Busted amidst the Boom: The Creation of New Insecurities and Inequalities within Pennsylvania's Shale Gas Boomtowns

In the middle of the first decade of this century new technological innovations enabled the extraction of natural gas through the use of hydraulic fracturing within gas‐bearing shale and other unconventional energy reserves. As a consequence, many places, often in economically lagging rural areas, saw dramatic change as they were socially and economically transformed through rapid natural resource development. Although scholarship on so‐called boomtown development has long explored social disruption associated with the sudden influx of workers and rapid economic development, this literature has tended to overlook the ways in which such development can create new poverty in the very midst of economic expansion. This article, through an examination of key informant interviews with low‐income residents and human service providers within Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region, discusses the contradictory processes by which new insecurity and social exclusions may be created precisely as a consequence of economic expansion associated with rapid natural resource development.     

A Localized Masculine Crisis: Local Men's Subordination within the Marcellus Shale Region's Masculine Structure

Rural economic decline in the United States has contributed to new situational conditions under which men construct masculinity. Under these conditions, men define jobs and activities that were feminized during periods of economic stability as masculine. One exception to rural economic decline for men is economic growth associated with oil and natural gas development in geographical hot spots throughout the United States and around the world. Employment opportunities in the oil and gas industry largely favor men; however, it is unclear what effect this development has on local men because itinerant extralocal male workers complete most of the labor. This article conceptualizes masculinity as a social structure, and uses economic reports and theoretically distinct literatures on natural‐resource‐based masculinities and energy boomtowns to illuminate how multinational energy companies and a predominantly extralocal, male itinerant workforce in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region cause adverse situational conditions for local men's constructions of masculinity. Within the new masculine structure, extralocal men's constructions of hegemonic masculinity become more important for defining the local socially dominant masculinity, which subordinates local men's constructions of nonhegemonic masculinities in their own communities. The article concludes with a discussion of how the oil and gas industry's hegemonic masculinity impedes sustainable economic development and community well‐being.     

“If You Talk Badly about Drilling,You're a Pariah”: Challenging a Capitalist Patriarchy in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale Region

Research on energy development is largely gender neutral, creating a need to illuminate how gender structures life in contemporary energy boomtowns. This study demonstrates how gender and the local economy are intertwined to perpetuate a capitalist patriarchy, which structures life for residents in these communities. The purpose of this article is to show that this economic‐gender structure creates tensions between those men and women whose gender performances reinforce hegemony and those who perform gender in direct opposition to resource extraction. I argue that men and women unconstrained by the capitalist patriarchy are better able to challenge its dominance than residents employed in the local economy. I use qualitative interviews (N = 39) with community residents and observations of community events in northeastern Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region as the primary methods of data collection. This study complements previous research by demonstrating the relationship between masculinity and femininity, showing the variability of gender in natural‐resource‐based settings and defining the hierarchal relationship among masculinities and femininities during periods of rapid energy development.     

Does Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Extraction Affect How Much Youth in Rural Pennsylvania Like Their Community?

Prior research on the impacts of boomtowns on youth provides mixed results. Recent qualitative work suggests youth are ambivalent about change associated with extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale. The Rural Youth Education longitudinal study of youth in rural Pennsylvania provides a unique opportunity to examine youth views about their communities before and during development of the Marcellus Shale. We use two waves of data from 10 rural school districts to assess differences in youth reports of how much they liked their community pre‐Marcellus (2005) and during Marcellus activity (2009), creating a natural experiment. Youth characteristics, aspirations, perceptions of job and educational opportunities, and views about their community are included in multinomial multivariate logistic regression models to predict how much youth like their community. We find no difference in youth liking their community pre‐Marcellus, but a larger share of youth in communities experiencing Marcellus activity by 2009 like their community “a lot” than those in areas not affected. The Marcellus effect strengthens when controls for other factors typically associated with extraction activity and views of community are included in the model, suggesting other, unmeasured aspects of Marcellus‐related activity influence how much youth like their community.     

Fracking Fortunes: Economic Well‐being and Oil and Gas Development along the Urban‐Rural Continuum

Oil and gas extraction, especially via unconventional means like hydraulic fracturing, is hailed as an economic boon by many commentators and political leaders. However, empirical evidence is limited. In this article, we consider the socioeconomic effects (particularly, related to poverty, employment, income, and wages) of unconventional oil and gas extraction using a national data set of U.S. counties. We use a novel between‐ and within‐county random effects modeling strategy to capture both resource curse and boomtown dynamics. Further, we allow the effect of oil and gas development to be conditioned by county rurality. Broadly, our findings suggest that oil and gas development has very complex effects at the county level. Within‐county growth in oil and gas production slightly improves most economic outcomes, but counties that specialize in oil and gas development tend to perform worse than other counties. We find that, in general, the effect of within‐county oil and gas production is not significantly moderated by county rurality.     

“Fracking democracy”: Issue management and locus of policy decision-making in the Marcellus Shale gas drilling debate

This study examined a two-year period in which natural gas development in the Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania expanded rapidly, as did public policy proposals meant to deal with the myriad legal, economic, and environmental issues that accompanied this growth. Focusing on the use of legitimacy strategies during the critical phase of the issue of hydraulic fracturing, the study examined how activists and energy industry advocates argued that different levels of government policy making – local, state, and federal – should be the locus of policy decisions. Both the “fractivists” and the energy industry sought to legitimize state-level legislators and regulators. Activists viewed federal-level intervention as legitimate leverage for their work in the state, while the energy industry saw federal regulators as redundant and restrictive. Finally, while both sides viewed local authorities as legitimate actors, the energy industry sought to limit their ability to act against the development of new wells.     

Socioeconomic System of the Oil Boom and Rural Community Development in Western North Dakota

An oil boom is a complex social and economic phenomenon. The socioeconomic system presented in this article represents a novel effort to explicate boom impacts and changes, within a systems framework, at the community level to enhance community planning and development efforts. Most boomtown studies focus on longitudinal changes of a boom‐bust‐recovery cycle or social‐disruption‐based approaches. This article is an effort to demonstrate that longitudinal changes or social disruptions of a boom manifest through the interactions and interrelationships between social entities and stakeholders acting within the boom conditions and surrounding conditions. The socioeconomic system approach in this article analyzes the boom as a system, which provides a useful lens for many other rural communities currently experiencing unconventional oil and gas development in the United States. The socioeconomic system highlights five main challenges or factors that need to be addressed through community development strategies: develop affordable housing, invest in community infrastructure, expand public services, attract new businesses to the area, and develop better community integration strategies to build trust and unity within the community. This article is qualitative and exploratory in nature. As a result, it explicates the functions, structure, and relationships between system entities to provide a broader understanding of coherence, conflicts, and synergies within a system.     

The Shale Boom and Family Structure: Oil and Gas Employment Growth Relationship to Marriage,Divorce, and Cohabitation

Shale oil and gas extraction technology has caused a large shift in the United States' energy landscape over the last decade. This had a wide range of impacts on rural communities mostly in which oil and gas extraction occurs. While many studies have focused on the economic and environmental impact of shale development, researchers have only begun to study the social changes brought on by the shale resource extraction. We examine the influence of shale oil and gas employment as a share of overall county employment on county marriage, divorce, and cohabitation rates. We find evidence that oil and gas employment growth is associated with decreased marriage rates and increased divorce rates from 2009 to 2014. We test several channels through which oil and gas development may influence marriage behaviors and find that changes in female labor force participation, county sex ratios, and median household incomes are associated with oil and gas development. We also test for differences across the rural/urban continuum and find that our results are largely driven by nonmetro counties.     

The Influence of Value Orientations,Personal Beliefs,and Knowledge about Resource Extraction on Local Leaders' Positions on Shale Development

Unconventional shale oil and gas production plays a prominent role in boosting economic growth and stimulating wealth creation in many communities. However, because of potential social and environmental drawbacks, including a lack of affordable housing and groundwater contamination from drilling, unconventional shale development is highly contentious in many areas and has resulted in many community conflicts. Hydraulic fracturing, which is a specific technology utilized in unconventional shale development, has proved especially contentious because of concerns about its long‐term environmental consequences. Given the fast pace of shale development, coupled with the controversy that surrounds it, we seek to understand what factors affect a local government official's stance on shale development and hydraulic fracturing. To do this we draw from value‐belief‐norms theory while additionally examining knowledge and community‐level factors that can influence an official's position. In this study, we survey 308 local government officials across six shale plays in the United States to examine local officials' positions on shale development and hydraulic fracturing. We find that the more positively officials perceive the consequences of shale development, the less likely they are to support banning hydraulic fracturing. Additionally, we find that networks to other shale communities are positively associated with favoring a ban. Further, leaders with a bachelor's degree or higher are more likely to favor a ban than those with lower than a bachelor's degree.     

Meat processing and Garden City,KS: Boom and bust

In December 1980, the world's largest beef processing plant opened 10 miles west of Garden City, KS. Three years later another beef plant opened on Garden City's eastern edge. Full employment in the surrounding region meant that most of the 4000 workers needed to run these plants had to come from elsewhere—and they did. Garden City grew by one-third from 1980 to 1985, and it became a modern boomtown. Garden City suffered many of the social problems associated with the energy boomtowns of the Rocky Mountain West described by earlier researchers. But unlike the jobs created in those earlier boomtowns, meatpacking paid poorly and provided few benefits. On Christmas night in 2000, a fire destroyed one of the beef plants, putting 2300 people out of work. Four years after the fire, the plant remains closed and the town's economy is in decline. This paper describes the social and economic consequences for a boomtown when a major engine of its economy goes bust.     

Classed,raced, and gendered biographies: young people's understandings of social structures in a boomtown

As young people attempt to adapt to a rapidly changing society, how they experience school and work has undergone significant changes in recent decades. Youth researchers attempting to understand these changes have drawn heavily on the concepts of agency and structure. In the process, researchers often end up taking a ‘middle-ground’ approach and in turn have critiqued the theorizing of Ulrich Beck for being too focused on agency. This article engages with this debate by examining young people's understandings of the social structures shaping their lives within the constantly changing environment of a boomtown. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with high school students, post-secondary students, and young workers, it was found that most young people were able to recognize how class had shaped their lives, only Aboriginal young people discussed how race/ethnicity had shaped their lives, and only young women understood how gender had shaped their lives. The findings suggest that the specific local context that young people experience their school and work lives within is important in their reflexive understandings of their biographies. In this case, the boomtown environment helped to highlight difference and make only certain social structures visible to particular young people.     

The State of Play in Poland's Unconventional Shale and Oil Development

Following initial geological assessments, Poland was identified as having one of the largest reserves of unconventional natural gas in the European Union. The Poles, seeking to diversify their energy sources, met the news with tremendous fanfare. However, shale gas development often requires voluminous speculative activity before the gas can be successfully extracted – an activity which has been rare in Poland, where a lack of critical infrastructure coupled with bureaucratic red tape in the permission process has led to slow growth in exploration activities. This article examines the current situation in Poland's unconventional gas and oil development.     

Perceived Impacts from Wind Farm and Natural Gas Development in Northern Pennsylvania

This study examines the environmental, social, and economic impacts that landowners perceive from the simultaneous development of an industrial‐scale wind farm and extensive natural gas drilling in an area of northern Pennsylvania. A mail survey (N = 1,028) reveals that the types of perceived impact from wind and natural gas are similar overall, although the perceived magnitude of positive and negative impacts is greater from natural gas drilling. Impact perception was found to explain a large portion of residents' overall attitudes toward the energy developments, and residents' place meanings for the area also explain some attitudinal variation. Additionally, factors such as place attachment and length and type of residency were found to have little or no effect on either the perception of impact or resident attitudes toward development.     

Local Labor Markets and Caseload Decline in Louisiana in the 1990s*

Abstract Efforts to explain declines in welfare caseloads in the 1990s focus on three factors (economic opportunity, welfare policy, and demographic characteristics) and produce mixed results. Although several recent studies consider state differences, few consider local differences within states. Failure to control for caseload persistence and within‐state variation in program implementation may be one reason why studies produce contradictory results regarding the effect of economic conditions on caseload decline. Using data for Louisiana parishes from 1991 to 1998, we analyze local caseload decline. Our results support other researchers' finding of a “threat effect” before 1996 welfare reform; they indicate that, all else being equal, reducing caseloads will be most difficult in nonadjacent nonmetropolitan parishes and easiest in adjacent nonmetropolitan parishes.     

Quality in early childhood services: parent,provider and policy perspectives

Recent government proposals give local authorities responsibility for establishing early years partnerships. The partnerships provide people interested in early childhood services with an opportunity to discuss local provision. In any discussion of early childhood services, quality is likely to be high on the agenda. This paper describes a series of discussions on the meaning of quality in early childhood services. Parents, day care providers and other stakeholders took part. Differences of opinion between and within stakeholder groups are discussed in the context of current policies and ideologies concerning non-parental child care.     

Response to Pennsylvania's Agricultural Preservation Programs1

Abstract Agriculture is the leading industry in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. At the same time, encroaching development has pressured prime agricultural land to change uses, a change usually considered irreversible. Some regions of Pennsylvania have used zoning to control and plan for the development of agricultural land, but these decisions have not always been agreed on. In response to conflicts over zoning and calls for more effective restrictions of development of prime agricultural soils, the state government implemented agricultural preservation programs designed to ensure the future viability of Pennsylvania's agriculture. While response has been reported as favorable, most reviews relied on voters' support of a state referendum to fund agricultural preservation programs. Few have examined local responses to the implementation of these programs. This paper explores local community responses to agricultural preservation and the state's programs in three regions of Pennsylvania which differ in levels of urban presence and pressure. Using secondary sources, qualitative data, and general population surveys, this analysis provides implications about strategies of agricultural preservation in a state which leads in such efforts.     

Confidence in the economy in times of crisis: Social representations of experts and laypeople

This study investigates experts’ and laypeople's social representations of the financial and economic crisis, as widely discussed in the media after the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Financial experts (n = 156) and laypeople (n = 153) with low versus high confidence in the economic recovery spontaneously associated thoughts and beliefs about the crisis and to economic and political stakeholders. Following a mixed-methods approach, they evaluated economic stakeholders with regard to six trust items. The study was conducted in March 2010 in Austria, which was moderately affected by the crisis. The results indicate that economic variables (e.g., unemployment) were central to the social representations of the crisis, while underlying feelings of unfairness and egoism surfaced during the ongoing process of association. The social representation did not comprise a general criticism of the economic system. The differences between the subgroups depended on identification-based self-protection and economic knowledge. Experts and laypeople tended to attribute the economic crisis to specific stakeholders in a self-protecting way: experts blamed the media, laypeople blamed the managers, and both blamed the politicians. Interestingly, the subgroups tended to evaluate the banks as being relatively neutral. Expertise and differentiated economic knowledge was related to confidence in the economic recovery. Thus, the perceived capability of politicians in terms of competence and morality seems crucial for regaining public confidence in the economy.     

Economic Attitudes and Responses to Siting Hazardous Waste Facilities in Rural Utah1

Abstract The siting of hazardous waste facilities has become a critical problem for the United States. Many western states are plagued with proposals to site such facilities. While the host communities appear to be typical western rural communities, responses to siting hazardous waste facilities vary. Previous research suggests that key variables in predicting responses are the anticipation of economic benefits and the perception of risk. This paper proposes that response to siting hazardous industries in rural Utah is not only a result of these key variables but also residents' perception of the local economy. Results from ethnographic and survey data from three rural communities in Utah indicate that the anticipation of economic benefits and perception of risk were strongly associated with response to a proposal, and that residents of communities with poorer local economies were more likely to support siting a hazardous waste facility locally.     

Place making,grassroots organizing,and rural protest: A case study of Anahim Lake,British Columbia

Contemporary rural social movements bring diverse interest groups and stakeholders together at the local scale in the pursuit of common visions and goals, often against the backdrop of an external threat. The challenge for a movement's leaders is to negotiate and design a rural agenda that resonates with this complex constituency. One way to approach this problem is to construct and politicize a local sense of place as a means of rallying insiders against outside forces and pressures. This article explores the place-making activities of rural leaders operating within a complex social setting through an analysis of a grassroots social movement in Anahim Lake, British Columbia. The study uses the concept of the “place frame” to explore how Anahim's activists created a local discursive framework that enabled them to bridge dissimilar environmental values and practices within the community. The removal of external pressures following protest, however, saw the dissolution of this alignment. In documenting this process, the article contributes to a fuller understanding of the significance of place in grassroots protest and activism.     

Bridging the gap between social work practice and community based welfare agencies

This article argues that social work in the UK needs to renegotiate its relationship with community welfare agencies. It begins by examining what we mean by local community and how welfare needs reflect complex non-linear dynamics unique to the local circumstances. It is argued that these are not always recognised in centralised policy agendas. The article broadly draws a parallel between policy issues for the European Community and for the national state. The drive for both is towards uniformity, which potentially fails to acknowledge the unique circumstances at both the national level between nations and the local level between communities.

The focus of the analysis is the lack of engagement with the subtleties of the local within the arena of social work education and practice. With the opportunity presented by the introduction of a new social work degree in the UK, the authors describe how a social work programme in Liverpool undertook a piece of research with the aim of creating an appropriate place for community welfare agencies in practice placements, the academic curriculum and, ultimately, with the next generation of social work practitioners. Eight welfare agencies within the proximity of Liverpool University, an area known as Toxteth, agreed to participate in the research to investigate what kind of placement module would enable local welfare agencies to engage meaningfully in the social work degree. Out of this process emerged a model for research based curriculum development involving local community agencies and academic institutions. More specifically for Liverpool, it placed the notion of social work's relationship with local community welfare at the heart of professional development for qualifying social workers, paving the way in this region of England for closer links between welfare agencies associated with civil society and professional social workers.