Rural Community Satisfaction and Attachment in Mass Consumer Society1

Abstract Previous models of community satisfaction and attachment have not included personal economic attitudes and behaviors as independent variables. Their inclusion is theoretically justified when residents of communities are viewed as consumers in a larger social/economic context first and residents of a particular community second. As locally-oriented economic processes—once part of the community experience—were removed to nonlocal markets, local economic and demographic attributes became less important to rural residents' experience of community. In two rural communities with extreme scores on a service center viability index, satisfaction with employment and location of employment are important predictors.     

Toward a Social Theory of Resilience: Social Systems,Cultural Systems,and Collective Action in Transitioning Forest‐Based Communities

Impacts from post‐Fordist and poststaples economic transition in the Canadian natural resource sector have resulted in dramatic challenges to the livelihoods of many rural residents and the viability of many rural communities. This study seeks to understand community response to economic transition through a lens of social ecological resilience. This article puts forward Archer's theory of cultural morphogenesis as an analogous model of social ecological change that focuses attention on cultural systems, cultural elaboration, and collective action within an adaptive cycle of resilience. With case material from focused ethnographies of two forest‐dependent communities, we identify distinctive interactions between culture and agency over time that condition community response to change, and we make an analytical distinction between the social system and cultural system. These insights point to catalysts for collective action and adaptation within a resilient cultural realm that extend beyond institutional factors such as economic dependency or political opportunity. By integrating culture, we also deepen the social theory contribution to social‐ecological resilience.     

Social Capital and Communities of Place1

Abstract This paper develops a framework for examining the questions: Does social capital make a difference for well being in communities of place? How might rural sociologists utilize social capital to further well being in communities? The author reviews social capital literature, contrasting rational choice and embeddedness perspectives. Opting for a marriage between embeddedness and conflict theory, he introduces entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) as an alternative to social capital. ESI adds to social capital the notions of equality, inclusion, and agency. Research results are presented which support the embeddedness approach: community-level action (the community field) is not simply an aggregation of individual or organizational actions within the community; social capital and ESI contribute jointly and independently to community action. Examining economic development as a form of collective action, the author concludes?the following: a) ESI contributes to economic development, and b) inclusiveness (internal solidarity) is more closely related to community self-development while industrial recruitment is better predicted by strong external ties.     

Religious Communities,Immigration, and Social Cohesion in Rural Areas: Evidence from England*

Religious communities are important sources of bridging and bonding social capital that have varying implications for perceptions of social cohesion in rural areas. In particular, as well as cultivating cohesiveness more broadly, the bridging social capital associated within mainline religious communities may represent an especially important source of support for the social integration of new immigrant groups. Although the bonding social capital associated with evangelical communities is arguably less conducive to wider social cohesion, it may prompt outreach work by those communities, which can enhance immigrant integration. This article examines these assumptions by exploring the relationship between mainline and evangelical religious communities, immigration, and residents' perceptions of social cohesion in rural areas in England. I model the separate and combined effects of religious communities and economic in‐migration on social cohesion using multivariate statistical techniques. The analysis suggests that mainline Protestant communities enhance social cohesion in rural England, while evangelical communities do not. The social integration of immigrants appears to be more likely where mainline Protestant and Catholic communities are strong, but is unaffected by the strength of evangelical ones.     

Renegotiating family gender identities in a disadvantaged Atlantic Canadian working-class community: young adults' perspectives

Within a climate of reduced social welfare support, disadvantaged working-class communities in Canada are in transition as they consider their futures without the industries that were once the staples of their economies. In this paper, I examine how a group of young women and men living in Industrial Cape Breton – a disadvantaged Atlantic Canadian working-class community – negotiate the traditional gendered identities ascribed to them through local history with twenty-first-century conceptions of family and gender. Young adults in this study suggest that class-based and gender-based capital plays a significant role in how these changes are experienced by individuals, families, and communities. Furthermore, the social, economic, and psychological expenses for individuals attempting to secure economic comfort and gendered respectability in their disadvantaged communities leave little time and energy to critically reflect on the systemic social and economic conditions that enable class-based gender inequalities to thrive. As a result, traditional concepts of the masculine family ‘breadwinner’ and the feminine family ‘caregiver’ survive even as the societal basis for these roles is eroded by global capitalism.     

Contradictions in Agrarian Ideology: Restructuring Gender,Race-Ethnicity,and Class1

Abstract Contradictions in agrarian ideology are revealed through an analysis of social dimensions of economic restructuring in rural Iowa. Data are culled from field observations and in-depth interviews with white European American residents. How rural residents cope with and make sense of the changes within their communities are two interrelated dimensions of social restructuring. The research highlights a perception of sharpening social and economic divisions within two small communities. The social and economic changes challenged residents' self-definitions, perspectives on rural community life, and previously taken-for-granted notions of gender, racial-ethnic, and class relations. Analysis of field data demonstrates contradictory ways that discourses on agrarianism and gemeinschaft serve as resources as well as impediments to social support and community development.     

International Labour Migrants' Return to Meiji-era Yamaguchi and Hiroshima: Economic and Social Effects

International labour migration from Meiji era (1868–1912) Japan was intensely concentrated: over 60 per cent of the 29,000 participants in the government-managed Hawai'i emigration programme ( kan'yaku imin , 1885–1894) came from seven coastal counties around the Hiroshima-Yamaguchi prefectural border in southwest Japan. Almost half of the emigrants became long-term settlers instead of returning to their hometowns, but this paper examines what happened to returning emigrants and to their home communities. Since the migration was primarily economic in nature, the effect of migrant earnings was carefully monitored and is frequently cited by scholars. Surveys showed high rates of debt repayment and savings, and improved living conditions, but investment and entrepreneurship were limited. High-emigration regions rarely became economic centers of any importance. Less carefully studied are non-economic effects, partially because the labour programme was structured to minimize contact with Hawaiian or Caucasian culture, and thus returnees had little cultural experience to transfer to their hometowns. Local officials in Yamaguchi seemed proud of the lack of social change. Even long-term sojourners, who returned due to family needs after a decade or more overseas, exhibited no readjustment difficulties. Returnees, particularly in Yamaguchi, sometimes moved on to Japanese colonial territories, creating multilateral and complex relationships with overseas communities. This sojourning migration, like contemporary analogs, was a powerful form of poverty relief in the midst of dislocating globalization, but did not produce a rise in entrepreneurship or a Westernization of local culture. Because this sojourning migration was structurally similar to our modern-day patterns, it provides evidence of the longevity of those patterns and the possible long-term effects, and raises questions about our expectations for migration policy.     

Social Capital Investment and Immigrant Economic Trajectories: A Case Study of Punjabi American Taxi Drivers in New York City

Although the scholarship on social capital and immigrant economic incorporation has sufficiently documented how immigrants mobilize social capital in their search for employment which often leads to the formation of immigrant niches, how social capital is processed after immigrants acquire employment and its significance for the preservation of immigrant employment niches is less well explored. This paper addresses this gap in the literature with a case study of immigrant Punjabi taxi drivers in the New York metropolitan area. In particular, this study shows how a group of immigrant Punjabi taxi drivers mobilized social capital via embeddedness in co‐ethnic social networks and improved their working conditions – a process that must be considered in explanations of the Punjabi niche in the taxi industry for more than two decades. The study has implications for the relationship between social capital and the structure of the workplace or industry where immigrants are incorporated and its subsequent impact on immigrant economic trajectories. Further, this study contributes to the debate on the usefulness of ethnic communities for the adaptation of immigrant groups. Additionally, this research is relevant to the scholarship on the economic adaptation of South Asian (a subset of Asian Americans) immigrants, an understudied immigrant group in the United States.     

Cultivators of Change: Food Justice in Social Work Education

Food security is an important social work issue historically, and social work educators are responsible for teaching a curriculum that ensures social workers advance human rights, social justice, and economic justice. Contemporary food justice work focuses on the intersecting issues of policy, health, social justice, economic development, and the natural environment. The long-term global public health and environmental threats posed by the mainstream food system in combination with increasing poverty and food insecurity have led to questions about the ability of communities to sustain a nutritionally adequate and equitably distributed food supply. This paper provides examples of social work courses, units, and assignments that focus on educating students about food and environmental justice issues. Much of this work is based on service learning, which is an effective pedagogical tool for fostering connections between classroom concepts and practice. Courses that help students understand the contextual environments in their local communities provide optimal learning environments to address social, economic, and environmental injustices in the food system. Food justice, in particular, is one lens by which students can learn about environmental justice issues for application to their future practice.     

In search of a happy medium: How the structure of interorganizational networks influence community economic development strategies

Routes to economic development attract considerable attention among social scientists, policy makers, and community activists. Increasingly, social scientists examine various attributes of communities, their members, and their natural surroundings that facilitate and inhibit economic development. However, few empirical analyses exist that analyze the impact of a community's network structure on different forms of economic development such as on industrial recruitment and self-development. Using data collected from six communities in Washington State, the impact of a community's interorganizational network structure on industrial recruitment and self-development is examined. Results suggest that different types of network structures are better suited for different economic development strategies. A certain level of cohesiveness among community organizations and institutions are favorable for implementing self-development projects. However for industrial recruitment, networks that are bridging facilitate more types of economic development. While bonding and bridging network structures appear to be at odds with one another, it is possible for communities to increase both forms of economic development by maintaining a certain level of cohesiveness among subcomponents and increasing the number of organizations that serve as cut-points connecting non-redundant sources of information. These findings illustrate the need for communities and local activists to consider a community's network structure when deciding on an economic development strategy.     

Planning for change in small towns or trying to avoid the slaughterhouse blues

Rural farming communities throughout the Prairies and Great Plains have sought to reverse decades of slow economic decline by attracting value-added processing of agricultural products as a means of economic development. The meatpacking industry has been attracted to the region by the availability of fed cattle. It has created thousands of low-paying jobs and boosted local agricultural economies by increasing the demand for animals and feedstuffs, while at the same time impairing water quality and bringing a host of social problems to packinghouse communities. This article examines how the town of Brooks, Alberta prepared and dealt with these challenges over a two year period following the expansion of a beefpacking plant. Despite the advance warning of the social changes that would accompany the hiring of additional workers the town failed to meet the housing needs of newcomers recruited to work at the plant and experienced a significant increase in a variety of social disorders. The study concludes that preparing for change begins with the recognition that social and environmental impacts are inevitable with the arrival of a new industry. A pro-active response to protecting the environment and ensuring that basic human needs are met is better for a community and its workforce than having changes thrust upon it by an industry whose only interest is in maximizing profits.     

Data-Driven Organizing: A Community–University Partnership to Address Vacant and Abandoned Property

Vacant and abandoned properties adversely affect the physical, mental, social, and economic health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. This article describes a community–university partnership that combined a multimethod data collection strategy with a novel community-based participatory intervention research model (i.e., data-driven organizing) to address the vacancy problem. The project assessed the conditions of over 1,500 properties in an economically disadvantaged, predominantly African American neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and mobilized residents to use an existing policy mechanism to ameliorate the impact of property vacancy in the community.     

Intellectual property and industrialization: legalizing hope in economic growth

This article draws on theoretical resources from economic sociology and sociology of law to intervene in economic debates about the relationship between intellectual property and industrialization. Utilizing historical evidence from the earliest period of American intellectual property law and from a formative company in the New England textile industry, I propose a social process of influence that connects intellectual property law to industrialization. I argue that, consistent with the findings of New Economic Sociology, social relationship structures and social capital are the proximate influential force in industrialization. However, I also argue that transformative changes in those social relationship structures are rooted in the emergence of a particular type of political culture: what I call here, borrowing from Hannah Arendt and Frank Dobbin, a “Natal-Industrial Culture.” A Natal-Industrial Culture, as I propose it here, is a political culture in which collective hopes for the future are placed in new technologies and new cultural products, as means for achieving economic growth. Intellectual property law contributed to the emergence of this new type of political culture by holding out the promise of property, as a reward for the provision of new technologies or new cultural products. Because of the way that hope works on motivation—through cognitive pre-rehearsals of future attainment, which involve semantically-meaningful propositions and contribute to positive emotional experience—the promise of property provided a powerful stimulant to social capital formation. Working through the semantic resonances of property, intellectual property law contributed to a political culture in which invention and creativity were expected to secure a future of growth within the political community, both for particular members and for the political community, as a whole. By fostering a Natal-Industrial Culture, intellectual property law contributed to systematic invention and social capital-formation, leading, in turn, to the transformative changes in working and material provisioning that constitute industrialization.     

Producing More with Less? Community Forestry in Durango,Mexico in an Era of Trade Liberalization*

Abstract Through a qualitative case study of peasant‐organized forestry in Durango, Mexico, this paper examines how neoliberal policy reform is reshaping the community forestry sector. Post‐1992 agrarian and forestry laws facilitate the emergence of new forms of association in ejidos (collective property communities created by agrarian reform) and agrarian communities, and reorganize the delivery of forestry technical services. These developments indirectly undermine peasants' capacity to deal with the sector's long‐standing internal problems, putting at risk their ability to provide themselves with the services they need for sustainable community livelihoods and forest exploitation. Nevertheless, this study of a forest peasant federation shows that institutional change is a process peopled by groups of social agents who respond creatively to external structure from local organizational and community contexts. Ethnographic methods can be used fruitfully to study complex interactions between multiple levels of political‐economic structure and local action, which both constrain and provide opportunities for the organization of common‐pool resource management regimes.     

Being involved in the country: Productive ageing in different types of rural communities

Productive ageing recognises the contribution of older people to economic, social and cultural growth and helps build a sustainable community. Being involved in community life is good for individuals and good for society. However, we know very little about the participation of and contribution by people aged 50 and over in rural communities. This research aimed to develop a better understanding of productive ageing in different types of communities in rural Victoria, Australia. An anonymous self-complete postal questionnaire was distributed to a sample of households in twenty rural communities using the Australia Post Unaddressed Select Service. Those householders 50 years of age and older were invited to complete the survey. Data collected allowed examination of social and civic engagement, familiarity with community, the value placed on social relations by people aged 50 years and over, and how community involvement was linked to community sustainability. In particular it attempts to address the question ‘Does social and civic engagement differ across declining, stable and growing rural communities?’ Despite differences among rural communities, this study showed that older people develop and maintain strong community connections and well-functioning social capital and that participation in social activities was associated with feelings of being connected with community. It also identified health issues and lack of options as the main constraints on participation. A key message for policy makers is that older people play an important role in the sustainability of rural communities. There is much to be gained from actively supporting their participation in activities that are connected to ageing well.     

Refugee-owned small businesses: A typology for blended value creation

While it is clear that refugee-owned small businesses generate economic value, what is less understood is small businesses' role in blended value generation for ethnic/co-ethnic and local host communities. To explore this issue, we conducted interviews with 19 refugee business owners residing in New Zealand. Our findings concur with the extant literature that refugee-owned businesses generate economic, social and cultural value in their adopted countries. However, these businesses can be differentiated by their value focus; that is, whether the business' sole focus is economic or a nuanced blend, where economic value is complemented by strong social and cultural outcomes. In addition, these businesses' blended value generation is concentrated in either ethnic/co-ethnic or to local host communities. We use the findings to construct a typology of value generated by refugee-owned businesses, based on two continuums: from economic value to blended value and from ethnic/co-ethnic focus to local host focus.     

For the public good: Urban youth advocacy and the fight for public education

This article examines a grassroots movement for public education that has recently emerged to challenge corporate-style education reformers. These reformers became well-established in the early 21st century promoting the business strategies of capitalism such as school choice, competition, privatization, and closure. To understand how and why local communities are fighting for public education while embracing a much older, traditional notion of the common good, this article takes Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a case study, situating the struggle for public education in historical and political contexts. It also places the corporate-reform and grassroots movements in a social and economic framework, and it pays special attention to the urban youth who stand at the center of much of the policy debate on public education, considering the ways in which young people themselves express political agency through activism.     

“He invited me and didn't ask anything in return” Migration and Mobility as Vulnerabilities for Sexual Exploitation among Female Adolescents in Mexico

Although human trafficking is recognized as a major human rights violation, there is limited evidence regarding the vulnerabilities that contribute to female adolescents’ risk of being forced or coerced into the sex trade. Vulnerabilities such as gender‐based violence, economic and social inequalities have been shown to shape the risk of sexual exploitation among adolescents. In‐depth interviews (n=18) with current sex workers who reported being deceived or forced into the sex trade as adolescents (<17 years old) were analysed to explore their experiences of migration and mobility in Mexico. Driven by socio‐economic and vulnerabilities in home communities, adolescents often engaged in internal migration and mobility to other Mexican communities and states. Migration and mobility further predisposed them to social isolation, economic hardship and abuse, which were used as tools to trick them into the sex trade. Policies that support safer migration for adolescents in origin, transit, and destination communities are needed.     

The philosophical foundations of Las Vegas

Las Vegas is a city that has long challenged social norms of the rest of the United States and built a highly successful economic base on gambling and other hedonistic pursuits. Now that many other states and communities are pursuing or actively considering following the route of legal casinos for economic development purposes, the ethical considerations that have confronted Las Vegas about the question of gambling and its broader social impacts take on greater import.This paper examines the ethics of gambling relative to Las Vegas at two levels: first, as a pragmatic trade-off of accepting an activity with some bad consequences because of the economic benefits that can be derived; and second, more fundamentally, by examining the validity of the major ethical arguments against gambling.