B and Bs. It is not developed. It is not accessible. It is very beautiful. (Riddoch, “Speaking Out,” 1994). The other issues that have been the drivers have been absentee landlords to the point of the kind like on Eigg. And some of the buyouts where the assets were falling into disrepair, the houses were not in good condition, like on Eigg. (Finlay)
Landlord-tenant relationships
Acrimonious landlord-tenantry relations Schellenberg issued two eviction notices – one to a local family with five children and the other to the resident wildlife warden – a story that again received major press coverage. It turned out to be the issue which totally united the community in it is opposition to a system which could treat people with so little regard. (Maggie) The long feud between the Hebridean islanders of Eigg and its flamboyant owner has flared up again over his plans to sell key properties on his estate. (Dean 1994)
Legacy breaking: local organizing and network support for community land ownership
Local organizing
Communities of place Ultimately it is about communities, and communities taking control and trying to move things forward and drive things forward and address local issues … they do not see themselves as social enterprises, they see themselves as enterprising communities … and trying to be democratically accountable to your local community. (Euan) The incoming islanders play an active caring part in the community. They help run the senior citizens lunch club, they drive the community minibus to enable those without transport to get to the shop or church. (Maggie) Communities of interest Over this period there had been frequent discussions about the possibility of community ownership but there certainly was not the consensus or the confidence to put these ideas into practice until 1991 when a group of people concerned about land ownership in Scotland formed the Isle of Eigg Trust and brought their ideas to the island for our consideration … Shortly after we launched an appeal for funds to enable us to explore our alternatives and the resulting flood of letters and donations left us in no doubt that land reform was an issue that concerned the majority of Scots. (Maggie) The famous journalist Lesley Riddoch. She was touring the country and inviting people to speak out about their problems, and she decided to hold a Speaking Out programme on Eigg. And to make sure that she had the necessary ingredients for a lively debate she invited Alan McRae from Assynt. A very famous land rights campaigner. And after Schellenberg spoke, he said ‘Well I can see that the proprietor is not necessarily on the side of the islanders.’ (Camille)
Network support
Public sector networks Back then, they were trying to get all the public bodies to work together to get more peripheral areas, more effective support. I suppose that changed from being focused on the public bodies doing a better job supporting those communities to actually realizing that the communities had a better idea of what was theirs and that became bottom up. And then they had all these community groups that were then public bodies who were trying to facilitate and that led on to HIE and mainstream support. (Gordon) We have drawn on sources to help fund the things we want to do. The Coastal Communities Fund, which is managed by the Lottery, and funded by the Crown Estates to an extent, awarded us a major grant. (Heather) Civil society networks (Discussing the Scottish Wildlife Trust) They were invited by our former landlord, and it has to be said that that is one of the pluses on his side. He was not one of the hunting and shooting brigade – he was more on the conservationist side. They had approached him because they were interested in 2 or 3 sites of special scientific interest on the island, and golden eagles and the sea birds. And so, they came. They employed a part time warden who would take the visitors around the island. In the late 1980s … They were an important part of our buyout campaign because they could draw on all the national organizations for support. (Camille)
Legacy supplanting: new social structures, relations and entrepreneurial flourishing
New community structures
Local governance After a community buyout, the community owns the property rights and itself becomes the landlord. However, ‘It’s not quite like the old landlord saying – ‘I’m going to take your money and disappear’. It’s ‘we’re going to take your money and we’re going to do up somebody’s windows for them, or we’re going to put on an OAP bus service’, or something like that. So that’s where this benefit comes back to the community. (Angus) For such a small island and population Eigg has a considerable number of different organizations who take responsibility for various activities. Understanding these is key to understanding how the community on Eigg operates. (Bryan 2007, 2) Income generation There’s a balance for them all the time because they’re not private businesses but they do need to generate income because they want to be economically sustainable and so they need to focus on economic development really – including some that generates income for them as an organization. They cannot be reliant on public funding going forward to pay their staff wages. (Finlay) The bigger challenge is the financial sustainability of community ownership. And it’s quite difficult to generalize because different assets require different strategies, and it depends on the context of where the asset is and is there a market? What kind of market is there? The operating principal is a commitment to being enterprising. (Euan)
Entrepreneurial flourishing
New community-owned enterprises The wind power is there all the time. And the energy is available to everyone 24 hours a day. It is much better than the old diesel generators, although most people have them as a backup. But they’re not really needed. (Field notes, Daniel) The Eigg energy system means that we have regular electricity when before we had to rely on generators. The power from the turbines goes into our island grid. And we have an allowance, we are capped at 10 kw a day because we are a business. And for homes it is 5 kw. And the monitor tells us what our use is, and we can keep an eye on it. It’s so much better than before. Especially for the bed and breakfast. (Field notes from conversation with Ariadne) New private enterprises A wood fuel business has been set up, and that also includes a tree nursery and tree planting. When we bought Eigg we came to the conclusion that we would rather give people the opportunity to run their own businesses rather than us running everything. (Maggie) The main thing is that electrification has brought us access to the Internet. You can conduct work online without the need to be away from the island. This is a massive advantage for us. It provides access to work and the possibility to trade. It allows people to have an online presence. But it is still in its infancy. It has started but it can be developed more. (Camille)
Institutionalizing new structures and social relations: regulatory, cultural and normative institutionalization of community land ownership
New legislation and policy
New legislation (Referring to the Land Reform (Scotland) Act (2003)) It can have that kind of indirect influence both on communities and giving them a bit of motivation, a bit of confidence. And on landowners, in terms of them thinking ‘well, if I don’t go along with this or try to find a mechanism whereby maybe to release the land to sell the land, they could use the community right to buy’. (Finlay) New policy The Community Right to Buy is the one where it gives a community some rights in relation to private land, and then that was extended into urban areas. The succession of Scottish governments just did land reforms off the agenda they had. They brought a Bill at the start of the Parliament and obviously that was one of their successes, but there was no need to revisit it. Then all of a sudden there was political interest in revisiting it. (Euan)
New support structures
New network structures Obviously there’s more funding available now. The legislation has kind of changed. The organizational support network has changed … One of the good things they’ve done is Community Land Scotland. They do a conference every year and I think they all kind of know each other now because of those conferences. Before they just used to go on little visits to these other buyouts and just go for some chat. (Finlay) We and our equivalents are more specialist in providing community resources. There’s Community Land Scotland. All of us under the umbrella of this community alliance. We all have conferences, we all have social media, websites, we all have resources. The community support service, we have got a lot of resources, a lot of case studies, videos. (Gordon)
New norms and expectations
Development of shared expectations The buyout has normalized community ownership to a degree that it is no longer something that is controversial, it is almost a given now. I remember thinking that when I saw a debate on the television with Alastair McIntosh and a representative of the Land Ownership Federation and the Land Ownership Federation was talking about community land ownership as another form of land ownership. This was about 20 years after the buyout. It is not something extraordinary or rare. (Camille) Eigg is considered the beacon of community land ownership in Scotland that dismantled the old feudal-style of governance and replaced it with a sustainable, democratic and thriving alternative. (Scotsman 2018)

4.1. Legacy perpetuation: compliance with institutionalized social structures and relations

The ownership of a landed estate carries responsibility for its economic sustainability, infrastructure, and maintenance. Prior to the community buyout in 1997, the Island of Eigg had been privately owned for more than 100 years (Morgan 1998). Although Eigg was used as a holiday home between 1925 and 1966 when owned by the Runciman family, the family was sufficiently wealthy to fund economic development activities, e.g. planting forestry, installing drainage and erecting new buildings, notably a dairy (Dressler 1998). When Runciman sold Eigg in 1966 to Robert Evans, an agent (the Factor) was employed to manage Eigg but failed to make the island profitable. Eigg was then sold to the Anglyn Trust (1971) directed by Bernard Farnham-Smith, but soon placed on the market when his project to develop a training school for handicapped boys failed and relations with the islanders deteriorated (SNR 1973, 1974c). Relationships between islanders, however, were described as forging ‘a distinctive sense of community on Eigg, and a consciousness of the continuity of settlement there over the centuries’ (SNR 1974a). Owned by Keith Schellenberg (1975–1992 and 1992–1995) this period is marked by deteriorating island economy, infrastructure, and relationships between the landlord (Schellenberg) and the island residents (SNR 1976a).

Prior to the community buyout, employment opportunities on Eigg were predominantly with the estate, either in the main house or on the farms (SNR 1974e). Other employment options were in the public sector, e.g. teaching, nursing, and the royal mail, or private entrepreneurship. Each of these options presented challenges. Employment by the estate was dependent on the landlord’s financial prosperity and while farming was full time, work in the main house was seasonal and part time. Public sector employment was also part time, with the exception of teaching. A major impediment to entrepreneurship lay in insecure tenancies. Tenancy rights were inscribed in occupancy, not contracts, thereby discouraging entrepreneurship as lack of secure tenure increased risk and impeded access to finance – businesses were ineligible for public business development grants and commercial loans (SNR 1996b). Camille explained the insecurity felt by residents on Eigg: ‘It was the estate model of tied houses, or very short term tenancies. Of giving people a 6 month lease. Or not even a lease. “You can come and work for me and as long as you work for me you can have a house. But if you do not work for me, you do not have a house”. You cannot build a life on this basis because you do not know what your security will be’.

Housing on Eigg suffered from lack of maintenance and repair and was described vividly in a documentary about Eigg as ‘rat infested hovels, damp and with leaking rooves’ (ITN 1996). The maintenance and repair of accommodation and infrastructure on the island had been neglected for many years (Bryan 2007). In 1987, two villages were designated a ‘Housing Action Area’ (Morgan 1998, 125) – meaning that houses were substandard. Further, the roads on the estate were poorly maintained making travel between settlements on the island difficult. Moreover, as Eigg was not connected to the National Grid, mains electricity service was unavailable, and residents relied on home diesel generators for lighting and heating.

In the period between 1925 and 1966, when owned by the Runciman family, relations between the landlord and residents were described as ‘the golden age’ (Dressler 1998; Morgan 1998) and with a ‘good spirit of cooperation between the estate and the rest of the island’ (Dressler 1998, 150). Later, however, between 1966 and 1996, the residents faced increasingly challenging economic and living conditions. Each change of landlord heralded a new regime of living and working relationships between the owner and residents. In 1971, when a family was evicted by Evans to make a house available for a former estate employee, living under these conditions was described as ‘living under enemy occupation’ (Dressler 1998, 154; Robertson 1994). While many residents were initially supportive of Schellenberg and his development plans, relationships soon soured. After moving to Eigg in 1976, Maggie explained: ‘I was delighted to live in such a beautiful place. To have a safe environment to bring up children and to be part of a small community – the politics of landlordism had yet to make an impression on me’.

Eigg’s population declined as young people, unable to find work or accommodation, moved to the mainland. Employment was precarious – the few employment opportunities on the estate were in agriculture or service in the estate house: ‘There were constant injustices but in general people were unwilling to speak out in case it would jeopardise their house or job’, (Maggie). In addition to these challenges, Camille described how estate employees were not issued with employment contracts, and if they left their employment, either voluntarily or by dismissal, the tied housing was forfeited and, as alternative accommodation was difficult to secure, most likely had to leave the island.

Lack of investment in infrastructure and landlord control were mirrored on other islands. For example, Heather described the management of a different island when it was owned by a succession of absentee landlords:

You move on through a sequence of landowners … and you are into a whole other territory of property ownership where a property, or an island, has to be self-sustaining instead of it being looked after as in the first instance your home. That changed the way that things were done. There was less investment, if any, put in. It is looked after as a business. There was no investment put into domestic properties. It was all rinse out, rinse out. (Heather)

These conditions made it impossible for islanders to make long-term plans and created a dependency relationship between them and the landlord: commenting on how landlord tenant relationships fostered dependence, a business support advisor explained: ‘I perceive there to be a hangover from land ownership situations where people were disempowered and used the self-talk of ‘I can’t do that’, (Heather)

4.2. Legacy breaking: local organizing and network support for community land ownership

The second set of findings concern community-based activities to change the institutionalized structures and relations by considering how the community might secure ownership of Eigg. Lacking other community buyouts to learn from, the period preceding the establishment of IEHT (1997) was characterized by local community organizing and experimenting with alternatives for public and community ownership of Eigg.

As conditions on Eigg deteriorated further, the imperative for the Eigg residents to find an alternative ownership regime became more pressing and help was sought help from public and third sector organizations. In 1974, the Highlands and islands Development Board (HIDB), a regional development agency, had been put forward as a prospective purchaser but failed to acquire the island (SNR 1974b, 1974d). In 1989, the Highland Regional Council became more involved but was unwilling to take full control, primarily because the islanders did not have security of tenure and therefore investment by a public organization was prohibited (SNR 1996c; see also ITN 1996; Hunter 2012).

Maggie explained how the Eigg Residents Association (ERA) was established in 1983 as an independent organization to represent islanders’ interests and manage local issues, such as co-ordinating group buying and organizing social events. By the mid-1980s however, ERA was proactive in investigating island services, primarily housing, senior care and refuse disposal (Morgan 1998).

To raise awareness of the situation faced by people on Eigg, in 1991 the Isle of Eigg Trust (IET), was established as a charitable body by a network of independent conservationists described as ‘a group of people concerned about land ownership in Scotland’, (Maggie). To gain publicity about the situation on Eigg, and build a reserve fund to purchase Eigg, the IET was launched at the Balmoral Hotel (a 4 star hotel in Edinburgh). When Eigg was put up for sale in 1992, IET sought to raise funds to buy and manage the estate in the interests of the resident community. A vote on the island in June 1992 found 73% in favour of ‘some kind of community ownership arrangement which they believe would give them some control over their future’ (Sinclair 1992).

Our endeavour was on behalf of the human and ecological communities. Our involvement was (not counter to you personally but) to challenge the whole system of feudal Scottish land ownership exemplified on Eigg. (Quote from an IET trustee (SNR 1992))

The IET, however, lacked legitimacy as the trustees were not resident on Eigg and it had been established without full consultation with ERA or islanders (Morgan 1998). This was rectified later in the same year when IET trustees resigned, handed the IET to ERA, and agreed to work together. Resolving local issues was prioritized above challenging the legacy of landlordism however, focusing on island issues would not be able to prevent Eigg being part of the national discourse about private landlordism and community land ownership (SNR 1996c, 1996d).

In 1997, the Community Land Unit was established to support communities considering a buyout. Although too late for Eigg, other communities availed themselves of support. For example, Robert described how when his community were contemplating a buyout, the Land Fund paid for a group from their island to visit Eigg: ‘We thought about it and did not really know how it would work out. And we went over to Eigg to see what they had done in the four years since their buyout’.

The networks between the people and the organizations provided access to resources and markets and are fundamental to island survival. Explaining sustainability of an island economy: ‘It’s almost an ecosystem, but it cannot survive on its own ecosystem, it has to have these connections to other conurbations, for selling the products and for people coming, for visitors coming and spending money’. (Angus)

4.3. Legacy supplanting: new social structures, relations and entrepreneurial flourishing

Distinctive to Scotland, in global land reform terms, is the pattern for communities to take whole estates into ownership, in contrast to dividing and selling land in smaller plots to multiple owners (Hoffman 2013). Explaining the motivation for a community buyout: ‘The whole ethos is to own it collectively, rather than to own as a bunch of individuals … And therefore, what is important is the community interests, the interests and future of the island, the sustainability of the whole community’. (Angus).

Over decades of private ownership, Eigg residents had found themselves ‘at the whims and vagaries of a series of landlords’, (Maggie). Commencing fund raising in 1996, the lack of public funding for community buyouts also meant that the community would need to raise the £2 million asking price. In 1997, IEHT managed the fund-raising process and relationships with network partners and supporters. This period heralded a publicity campaign to raise fundsFigure 2. The appeal for contributions described Eigg’s unique environment as supporting:

many rare and threatened species of life and an active community of 60 people. These very qualities have led to Eigg being owned by a succession of absentee landlords … years of neglect with estate properties decaying and land unused are putting both the community and wildlife under threat.

After their initial offer of £1.2 million was rejected, more funds were raised and IEHT then secured Eigg for £1.5 million – part funded by private donations and a public sector grant (£17 000) (SNR 1997). Of this sum, one anonymous benefactor donated £750 000 (boosted to £1 million through tax relief) and the remainder was secured from small donations received from approximately 10,000 national and international donors (ITN 1996; CBS News 2017).

IEHT is registered as a company limited by guarantee and a charity, and is a tri-partite partnership between the community (4 members), public authority (Highland Council, 1 member) and a third sector conservation organization (Scottish Wildlife Trust, 1 member). The IEHT board meets every 3 months and community representation ensures the community has decision-making control. The governance structure is designed to enable all community members to be involved in decisions that impact the community and workshops and open days are held to engage residents in community decision-making.

The first building to be erected by the IEHT, An Laimhrig, comprises a restaurant, grocery, craft shops, the office and public facilities (ITN 1996). IEHT established three wholly owned subsidiary companies. First, Eigg Trading Ltd. (1997), which owns and operates An Laimhrig. The aim is to conduct commercial trading for the sole benefit of the estate, and Eigg Trading manages the leases of the grocery store, post office, tea toom, craft shop and other facilities. All residents in trust-owned homes, farms and business premises were issued with long-term leases, most within the first year of community ownership. Second, Eigg Construction Ltd. (1999) was established to build and maintain new housing and renovate the existing housing, farms, and other premises. Third, Eigg Electric Ltd. (2005) was established to build, maintain and manage energy production and distribution on the estate. IEHT managed fundraising (£1.7 million) to purchase infrastructure to generate wind (4 turbines), solar and hydroelectricity (2 large and 1 small plants). Estate residents were involved in plant construction and installation and the first energy flow commenced in February 2008.

The establishment of IEHT and the three trading subsidiaries demonstrates how the inseparability of social and environmental values in entrepreneurship, first articulated by Anderson (1998), extend to community entrepreneurship. To illustrate, the motivation behind Eigg Electric Ltd. was the necessity to generate the energy required for domestic and commercial use. During a visit to the island, Ariadne explained that every house and commercial unit has an energy metre fitted, and is allocated an energy allowance that varies for domestic or commercial use. Residents and businesses are expected to monitor and regulate their energy consumption in line with their allowance. An independent study of Eigg Electric Ltd. found that 90% of electricity comes from renewable sources, energy reliability increased to 24 hours a day, energy costs fell by 80%, and carbon emissions per household are 20% lower than the rest of the United Kingdom (Chmiel and Bhattacharyya 2015).

In addition to developing three community-owned ventures, IEHT encouraged and supported private entrepreneurship on the island. Prior to the community buyout, ‘Eigg’s only businesses, apart from sheep farming, is three bed and breakfast operations’ (Clouston 1994). Since 1997, more than 50 new ventures have been established by residents on Eigg, many of the new ventures depend on reliable internet. Camille described how the reliable internet made available by Eigg Electric Ltd. had enabled private enterprises to flourish: ‘Booking online for all the visiting accommodation is so much easier. For the tourism sectorit is much easier to operate that way … people are sourcing their work online. We have two graphic designers doing that … and the record label’s Covid strategy is, instead of face to face, doing online events and that has brought more followers to his label than ever before’. Community embeddedness in place was hence fundamental to IEHT and in turn changed how Eigg was construed by the residents. By removing previous barriers to enterprise, the community buyout fostered a new entrepreneurial spirit on Eigg. Summarizing the impact of community landownership on communities:

I will give the critics of land reform some advice. They should … visit the island of Eigg. They will then hear from islanders who have been released from the shackles of absentee landowners. On Eigg, housing has improved greatly, and we have full employment. Businesses are being established and the population is growing. (Scottish Parliament, Official Report 2002c)

The generative entrepreneurial and institutional effects of community land ownership is also described in other communities. Robert, a resident on a different island, explained how he felt that community buyouts were overturning the legacy of landlordism and constructing a new legacy that returned land to communities: ‘I was at the shore, pondering. I wondered, “what is beyond the horizon?” I thought to myself, I think there’s something going on. Feudalism was going. All it needed was for folk to take control of, over their destiny … we knew it would be a hard road’. Summarizing the motivation for communities to acquire and manage land for community benefit:

What happened before with the island, when it was in private ownership, was that every time a private owner decided they were going to sell, they sold it for what the market would give them for it … But that’s not the right to buy and putting it into a community. The point is that the community are able to direct their own future, able to make decisions, which hopefully will be sustainable for their children, and so on and so forth. (Angus)

4.4. Institutionalizing new structures and social relations: regulatory, cultural and normative institutionalization of community land ownership

The first three phases of the findings presented above are concerned with place-based social structures and relations and in this section, the findings connect community-level to national-level action to institutionalize community land ownership. While the principal aims of IEHT were to address place-based economic fragility, insecurity, inadequate and insufficient housing and population decline, the widescale media interest in the Eigg community buyout added to the national discourse of landlordism and community land ownership.

In 1997, the newly elected Labour government created a Land Reform Policy Group (LRPG) to investigate the system of landownership, and land governance and management in Scotland (Combe 2020; Hoffman 2013). The aim of the LRPG was to support sustainable rural community development by removing land-based barriers (Hoffman 2013). Its report noted the importance of landownership diversity for rural development, recommended removal of land-based barriers to sustainable development, and prioritized public interest and communities in land reform (LRPG 1999). The Abolition of Feudal Tenure Etc (Scotland) Act (2000) (Scottish Government 2000) eliminated feudal burdens on tenants. The organizational landscape of community ownership developed further when prominent civic organizations promoted community land ownership:

The Highlands and Islands enterprise set up the Community Land Unit, and the Scottish government also has a Community Land team. And there was the Scottish Land Fund and subsequently variations of the Scottish Land Fund. And other mechanisms as well for communities who are fighting for funding. There’s been spin offs or linking aspects to the hard regulatory aspects. (Finlay)

The Scottish Land Fund (Scottish Government 2001) was established to provide support, grants and loans to fund land buyouts. Although too late for IEHT, the Scottish Land Fund supported other communities by funding preparatory work as well as contributing to land purchase price. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act (2003) (Scottish Government 2003) granted communities a land purchase pre-emption right (Part 2). These developments created a supportive policy context for community land ownership in Scotland and increased momentum for community land ownership to exist alongside private and public ownership of land. Subsequent legislation further strengthened momentum for community land ownership: The Land Reform (Scotland) Act (2016) (Scottish Government 2016), enables communities to register an interest in privately owned land and, when the designated land came up for sale, to purchase and hold the land in perpetuity for community benefit.

In 2003 we got the Land Reform Act and within that, there was the Right to Buy, grafting the community right to buy … so that’s important. That you can pick that up as a mechanism and you can slot yourself into it. You can apply to register your interest in land, and you’re given the right of first refusal. And that kind of concrete aspect of it is important but it has delivered a sea of community ownership across Scotland since 2003. (Finlay)

In 2010, the Scottish government set a target of 1 million acres in community ownership by 2020. By June 2017 there were 562230 acres in community ownership, i.e. 2.9% of the total land area of Scotland. This acreage is comprised of 492 land parcels in community ownership, owned by 403 community groups (ONS Scotland 2017). Assistance in meeting this goal was provided when the Development Trusts Association Scotland (DTAS), established a community ownership support service and guide to community ownership (Brooks and Ward 2016). A second support organization, Community Land Scotland (established 2010), represents the interests of community landowners, promotes community land ownership as a route to community development and facilitates networking (CLS 2018). These third sector organizations work collaboratively with communities and government to support and promote community land ownership: ‘Communities cannot exist in isolation, they have to be open to stakeholder engagement, and build partnerships with different people’. (Euan).

More recently, the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act (2015) (Scottish Government 2015) enables communities to use land, and other assets, as a springboard for fostering entrepreneurship and community development. Further land reform legislation in 2016 introduced a register of controlling rights in land, extended the community right to buy to land designated as abandoned, neglected or detrimental, without the need for a willing seller, and established a Scottish Land Commission (Scottish Government 2016). Reflecting back specifically on the broader impact of the Eigg buyout, Camille explained: ‘It changed the landscape of ownership, no longer the figure of the landlord is seen as so overwhelming powerful and impossible to challenge’. Summarizing the impact of community land ownership when compared to private landlordism:

There are a lot of regulations in place around land management for community owners just as there are for private landowners and I think it’s probably reasonable to say that, at the very least, they are now making collective decisions that involve a group of people and sometimes wider organizations as well, as opposed to one person making decisions which often are driven by financial concerns. (Finlay)

5. Discussion and contributions

There is growing recognition in entrepreneurship research that economic behaviour is best understood within its prevailing institutional and social contexts (Anderson 2000, 2015a, 2015b), as these ‘contexts provide individuals with opportunities and set boundaries for their actions’ (Welter 2011, 165; see also Johns 2006). Examining the establishment of IEHT through the community buyout process is descriptively useful, but also helps to conceptualize relationships between institutional legacy, social context and embeddedness in place, and how these motivate and shape community entrepreneurship.

The aim of the study was to explore how community embeddedness in place motivates and shapes community entrepreneurship. This was investigated in an in-depth enquiry into how an historical legacy of landlordism perpetuated place-based economic and social structures and relations, and how action by the community and support networks resisted the inevitability of such institutionalized structures and relations. The analysis leads to the development a process model of the sequence of events that ‘describe how particular things change over time’ (McMullen and Dimov 2013, 1482), specifically how an institution is broken, supplanted and transcended.

The model commences with the perpetuation of place-based economic and social relations through compliance with institutionalized structures and processes. In this study, compliance upholds the power of private landlords to control how communities live on and work the land on which they reside. Lack of landlord investment in infrastructure and antagonistic social relations, however, engender community dissatisfaction and motivate the search for ways to circumvent institutionalized structures and relations. In the second phase, legacy breaking, the island residents resist the inevitability of what has happened before, namely the legacy of landlordism, and search for alternatives to private land ownership. The island residents mobilized people to work collectively on shared interests and created a residents’ association to work on their behalf, initially by organizing social care services and group buying. The residents association enabled the islanders to change the way that their place is understood from one of constraint and entrepreneurial containment, to a place of potential and entrepreneurial possibility. While much land in Scotland is privately owned, and some areas publicly owned, such as crofting land and national forests, community land ownership was extremely rare. The residents’ association approached public sector and third sector organizations as prospective purchasers of Eigg. This phase is labelled legacy breaking as it signifies actions by the community to cease perpetuating the institutionalized structures and relations – the community resists the inevitability of existing structures (Anderson and Warren 2011). Building on the success of legacy breaking, the community draws on network support to raise awareness of the embedded economic conditions and social relations, and raise funds to buy their ‘place’. In the third phase of legacy supplanting the community buys Eigg in a partnership with a public and third sector organization. Community ownership transfers to the community the responsibility for economic development, physical infrastructure, and managing community relations. The community actions of renovating old buildings and erecting new housing, installing a reliable energy grid and arranging secure tenancies, creates conditions in which community and private entrepreneurship flourish. The community thus changes the social structures and relations embedded in place.

While private landlordism was supplanted in the community investigated, the institutional legacy of landlordism is perpetuated in other communities. Private landlordism has been much criticized in the Scottish media, such as by the pro-land reform West Highland Free Press (SNR 1996e, 1996f) however, Scottish Land & Estates campaign for landlords and communities to work cooperatively. The final phase of institutionalizing new structures and relations would not have happened in Scotland without the establishment of the Scottish Parliament (Warren and McKee 2011). Established after the Eigg buyout, The Community Land Unit, Land Fund and land reform legislation legitimized and normalized community land ownership, new third sector organizations supported communities contemplating buyouts, and procedures for organizing, managing and funding community buyouts became established. The model thus describes a place-based process in which a new institution supplants a long-standing legacy, without necessarily eliminating the impact of said legacy in other places. The contributions arising from the analysis and process model are twofold.

5.1. Elaborating the embeddedness in place perspective

The first contribution is to conceptualize a legacy-informed explanation of community embeddedness in place. Prior research has explained entrepreneurial embeddedness in place and communities as a ‘situated condition from which new entrepreneurial conditions arise’ (McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015, 51). Such research has noted that community organizing may be connected to a specific event, such as an environmental catastrophe (Cowen and Cowen 2010), or action in a depleted community (Anderson and Gaddefors 2016; Gaddefors and Anderson 2018). Considering why IEHT was established, the motivation lay in the impacts of the enduring historical legacy of private landlordism and associated lack of investment in infrastructure and maintenance, and antagonistic landlord-resident relations that together created increasing community dissatisfaction and searches for a way to change their place. The model developed above specifically elaborates the contextual influence of time (Wadhwani et al. 2020) and past events (Lubinski 2018) on community entrepreneurship. While prior research has acknowledged the temporal dimension of context (Lippman and Aldrich 2016; McMullen and Dimov 2013), the analysis presented explicates more complex relationships between context, communities and change.

The small but growing references to history in entrepreneurship research (Gaddefors and Anderson 2018), suggests that an historical time scale may inform our understanding of the richness of contextual influences on entrepreneuring. The institutional legacy of private landlordism had been built up over centuries in Scotland, and its effects are also seen over time. A long time span can be exploited as an advantage when seeking ‘causal explanations of institutional legacy effects’ (Greve and Rao 2014, 33). Community land ownership in Scotland has been portrayed as the righting of the historical wrongs of private landlordism; and as a structure for enabling more ‘socially just and sustainable futures’ (Mackenzie et al. 2004, 69, 171; see also Mackenzie and Mackenzie 2006). By creating a mechanism for people to produce their ‘own places’, rather than meanings being made for communities (Castree 2003), community land ownership and community entrepreneurship offer an avenue for emancipation from institutional constraints (Rindova, Barry, and Ketchen 2009), place reconstruction (McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015), and community relationship strengthening around a common purpose. The case study of Eigg demonstrates how the strength of community social ties embedded in place was leveraged to overcome the inevitability of the legacy of institutionalized political, cultural, and normative values of private landlordism and inspire new ways of entrepreneuring.

5.2. Supplanting and transcending institutional legacy

While prior research by Anderson (2000) articulated how traditional ways of life can be transformed into the resource base of commercially viable businesses, for IEHT the traditional values embodied in the legacy of private landlordism constrained entrepreneurial vitality. Although identified as an exemplar from which aspiring community buyouts can learn, the cultural history of Eigg is less important to the entrepreneurial ventures than conserving the natural and environmental landscape. This insight offers a more nuanced portrait of how embedded cultural values motivate and remain central to entrepreneurship (Anderson 2000).

Prior research has noted the energizing influence of entrepreneurial embeddedness on the reconstruction of place (Gaddefors and Anderson 2018; McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015). The case study presented sheds light on how community entrepreneurship also fulfils this role. Subsequent to the buyout, IEHT established subsidiary community ventures to meet the needs of residents, especially improved housing and reliable energy supply, and generate income from the sales of goods and services and gift surpluses back to the Trust. Supporting prior research by Skerratt (2013), for the community venture to become financially sustainable, the new trading subsidiaries were essential. In addition, private entrepreneurship has been encouraged to create employment and sustainable livelihoods. Because individual and collective interests co-exist (Van de Ven, Sapienza, and Villaneuva 2007), both community and private entrepreneurship flourish.

Community land ownership has been argued to generate greater motivation and collective action (Quirk 2007; Slee et al. 2007) and the residents’ involvement in IEHT governance fostered a new sense of achievement in securing control and increasing personal autonomy. Prior research has noted the community revitalization effects of entrepreneurship (Anderson and Gaddefors 2016; Gaddefors and Anderson 2018). IEHT also performed this role – after residents were given the security of long-term property leases, investing in private entrepreneurial ventures made more sense. This finding supports prior research about the positive psychological impacts of entrepreneurship in rural places (Korsgaard and Anderson 2011), and economically and socially deprived contexts (Johnstone and Lionais 2004).

The history of the motivations and shaping of IEHT traces the constraining effects of the legacy of private landlordism, and theorizes the generative entrepreneurial and institutional effects of legacy breaking and supplanting. Moreover, it is critical to bear in mind that no property regime is ‘inherently good or bad’ – exploitative asset management ‘can be practised by any type of owner’ (McKee et al. 2013, 67). Historical descriptions of less acrimonious relations between landlords and tenants, however, still perpetuate dependent social relations in which development is dependent on landlord wealth and harmonious landlord–tenant relations.

6. Concluding comments

The research set out to explore how community embeddedness in place motivates and shapes community entrepreneurship. By adopting an Anderson framing of entrepreneurial embeddedness (Anderson 1998, 2000; Jack and Anderson 2002), communities (Anderson and Gaddefors 2016; McKeever, Anderson, and Jack 2014) and place (Anderson 2015a, 2015b; McKeever, Jack, and Anderson 2015), the analysis presented develops his work further by elaborating the impact of historical legacy on community embeddedness in place and community entrepreneurship. Local community action is embedded in and impacted by place and part of the discourse of land reform, and by formally recognizing community rights to own land, the institutional legacy of private landlordism has been transcended in some, but not all, places.

Two implications for practice arise from the findings. The recent estimate of 562230 acres in community ownership (ONS Scotland 2017) suggests that communities continue to benefit from support to acquire land and other assets. While DTAS and CLS provide such support, future demand for services is likely to increase. Knowledge sharing would demonstrate how to mobilize and support community action to increase individual and societal awareness of the diversity of communities (Haugh 2007; Johnstone and Lionais 2004; Korsching and Allen 2004) and prosocial organizational forms (Harcourt 2014; Hollensbe et al. 2014). Second, economic, management and business school textbooks and curricula persistently downplay the potential of communities to tackle societies grand challenges – revisions to educational materials would address this shortcoming.

The research context is the legacy of private landlordism in Scotland. Further research in other contexts with legacies of contested land ownership, such as First Nations and ancestral lands (Braun 2002) and in former colonies (Banerjee and Iyer 2005), could explore the impact of institutional legacies on economic development under such conditions. Second, the focus on land ownership could be extended to other assets, such as buildings. Specific buildings, such as a post office, primary school, village hall and village shop, are considered ‘totemic’ of communities (Skerratt and Hall 2011, 172) and could be brought into community ownership. Further research that explored the institutional legacies of community acquisition of such assets would advance knowledge of institutional legacy trajectories. Finally, the empirical data are infused with emotional expressions of hope and joy, but also hunger for restorative justice. Further research to explore how affect inscribes, maintains and changes institutional legacies would advance knowledge on the light and dark side of institutional legacies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by Leverhulme Foundation grant Ref 2018-443 Community Entrepreneurship