Rural Sociology Encyclopedia 2014

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Rural Sociology 
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 · January 2018
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-08-100596-5.22533-X
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Douglas H. ConstanceSam Houston State University
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 http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerialConstance D.H. Rural Sociology. In: Neal Van Alfen, editor-in-chief. Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, Vol. 5, San Diego: Elsevier; 2014. pp. 62-74.© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Rural Sociology
DH Constance,
 Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA
r
2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary
 Adoption
diffusion of technology 
 Process by whichindividual farmers (or other prospective users of technology) make decisions about the use or nonuse of anew technology.
Land grant universities
 Integrated system of teaching,research, and outreach created to modernize agriculture.
New Rural Sociology 
 Conceptual approach to thesociology of agriculture that embraced critical perspectivesof rural development.
Rural
urban continuum
 Notion that the nature of socialstructure, social relationships, and values vary systematically across rural and urban communities.
Sociology of agricultural science
 Study of the processthrough which scientists and scienti
󿬁
c institutions discover new knowledge.
Sociology of agrifood studies
 Study of the sociology oagriculture and food that links agricultural production andfood consumption to globalization and commodity systems.
Introduction
Rural sociology is historically de
󿬁
ned as the sociological study of social organization and processes that are characteristic of rural societies and geographical areas where populationdensities are relatively low. In practice, modern rural sociology is considerably more comprehensive than the study of ruralsocieties. As rural societies do not exist in isolation, ruralsociology increasingly addresses the relationships betweenrural society and society as a whole and within the globaleconomy and society. Vertical linkages to the macrosystemintegrate rural areas into national and global social processes(Bonanno
, 1994; Warren, 1963).  Although rural sociology as a discipline originated in theUnited States in the early twentieth century, as part of deco-lonialization and modernization projects after World War II, it has diffused around the world where it is more often referredto as peasant studies, development studies, or village studiesinstead of rural sociology (Newby, 1980). Additionally, many of the foci of rural sociology are related closely to other socialscience disciplines including cultural geography, social an-thropology, and agricultural economics.
The Roots of American Rural Sociology
 Although the
 󿬁
eld of rural sociology has made major strides inunderstanding rural social processes, like the parent disciplineof sociology, it still has strong roots in the nineteenth-century social thought. A central concern of nineteenth-century the-orists was whether village and farm life was morally and so-cially superior to metropolitan life, and whether rural life would be resilient in the face of urban industrialism. Informedby the Enlightenment and Western rationalism, the classicalsociologists Emile Durkheim (1858
1917) and Karl Mar(1818
83) both argued that urban
industrial capitalism andmodern technologies and organizational practices were un-avoidable and progressive social forces would eventually supplant the residual remnants of backward, preindustrialrural social forms. In contrast, Ferdinand ennies(1855
1936) viewed urbanization and industrial capitalismthat characterized gesellschaft societies as leading to the de-cline of the pastoral virtues and intimate communal bonds of rural gemeinschaft societies that are necessary for healthy so-cial life. For Töennies and many early rural sociologists, thecities and social relations of industrial capitalism representedthe degradation of civilization. Although Max Weber (1864
1920) recognized the dynamism of the social forces of bur-eaucratization, industrialization, and urbanization that weremarginalizing traditional rural societies, he thought that bur-eaucratization and the industrial revolution, which he referredto as an iron cage, would lead to social movements, politicalideologies, and other forms of resistance to these forces of rationalization and uniformity. Throughout its history, rural sociology has engaged in thesenineteenth-century debates over the desirability and resilienceof traditional rural social organization. Two general positionshave alternated over time and still exist: (1) the view that ruralsociety, owing to its more intimate social bonds, lower inci-dence of social pathologies, and stronger religious institutions,is socially and morally superior to urban society and thereforedeserves to be preserved and (2) the view that traditional ruralbeliefs, social structures, technologies, practices, and insti-tutions are nostalgic anachronisms of the past and must bemodernized for the quality of rural life to be enhanced. Bothpositions are embedded deeply in Western social thought andcontinue to inform the discipline and discourses of ruralsociology. The historical roots of rural sociology in America reside inthe economic, political, and economic transformation brought about by the industrial revolution that occurred after the Civil War. Though the surge of industrial capitalism brought af 
󿬂
u-ence to many regions in the United States, it also createdpoverty and inequality in many rural areas. A benchmark publication in the debate between these two views of ruralsociety was Sorokin and Zimmerman
s (1929) Principles of Rural
Urban Sociology, which synthesized rural sociologicalthought of the time and was the summative treatise in the
󿬁
eld. Sorokin and Zimmerman
s
 
rural
urban continuum
perspective drew primarily on Töennies
 analysis of how 
Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, Volume 5 doi:10.1016/B978-0-444-52512-3.00253-9
62
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urbanization and industrial capitalism led to the undermining of the primary social bonds of community. Accordingly, therural sociology research carried out before World War II waslargely devoted to rural community studies and tended topresent rural life as socially richer and morally superior tourban life.
Agrarian Politics and the Country Life Commission
 America
s agrarian politics also signi
󿬁
cantly shaped the tra-jectory of rural sociology. Though the term
 
rural sociology 
 was not widely used until the 1920s, the
 󿬁
rst American ruralsociological studies were conducted in the 1890s during adecade of populism and agrarian unrest. These pioneerinrural sociological studies were initiated by  DuBois (1898), ablack sociologist on the staff of the US Department of Labor.DuBois
 studies emphasized how the postbellum crop-liensystem in southern plantation agriculture reinforced black poverty by tying black farmers to the plantation system andsubordinating them to the power of the planter class. During this time, studies of agricultural communities in the northeast  were also undertaken by F.H. Giddings and associates at Columbia University. In these early days, land grant uni- versities had little or no presence in the scholarship now calledrural sociology. Although the populist critique of industrial capitalismswept through much of rural America during these years,populism did not directly in
󿬂
uence early rural sociology.During the
 󿬁
rst full decade of American sociology, there was widespread suspicion among university administrators andtheir patrons that sociology should be scrutinized to ensurethat it concerned itself with empirical research rather thanpopulist politics. This political environment led most soci-ologists to distance themselves from radical social theories andmovements. There is no indication that any American ruralsociologists were active supporters of populism.Populism
s indirect in
󿬂
uences on rural sociology, however, were important. The populists
 mostly unsuccessful attemptsto recruit black farmers into their movement contributed tothe questioning of the sharecropping system, the structure of agriculture, and southern rural social structure. Populist rad-icalism was a major source of concern to urban industrialists who bene
󿬁
ted from a socioeconomic system that provided astable supply of cheap food for their workers. Although Wil-liam Jennings Bryant 
s loss in the 1898 presidential electionsignaled the defeat of populism in electoral politics, fear of aresurgence of populist radicalism remained for more than adecade. The aim of providing a moderate alternative to populism was integral to the establishment of the Country Life Movement (Danbom, 1979). Founded by industrial and other elites, theCountry Life Movement maintained that, contrary to populist assertions, rural social problems were not owing to the negativeimpacts of industrial capitalism, but rather because of a lack of organization, poor infrastructure, and technological backward-ness in rural areas. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt rec-ognized this reform movement by appointing a PresidentialCommission on County Life, chaired by Liberty Hyde Bailey,dean of Agriculture at Cornell University. The next six decadesof American rural sociology were framed by the Country LifeCommission Report published in 1909. The report did ac-knowledge many of the social problems of rural America (e.g.,the inequities of the crop-lien system and widespread share-cropping), but its dominant message was that an expandedeffort to modernize rural America technologically and socially  was integral to improving rural society. The Country LifeCommission recommended the establishment of what is now called the Cooperative Extension Service to speed the modern-ization of rural America. The Cooperative Extension Service(Smith
Lever Act of 1914) completed the land grant collegemodernization triangle of teaching (Morrell Act of 1862) andresearch (Hatch Act of 1887). The Country Life Commission recommended the harness-ing of the social sciences, particularly agricultural economicsand rural sociology, to support the technological modern-ization of rural America. Rural sociological studies in landgrant colleges of agriculture were critical in helping to removesocial barriers to technological modernization and stabilizerural communities. The establishment of rural sociology,however, was slow and uneven, particularly compared withthe
 󿬁
eld of agricultural economics. Only a few land grant colleges
 
 generally the larger ones in the Northeast andMidwest 
 
 established major rural sociology programs.Moreover, it was not until the Purnell Act of 1925 that federalfunds were available to support rural sociological research. For all practical purposes, the land grant colleges where ruralsociology was present in the 1930s are the same 25 or soinstitutions where rural sociology existed in the early 1990s.
Institutionalizing Rural Sociology
 Three other historical factors were crucial in shaping and in-stitutionalizing rural sociology. First, the Great Depression andthe New Deal opened up vast opportunities for rural socio-logical scholarship aimed at rural reform and relief. By themid-1930s, sociologists in the United States Department of  Agriculture (USDA) Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE)and other federal agencies had carried out an impressive pro-gram of empirical research on rural communities, ruralpopulation, and the structure of agriculture and had linkedthis research with an agenda for far-reaching rural reforms(e.g., reduction of the power of southern landlords, landtenure reform, and encouragement of cooperative forms of production). Second, the course of rural sociology was de-cisively shaped when in 1936
1937 rural sociologists brokefrom the American Sociological Society (later the AmericanSociological Association) to establish the Rural SociologicalSociety and started their own journal
 Rural Sociology 
. The or-ganizational break from the larger discipline of sociology ledrural sociology to become even more identi
󿬁
ed with and in-stitutionalized within the land grant and USDA complex. Third, from the late-1930s through the mid-1940s the pro-gressive reformism of the New Deal came under attack by conservative members of the Congress. The crackdown on re-formist rural sociology (and agricultural economics) wascompleted when the BAE was disbanded in 1944. Seminal works on the relationship between the structure of agricultureand quality of life in rural areas carried out by  Goldschmidt 
Rural Sociology
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