Connecting place-based heritage to platform markets
Rural actors, digital capacity and perceived market value in Fujian's tea industry
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24214865 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ying Song (0009-0009-3483-8403), Yuanping Cao |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 128 |
| Pages | 104453 |
| Publication date | 2026-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Rural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0743-0167 • E-ISSN: 1873-1392 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2026.104453 |
| OpenAlex | W7219744714 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 39 |
Digitalisation can widen rural market reach, but for heritage agri-food products the problem is not only access: place-based meanings must remain legible as products move into platform markets. Using a survey of 671 tea-sector actors in Fujian Province, China, together with 15 supplementary semi-structured interviews, this study examines heterogeneous digital practices and the association between enacted digital capacity and perceived market value. Digital communication was hybrid rather than purely online: short video and livestreaming coexisted with tourism, heritage activities and continuing customer relations. Among tea farmers and enterprise actors, enacted digital capacity was positively associated with perceived market value in the fully adjusted model (N = 416; b = 0.409, robust SE = 0.025, p < 0.001), with similar positive patterns across alternative samples. The strongest reported communication constraints concerned content planning, expression and audiovisual production rather than equipment alone. Item-level diagnostics did not support a three-stage measurement structure separating cultural narrative translation, brand meaning and value capture. Accordingly, cultural narrative translation is treated as a process concept describing how territorially embedded knowledge is made legible to platform audiences, while perceived market value serves as the survey-based market outcome. The study advances rural digitalisation research by showing how digitalisation reorganises place-market relations through actor-differentiated capacities and hybrid local-platform infrastructures.
digital capacity · E-commerce · Fujian · place-based heritage · platform markets · rural actors · rural digitalization · tea industry · Agricultural Innovations and Practices · Digitalization and Economic Development in Agriculture · Rural development and sustainability
Value Creation and Value Capture
Agriculture 4.0
Food, place and authenticity
Leveraging social media to promote ceramic craftsmanship
Digital Storytelling in Cultural and Heritage Tourism
Product, Process and Place
Rural development in the digital age
The potential of local online shopping platforms for villages and small and medium-sized towns
Regional foods and rural development
Place attachment and digitalisation in rural regions
Digital from farm to fork
Contextualising digitalisation through ambidexterity and new territorial proximities
The contributions of short food supply chains to territorial development
The remapping of rural digitalisation
Translating terroir
Geographical indications, terroir, and socioeconomic and ecological sustainability
Improving the design of local short food supply chains
Knowledge, Food and Place. A Way of Producing, a Way of Knowing
Geographical Indications and local development
Digital heritage as eudaimonic space
Embeddedness and local food systems
Skill generation and distribution in rural livestreaming E-commerce
Digital rurality
Constructing ideal wanghong villages on social media
Governing modesty
Local Development and Heritage
Understanding Alternative Food Networks
Embedding Local Places in Global Spaces
| Highly cited | No |
|---|